Gospel: A Novel

1

I had lost my faith, Josephus.¹

2. It had parted as the flower falls from the wilting stalk, as the tide recedes to reveal the mud beneath the sea, gone as the moon behind a large cloud, as Helios in bed at Eridanus at nighttime’s ebb.² So it was with me! I awoke to find what had once been certain now uncertain. And thus began my travels, my brother, and this magnificent history you are about to read—surely, I say, to be ranked among the most important of my works!

3. It is the sixth year [76 C.E.] of this monster Flavius Caesar,³ whose avarice is boundless and cruelty legendary. However, I bring news to your deaf ears, for you, my brother, have done all but service this ogre in his bedchamber. Yes, and I assure you the Jews say worse about you. Such as, First there was Aliturius upon the stage and now you too: Josephus who acts the Roman, betrayer of his people!⁴

Mind you, Aliturius only committed his genital member to Caesar while you have flung your soul at him, as well as our beloved father’s name, since you are now raised up as Flavius Josephus. Furthermore it is no small insult that you dally as an historian, a rival to me, your older brother, whose fame you shall not so easily eclipse by writing love letters to Roman generals! Truly, my brother, I would believe it if I heard that you had taken recourse to surgeons to erase that primal sign of covenant with our people.⁵

4. Perhaps you will throw this missive into the fire as you did my last one; certainly my tone with you does nothing for its chances. Indeed, Tesmegan, we shall soften my rhetorical blows when you read this back to me. (Tesmegan is my scribe, purchased here with my last monies, in what is surely the last act of my life. How it must delight you to know that you will never hear from me again!) But keep reading, for there are more delights in store for you, dear Josephus. For nearly half a century you have berated my association with the Nazirene Church⁶ and it shall be among your final triumphs to know that I come to the end of my life with the Church at odds with me and I at odds with it; it is hard to know who is more disgusted and disappointed in whom. The Nazirene Church in the last twenty years has become a shambles, but I hardly need to tell you that, armed as you are with abuse for the followers of the Teacher of Righteousness.⁷

5. Mark my words: my faith in the justice of Our Savior’s teaching has not swayed one bit—not a particle!

However, the ensuing riot of heresies that has affixed itself to the life-account of Our Master has forced me to stand to the side of the Movement He originated, so rife with blasphemies and innovations it has become. (Naturally, I your brother, scholar and historian, could be depended upon to root out all heterodoxies, but these days I am no more heeded than Micaiah before Jeroboam.)⁸

I propose to tell you now of the last ten years and my search for the truth concerning Our Master and His Disciples, and then lastly, how I come to the end of my life, here in the midst of Africa, alone, penniless, without companion or synagogue to support me. (Tesmegan insists that he be counted among my friends—very well, write that down but that is the last of your interruptions, young man.) Like Herodotus, I have come to my account of Xerxes.⁹

O Blessed Sophia be ever with me as I commit my last excellencies to posterity!

6. I recall you despised all of the fellow Disciples that you met, but you have more in common with them than you know, Josephus. Twenty years before the catastrophe of Jerusalem [50 C.E.], I wrote a three-volume Gospel that our Chief Disciple, Peter, quite intemperately burned, instructing me in his blunt, artless manner that I did no service to Our Church.

A similar fate was prepared for my All Heresies Refuted in Philippi, I was informed, though copies still exist in Damascus and in certain private libraries, along with my Cosmos Explained, which I feel to be immature and enthusiastic in its praise of Sophia, but not without many passages of merit, and my influential Catalogues of Martyrdom, which is a learned speculation upon the matters of the Throne, Crowns, the Chariot, Diadems, and the like. I have, it must be admitted, also distanced myself from that rather enthusiastic work (though my Greek garnered the praises of many).¹⁰ I was delighted to note that Ephesus still possessed a copy of my Odes of Arkady, which was well received in many Alexandrian circles, I must say, as well as my splendid epic The Hebraika, which, I am resigned, will long outlive my theological dissertations.

(You will recall Zechariah bar-Sirach¹¹ himself considered The Hebraika the finest work of its sort since the Psalms of King David, and though you never mentioned it by name in our many letters, I have always suspected that you bore it begrudging admiration. Would that we could put aside these foolish pretensions!)

7. But now to my tireless history at hand: Clio, may thy steady hand be ever on my calamus!

Sadly, given your adventures with the Romans, who befriend us one moment to better crucify us the next, I have no way of knowing whether you are alive as I dictate this. I wonder if you have perished answering the outrages of more pots turned upside-down in Caesarean alleyways or died at the hands of the now-desperate Sicarii.¹² But there is no reason you shouldn’t be alive and well-fed as you now sit enthroned in my former estate, our family’s property that was rightfully mine and that you usurped from me—let it here be recorded!

8. I promise not to dwell upon this, the most recent of our contentions, but though six years have passed, I feel no less heated about your being given the title to the estate as a reward by the Romans, and your expelling my Nazirene commune of charities from your property. Understand: it is not for me selfishly that I resented your intriguing with the Romans to give to you, the second-born, the property that was rightfully mine as the first-born.¹³ My sadness was for the orphans and elderly, virgins and scholars that I had installed there.

Indeed, I smell the stale perfume and wine-breath of my unbeloved stepmother, my father’s ill-chosen second wife, in all this! That woman, your mother, an ever-flowing fount of poison where I am concerned, was surely behind your action. Though she rarely left Jerusalem where she and our father spent their last decades, it nonetheless perturbed her that the country estate had been consecrated to this higher purpose. With Jerusalem in ruins, naturally, she set her eye upon the estate just as she had set her eye on our father’s money. Your surprising choice to abandon the priesthood for a military career at the age of twenty-nine with no previous experience served to make her worse-tempered with, as she called it, my distasteful Nazirene rabble, a sentiment she attributed to you.

Distasteful rabble? Coming from one who extinguished years fawning upon Nero Caesar and his whore-wife in that cesspit of all sodomies, Rome, mingling with a court for whom rabble is too good a name! Would that your dispossessed brother who shares your blood were as high in your sight!

But far be it from my purpose to start an argument.

