The Confessions of Frances Godwin Read online

  Nonetheless I sat down at the long, narrow harvest table in the living room, uncapped my Pelikan Souverän 600, and started to write, and I kept on writing for two weeks, filling more than seventy pages and going through a full bottle of Aurora black ink. I’m computer literate, of course—I have all my lesson plans, and all my translations, on my MacBook Pro—but I wanted to share my story in ink, wanted the ink to flow from my pen onto the creamy Clairefontaine paper as if it were my own dark blood.

  I’ll begin at the beginning—the Shakespeare party in Paul’s attic—more than forty years ago.

  PART II: 1963–1964

  2

  Santa Maria in Trastevere (1963)

  Paul and I joined our bodies—if not our souls—together for the first time after the annual Shakespeare’s birthday party in the attic of Paul’s big Victorian house on Chambers Street. Saturday, April 27, 1963. I’d been around the block a few times, but never with a man who knew what he was doing, and it made quite an impression on me, opened my eyes. Did Paul seduce me, or did I seduce him? Let’s just say that I made myself available. Lois was upset and threatened to report us to the dean, but that was only because she was jealous.

  Lois and I had sat next to each other in the front row of Paul’s Shakespeare classes during our sophomore year. And as seniors we’d both taken his seminar on Shakespeare’s Roman plays. We were attracted by his energy, which was calm and flowing rather than nervous and jumpy—a river, not a waterfall. You could see it in his eyes as he leaned back against the chalk board at the beginning of every class, making eye contact with first one student and then another. “Friends,” he’d say in a deep rich voice.

  So this was our third Shakespeare party. At the first party Lois, an English major, played Hamlet’s mother in the closet scene and I got stuck as one of the fairies in the play within a play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the second party—our junior year—I did a knockout Portia—“the quality of mercy is not strained”—with Lois as Nerissa, and Rita Johnson, who taught French, padded out as a fat Shylock, though she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. At the third I got to do the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, but according to an ancient Shakespeare party tradition—one that predated Paul—the gender roles were always reversed in this scene, so I played Romeo to Paul’s bearded Juliet.

  After the party, Lois’s boyfriend dragged her off. I stayed behind in the attic and was pretending to be asleep on one of the old couches when Paul came up to put the makeshift costumes and hats away. Paul’s wife—a lovely woman, elegant—was in New York, visiting her parents, who lived in a large rent-controlled apartment on Central Park West. She was a native New Yorker and loved to talk about New York, the greatest city in the world. She felt trapped in Galesburg: no Zabar’s, no MoMA, no Metropolitan Museum, no Central Park, no Lincoln Center . . . Lois and I knew nothing of these magical places, but we resolved to live in New York after we’d been graduated, preferably on Central Park West.

  Paul and I began a torrid affair—at least that’s how I thought of it at the time, though “torrid,” from Latin torridus, meaning parched or scorched, is perhaps not the right word. “Scorched” maybe, but not “parched.” Paul’s wife was going to stay in New York till the middle of June, so we had no logistical problems. I would walk down Kellogg Street, where no one was likely to see me, then over to Chambers. I’d circle around and come up the alley and cut through a gap between the end of the privet hedge and the neighbor’s garage. I’d wait on the back porch for a minute, sometimes two, holding my breath and (standing on tiptoe) looking through the little window into the kitchen and admiring the picture of a big artichoke on the far wall before knocking on the door. If Paul was reading at the kitchen table he’d look up and smile. If he wasn’t in the kitchen, I’d have to pound on the door and wait.

  I felt very grown up. Safe, too, because we had a clear terminus ad quem: as soon as the term was over Paul would be leaving for New York, to join his wife for a few days, and I would be leaving for Rome, to take an eight-week course in spoken Latin. “Quo fata trahunt,” I said to myself, “retrahuntque sequamur.” Wherever fate leads us, let us follow.

  I was graduated from Knox College in June and left for Rome a week later. Leaving Paul. Leaving my family. My mother had hoped I’d get to see the Pope—John XXIII—before he died, though she wasn’t a big fan of the changes that were coming out of Vatican II. “The Pope can go to hell if he wants to,” she liked to say. “That’s his business, but I’m not serving meat on Fridays.”

