The Chapel Read Online Free PDF

Portuguese-Guinea,” my mother reminded me each time we spoke that spring. My mother was all for the natives, who’d overthrown the repressive colonial government, but she was also sending ten dollars a week to the Portuguese convent and hospital to make sure the poor Africans didn’t throw out the quinine with the bathwater.
    My mother was not a fanatic. I’m sure she didn’t expect to be miraculously cured of her headaches. She had taken to religion as a young widow, and her piety and her devotion to her parish did not go unrewarded. She offered up the inexplicable and unbearable circumstances of her little, often lonely life and they acquired significance in the ancient and worldwide project of the propagation of the faith.
    Unlike my older brother, Richard, I had not really gotten to know my father before an industrial transformer he was installing exploded and killed him and three other young men, so I was vulnerable to the appeal of a heavenly father and stories of brave young saints whose gruesome deaths won them celebrity status in heaven. And when I got my first look at the graphic reality of pregnancy in a grade-school Hygiene and Holiness class, I got very interested in a career as a virgin martyr or a nun. Richard never succumbed and eventually got himself tossed out of two Catholic colleges in one year and dropped out of my life for a long time. I was in high school by then, and my friends’ older brothers were teaching them to drive, and their fathers were buying them flowers for just being in the chorus of a play, and I irrationally aimed most of my resentment at the Church and the big fuss everybody made about the Crucifixion, which seemed less tragic than my lot in light of the Resurrection three days later.
    But I was practiced and pious enough as a young Catholic girl to be an asset when Mitchell was navigating the implicit moral and social codes at Boston College. I also came in handy as a theological resource when he was still working on his Dante book in earnest those evenings. Whether I was reading a recipe or pondering the persistent blanks in a Times crossword puzzle, I was delighted when Mitchell interrupted me with a question about the hierarchy of angels or a miracle. I was amazed to discover that stuff had value, and Mitchell and I were both astonished by my recall.
    On any given evening, in the midst of preparing dinner, I could recite the Seven Sacraments or the Seven Deadly Sins or the Seven Cardinal Virtues. I was no scholar. I was more like Wikipedia with a cocktail shaker. But I had other skills, as well, and Mitchell’s readiness to exploit them registered as a compliment, elevating my degree in library science from technical training to an academic accomplishment and raising my hopes about my own prospects in the world. During my last year at the Cambridge library, I happily devoted more time to cross-referencing arcane 14th-century sources than to reshelving periodicals, but then we went to Paris, and he came home to a new job, and I came home pregnant.
    We didn’t lose Dante when Mitchell veered off into the secular world of academic administration, but an unlikely passion we’d shared was downsized to a hobby. And nothing in my girlhood qualified me as a guide to Harvard Yard. I stayed at home until Rachel and Sam were in school. And now, I was no longer a wife, no longer a librarian or a teacher, and not really a mother anymore. Not a lot to go on conversationally. So, as no one in the Church hierarchy had bothered to excommunicate me for my many sins, I said, “I am a Catholic. Why do you ask?”
    â€œI thought Berman might be Jewish,” Shelby said. “One of my aunts—her maiden name was Effie Berman.”
    â€œMitchell’s father was a Jew,” I said.
    Shelby said, “He’s passed on, too?”
    â€œYears ago,” I said. “And Mitchell’s mother, too.” Mitchell had insisted we move her from a