Acts of Faith

  “Spiritual home,” she corrected him.

  “I mean it, Deborah. This is a place where we both could live. Together.”

  “Tim,” she said in desperation, “you want to be a priest. All your life you’ve wanted to serve God—”

  “I could still do that without taking Holy Orders,” he replied, trying to convince himself as well. “I’m sure one of the Christian schools would let me teach.…” His voice trailed off.

  He looked at her. She knew full well the implications of his words and loved him too much to pretend otherwise.

  “Timothy,” she began, “in my heart of hearts, we’re already married. But, in the real world, it would never work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t forget my religion—and neither can you. Nothing—not all the holy water in the world—could wash away the essence of what we are.”

  “You mean you’re still afraid of your father?” he demanded.

  “No, I don’t feel I owe him anything. I meant the Father of the Universe.”

  “But don’t we all serve Him in the end?”

  “Yes, Timothy. But we serve Him each in our own way until the end.”

  “But when the Messiah comes again—”

  He did not have to finish his sentence.

  Although they both believed with perfect faith that the Messiah would ultimately appear, they also knew the world they lived in was far too flawed to receive Him.

  The Messiah would not come—not in their lifetime anyway.

  29

  Timothy

  They parted at the Jerusalem bus station. As Deborah climbed onto the first step, he impulsively pulled her back for one last embrace.

  He could not let her go. He loved her with a fire so intense it would have burned all his resolve had Deborah allowed it.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” she protested weakly. “Your friends, I mean the ones who saw us—”

  “I don’t care—I don’t care about anything but you.”

  “That’s not true—”

  “I swear to God, I love you more.”

  “No, Tim, you really don’t know how you feel.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because I don’t know myself.”

  She tried to break away, not only because his priesthood was at risk but because, for her own sake, she had to leave now or never. And she did not want him to remember her face streaming with tears.

  Yet as they stood in one another’s arms, she could feel the sobs he, too, was struggling to suppress.

  Their parting words were the very same—and spoken almost in unison. Each told the other, “God bless you.” And turned away.

  When he reached Terra Sancta College, the two other Americans were already there.

  “We were dog tired from the heat,” Patrick Grady explained. “Besides, no one can spend too much time here in Jerusalem.”

  His colleague Cavanagh agreed, “It’d probably take a lifetime to see it all.”

  Neither gave the slightest indication of whether he had seen the lovers in Bethlehem. That was yet another cross Tim had to bear. He would now be living in perpetual anxiety, wondering what his two classmates knew. Whether they would somehow use it to discredit him. And when.

  “I confess, Hogan,” George said in a more amicable tone, “we’re sorry we didn’t ask you to come along. We would have had a much better time.”

  “Oh?” Tim asked.

  “I mean, my Latin’s good enough, but most of the inscriptions seemed to be in Greek. You would have really come in handy.”

  “Thanks,” Tim answered dourly. “I’m flattered.”

  Just as promised, pünktlich to the minute, Father Bauer and the German seminarians returned. All were exhausted, dusty, roasted by the late-summer sun.

  Tim gave a retroactive shiver. It was a minor miracle that he and Deborah had not run into them as well.

  The next morning, flying thirty thousand feet above the earth, and that much closer to the heavens, Timothy read his breviary, trying to flood his mind with pious thoughts. As their plane circled the city, awaiting permission to land, they passed over the Vatican. With Michelangelo’s rounded basilica opening out into Bernini’s many-columned piazza, St. Peter’s looked like a giant keyhole.

  Lest the metaphor be lost on any of his sleepy charges, Father Bauer commented, “That is the true gate to Paradise, my brothers. And it is for us to earn the keys to the Kingdom of God.”

  Timothy gazed down, and wondered if those gates were not shut to him forever.

  PART III

  30

  Timothy

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.…”

  How can I begin, Tim agonized as he knelt in a stifling confessional in the chapel of the North American College. How could he describe what had occurred in the Holy Land?

  That he fell in love with a woman? But that was such an inadequate expression of his feelings.

  That he had had sexual intercourse? He, a seminarian, already committed to chastity, who in barely two years would take a vow of eternal celibacy?

  “Sì, figlio mio?”

  It was some consolation that his confessor spoke Italian. The gravity of his words could perhaps be diffused through the filter of a foreign tongue.

  “Ho peccato, Padre, I have sinned,” he repeated.

  “How may I help you?” whispered the voice behind the screen.

  “I have loved a woman, Father.”

  There was a pause. The pastor rephrased it, “You mean you have made love.…”

  “There’s no difference,” Tim asserted, almost indignantly.

  The confessor coughed.

  “We made love because we cared for each other’s souls. When our bodies touched, our souls met.”

  “But your bodies … touched,” the confessor replied.

  He doesn’t understand, Tim thought. How in God’s name can I confess to someone who doesn’t know what earthly love is?

  He tried to tell the story coherently, but for all his urgent desire to confess in full, he wanted to protect Deborah. He would not name her. Nor would he say that her father was a man of God.

  The dialogue took a long time. The priest had so many questions. Where? How many times?

  “Why do you have to know all this?” Tim pleaded desperately. “Isn’t it enough that I did what I did?”

  He tried to rationalize that perhaps this probing was intended to be a part of his penance. To excise carnality from his soul and lay it like a cancer on a surgeon’s tray, malignant, apart from him.