  One of the announcers at the Radio Vaticana had come from Galesburg. His father still lived here. You could see him—the father—mowing the lawn in front of a small brick house on Cherry Street. My mother called him, but he said he couldn’t arrange an introduction to the pope and didn’t think his son could either. In any case, Pope John was already dead by the time I got to Rome.

  My mother, who’d gotten wind of my affair with a faculty member and who was very upset about it, wanted me to go to confession before I left for Rome. It had been a long time.

  “You know,” she said, “Father Gordon at Saint Clement’s is very understanding.”

  “He’s not supposed to know who I am.”

  My mother waved her hand. “When was the last time you made a full confession?”

  My father used to drive us in to Saint Clement’s on Saturday afternoons, but that was before I went off to college. “At least talk to him,” my mother said. “I don’t want you flying over the ocean in a state of mortal sin. What if the plane crashes?”

  “It’s not going to crash, Ma.”

  I wasn’t sure how my mother found out about the affair. Lois? Probably not. She—my mother—wanted my father to complain to the dean, but I wouldn’t tell her who the faculty member was—my współpozwany as she kept calling him. My co-respondent.

  I was a classics major and my mother suspected Professor Davenport, who had directed my honors thesis on Catullus.

  “Let it go, Anka,” my father said.

  “She’s in a state of mortal sin, Kazik. I don’t want her flying over the ocean in a state of mortal sin.”

  This scene was repeated for the last time on the day before I left. I refused to give up Paul’s name; my father, whose name means “keep the peace” in Polish, refused to complain to the dean; my mother was weeping in her room and wouldn’t come downstairs. My aunt came over and fixed sausages and cabbage for our supper, and a cucumber salad, and half a cheesecake from the bakery on Seminary Street.

  The next morning my father took me to the airport in Peoria. My mother managed to come down to say good-bye before we left.

  “Was it that Professor Davenport?” she asked as I was getting into the truck.

  “Ma, he’s fifty years old.”

  “So,” she said. “Your father’s fifty-two.”

  “How about Professor Hanson?” I asked. “Or Professor Goddard?”

  “Franciszka,” she said, turning red. “What are you talking about? They’re women. Don’t tell me . . .”

  “Ma,” I said, “don’t worry, okay? Besides—”

  “At least go to confession when you get to Rome,” she said. “Or maybe you could go before, in the airport in New York. They have churches in airports. Do this for me, will you? Maybe they’ll have a new pope while you’re still there.”

  “If they do,” I said, “I’ll tell him you said hello. I hope it’s not that sour-faced Cardinal Montini.”

  Ma came over to the truck and reached through the open window and held my head in her hands and kissed me.

  “Ma,” I said. “I love you.”

  I cried halfway to Rome, a traveler sensing the gravitational pull of home. The stewardess kept asking if she could help me, but my tears were tears of sorrow mixed with joy, and I was enjoying every one of them. I thought about Paul’s kisses, and Ma’s last kiss as we were pulling out of the drive, and I thought about Lois, who was going to spend a big chunk of the summer detas
seling corn before going to the University of Illinois in Urbana. I was going to Loyola University in Chicago, a good Catholic school. Even so, I was leaving my old life behind, and I wouldn’t be going back home in the fall. But I’d already said good-bye to my old life, the night of the Shakespeare party. I’d crossed a line that night, crossed the Rubicon. The die had been cast. Alec iacta erat. And so I was sad. But I was happy, too. I’d negotiated a grand passion, my first adult love affair. Just what I’d needed at that time in my life. I’d handled it well. There were no loose ends.

  I’d been encouraged by Professor Davenport and by Miss Buckholdt, my high school Latin teacher, to take the course in spoken Latin taught by Father Adrian, an American Carmelite friar from Philadelphia who taught Latin at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In the fall I’d be going to Loyola on a generous scholarship, living in Rogers Park. No turning back now.

