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Forget your Madonnas with upturned eyes. Forget your downcast pietàs. Forget even your ravished, hands-in-the-air virgins, or your open-mouthed martyrs, ever resigned. Lounging concubines, too, for that matter. Also clear-eyed goddesses emerging from their baths.  

All wrong because this, surely this, is the enduring pose of all solitary women: head twisted for that over-the-shoulder gaze, elbows raised like a skateboarder’s, hungry eyes taking in that middle distance. Not heaven, not hell, not twinkling stars or an infant’s homely crib, but the space between shoulder and calf. Taking it in with only one question in mind: How wide does my bottom look in this dress?

Pretty wide. Wider than you’d like.

Catherine turned around to face herself fully in the mirror. Rehearsed a public smile, changed it to a grimace: There you are.  

The dress itself was a lovely shade of red, a soft crepe, well-fitted. It made her breasts shapely and her waist slim—nice addition, that thin black belt, the small buckle of gold. From the front, from the podium as she spoke, and then later when she took the chair for the onstage discussion, the color would take over, surely it would. The rich color of the dress, the stylish reading glasses, the expensive—well worth it—highlights in her blond, going-to-silver hair.  

Nice shoes. (She slipped into them.) Good shoes, she knew, were essential. No matter how many times tonight her picture would be taken straight-on, with professors or students or members of the audience, inevitably a photo would appear in the aftermath, a photo taken from below by the ubiquitous campus photographer—always a bearded guy, it seemed, always a guy ranging about the space between stage and front row like some jungle war correspondent, aloof, disdainful, bearing more cameras and lenses than he could possibly need—the result of which was always the awkward shot of two seated figures viewed from beneath: all shoes, then legs, shoulders, and finally their tiny open-mouthed heads. 

She’d been teaching and lecturing and publishing books for two decades now. Repetition alone should have dulled her anxiety over these annoyances. Her own sense of the absurdity of it all should have kept her comfortably nonplussed. Yet still this adolescent self-consciousness before the full-length mirror. Still this useless vanity.  

She knew, or had been told by her students anyway, that all such body-image issues were obsolete; that our culture’s definition of female beauty had expanded to include every permutation imaginable—if only, her smarter students were bound to admit, in order to sell more soap and underwear. And yet, how often had she overheard these same young women consult one another sagaciously about their botox treatments or their injected diet drugs?  

“Pinch and poke,” she recalled hearing one smart, somewhat zaftig young woman telling another as they waited for class to begin. The girl had the hem of her shirt tucked under her chin, her midriff bared and a good hunk of her lovely flesh gripped between thumb and forefinger. This was in Catherine’s seminar on Mary Magdalene. (“Not a Whore” was the subtitle of the class, although the administration had stricken the phrase from its website.) As she recalled it, this same girl was a startlingly pared-down version of herself by semester’s end. 

Catherine turned around again, looked over her shoulder in that familiar, ancient, yes, classical contortion that is woman. Thought: Yeah, well, you’ve always been wide-bottomed.

And, let’s face it, plain. No beauty. Petite and stout. (She lifted her purse and her coat, found her hotel key card, left the room.) Weak-chinned and short-necked. As she’d discovered some years ago, surgery could adjust the one but not the other. And wasn’t she now way too old, nearly fifty, to be in need of her own maternal reassurances that her intelligence, her erudite book, her delightful sense of humor, would charm the audience tonight as a prettier lecturer could not?

Charm the audience, the students, her peers, even the shy PhD candidate waiting now in the dank lobby of this second-rate hotel, self-consciously nonchalant as he perused the wire rack of regional brochures. As if he believed this assignment—to fetch the visiting author from the campus hotel and drive her to the auditorium—required some stealth.

She held out her hand and said, “You must be Brendan.” He turned, surprised and somewhat abashed, it seemed, as if she had blown his cover, although there wasn’t another soul in the lobby. “I wonder how old these things are,” she said, indicating the rack of tourist guides.  “Pre-Google, don’t you think?”  

He said, grinning, “Yeah. Got to be.” 

Awkwardly, he added, “Hi. I’m Brendan.” And then, “I’m parked right outside.”  

“Brendan the Navigator,” she said.