9. Go and have the cursed estate, even with my blessing. Enjoy your desolate, ruined Judea. I shouldn’t think the Zealots and rabbis and sons of Zadok and weekly messiahs that sprout like weeds in the rubble of the Temple should give you much peace. As Judeans they could for centuries not agree on a single matter until, of course, the matter of your infamy was before them. So since we find ourselves respectively reviled by the world we used to inhabit, surely then let us be as Jacob and Esau reconciled at Shechem!¹⁴ Having the estate in your possession—snatched like the girdle of Hippolyta!—let argument and strife be through between us and let us speak to one another as men of a family. Or better yet, scholars that we are!

10. And frankly it is little matter old as I am whether you love me or no, but rather, as with all that are aged, whether you attend what I have to say. I suspect you bear me, the one who raised you and encouraged you in your studies, no affection, still find me foolish and irresponsible, find my researches laughable and the values of Our Master doomed to extinction. At least then consider what I have seen, and that I have traveled to Tarsus and Tyre, Antioch and Alexandria, speaking to Celts and Caucasians, to Paphlagonians and Persians, and I write you now in dire circumstances from Meroe!¹⁵ Whereas you have marched with pomp into many a city and dealt with the rulers and sat at the fine tables, I entered often as a stranger, a beggar who took the kindness of the town, and believe I can write as true a history from my travels.

11. I exhort you,¹⁶ my brother, to read on and learn!

You shall not believe the wickedness of the Nazirene’s enemies. False messiahs abound! To take a life in these times is as nothing; no blasphemy is too foul, no lie is too absurd for it not to be believed and championed, no self-mutilation too horrid to practice. Though you have seen much in battle, you shall not sleep when I tell you that I myself, your own brother, was threatened with unchastity and sodomies¹⁷ by the fleshpots of our enemies! The Whore Helen, whose notoriety is deserved! (You know that virgin chastity, and freedom from submission to sin,¹⁸ I have always felt, to be the only engine of refinement for the soul.) I dread even to think of her now, and her hellish loins.…

12. Ah, but young Tesmegan tires, and I will begin the tales of my travels tomorrow. How in fits and starts, over the last ten years, I began my wanderings to search for the true relation of Our Church’s origins according to Our Master’s first disciples, followers, and acquaintances.

BRITAIN

I never saw, heard, nor read that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular but some degree of persecution.

—Thoughts on Religion, Works, vol. xv, R17 (post. 1765)

JONATHAN SWIFT

Let him who is fond of indulging in a dreamlike existence go to Oxford, and stay there; let him study this magnificent spectacle, the same under all aspects, with its mental twilight tempering the glare of noon, or mellowing the silver moonlight; let him wander in her sylvan suburbs, or linger in her cloistered halls; but let him not catch the din of scholars or teachers, or dine or sup with them, or speak a word to any of the privileged inhabitants; for if he does, the spell will be broken, the poetry and the religion gone, and the palace of the enchantment will melt from his embrace into thin air!

—Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries (1824)

WILLIAM HAZLITT

[The Arian Heresy,] this poisonous error, after corrupting whole world at length crossed the sea and infected even this remote island; and, once the doorway had been opened, every sort of pestilential heresy at once poured into this island, whose people are ready to listen to anything novel, and never hold firmly to anything.

—A History of the English Church and People (721)

BEDE

So the Maker of Mankind laid waste this dwelling-place until the old works of Giants stood idle.… Therefore the Man wise in his heart considers carefully this wall-place and this dark life, remembers the multitude of deadly combats long ago, and speaks these words: "Where has the Horse gone? Where the young Warrior?… Where are the joys of the Hall? Alas, the bright Cup! Alas, the mailed Warrior! Alas, the Prince’s glory! How that time has gone, vanished beneath night’s cover, just as if it had never been!

—The Wanderer, The Exeter Book (975)

Shortly after the captain mentioned they were passing over Stornaway, that it was 45 degrees below zero outside, that they were at a height of 36,000 feet, that the weather in London was cloudy and drizzly and a good morning to all, he warned that due to a high-pressure cell over Great Britain it might be a little turbulent for the next hour or so, and after signing off—Buck, Chip, Dirk, Biff, whatever his name was, to Lucy he sounded drunk or at best half-awake—the little seatbelt sign lit up with a ding.

Lucy Dantan automatically put her hand to her seatbelt, which had never been unfastened, and steeled herself.

First flight.

With the excitement of a first trip to Europe, the unusual mission ahead of her and her terror of being airborne, Lucy reckoned she had acceded to just twenty minutes of tortured plane-sleep, awakening with every bump and wobble. It was 6:30 A.M. by her watch, 12:30 to the British people down below—technically Scottish, Lucy decided—and it wasn’t too long now to London and Heathrow Airport.

As promised, here came the turbulence.

Lucy looked at the sleepy stewardess making her way down the aisle. The stewardess did this all the time. Several days a week, for months, years people did this. No problem, this turbulence. Absolutely common. Then there was a big kalumph as the plane dropped a hundred feet, a lurch Lucy found reminiscent of when the down elevator in the Sears Tower back home in Chicago puts on the brakes. A few people groaned, most shifted and readjusted themselves, still sleeping.

Time for more prayer, she vowed.

Our Father, Who art in heaven,…

(This again.)

… hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come… Lucy trailed off, this being too pro forma. Please don’t let this plane crash, Lord. Jesus, if it does go down, forgive me of my sins. And Holy Spirit…

(Yes?)

Lucy dried up on the Holy Spirit. If we’re all gonna die, please sustain me and allow me the peace to meet my end with dignity. What if the plane hurtled into the cold North Atlantic? Lucy imagined a crash-landing on the water. The plane would initially float and then panic would break out and there’d be a riot getting to the life rafts. Give me the strength, Holy Spirit, to be of service through this coming ordeal. And if death is my lot…

(The plane is not going to crash, My child.)

Then the plane hit a treacherous series of drops. A stewardess lost control of the orange juice she was pouring and a baby began to cry.

Thy will be done, Lucy muttered, eyes pinched closed, hands clasped tight. If You want me to drop out of the sky, twenty-eight years old in the prime of life, all right, I can’t stop You. But I’ll be happy to dedicate my life to something or make some kind of promise…

(Over Newfoundland, you promised Us two years with Mother Teresa. What do We get now?)

And please, Holy Spirit, be with the pilot and copilot and guide them and be with them so that we may all land safely.

(But I am with you always.)

