The old man looked dubious.
“Listen, I realize I talk a good game. How do you think I know an act when I see one? But I’m telling you, Jay, he had the real power. He’s always had it.”
The old Dominican sat so still, his robes plainly laundered that morning, that he prompted the contrary image of Barbara’s kids tearing around in a nearby soccer field, their shorts and sneakers smeared with grass. The place was open to the public most afternoons. Her chosen church wasn’t down in the vicoli, but up in the family’s part of town, where you found regularly groomed green-spaces and a responsible staff The last she’d seen the children, the teenagers were playing goalie and the younger ones were sharing a pickup squad with a few locals. Paul had looked fine, just another kid with a ball, and Barb had no problem leaving to meet with Cesare, a couple of staircases farther uphill (in this city even the best neighborhoods presented an aerobic workout).
What did it matter that Barb had discovered this man uptown? Cesare wasn’t defined by the parish assigned him any more than by Jesuit or Dominican. He’d committed his ministry to “the wretched of the earth,” a phrase his new member from New York admired, though so far she’d avoided admitting that she didn’t know the source. She knew enough, anyway. Barbara understood that though she liked the old man, there was chemistry, what she depended on in their give and take was his commitment to the opposing point of view: Jay’s version of the Lulucitas’ business in Naples. This made the Padre Superior a bracing corrective. Again, with him it was like with Nettie: if the wife could make her argument to this priest, then she might be frightened, she might be disappointed, but she wasn’t merely whining. For Cesare hadn’t needed an earthquake in order to do something for the non-Europeans, the people off the Italian books — the clandestini. Over the past couple of years, though it violated church policy, he’d allowed homeless blacks and Arabs a night or two of sanctuary. If they could make it up to Cesare’s, these strays, they had an alternative to the lice-infested shelters in the old city, or the Camorra-run “squats” out by the mozzarella ranches.
Even now, the priest had two such lost souls camped in the church basement. The first time Barbara had spoken of the attack on her husband, Cesare had noted the date with interest; on her next visit, after he’d decided the American could be trusted, he’d revealed that he’d taken in “two poor creatures” that very same evening.
These two had been guests of the church for a week, Cesare reminded her now. “And it’s obvious, don’t you know,” he went on, “that these young men have had some scrape with the law. See them flinch when they hear a siren, it’s entirely obvious.”
The mother wasn’t sure what had brought this on.
“Well, one wonders, Mrs. Lulucita. These two in my care, one wonders if they weren’t the same fellows as attacked your husband.”
Barbara got a hand on her purse, a reflex.
“This husband who you claim had the power to drag you all the way across the Atlantic — well, two penniless beggars laid him low just like that.”
“Mary, mother of God. What are—”
“Take care, Signora. That’s a holy name you’re using.”
“But what are you saying?” She and the priest were alone. Between morning Mass and evening Mass, people in this neighborhood preferred to stay home with the appliances. Now Barb had the purse in her lap, her hands in fists around the handle. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Why are you complaining to me about some so-called power in a marriage? In this world, power is a piece of iron pipe. It’s a wallet full of Euros.”
“Oh, Father. The two that hit my Jaybird, that night they would’ve had the Euros. Now don’t you think they would’ve taken the money and run? That’s what the police think, they hightailed it for Norway or someplace that very night.”
Cesare had kept his own arms down. In another moment, unflappable, he undid what he’d just done. He pointed out that Jay’s attackers had had a motorcycle, which meant they must’ve worked with some under-the-table dealer out on the city’s periphery. Out in a mob neighborhood like Secondigliano, for instance. The two men the priest was keeping in the cellar, on the contrary, had shown up on foot.
“One could see that they didn’t even have 90 cents for the funicular.”
Barbara hadn’t quite shaken her panic, her blood-rush. “If you’re saying there’s no power dynamic in a marriage…” She tsked, irritated at her vocabulary, power dynamic. “If you’re saying it wouldn’t be about power out at the Refugee Center, the Glorious Jaybird Show, then you’re the one who doesn’t know how the world works.”
“But think of the reason you couldn’t stand to see him in power. If that man had power, signora, it was because you loved him.”
Sighing, Barbara lifted her purse and set it back down.
“It was love between you two,” the priest said.
At least she resisted the counseling-session response, I acknowledge that. She looked to the altar. A thing of glazed concrete, flecked with shards of glass in purple and green, it hardly seemed an Italian piece. It was New Age California.
“Well, and wouldn’t that love be the reason you still find yourself making love, actually, Mrs. Lulucita?”
“Oh, so far as that goes, listen.” Another reason she’d chosen this priest was how willing he was to talk about sex. “We can’t be sure what’s going on, so far as that goes. What does any of us know, honestly, when it come to the libido?”
“I suppose. But you are some years past forty.”
“Some years. Some years, there’s a nice way to put it.”
Much as she preferred straight talk, Cesare’s collar didn’t give him the right to check her hormonal balances. Whatever menopause or its approach might have to do with Barbara’s ongoing Neapolitan upheaval, she could handle that part of it herself. With Jay, she’d gone so far as to use the expression “change of life,” just the night before. This was after another spasm of clutching and gasping, turning to glass and tumbling through glass; her energy had been up.
“But,” the priest replied, “I’m not just talking about your body and its changes.”
“Cesare, I had five children, you know what I’m saying?”
“Indeed I do, signora. Your body and its changes, that’s your own affair, finally. What I’m trying to talk about is a long and happy marriage.”
And faithful too, Father. Barb, nodding, sighing again, recalled in silence her lone suspicion of adultery. She’d suffered a wondering night or two early during her final pregnancy — and in the next minute, never mind that she and Cesare weren’t in the confessional, she told him about it. “There were just two nights in twenty years,” the mother said, “two nights of something jay called a late inventory check, down at Viciecco & Sons.” And whatever kind of inventory the man had been taking, it was over and done with by the time the twins had entered their third trimester.
The priest had come closer again. “You have your doubts, but you don’t know for certain? You can’t bring yourself to ask him?”
“But haven’t you heard what I’ve been telling you, Father? Haven’t I been saying, inside a marriage, power is just as real as out on the street?”
“Well, power of a kind, I suppose. But you made your own choices. Didn’t you just see fit to remind me that you have five children?”