He laughed but, perhaps, did not understand.

“A Highlander, actually,” he said. Or perhaps he did.

She’d been told more than once by various escorts on these various junkets that she looked so much taller in her author photo and, good God, here he was, sweet boy, saying exactly that now, following her through the hotel’s revolving door, “I thought you’d be taller,”  he said as they emerged into the wet night. “Well, yes,” she replied. “I did, too.”

The book, her seventh with a small academic publisher, had been out for over a year now.  Wives of the Saints was a braided biography of a handful of women who had been the mistresses or love interests or lifelong correspondents of famously saintly men, each account punctuated with short portraits of more obscure women who had spent their lives as dedicated spouse/housekeepers to celibate priests. 

The book had garnered some nice, niche notices, some hate mail, and a handful of Zoom interviews. Also poor sales, as usual. The particularly Catholic content gave her a place on a third-tier lecture circuit, thus tonight’s appearance at this small Catholic university, the last stop on what she still called her road show.  

She’d been told by the theology professor who’d invited her here—what was her name now?—that there would be a reception first. The usual dean or two, the professor had written, some elderly donors. The indifferent heirs of the woman, long dead, for whom the lecture series was named.  

Since it had begun to rain again, Brendan offered to drop her off at the door of the auditorium—a bit of early-sixties architecture, rosy brick and pale concrete, and a row of plate-glass doors looking mottled in the fading light of six o’clock.

“There will be someone right inside,” he said carefully, “She’ll help you find the reception.” And then, putting a fine point on what he seemed to think were her unpredictable infirmities, asked gently, conscientiously, “You’ll be all right?”

The doors to the place were no more than twenty feet from the curb, across a merely damp sidewalk, and already she could see another student guide peering out at her.

“I think I can manage,” she told him. “You’ve been great.”

The interior student, a tall girl with freckles, gulped her greeting shyly and took a second too long to know how to respond to Catherine’s extended hand. In the elevator—linoleum-floored and papered with notices of readings and lectures, evening vespers and 5K runs, an elevator that smelled like paper and paste, an odor dear to Catherine’s academic heart—the poor thing kept her eyes on the moving green light behind the floor numbers, as if to speed it along. An awkward Madonna.

“And here’s our guest of honor.”  

This from a bustling, balding dean who instantly introduced her to the heirs, two sisters who might have been twins, both of them wearing elegant knit suits and beautiful necklaces, one pearl, one heavy gold links. Gracious and well-moneyed. And then a young poet-theologian of some repute—he was here for only a semester—who greeted her warmly. He was not tall (or not as tall as she thought he would be from his jacket photos—so there you go, she told herself), but his brown beard and his soft, wide hand made him seem bearish and cuddly. “I have some tough questions about your book,” he told her, his smile a mere slice of white teeth between the fur of chin and lip. “But I’ll save them for later. Over dinner.”

“I like tough questions,” she told him. Lying.

The dean asked if he could fetch her a glass of wine, but she told him water would do for now.  

“You’ll want a glass at dinner,” the man said jovially, and directed a thumb toward the poet. She recognized in his enthusiasm a small boy’s middle-school crush on the popular quarterback. “Especially if this guy is grilling you.”

The room was narrow and getting crowded, a seminar room with a long, gray table at its center, covered now with two charcuterie boards and a few plates of canapés: she noticed meatballs and cocktail franks, and the free-food-and-drink eagerness of underpaid academics.  She understood most of them were not here to meet her.

She was given a glass of sparkling water—she would have preferred still—and introduced to the professor of theology herself—Anne Marie—sixtyish, thin, pleasantly effusive.   She said, “Let me introduce you to your interlocutor,” and gestured to a young woman who immediately excused herself from a gaggle of young men in plaid shirts and ill-fitting blazers.  The girl approached, beaming.

Now here was a beauty. Her face a perfect oval and her skin, even in this harshly lit room, luminous, giving off, it seemed to Catherine, a quality of light that was neither pale nor blandly consistent; there was a pretty, natural blush about her cheeks, a color make-up could not achieve. Something of a painted portrait, painted by a master, in all her coloring, cheeks and lips and large, dark-brown eyes, heavily lashed. Heavy black hair parted neatly above her white forehead. The kind of beauty that probably evoked from everyone she met the same astonished admiration Catherine heard in her own voice as she greeted the girl, who smiled broadly and said without false breathlessness, “I loved your book.”