There was a respite from the turbulence and Lucy was determined to distract herself. There were two allowable diversions: the in-flight magazine with every piece read three times except the mutual bonds article, and Lucy’s own notepad with the details of her mission.

She reviewed: Dr. O’Hanrahan and his assistant, Gabriel O’Donoghue, her childhood friend and fellow grad student at the University of Chicago, had left the university on some kind of hush-hush expedition back in February. Gabriel and the professor were supposed to return in March. They didn’t. Attempts to contact them by the Theology Department proved fruitless. Soon Gabriel stopped sending messages home. Soon the department had lost the trail of Dr. O’Hanrahan, but since he had the department credit card they had his receipts and some clue as to where he had been. Soon, a bill of $2,000 arrived and the department canceled the credit card.

While assuring Gabriel’s parents that he was all right, and assuring Dr. O’Hanrahan’s sister that the old man was all right, the Theology Department began to suspect that things were not all right: that this bitter, alcoholic, eccentric genius had taken the department credit card along with many other funds and trusts, and was blowing it in a last-ditch effort at revenge on the department he had built and, he felt, had betrayed him.

You see, Miss Dantan, Dr. Shaughnesy had told her a week ago, as she sat in his oaken office, somber and muted as one expected a theological study to be, O’Hanrahan is a great man with a great mind, but alas, with a great grudge against us as well. Poor Patrick suspects his ouster as chairman was the result of a Masonic plot.

Lucy asked, If he doesn’t listen to you, why would he listen to a stranger like me?

He may not, but at least the Theology Department will have done what it can to retrieve him. It is with the most abundant possible tact and diplomacy that we want you to approach him, and suggest… Dr. Shaughnesy attempted a look of concern, human compassion never being his strength and always having to be slightly play-acted. … suggest that he come back home to his loved ones and fellow colleagues. Don’t let it end like this, in this … this childish display.

Might, Lucy speculated, he really be on to something? I mean, this was the man who worked on the Nag Hammadi digs, the Nimrut Dag stele, who helped catalogue the Huntington Library fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe he’ll walk in the door with another Dead Sea Scroll or something.

Dr. Shaughnesy looked somewhat pained and twisted the large onyx ring on his left hand; Lucy observed his pale, long fingers. I don’t think so, my dear. I have a file drawer full of hate mail from the man and I’m not sure he has any purpose but running up a tremendous bar and restaurant tab. The head of the Theology Department twisted his ring again uncomfortably. And yet, I don’t want to report him to the police for defrauding the department. I want to give him this warning—Patrick was responsible for hiring me, after all. We, his former colleagues and admirers, owe him this courtesy.

Lucy asked Dr. Shaughnesy why he was sure O’Hanrahan would be attending an upcoming dinner in All Souls College at Oxford University, Thursday night, June 21st, 1990. The Acolytes were a dining society for ecclesiasts from a number of faiths—Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism, Judaism—who met once a year for a feast of fine food, rare wines, precious liqueurs, and an agreed-upon topic for learned, rousing debate.

He’s never missed one of these Acolyte Suppers yet, said Shaughnesy. And I have contacted a colleague at Cambridge who is in the Acolyte Society and, being indisposed, has ceded his place to me, and I in turn have put forward your name to attend.

Wow.

You are free, of course, to decline this trip for the department, offered Shaughnesy, examining his bloodless hands.

Oh no, sir, she had insisted. What an opportunity. I mean, I’ve never really been anywhere at all. Is there … is there some reason you’re picking me to do this?

Shaughnesy smiled briefly. We were going to send one of the faculty, but it occurred there was no one available whom Patrick might not take great exception to—so few of us are on speaking terms with him. And you are among the most mature grad students remaining in the department.

Lucy returned a wan smile. Her thesis: four years and counting.

So, of course, she had to go on this trip. When she said she’d been nowhere, she’d meant it. Indiana, Wisconsin as far as the Dells, all over Illinois, once down to St. Louis when the big arch was dedicated when she was a kid. Also, Lucy couldn’t refuse the one thing ever asked of her in years of academic obscurity in this department. Especially with her thesis-extension hearing looming in September. And the fact that she’d been through three different senior advisers. No, there was no choice, politically. She had to go, and she had to succeed.

Lucy also had to go because it would be exciting—a whole other country. And there had been so little excitement in her life that if Lucy had turned this down she would be lying awake for months cursing this missed opportunity for an expenses-paid trip to Great Britain. Besides, she wondered sometimes if her life had the capacity to be exciting, if the years were fated to continue just like the previous ones, safe and dull.

A jolt from the turbulence brought Lucy back to the present.

Between the plane crashing and dealing with Dr. O’Hanrahan, whose ferocious presence Lucy had witnessed in lecture halls a time or two, her body pumped an adrenaline of incessant worry. What if Dr. O’Hanrahan isn’t at Oxford as planned? What if he refuses to talk to her? What if he’s insane? What if Gabriel’s had a bad accident and O’Hanrahan is covering up.… Soon enough she would have her chance to learn the answers, Lucy thought as she looked out to see London in a soup of low-lying rain clouds. Oh thank you, Father, Jesus, and Holy Ghost, for delivering me safe and sound!

(No problem.)

Although, then again, most planes crash on takeoff or landing.

(This is not the fighting spirit We might have hoped for, Lucy.)

Touch down. Deceleration. Everyone alive.

Lucy was herded through Her Majesty’s Customs and emerged with a minimum of hassle and customs folderol. Her luggage rode the luggage carousel and she grabbed her overpacked suitcase quickly, relieved to see it had come with her, afraid someone would run off with it, still suspicious of this Europe place.

Slowly she apprehended the foreignness of things. The sign: INFORMATION CENTRE. That’s right, she remembered from somewhere, they turn around the er’s, over here. Amid the Urdu and French and German snatches of conversation she recognized her own language, more clipped, sometimes more gracious and formal, sometimes incomprehensible but musical and bouncing. Yeah, she confirmed to herself, they even look English. Not all too different from the Irish she grew up with really, here and there. No bowler hats, though. No dreamy indolent boys from Eton, no chimney sweeps out of Mary Poppins, no royalty anywhere to be seen.

The signs led her to a plaza, where she discovered it was damp and cold; she congratulated herself on the warm clothes she had brought. And look, there rounding the corner was her first red double-decker bus, its sign announcing Victoria Station. There was a line, which Lucy didn’t take notice of as she went to read the small posted schedule—

Excuse me, said the protectress of the line, "there’s a queue."