  They turned off the cabin lights about ten P.M. Chicago time. I turned on my reading light and took out the Loeb Ovid from my backpack, but none of Ovid’s heroines spoke to me. They offered warnings rather than invitations. Why did things always go wrong for the women who were loved by the gods? I didn’t know, but I knew that I was undergoing a kind of metamorphosis. But what was I turning into? A tree? a cow? a bear? a stag? a flower? a rippling mountain stream? a bubbling fountain? a woman?

  I went to sleep on that thought, and when I woke up we were over the North Atlantic, and I was feeling a little shaky. Maybe I should have gone to confession? What if the plane did crash and I was in a state of mortal sin? Which I was. What about Paul’s wife, a woman who had always been very kind to me? In my dreams Paul and his wife had been laughing about me as they tried to explain these things to my mother. “I found her up in the attic,” Paul was saying, “after the party.” And my mother said, “I just hope they elect a new pope soon so she can go to confession in Rome.”

  By the time the charter flight landed at Ciampino, the military airport, I had regressed to my pre-first-adult-love-affair self. I needed help, physical as well as spiritual. There was no subway into the city; there were no shuttle busses. I had to heave my suitcase and my L. L. Bean backpack onto a regular city bus. I didn’t understand at the time that I was supposed to buy a ticket before I got on the bus and punch it on the bus itself, and I almost got arrested, but I pretended not to understand the policeman who checked our tickets. And in fact, I didn’t understand him. The policeman wrote out a ticket and handed it to me. I put it in my backpack. I still have it. (There was a policeman at each end of the bus, to keep people without tickets from jumping off.)

  Rome was a casino, a madhouse. Pope John had been in the ground—in the cave under Saint Peter’s—for over a week, but no one had gone home after the funeral. They were all sticking around the center of Rome waiting for the election of a new pope. Not just cardinals and their retinues, but priests, monks, friars, journalists, pilgrims, students, tourists, from all over the world.

  The students in Father Adrian Young’s spoken Latin course were going to stay in the Carmelite convent on the Janiculum, a big hill on the left of my map, just south of the Vatican. But I couldn’t get into my room till Sunday, and I was sorry I’d come a day early. My Italian was based on three years of Italian at Knox superimposed on a solid foundation of Latin, augmented by a book written by one of my professors called Italian Is Easy If You Know Latin. So I could get around all right; I could read the street signs, ask directions. But I couldn’t get close to the American Express office in Piazza di Spagna to cash a traveler’s check. The piazza was too crowded to negotiate with a large suitcase and a heavy backpack. It was like Disneyland. I couldn’t find a pensione; even the cheap places near the station were full. My backpack—containing Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary and the Gildersleeve and Lodge Latin Grammar, which we were to have with us in class at all times, as well as my own Catullus, Ovid, Vergil, and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl—was so heavy I was afraid I was going to fall over on my back. I managed to take a rogue cab from the station to the convent and used up almost all my cash. I knew I was being cheated. My Italian was okay, but not good enough to deal with the cab driver.

  I left my suitcase and backpack at the convent. I had only ten thousand lire left but I didn’t feel like making another attempt to get to the American Express office. So I spent the afternoon on the Janiculum, the eighth hill of Rome. On a bench, reading Ovid. Nothing to eat. The sun started to set behind me, and I started to feel a little uneasy, so I walked down to Santa Maria in Trastevere, not an easy trek in the fading light. My feet twisted and turned on the uneven cobblestones. I passed a strange lighthouse and then the Roman Finnish Institute and the Embassy of Finland to the Holy See, and kept bearing to the right and downhill—toward the city center—till I came to a poorly lighted street that ran along the Tiber. I was able to consult my map and find my way to Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. I was thinking that the proximity of the church would protect me, but by nine o’clock the church was closed. At least there were a lot of young people in the piazza, and two different men asked me if I was lost and needed help. I hadn’t gotten very far in Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, but I was far enough in to know that I didn’t want any adventures, at least not that kind of adventure, at least not now. I sat at the fountain, telling myself that this was an adventure. I tried to imagine myself telling Paul about it. I realized that I still needed to get Paul out of my system, but I wasn’t quite sure how to do it. Lots of young people were necking on the stone steps that circled the fountain in the center of the piazza, and I wondered if their butts were starting to hurt like mine.