Her name was Frances Breen. Such a plain name for such a stunner. She was dressed in the Catholic graduate-school style: a knee-length skirt and tights, nondescript sweater. Modest ballet flats. A cloth carryall bag over her shoulder—as simple and unadorned as a monk’s.  Perfect figure.

Frances had a plan for this evening’s onstage conversation. She would begin—“if this is all right with you”—by asking Catherine to read just a few paragraphs from the chapter on Margie Smith, the young nurse trainee Thomas Merton so adored.

“I have it marked in my copy,” she said. She gestured toward her bag—“Do you want to see?”

“No need,” Catherine said. “I’m good with that.”

“It was difficult to find just one passage,” Frances told her. “I had so many favorites, but this one says so much about the book as a whole.”

There was a steady intelligence about the girl’s voice; she was not a gusher or a contrarian, or a show-off, and her sincerity seemed as natural as her blush.

“It’s a good choice,” she told Frances. “I’ve often selected it myself.”

“And then,” Frances went on, “I’d like to guide our conversation through each of the major chapters, beginning, of course, with your prologue about Peter’s wife. Which I found amazing. Both your research and your imaginative leap. And then Augustine’s nameless teenaged Baby Momma.” With a laugh. “Teilhard’s Lucy Swan, of course. Both Lucy Swan and Leontine Zante. You really captured the brilliance of these women. How he needed them. But I also want to save time for the shorter pieces about the housekeepers. I read the interview where you talked about discovering that Italian woman, in Rome, who lived with her priest in the shadow of the Vatican.”

“I was your age when I met her,” Catherine added. “She was an old woman then.  Widowed, although, of course, her priest never actually married her. Without resources.”

Frances nodded. “And to think it was so accepted. So many priests with an in-house paramour. I also loved your portrait of the housekeeper in that Philadelphia rectory. You made her seem so heroic.” 

“It was important to me, in this book,” Catherine said, and she knew she was repeating what had become a kind of stump speech, “to give substance to these women’s lives. To tell their stories as real human beings, not as what Teihard called, speaking of the Blessed Mother,” she scratched the air with two fingers, “‘the translucent medium between God and man.’ There was nothing translucent about these ladies. They were full flesh and blood. They lived passionately.”

Frances nodded. “Yes, of course.” Thoughtful, engaged. “You made that point so well.” Her brown eyes were really liquid. Enchanting. “My mother was Argentinian,” Frances said. “She had an aunt who could have been in your book. Loyal companion, housekeeper, wife, really, to their parish priest for forty years. She was quite beautiful. Everyone in my father’s family, they were Chicago Irish, thought it a shame she never married. But my mother’s family understood. She was devoted to her priest.”

“And he to her, one would hope,” Catherine said.

Frances smiled, a bit of pained wisdom in her beautiful face. “Hope, yes.” She made it seem a prayer.

The theology professor reappeared with a middle-aged couple she wanted to introduce.  And Frances quickly apologized for “monopolizing” her attention.  

“Not at all,” Catherine said. “I’m looking forward to our chat.”

The couple were married professors at the college. He in the English department, she in business. He said some nice words about her book—he was not aware of such women was his refrain—and his wife concurred. “Although I am no feminist,” she added.  

And then another young adjunct, who had, so far, only read the prologue.  

“Reads like a novel,” he added, uncertain, it seemed, if this pleased him.

Beside him, a pert blonde who confessed she hadn’t had a chance to read the book but was looking forward to tonight’s conversation. In fact, she announced, she had ordered the book on Amazon last week, but it still hadn’t arrived. “Usually it’s overnight,” she said. As if Catherine herself had some part in this delay.

Catherine shrugged. Smiled graciously. “Academic press,” she said. “Pretty much print on demand. It can sometimes take a while for them to find someone to turn the wheel of the mimeograph machine.”

The woman didn’t laugh. “Is there an audiobook?” her husband asked instead.