After a dumb second, Lucy joined the silent regiment of waiting travelers at the very back, glared at the whole way.

The bus wheezed into the dock and Lucy bought a ticket with a crisp blue five-pound note and sat by a window so she could look out; an elderly lady sat beside her. When the bus commenced the ninety-minute trip, the windows fogged up and Lucy persistently used her sweater shirtsleeve to wipe away a small peephole.

It’ll do that, it will, said the older woman in a whispered voice.

I’m from America, Lucy explained herself, I just want to see out.

Yes, it’s rather nice to see out.

That was it. First conversation in Britain.

Well, at least she can tell Judy when she gets back home she made conversation, made friends, talked to people. Lived. It was important to prove this to Judy, her housemate back on Kimbark Street. Judy was adamant that Lucy never asserted herself or did anything fun. It had just about killed her that Lucy was chosen to take this trip for the department.

Her roommate Judy was her best college-era friend.

Both were Roman Catholic, both of them went to the non-Catholic Chicago University, both were now graduate students, which mystified their complaining parents. Perhaps university prisoners-for-life was more like it, living in the grungy student ghetto in that biggest ghetto of all, the South Side of Chicago. Lucy, after starting out as a classicist, transferred to theology, specializing in Ancient Languages. No two worlds could be more distant than the world of St. John’s Greek and the gauntlet Lucy regularly ran to class: the inner-city kids harassing her, the drunken homeless she must step over or dodge, the brazen drug deals at every corner obvious to the most naive policeman, the rape whistle she always carried, the personal schedule of when not to walk certain places, ride certain trains, be at particular bus stops.

About here her mom’s scolding voice interfered with her memory: You should be living, like any proper young lady, at home.

To live away from home, according to Mrs. Dantan, as an unmarried girl meant orgies and fornication. Lucullan banquets, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lucy in the role of Valeria Messalina, coming home any day pregnant and unbetrothed. I wish, Mom, thought Lucy, I wish. Anything but the dullness of coming home to Judy. Judy was studying psychology, which to Lucy was … ironic. That was always the way with psychology students, she had observed, always in need of more desperate messed-up people to talk to so they could feel like they had the answers to their own disarrayed lives. No, that was cruel to Judy. But Judy did undermine her.

Can I wear your sweater? she’d ask. Your hand-knit thing? I figure we’re both about the same size and if it works for you it’ll hide all my flab too.

Judy was always on some form of unsuccessful diet and she was big on announcing how she and Lucy were sisters in weight problems. Lucy was a bit plump, twenty pounds overweight max, Irish-American, freckled, white-girl plump, but she wasn’t the cow Judy was.

I just wish we hadn’t been raised Roman Catholic, Judy would declaim. That’s why our lives are decades behind other women’s. Judy went on: "I mean, you don’t really want to be in theology, you’re just doing it out of guilt that you didn’t become a nun like your mother wanted."

Well, yes and no—

And if we hadn’t been raised Catholic, we’d have each had fifty boyfriends before now. That’s why we’re neurotic about sex.

Yes, that was another ritual. Over the vegetarian casserole with the TV local news blaring, drinking skim milk and having first courses of plain yogurt to be followed by Weight Watchers frozen tuna lasagne, the endless discussion of men men men. Lucy had never been the type of woman to think night and day about men since, frankly, very few guys she’d met had appealed to her. Catholic or not, she found most men of the species loud and unkind and immature and, decisively, not interested in what interested her.

Judy: "… and Vito Campanella, Gabe’s friend? Hold me back, for God’s sakes. What a behind on that boy. I wish I could get him to walk backward."

Judy had the rhetoric of horniness down to a precision not found in Catullus. If there hadn’t been constant sightings of good-looking men and declarations of their great distance from Lucy, Lucy might have lived quite happily. As if Judy was some great object of romance. Okay. Technically, Judy was a little bit better looking in the face, though given to putting on more weight. It was her personality that kept men away, that and the nasalest, flattest Midwestern drawl. Besides, Lucy knew that her roommate’s true and everlasting love was Paws the Cat.

Paws the Cat belonged to Judy, and Cattus—once part of a duo, Felis and Cattus, but Felis got run over—was Lucy’s.

Lucy, I think we have to talk, Judy said the night before Lucy was to leave on this trip, as if Lucy had a second to waste. I notice that you always give Cattus the same dish, but you put down any old thing for Paws to eat off of. And another thing, why do you serve your cat first when you dump out the Mr. Kittles?

Because he’s bigger and more aggressive.

Because you always feed him first.

No, Lucy explained at the time, because if I put down food in Paws’s dish first, Cattus will think it’s his and eat it.

Only because he’s used to being fed first.

Lucy was often subjected to Judy meowing, talking cat-talk to Paws. Big Cruel Lucy didn’t feed yooooo, no she didn’t! She doesn’t care if we live or die!

Yep, that was about the size of it.

(A little more charity would not go amiss, My dear.)

It was just that Judy made her so mad. The first year they roomed together was all right—just all right, nothing brilliant—but this year had become pure misery. Why haven’t I moved out? she wondered.

(Do you want an answer to that? You judge Judy for being a psychology major to observe others’ distress and feel superior to them, but My child, that’s what you do too. Always have. In St. Eulalia you usually gravitated to the girl who was less socially adept than you. Remember your friend Faith? Isn’t that the real cause of your resentment of Judy, that you see in her your own faults, your own limitations?)

I don’t want to think about Chicago anymore, Lucy decided.

She instead tried to make Berkshire and eastern Oxfordshire a little more like what she had expected. There were expressways and shopping malls and office parks and factories and no abundance of the thatched-cottage villages that she was hoping for. Every once in a while, too far from the highway to inspect, was an old Cotswold-stone church, a sturdy squarish bell tower amid a copse of trees and slate-roofed houses. Because the illusion and its beauty might have dissolved upon a closer look, she persuaded herself of its Englishness as the bus descended into another slight valley.