  What was I doing? What did Rome mean to me? As a classics major? As a lapsed Roman Catholic? Maybe the new pope—when he got elected—would give me some good advice. I hoped it wasn’t Montini. I couldn’t imagine any words of sympathy or kindness coming out of that pinched mouth. Actually, I could imagine them. And did. “Father,” I’d say, and he’d say, “Child, you’ve lost your way.” Maybe I’d even discover a vocation. My mother’s cousin was a big-deal nun in the Clementine order in Chicago, and I used to stay in the convent once in a while. The nuns were happy. Why was I surprised?

  “All I know about love,” I thought, “is . . .” What? I couldn’t think of a single thing that I knew about love, and I was homesick. For the farm, for the old Sunday evenings at home, my mother playing Polish folksongs and Chopin drinking songs on the upright piano at which I’d been forced to practice a half hour a day, seven days a week. (Yes, Chopin did write some drinking songs.)

  I’d been terribly homesick when I first went off to college, even though “home” was only five miles away. I went home every weekend for a while, and then every other weekend, then once a month, then hardly at all. I told myself it would be this way with Paul. At first . . . then . . . and finally . . . but it didn’t happen that way.

  What did I want to happen right at that moment, sitting on the steps of the stone fountain outside Santa Maria in Trastevere? I couldn’t think of anything. A good restaurant? I didn’t have any money, and besides, I wasn’t even hungry. I hadn’t planned well. What I wanted was to go to sleep and wake up calm and refreshed, but that’s hard to do when you’re having some kind of psycho-sexual crisis.

  What I really wanted, I see now, was to go to confession. Ma had been right. I needed to clean out my attic.

  I slept, sort of, on the steps of the fountain, using my backpack as a pillow. In the morning I spent my remaining ten thousand lire on some postcards and dragged myself back up the hill to the convent. I sat on a bench on the edge of the hill, overlooking the city, and wrote to my folks, to Lois, in Latin to the classics professors at Knox, and to Miss Buckholdt, my Latin teacher at the high school, and in Italian to Professor Marino, who’d written Italian Is Easy If You Know Latin. I told them that Rome was wonderful, even as my tears were falling on the postcards and smearing the ink. But I didn’t write to Paul.

  A n
un sat down next to me on the bench. She had a small suitcase and a heavy backpack, like mine.

  “Are you all right?” she asked in Italian, and I was able to understand her.

  “A little bit lost,” I said in Italian. “Perduta.”

  “A ‘lost’ woman?” she said in Italian, laughing. “Or do you mean you don’t know where you are?”

  “That too,” I said.

  I was glad to discover that she was a student in the program. We were both waiting for the convent to come to life. It was still early. We couldn’t get into our rooms till afternoon.

  We continued to talk in Italian and I had to concentrate. Her sister was coming from Ireland, she said. She had tickets for a papal audience on Wednesday, but now that the pope was dead, her sister wasn’t coming.

  “If your sister’s from Ireland,” I said, “then you must be from Ireland, too.”

  She laughed. “Yes,” she said, “but I’ve lived in Italy for over twenty-five years. I teach at a convent school in Florence, a liceo. They’re sending me to this program because they need someone who speaks Latin.”

  I recognized a critical moment: we could switch to English or stay in Italian. It was my option, but I waited.

  “Hai fame?” she asked. Are you hungry?

  “Si,” I said, feeling more confident.

  She dropped her suitcase off at the convent and we walked up and down the path at the top of the Janiculum. She treated me to a cappuccino and a dolce, which we ate sitting on a bench overlooking Regina Coeli prison.

  “It used to be a convent,” she said. “Two convents, actually.”

  “And now it’s a prison?”

  “Some people would say it’s always been a prison.”

  “But not you?”

  She tossed off another nice laugh. There was nothing mean or sarcastic about it. It rang in the air like a wind chime.