The theology professor intervened once again to introduce her to four more graduate students, Brendan now among them. Each was holding a small plastic plate piled high with cheese cubes and tiny franks in one hand, a cup of wine in the other. They all laughed as she elbowed a greeting. She had a sense they were here for class credit. One of them asked her if you needed an agent to publish with such a small press.

And then, beyond their heads and shoulders and polite smiles distorted by cheeks full of food, two priests in the doorway of the room, one of them thin, white-haired, stoop-shouldered and yet elegant in all his movements: Fr. Steadman, her mentor since undergraduate days. Behind him, a taller, dark-haired young priest in horn-rimmed glasses.  

She excused herself from the graduate students and made her way to her friend, putting her water glass on a nearby table as she did because she knew Fr. Steadman would take both her hands as he greeted her. Kiss both her cheeks in his European way.  

She told him, “I am so delighted to see you,” nearly tearful because the sentiment was so true. Thirty years ago, his seminar on Paul’s Epistles had inspired her to change her undergraduate major from literature to theology. Later, his generous counsel helped her to discern that law school, after one miserable year, was not for her, that she was meant to pursue instead a PhD.    

Fr. Steadman said as he touched his cheek to hers, “The book is brilliant.”  

He’d written to her a year ago to say much the same—a gorgeous letter on heavy stock, his easily legible handwriting, a merger of an engineer’s clear print and an old nun’s elegant cursive, outlining brilliantly her every theme. Satisfying, if only briefly, her deepest hopes for the work.

But, of course, to hear him say this in his own, fond way was something else again. He held both her hands. His eyes, once vividly blue, were perhaps no longer so striking, but his grip was firm. His face still handsome. There had been much discussion of his delicate good looks when she was an undergrad. (The joke among the girls in his classes was to call him “Fr. Whatawaste.”) Still the same monastic hollowness to his fair cheeks, the surprising strength of his jawline. Something, always, sparkling about him. A friend once said it was like he’d been dusted with mica, or baby powder. But Catherine had argued it was a keen intelligence delightfully frosted with wit, good humor. In class, he was always funny and wry. As ready to poke fun at himself as he was to pierce, gently, any intellectual pretensions in his students.

“And what might a real person think?” he would ask them. “Or feel?”  

And his good point would be made.  

Fr. Steadman had been the indulged only child of American diplomats, had grown up all over the world, raised by governesses, French or Spanish, and tutors, German or Greek, and a Dickensian collection of butlers and gardeners, chauffeurs and aides-de-camp. He told marvelous stories about his youth, in class or in quiet conferences in his low-lit office, just the two of them, the pages of her essays spread out on the desk before him.

He’d learned to surf off the coast of Africa, to play the piano in Vienna. Took cooking classes in Paris when he was only twelve.

He’d returned to the States, Park Avenue, when his parents retired. Studied art history at Columbia. Teilhard de Chardin himself had attended a dinner party at their apartment—in his letter last year, he wrote that he had especially appreciated her chapter on Teilhard’s women—but, as Fr. Steadman told it, the saintly paleontologist made no impression on his young self, or none that he could recall. Although (“chronology is not causation,” he sometimes warned her), it couldn’t have been too long after this encounter that he stopped a priest on Lexington Avenue, an utter stranger, to say, “I hope for nothing, fear nothing, believe in nothing, expect nothing.”

The old priest was a Jesuit. And thus a vocation was found.  

Fr. Steadman released one of her hands to indicate the young, heavily spectacled priest behind him. “Fr. Trout here,” he said, and then added, “Not a pseudonym, I assure you,” catching up her fingers once again, “was gracious enough to drive me down from St. Paul. We’ll be joining you for dinner.”

“Oh, marvelous,” she said. She knew she sometimes had difficulty suiting her voice to her happiness. Any sort of joy too often made her sound as if she was about to sob.  

Fr. Steadman leaned closer, speaking into her ear as if to avert her tears. “We’ll drive you to the restaurant. I’m told it’s a good twenty minutes or so. Might be our only chance of a quiet chat.”

“Marvelous,” she said again as the theology professor reappeared at her side, touched her elbow. Time for the sound check. Fr. Steadman briefly tightened his grip on her ten fingers and then, with a fond shake of both her hands, let her go.