The road soon became more congested, and the bus leaned through a series of inevitable British traffic circles. Lucy looked at her watch and knew they were almost to Oxford. Lucy was giddy to be somewhere that had been previously confined to PBS specials and the Travel Channel on cable TV back home. The bus crossed Magdalen Bridge and the city of medieval monasteries came into view, its fortress gates, the bell towers and steeples, quaint ye-olde-Englande shops crammed between the stone bastions, bands of boisterous uniformed students gathered outside the Examination Schools celebrating the end of the term and exams with champagne and revelry.…

Lucy wanted off the bus so she could explore!

OXFORD

JUNE 20TH, 1990

The clouds subsided and the rain-soaked High Street was briefly displayed in the queer off-white, horizontal light Oxford alone seems to enjoy. Lucy stared fondly at the scene: the gradual hill of High Street, the road winding upward and left, fortified on both sides by the palisade of ancient colleges presenting spired, stone facades to the road, the Georgian evenness of Queens College and the isolated statue of some queen, stylita, under a stone canopy above the gate.

Lucy groped in her large carpetbag to unearth the guidebook she had bought, ready to decipher centuries of remainders and reconstructions. She walked to the middle of the square formed by St. Mary’s Church, All Souls College, and the Bodleian Library. In the middle of the quad this big round five-story dome, the Radcliffe Camera, subject of most Oxford postcards, had been plopped down in the grass, it seemed, merely because it fit. No less impractical was another gate in the wall of All Souls College with its Indian mini–Taj Mahal dome, and two decorative towers shrieking up from the central building beyond it; farther down the street leading from the quad was a mock Bridge of Sighs at Hertford College, across from that there was a Greek Parthenon-like building, next to Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theater … it was like a stone playground full of cherished architectural follies, and everywhere the much-lauded spires, wherever one could be affixed, at every awning and roofpoint.

Lucy felt despondent at being in Oxford and yet not being enrolled there.

She noticed a group of chattering British female students, dressed in shapeless sweaters, drab woollen skirts and black stockings, a fashion sense Lucy could love, but one much helped by an Oxford backdrop. All I got, mourned Lucy, is crummy old Chicago. Yeah, Chicago is a great university, but Rockefeller built a lot of the romanesque, Oxford-like buildings in the 1930s, for Pete’s sake, and the local joke is that old John D. proved you could even buy history. But you can’t. Because the University of Chicago is dignified and practical and indisputably boring, and Oxford, like history, is silly, impractical, and, she conceded, utterly romantic.

Her map led her to the grim Tudor facade of Braithwaite College where Dr. Shaugnesy had arranged for her to stay. Lucy showed her letters of introduction to the porter, a grumpy red-faced man at the gate, who grunted, looked up at her, grunted, made a phone call no one answered, grunted again, read the letter, another grunt, then put on his glasses in order to be authoritative.

Can’t say I can ’elp ye, miss, he said. We got the Canadian Lawn Bowling Society in this week and rooms’re tight. Ye’ll have to take this up with the Bursary. Mrs. Miggins. And I don’t envy ye none.

Lucy was given directions to get to the Bursary. Lucy quickly surveyed the square beyond this gate, a three-story quad with an even green lawn with several overlarge signs stating no one was to walk upon the grass. The signs had been allowed to become the most striking thing in this tomblike courtyard. She followed the cobblestone perimeter around the sacred grass until she came to a doorway with the numeral III above it, which opened to a dank passage leading to another square quad, replete with warning signs, a doorway that led to a masters’ garden that no one but masters were to use, an outside stairway that led to a library that visitors were not permitted to see. Reminded of Alice in Wonderland—written by an Oxford don, Lucy recalled—Lucy finally found another passageway that led to a third and last quad and a doorway with the numeral XIII, The Bursary.

"We simply cahn’t honor this," breathed Mrs. Miggins, setting down the letter, the pain of all martyrdoms in her voice. One, she enumerated, you are here after the Bursary’s hours of operations…

Lucy noticed the silver hair plastimolded into an arc up above Mrs. Miggins’s head, her gestures, and even the pinched, heartless meting out of the English language were familiar somehow. She’s modeling her public technique on Margaret Thatcher, Lucy realized.

Two, there was no notification to the Bursary of a guest room being made ready for Lucy. Three, consequently there was no staff notification, hence a room could not be prepared. Four, perhaps the rooms had been booked for an American garden club that paid dearly to be here each and every summer, for her information. Five, these exchanges with the University of Chicago—who can’t just barge in here thinking it owns the place merely because it virtually does—involve some degree of paperwork, which, as Lucy could see, is impossible now since the sign outside clearrrrrly states the office hours of the Bursary during which business may be conducted.

I suppose you Americans think we need but snap our fingers and arrange things like that. See this stack of papers?

Lucy looked at the five sheets to the woman’s left.

"American graduate students applying for a place in the college to live. As if we’re here to supply that sort of thing! Well, all I will say is that we have quite enough of the Americans, thank you very much, and there will come a time we don’t have to use our fine institutions for hotels for Americans merely to meet our economic needs."

Is there a guest room I could pay for?

As if we’re a bed-and-breakfast? I suppose you think I have time to ring the lodge and investigate this for you? Mrs. Miggins collapsed before the ordeal and pushed a single button connecting herself to the main gate. Go back to the porter, Mrs. Miggins then directed, "and speak to John and he will try to find something for you, and tomorrow, if it will not be too much trouble for you, return to this office during the posted office hours and we shall try to undo this … this damage."

Lucy returned to the porter and:

1) filled out a form saying she had a guest room key and would give it back,

2) paid a £3 deposit and received a receipt,

3) filled out another form saying she had a doorkey to the college gate and would give it back,

4) filled out another form registering herself responsible for the guest room should any desecration occur in said guest room, and

5) handed over £6.25 for the guest room itself.

Lucy made her way through the quads and passageways to the gloomy, ill-lit Staircase IX. She trudged up to the very top of the groaning old stairs and found a door marked Guest Room staring her in the face … beside a plaque delineating the Rules of the Guest Room. Lucy turned the key to open the cold, dingy guest room with an old hospital bed and a rusted, dripping sink under a slanted attic ceiling. Oh well, she thought, what else can you expect from thousand-year-old rooms? How romantic! Perhaps a monk copied scrolls here once!

(The quad is 1925 pretending to be Victorian pretending to be medieval, but We’re glad you’re enjoying yourself.)

