Vatican Waltz Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought he might have whispered. Or maybe “Don’t give up.” I leaned down and kissed his lips, and then the nurse and a doctor came hurrying into the room and Father Alberto’s eyes closed and the lines on the machines wavered a last time and went flat. I stepped away to let them work on him—it’s such a violent exercise, trying to keep someone in this world. Instead of leaving the room as they told me to, I stood in the doorway and watched. I could clearly see Father Alberto’s spirit gathering itself, almost the way a person brings his arms in close to his body and bends his knees before making a big jump. But this spirit didn’t have any shape that resembled a human body; it was something else, not ghostlike exactly but outlined in light, supple, electrical. Somehow—I could never say how—it contained, not his looks and personality, but Alberto Ghirardelli’s
essence.
There was a signature stamped on it. I watched that essence preparing itself, gathering itself up through his chest and throat and in the features of his face—just the smallest flexing of the smallest muscles there. And then it flickered a last time, like a candle flame going out, and made its leap into the next world.
    The doctors and nurses worked and worked—they’re required to by law—but I could have told them it was no use. I said one Hail Mary, helping him on his way, and then, carrying a familiar sad weight, feeling an all-too-familiar hole opening in my world, I went out into the hall to find Matilda.
    ON THE DAY AFTER FATHER Alberto’s death, Monsignor Ferraponte—who had taken over a group of local churches after the retirement of Monsignor Zanelli—put out a brief statement saying, basically, “We are all saddened by this loss.” To my ear at least, the tone of it was half sincere. There wasn’t a single good word about Father Alberto, no praise, nothing about how beloved he’d been, and it struck me as doubly strange that the monsignor didn’t preside over the funeral Mass and wasn’t anywhere to be seen among the thousand or so people who crowded the church.
    In the days and weeks following Father Alberto’s death I felt as though I inhabited a great cold emptiness. It was all I could do to make myself go into Boston for school, to come home and finish the chores I was supposed to do around the house. My father seemed frightened by the depth of my grief. At the funeral he watched me as if I might melt. And later, at home, he was like a knight clanking through the kitchen and living room in a heavy armor of self-consciousness. Father Alberto’s sudden death had taken hold of his world with two big hands and shaken it so hard that the things he’d always done easily—snapping green beans off a vine, gluing and clamping a loose leg on an old kitchen chair—seemed suddenly beyond him, as alien to his hands as the French language to his tongue.
    “What’s wrong, Pa?” I said at last.
    “Nothin’.”
    “You’re not yourself.”
    A grunt. A silence. Then: “You best friend you lost now.”
    I looked at him through a quick lens of tears, but even in that sad blur I could see the fear on his face, a cold-weather tan. I
was
sad, of course, wrapped up in sadness from eyes to knees, but I wasn’t afraid. “I’ll see him again,” I said, because that was—and is—a certainty in my world. I know it like I know red from blue: God doesn’t bring souls together for a few years in the ocean of eternity and then separate them forever. What sense would that make in a world that, even judging by the known laws of biology, chemistry, and physics, is otherwise so meticulously ordered?
    “Nobody knows it for sure,” my father said, then he made a quick retreat to the consolation of television, that leaping, seductive, electronic world, a deathless universe.
    Though the state and local police conducted an investigation—Matilda told me they knocked on every door in the neighborhood, hoping to find someone who’d seen