Under the stage lights, Frances’s face was even more radiant, her black hair more luxurious, her gestures more elegant. The handheld microphone only enhanced the steady intelligence of her lovely voice. And those big eyes, by turns lively and amused and curious. Was it any wonder she had been chosen for this task? She was meant for the stage. 

Even the campus photographer—a pale-faced undergrad this time—paused in his roving through the auditorium, his camera over his heart.

Frances held a single page of notes on her lap but never glanced at it, and each of her questions was preceded by an observation or a compliment so incisive and warm, there could be no doubting its accuracy, its truth.

In fact, for the first time in all of Catherine’s travels promoting this book, there wasn’t a single hostile question from the audience at the Q&A.  

Nothing like there had been only last month, when an angry man at the microphone asked her why she wrote about Thomas Merton’s obsession with Margie Smith, that young nurse trainee—the very section she had just read here—if not to discredit the monk, to prove him a pervert, not a saint. She had patiently explained to the man, as she’d had to explain to others, that the goal of this book was not to prove that these holy men were less than saintly because of the women in their lives, but to dispel the notion—thank you, Augustine—that the lack of a feminine presence was a necessary condition of their holiness. 

The book was meant to prove, in fact, that there was no such lack of what Teilhard himself called “feminine influence” in the lives of these holy men. And to propose that their very need of such influence was an indication of both their full humanity and their extraordinary spiritual grace. An indication that these men understood how a loving God had shaped them into beings who required the company of women.

Even if, due to the Church’s historical and perverse obsession with chastity, the full extent of these relationships could not be acknowledged.

Her book was meant to propose, she said, that the desire for feminine love was a condition of their holiness, not a contradiction of it.  

The man, her questioner, was not convinced. “You’re trying to undermine the gift of priestly celibacy,” he said.  

“Oh, we make too much of celibates,” she’d replied, pleasantly enough.

She had thought to add, just to lighten the mood: “And I speak as one of them—although more by circumstance than choice.” But she didn’t. Not likely the jerk would have laughed.

Tonight, however, one questioner after the other, most of whom had not, of course, read the book, seemed determined to agree with Frances in her admiration for everything Catherine had written. Listening to the kind and fawning questions, one after another, she was amused to see how eagerly every audience member sought to share the opinion of the beautiful girl on stage beside her. Another bit of lingering middle-school infatuation, she suspected. I’m friends with the pretty one.

Even the poet ambled to the microphone to praise her book’s “provocative premise” about the “spiritual essentiality of male/female pairing.”

“Not really a question,” he admitted. And then he said, “But while I’m up here, can I just acknowledge your brilliant interlocutor?” which brought forth a burst of applause from the audience. Also a first, in Catherine’s experience.  

“Yes, isn’t she marvelous?” she breathed into her own handheld mic.

Frances bowed her head demurely, whispered a shy thank you and then added, when the applause died down, “All credit to the grace of this fascinating book.”  

As the hirsute poet returned to his seat, Catherine recalled his promise to save his tough questions for their dinner conversation, when she would be fortified with drink.  

Fr. Steadman’s car was at the curb as the smiling dean led her through the doors and into the moist night. The dean, too, was full of compliments. One of the best, he was telling her. The audience in her thrall. A conversation the students would be talking about for weeks to come. “And isn’t Frances lovely?”

Fr. Trout was out on the sidewalk as soon as she appeared, opening the back door for her, touching his thick black-framed glasses as they slipped from his nose. They seemed not to fit him well. Seemed, in fact, a kind of disguise, borrowed from a homelier young man. Even in the humid, rust-colored light of the darkened campus, she could see clearly that without them he was definitely another Fr. Whatawaste.

Fr. Steadman was already in the back seat, looking smaller and frailer in the dim light. It pained her to see he had a plaid wool blanket draped over his lap. He was growing old. It seemed impossible. Impossibly unfair that he would not live forever.

As Fr. Trout carefully closed her door—bending down to make sure he did not catch her skirt, the glasses slipping once more—Fr. Steadman took her hand again.  

“A triumph,” he said. “My dear, you were brilliant.”