Lucy yawned as she sat on the bed and she realized if she put her head down she would fall asleep for hours, never to adjust to Greenwich Mean Time. She grabbed her guidebook with the map and headed out to explore All Souls College and see if Dr. O’Hanrahan was in residence.

All Souls College, she read as she walked: founded 1438 by Henry VI. The only college without students. All Souls is a collection of Fellows, reputed to be the cream of any generation, who gather to drink and talk and not too terribly much else. The test to be one of these elite was formidable. One needed to sit for exams in two of either Law, History, Philosophy, Economics, Politics, Literature, or Classics, submit three excellent essays, translations from an ancient language, and an oral quiz. Some fellowships must be forfeited upon marriage, as in the Middle Ages. And then there’s the dining test. If you were bad company or a moron socially, that could blackball you. To hinder your path, a virtual obstacle course of difficult-to-eat foods was served: slurpable spaghetti, escargot with the shell-clamp, small game hen with knife and fork, and a dessert of cherries, which were passed to the candidate to see what he did with the pits. An insular, unaccountable place, All Souls College.

Excuse me, said Lucy to the porter on duty at the entrance. I’m looking for a visiting professor here, a Dr. Patrick O’Hanrahan?

Oh yes, miss, the porter said, nodding with concern. The library, I suspect. If he’s back from the Infirmary after last night. Or the Senior Common Room, near the sherry cabinet.

I see, thought Lucy, he’s living up to his reputation. She had a faint memory of Professor Emeritus O’Hanrahan from her undergraduate days, when she took his Introduction to Hebrew. Dr. O’Hanrahan showed up plastered at the first lecture, telling wild stories of working on the Dead Sea Scrolls and being in Jerusalem in 1948 with bombs falling all around him. Not professorial behavior, but not a soul in the room didn’t want to learn Hebrew by the time he was done. The next week a graduate student replaced him and the class returned to the predictable tedium of all language classes.

After a few wrong turns, Lucy asked directions again and was directed to a small door on the side of the quad beyond the chapel. She entered a little, reasonably appointed room of old leather-bound books, antique end tables, and vases. But nothing prepared her for the vista upon opening the next door: The Codrington Library, the greatest Georgian architectural expression of Oxford. A palatial hall paved with a checkerboard of black and white marble, enclosed by three floors of antique books and manuscripts shelved in towering old-fashioned, dark green–stained bookcases. Librarians and assistants climbed perilous ladders to reach the upper shelves, scooted along rickety ledges and railings, while below, symmetrically arranged down the marble avenue, were old scribe’s desks, perfect for inkwells and quills and ledgers, with students laboring over modern books in absolute, heavenly quiet. A white-marble statue of some self-satisfied Jacobean grandee faced the students from the end of the long hall, as if to assure this tranquillity.

May I help you? whispered a heronlike librarian-lady. You have to be a registered reader to study here.

Lucy snapped to. I’m here to find a Dr. O’Hanrahan.

Oh, she said, focusing unmistakable weariness into the syllable. No, he is not here this afternoon, nor do I expect him… But then she blanched. Lucy turned and saw a man bolt through the reference area and out into the main hall. It was just a glimpse, but it was Dr. O’Hanrahan, and his presence registered to Lucy as a shock.

O’Hanrahan took possession of a scribe’s desk halfway down the cavernous room, and let his books, papers, and a briefcase drop with a thud, which startled the few drowsy students around him. Lucy uneasily edged forward, all the while taking the measure of his fearsome visage:

Patrick Virgil O’Hanrahan was 6′ 1″, around sixty-five years old Lucy figured, balding with a holy man’s white hair combed forward and across, the pink excitable face of an unregenerate Irishman, and steely blue eyes that could sear the ignorant and inexcusable. Otherwise, he was standard academic professor-emeritus issue: a potbelly, a good suit now worn and creased around his girth, and even in repose an aura, his own weather-system swirling about him. Lucy recalled his oratorical booming voice that made his lectures legendary and his wrath a thing to be much avoided.

She took a step closer.

His left arm was in a light sling, without a cast or even a bandage to explain its injury. She watched him settle into the Victorian scribe’s desk—a tight fit—and intemperately wrench off the sling with his good arm and hurl it to the floor. He slowly unstretched his bad arm, wincing slightly, exercising his five fingers, and then rubbing the injured elbow joint.

Lucy took another step closer.

Without looking up he said in a low tone, Something I can help you with, my dear?

You’re Dr. O’Hanrahan, I believe. Sir.

Still without observing her, he asked, I’m sorry if I misbehaved last night but too much madeira will do that to a man. If the dress is ruined, just drop it off at the porter’s lodge here at All Souls and I’ll be happy to make reparation or have it cleaned.

Uh, I believe you’ve confused me with someone else. I’m…

He looked up, fixing her with a mildly curious glance.

I’m a … here to see you, in fact. Sir.

O’Hanrahan didn’t waver. Short of my having fathered your love-child, young lady, I can’t imagine what business we have to detain us longer.

Lucy Dantan, sir. I’m from the department. I’ve been sent. To, uh, see how you’re doing.

There was not even a minute change of expression as he held her there. My health is fine, thank you, he said in a still voice. My arm is a bit sore after last night’s tumble in the quad and my stomach is a constant churning sea thanks to British tapwater, but aside from that I am in the golden prime of my autumnal years.

Here, he clambered to his feet, released by the surrounding desk. His voice grew more intense: Now you know how I am. Now you can go away. Go far away, go back to Chicago, and tell mine enemies to call upon me no more. His white eyebrow arched, his countenance now exceedingly malign. That clown Shaughnesy sent you, did he?

Well, yes sir, I—

You tell that impotence, that inconsequence, that imitation of a human being…

Lucy reflected in mid-tirade that Dr. Shaughnesy had engineered the retirement of Dr. O’Hanrahan as department chairman in 1974. For O’Hanrahan’s own good, it was said.

… that if he wants a piece of this action, thinks for a millisecond—which is surely as long as he can sustain cerebral processes—that the theological find of the century has one pitiful chance in hell of ever ending up in the Department of Theology’s Patrick V. O’Hanrahan Library and Research Center…

Lucy further reflected that the cost of unseating Dr. O’Hanrahan as department chairman had been naming the department library after him, which was just, since all of the treasures within it were acquired by Dr. O’Hanrahan. Lucy also noticed she was backing away and he was progressing toward her.