She lapped it up, his praise. Knew that’s what she was doing, eagerly lapping it up, and she both despised and forgave herself for own ravenous ego. She knew this sometimes happened at the end of a book’s life. The delayed Amazon delivery was not a fluke. Wives of the Saints, out for over a year now, was edging slowly toward the precipice of Unavailable. 

These final days, she knew, were her last opportunity to be reassured of the value of the thing—of the twenty-plus years she’d spent thinking about this book, the five years she had devoted to writing it.

And, of course, no one else’s praise, not even the beautiful Frances’s praise, meant as much to her as Fr. Steadman’s good word. 

Fr. Trout skipped behind the car and slid into the driver’s seat.  

“You have the address, Ted?” Fr. Steadman asked casually and Fr. Trout touched the screen. “Right here, Bill. A little traffic through the village, but we’re fine.”

“Take your time,” Fr. Steadman said, sitting back again. And she took this, too, as part of his praise. He was grateful for this time alone with her. Another compliment.

Diverting it, even as she hungered for more, she said, “But wasn’t Frances excellent?”

He seemed to consider this, or perhaps needed a minute to remember the girl’s name.  “Very good,” he said shortly. “I thought her questions very smart. Thoughtful.”

“They were,” she agreed. “And such a beauty.” Generously. “If the Church didn’t need more women theologians, I’d advise her to head for Hollywood.”

He laughed. Released her hand and patted it fondly. Then he gathered his two hands together over his heart. A gesture she remembered from his lectures, the precursor to some statement or recollection that he had not yet thought of, or had not yet properly worked out, but that would be, perhaps because it was as new to him as it was to his students, brilliant and intriguing. Revelatory. 

“We lived in Madrid for a summer,” he said, “My parents and I. I was nine. It was meant to be a brief assignment for my father, my mother was still modeling in those days, and I had begun to balk at governesses, babysitters—what we’d call now caregivers—of any sort. That summer, we struck an agreement, my parents and I. Our apartment was just a short walk from the Prado, no major streets to cross, and if I would take myself there every morning and bring myself back at four o’clock every afternoon, I could use the museum as my playground. Wander as freely as I liked.” He laughed, recalling it. “What could be more delightful to an independent nine-year-old with artistic aspirations?”

She laughed with him. Saw Fr. Trout glance into the rearview mirror, smiling as well.

“That was the summer,” Fr. Steadman said, “I fell madly in love with Rafaela Flores Calderón.” He pronounced the name with a flourish, savoring it. 

Fr. Trout chuckled. No doubt he had heard the story before.

Laughing, Catherine held up a hand. “Wait, what?” She spoke teasingly, not a tone she would have used with him when she was young. “Who is this?”

“A child,” Fr. Steadman replied. “About my own age.” And then he turned to her, his face as pale as the streetlights they were passing under, as insubstantial as her own reflection in the window behind his head. “You don’t know the painting? In the Prado?”

She was embarrassed to say, “I don’t.”

“A beautiful child. Painted by Antonio María Esquivel. He painted her brother, too, also in the Prado, but it was Rafaela who stole my heart.” He was smiling, his thin lips moist. “The whole time you were on stage tonight I was watching your interlocutor, wondering whose face she brought back to me. What,” he paused, searching for the word, “what feeling she brought back to me. And then I remembered her. My little love from that heady summer. The two faces so similar. Your companion up there—what was her name?”

“Frances,” she told him.

He nodded. “Your Frances might have been my Rafaela grown into beautiful womanhood. Uncanny,” he said. “The resemblance.”

And now he was tapping his heart with his right hand, while the left remained splayed against his chest. What she would have called a liturgical gesture, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, but meant now, it was clear, to indicate not a contrite heart, but one all aflutter with memory.

“I discovered her portrait early in that summer. Looking down at me in her white dress.  Those big brown eyes. She took my breath away. There was a parrot on her wrist, an open cage behind her, and I longed to be that bird. I imagined she would call me pajarita—a name I was given by a previous governess. Pajarita dulce.” His voice had grown rich; she remembered the sound of it from their time in class or in his office when he told these stories from his romantic childhood.  

“Suddenly,” he said, “everything else in the museum lost its spell. The El Grecos, the Titians, even Goya’s work. I later wrote my undergraduate thesis on Goya’s black paintings, but that summer, even they lost their thrill.”

“Oh, I remember those,” she interrupted him to say. Her own good-student voice. She was grateful to make up for her ignorance regarding the portrait of the child. “So weird,” she said. “Painted on the wallpaper of his villa, as I recall. In his last years. Just terrifying.”  

In fact, she’d seen them at the Prado the same year she had studied abroad in Rome, the year she met, through a fellow student, the “housekeeper” to a well-known Vatican bishop, one of the women she profiled in the book. She reminded herself to tell him this when he finished his recollection. Perhaps move the conversation back to her writing. Had he found her depiction of Peter’s wife too whimsical?

“Even Saturn Devouring His Son,” Fr. Steadman was saying, “a painting that had caused me no end of nightmares when I first saw it, now meant nothing to me. Or Fra Angelico’s gorgeous Annunciation.” A regretful shake of his head. “Once my eyes fell on Rafaela, everything else lost its appeal, was conquered, dispelled. Everything else in the museum, everything out on the street, for that matter, in the rooms of my own home, everything else became dull, dimensionless, flatly unreal. There was for me, night and day, only Rafaela’s beautiful face. Her white dress. Her stockings and her small shoes. My own longing to be the bird perched on her pretty wrist.”

“You were nine,” she said, amused. 

And the old priest nodded, but missed the joke in it, the opportunity to laugh at himself, something he was usually so good at. His face was quite serious. “I stood before her for hours at a time. Until my little legs burned with fatigue. A pain I offered to her, in a kind of childish ecstasy.” He drummed his fingers over his heart. “All the pleasure and all the heartache of first love,” he said, nearly whispering now, “all of it uncomplicated by personality or circumstance. Even physicality. An unencumbered confrontation with pure beauty. Feminine beauty.”

He turned his eyes on her again. They were, briefly, moist and unseeing. “All the while you were speaking tonight, I was remembering that time in my life. Feeling so vividly the depth of that encounter.”

The car had pulled to the curb. A light from an old fashioned street lamp lit the passenger window beside him, cast a watery glow over the old man’s fine features. There was, perhaps, a silver sparkle from an unshaven patch on his hollow cheek. A fleck of mica, perhaps a tear, on his delicate skin. “She brought it back to me,” Fr. Steadman said. “Your lovely interlocutor. Your Frances.”

In the front seat, Fr. Trout sat with his hands on the wheel, his head bent. In the brief, reverential silence—there was only the click of the wipers and the faint drum of the rain on the roof—she became aware of the searing discord between her own bruised ego—All the while you were speaking, he’d said—and the old priest’s gentle astonishment at what had been returned to him by the girl’s beauty. 

For a moment, she, too, bowed her head. In the colorless light, the lap of her red dress was now a muted brown. Franciscan, she thought. For a moment, she knew herself to be a weighted creature, ugly, thick-necked and wide-bottomed, as crude in her self-obsession (had he not heard a word she’d said?) as one of Goya’s shrouded ghouls. No beauty; only the plain, hulking, earthbound amanuensis for other, finer, beings. The flat-footed, celibate chronicler of other peoples’ transcendent love.

In the restaurant, a long table was already crowded with the night’s cast of characters, who greeted her with raised glasses and wry cheers. The wine had already been ordered and poured. It would be charged to the lecture series, of course, so there was pleasure in it all around. Catherine remembered then that a colleague on her own campus had told her that this small Catholic college was on the verge of bankruptcy, probably would not survive another year.  

Lovely Frances was at one end of the table, smiling expectantly beside the empty chair where Catherine was meant to sit.

But she demurred, gave the chair to Fr. Steadman, who took the girl’s hand as Catherine introduced them, his face illuminated with what she saw now as his boyish intoxication.

She sat instead between young Fr. Trout in his Clark Kent disguise, and the ursine poet, who filled her wine glass without asking for her preference, red or white (he gave her red, which was her preference nonetheless), and with the bald dean and the gaunt professor of theology—Ann Marie? Mary Ann?—grinning at him from across the table, he began to tell her where her book had gone wrong.

This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.