… then he is even more of a blackguard, cretin, and charlatan than I already know him to be. Is that clear? Good. Nice to meet you, Miss Dantan, and I hope you have a nice flight home.

Uh, sir, I need to ask you about Gabriel O’Donoghue—

As if an electric shock distorted him, he snapped, "That is a subject I have no interest in discussing!"

In the silence after this remark, Lucy had occasion to remember the tangled history of her friend Gabriel and Dr. O’Hanrahan. Last fall, to let him earn a bit of extra money and keep some of his office privileges, O’Hanrahan was summoned to Hyde Park to counsel a few students in their doctoral theses. Gabriel was assigned to Dr. O’Hanrahan, and for the whole year this adviser-advisee relationship had been the biggest source of stress in young Gabriel’s life.

Gabriel’s thesis—one of five topics last year—involved Alexandrian Greek, an O’Hanrahan specialty. Nothing Gabriel wrote, said, or thought suited O’Hanrahan, who thought his advisee was clearly an idiot. Nonetheless, if Gabriel threatened to cancel their monthly appointment, O’Hanrahan seemed distraught and insisted on seeing him. Gabriel once confessed by phone to O’Hanrahan that he hadn’t done a lick of work since the last time they’d met, but O’Hanrahan said it didn’t matter, they should meet anyway.

At some point it occurred to Gabriel that the old guy was lonely.

Then, out of the blue, January of 1990, O’Hanrahan asked Gabriel if he wanted to be his research assistant. It involved a month in Jerusalem, Rome, Germany, France, England … Lucy remembered vividly the savage winter day Gabriel ran over to the apartment to tell her about it.

Sounds like a great opportunity, Gabe, she said.

I know, he said, pacing in his hooded winter coat, shaking snow all over the carpet. But two months with that ogre!

He’s probably quite sweet underneath, said Lucy. He must be companionable at some level.

Well, maybe I was wrong there, thought Lucy, back in the present.

She tried again: Excuse me, sir, but back in Chicago no one knows if your assistant Gabriel is alive or dead—

"I don’t care if he is dead. And he’s not my assistant anymore, the little Judas. He fixed her with an angry glare. Now will you leave me be?"

Lucy began full retreat, nodding good-bye, as he stalked back to his desk. A few interested students had attended this scene and she met their glances hoping for a trace of sympathy, but none was there.

Stumbling out into Radcliffe Square again, into the cool damp air on this graying June day, Lucy sat upon a ledge of the domed library building. Her mission was going to be more difficult than she had imagined. And, Lucy wondered, what on earth is Dr. O’Hanrahan going to say when I show up to the Acolyte Supper tomorrow night? Maybe she should have mentioned that.

Oh well.

Feeling exhausted and ready for bed now, Lucy returned to Braithwaite College and her spartan cell. Lucy scouted out the dripping, mildewed toilet two floors below. She brushed her teeth at the sink in her room, discovering that the Hot faucet never yielded anything hot, and that once turned on, proceeded to drip in its discolored basin. Lucy then settled on the stiff, creaking bed, bouncing on it a bit hoping it would soften, and read from her guidebook by the light of the dimwatted bulb. And as tiredness overcame her, she mouthed a perfunctory Lord’s Prayer and thanked God for delivering her safe and sound to a foreign land.

(Sleep well.)

And Holy Spirit, she added, don’t let me be a failure on my one small mission for the university.

(Anything but that, My child.)

Lucy curled up in the rough, clammy sheets and stale-smelling doggy blanket provided for Braithwaite’s guests. Not quite enough to defeat the chill. Lucy exhaled a few times, alarmed that she could almost see her breath. She got up and put on her sweater and climbed back in bed.

It was all so English! How exciting it was to be in Oxford!

JUNE 21ST

Lucy awoke at dawn, still not adapted to her new time zone. She read some more in her guidebook and then made her way to the shower stall across the landing, a freezing mildewed compartment with a door that wouldn’t lock.

Lucy later returned to her room to find a servant vacuuming it and her suitcase gone without a trace. The servant declared repeatedly, Wouldn’t know anythin’ about it, love. Lucy, clutching her bathrobe and shivering, passed on the stairway an attractive, tall brunette in a beret, wearing a short skirt with her long legs in magenta stockings, on her way up, holding an empty champagne bottle, perhaps just now coming home from a party.

I’ve been moved out of the room upstairs, Lucy said.

How beastly, said the girl warmly, in a crisp, posh accent. If he won’t let you back in, come knock me up here and I’ll give him a proper bollocking for you.

Lucy continued through the quads and confronted the new porter at the lodge.

So you’re the one in the Guest Room, he said accusingly. We thought you’d gone off without paying your bill. Heh-heh, we’ve held your things for ransom… With a sweep of his hand, she saw behind him, in the porter’s lodge, her carpetbag and suitcase.

May I have them, please? she said, entirely annoyed, her teeth chattering with the chill.

Not before paying the £6.25 room bill, and for storing her things, an extra fine of £1, which Lucy grouchily paid to get her things back.

You should’ve seen to this bill last night, miss, he mumbled.

"I paid yesterday, for your information."

Is you stayin’ tonight?

I suppose.

So you’re payin’ me now for tonight, aren’t you?

Are you going to give me my suitcase?

The porter lugged her suitcase and carpetbag to the door and Lucy frowned at the prospect of carrying them up the stairs again.

Oh, and miss? he said. I suppose you’ll be wantin’ a breakfast ticket.

She thought about it. Breakfast might be nice. Yes, an English breakfast, scones and richly brewed Earl Grey tea in pewter teapots … How much?

That’s £1.95, a real bargain, it is.

Okay, I’ll take one.

He pointed to the main stone edifice on the side of the well-groomed quad. That’s Hall right there, can’t miss it. Be there at the door at 8:20 on the dot.

Lucy trudged back to her room, dragging her suitcase up the stairway, dressed hurriedly, put on two sweaters hoping for warmth, and ran down the stairs to report at the Hall at 8:20 on the dot. She heard the noises of students filing in, the clattering of plates and silverware, but the door she stood before wasn’t open. She knocked, and as there was no answer, she circled the building and found a small, unheralded entrance on the other side.

And where do you think you’re going? snarled another Dickensian relic, also with bulbous nose and red alcoholic cheeks.

To breakfast? she suggested.

Let’s see your ’alf-ticket.

Lucy showed him her ticket, untorn, with a dotted line down the middle.

Ah, you can’t use that.

Lucy met him with an impatient American glare. Why not?

Well, ye didn’t post one ’alf of it in advance. We dudn’t know ye were coming, now did we? Not if ye don’t post yer ticket.

Lucy explained that the porter had just sold her this, and she assumed it was good for breakfast.

That it is, that it is, but not the breakfast fer today. And besides, ’tis after half past, too late to be seated anyways.

Just fine, thought Lucy, as she fled the portals of Braithwaite some time later and walked into the faint sun of the English morning, guidebook with map of Oxford in hand. Lucy spent the rest of the day sightseeing and snapping photos, half-distracted by the thought of the performance ahead. The Acolyte Supper. For god’s sake, let’s hope they don’t ask me anything.

She started primping at 5:30. She combed out her often frizzy dark-red hair that the English humidity had made limp and oily looking. Lucy wore a conservative billowy black skirt, her one formal change of clothes, black stockings, and a white blouse; not far, she noticed, from the official sub fusc Oxford undergraduate uniform. She timidly checked in at the All Souls porter’s lodge, punctually at 6:30. She was given directions to a wood-paneled upstairs room, where only three people had arrived.

Along the walls of this study were trophy cases displaying a variety of eclectic things, including three Nobel prizes, a reverend member’s pipe, a wager on parchment written in Latin in the 1500s, a silver chalice, each, Lucy imagined, with its own venerable story to qualify for the cabinet. Elsewhere it was an elegant room of fox-and-hounds pictures, a sword above the fireplace, a long, dark-stained mahogany table loaded down with bottles and glasses, and two wordless servants awaiting the guests’ pleasure.

You must be Miss Dantan, said Dr. Whitestone, a tall patrician gentleman in a minister’s collar, Anglican Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s. John Shaughnesy wrote that you were taking Father Ratchett’s place, yes? He clasped her hand with clammy fingers.

Relieved, she placed herself in his control and he escorted her to meet the guests. Lucy was introduced to a Dominican brother, Father Philip Beaufoix of Montréal and the American University in Cairo. Father Beaufoix was a short, compact man in his sixties, Lucy estimated, with a soft olive face with a large Gallic nose pitted by a life of convivial drink, which made him seem approachable and wise. Beside him was Sister Marie-Berthe, possibly fifty years old, a Josephine Sister from Québec as well, lately of the Sacred Heart Academy in Toulouse, France. Dr. Whitestone went to fetch a tray of liqueurs.

Bon soir, mademoiselle, Father Beaufoix said, bowing, then the next moment wondered, Dr. Whitestone tells us you are somehow associated with Patrick?

I’m from the University of Chicago. One of his … students, you could say.

Are you over here, asked the sister, assisting Patrick?

Well, no.

Working on some book of your own perhaps?

Uh, no.

Sister Marie-Berthe glanced anew at Father Beaufoix and suppressed a smile. Oh, Jesus, thought Lucy, they think I’m his mistress now.

They moved along. We’re the Canadian contingent tonight, whispered the sister, in a perfect, nasal English. "Whatever tonight I say, Philip, you will agree with me, non?"

Why should I make an exception tonight?

The door opened and more Acolytes were admitted. Local scholars mostly, Lucy decided. One gratingly fey man, Dr. Crispin Gribbles, was introduced, a man in his late forties with a mouth that formed white foam at the edges. He was a scholar attached to St. Ann’s College and was currently cataloguing the relics at St. Aloysius, the most popular Catholic church, he commenced to tell, for all the foreign students:

Oh, it’s dreadful, Vicar, Gribbles was saying to Whitestone. "All the Spanish and Italians and French, on their knees, weeping—what a show it can be when these foreign-student groups come through. Fifteen, sixteen years old, first time away from home, can’t stand our food, can’t stand our weather, so they come to St. Aloysius to weep."

Lucy took a small liqueur glass from the tray. It held a lavender aromatic liquor that seemed to taste of violets. It was called violette, explained the sister, a unique libation of Toulouse. It was my turn this year to bring an aperitif. Each year, she added, three of us bring a bottle of something extraordinary, with an ecclesiastical past. Three for the trinity, she added.

Which is not a difficult task, added Father Beaufoix, since most libation was originated by the Church at one time or another.

Once, I recall, said Dr. Gribbles, "dear Patrick O’Hanrahan brought some moonshine from America, claiming we were to sample the wares of born-again Southern Baptists. Typical O’Hanrahan, I must say."

And speaking of the great man, he had arrived.

Reunited with his companions for this one rare time a year transformed Dr. O’Hanrahan; his blue eyes seemed to be in some afterglow of a dirty joke. He wore a gray crumpled suit with a black tie and Lucy smiled, noting that his top shirt-button had long lost the ability to fasten and the tie was not pulled tight either. Rumpled though he was, what a sight! He hugged his old friends, pinched at Sister Marie-Berthe pantomiming reaching under her habit; his eyes crinkled as he trumpeted his loud war-cry laugh.

Lucy hadn’t been detected yet. She was suddenly fearful that he would see her and make a public scene, banishing her from the festivities. Maybe she should defuse the situation by announcing her presence. She crept up on O’Hanrahan, as he and Father Beaufoix were talking:

Paddy, said the Dominican, "you know you want to tell me what you’re after. Don’t tell me you’re chasing that worthless Acts of Stephen again. Mon ami, I have fifteen copies of that lying around in my office in Cairo."

No, said O’Hanrahan, no such latter-day riff-raff as Stephen for me. Nothing less than one of the Twelve.

Father Beaufoix laughed in O’Hanrahan’s face: Pooh! You don’t believe you have found a real disciple’s gospel, do you?

You’ll read all about it one day, Philip, in the newspapers.

Father Beaufoix, despite the smiles, suddenly seemed to Lucy to be unpleasantly needling Dr. O’Hanrahan. You’re sure you are really chasing a lost gospel, dear friend, or is this another one of your schemes to bankrupt your department? I suppose, this research trip, continued the Dominican, patting O’Hanrahan’s belly, just happens to take you to Rome and Paris and every five-star restaurant in between.

O’Hanrahan mustered a good-natured