  Finally the ordeal was over. He had confided as much as he was able. For what remained, he thought, God knows what I did and how I feel. Let Him pass judgment on me.

  He was sweating and out of breath as he waited for the priest’s comments.

  “There still are questions left unanswered …” was all his confessor vouchsafed. He fell silent, waiting to measure Timothy’s contrition.

  “I know, I know. I’m a seminarian. I should have been more resolute. I love God—and I want to serve Him. That’s why I’m here.” He paused, then added, “That’s why I was able to come back.”

  “Are you certain of your new resolve?”

  “I’m a human being, Father. I can only know my own intentions.”

  “Will you, of your own accord, discuss your future with your Spiritual Director?”

  Tim nodded and whispered, “Yes, Father. I’ll do whatever’s necessary to be worthy of the priesthood.”

  At last his confessor delivered his judgment.

  “We are all of us but flesh. Even saints have battled with the same demons. Need I but mention St. Augustine—and St. Jerome, both now Doctors of the Church? It is their example you must follow. And for your penance, for the next thirty days say all three chaplets of the rosary every day. Meditate on each of the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries, asking Our Lady to intercede for you with Our Lord to grant you grace. Also, recite Psalm fifty
-one at morning and at evening prayers.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Through the screen Tim glimpsed the movements of his confessor’s right hand making the sign of the cross as the priest absolved him in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

  “Va in pace,” murmured the priest, “e pregha per me.” Go in peace, and pray for me.

  Rome, the fabled “City of the Seven Hills,” has an eighth: the Janiculum, situated across the Tiber, on the right bank. Here in the third century A.D., the Emperor Aurelian built what he thought would be an impregnable wall, twenty feet high and twelve miles long, to protect all of Rome from barbarian attacks.

  It was on the Janiculum in 1953 that Pope Pius XII himself, in the company of Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York (the prime mover in the fund-raising appeal), dedicated the new North American College—a seven-story structure of tan pastel brick—a magnificent gesture of fealty on the part of the faithful in the New World.

  The porticoes of its airy courtyard are lined with insignia celebrating the generosity of various dioceses in the United States. The graceful fountain at its center spouts a jet of pure water from a rock spangled with stars representing each state of the Union.

  Various public rooms bear the Coat of Arms with the college’s motto, “Firmum est cor meum,” My heart is steadfast. For a significant portion of its one hundred and thirty inhabitants, mostly American candidates for ordination, the motto hides an invisible question: Is my heart strong enough?

  It was here that Timothy and his four colleagues would lodge while they continued their studies. A few of the classes like Canon Law were still given in Latin, but most were in Italian, the tongue they had supposedly mastered during their intense summer in Perugia. Since they were not all linguists, Mondadori Italian-English dictionaries were clutched as earnestly as if they were breviaries.

  During his month of penance, Timothy had twice daily addressed God in the words of the Fifty-first Psalm, asking Him to “wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.” And he was confident, in the words of the psalmist, that the Almighty had created in him a clean heart and renewed a “right spirit.”

  He knelt before the altar and swore an oath that he would never communicate with Deborah again.

  Yet even as he uttered his vow, a light was kindled in a distant corner of his despair. It illumined in his thoughts a flickering question. Might God have ordained that we meet again?

  He was drenched with sweat as he left the chapel, but it was not from the windless warmth of the October Roman night. A desperate thought had suddenly breached the wall of his defenses.

  I will live in hope of seeing Deborah.

  For the rest of my life.

  31

  Deborah

  It was a shock, but not a surprise.

  Since Deborah and Tim had spent nearly three weeks together, it would have been surprising had she not been pregnant, but in truth, an irrational part of her had longed for the “misfortune” that confronted her scarcely four weeks after she and Timothy had parted.

  She heard the test results from Dr. Barnea, the kibbutz physician. He at least was not ambivalent, for he smiled warmly. “Mazel tov.”

  She sat silent for a moment. “I don’t know what to do,” she murmured.

  “Don’t worry,” said the doctor reassuringly. “I can tell you everything you need to know. Besides, there’s always someone pregnant on the kibbutz. You can get better information from them than from any of my textbooks.”

  Was it that simple? she asked herself. Was she just going to sit and watch her stomach grow? Would she not be a laughingstock or, worse, overwhelmed by a tidal wave of communal pity?

  “Dr. Barnea, this … baby that I’m carrying …”

  He waited patiently for her to find the courage to continue.

  At last she remarked, “There’s no way in the world I could … marry the father. I couldn’t even tell him.”

  The physician smiled reassuringly. “So who’s asking? On the kibbutz, the arrival of a baby is always an occasion for rejoicing. And your child will grow up in the most wonderful circumstances in the world. By the way, you’re not the only single parent on the premises. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “No,” she replied.

  “Aha,” said the doctor, waving his finger in rhetorical triumph. “That’s exactly my point. You haven’t noticed because all children are treated the same.”

  “But what if this baby … asks about its father?”

  “Well,” he smiled, “unless it’s extremely precocious, it won’t be doing that for quite some time. By then, your situation may have changed.”

  No, Deborah thought to herself, it won’t change. This is Timothy’s baby, and no one else’s.

  The doctor mistook her introspection for discomfiture and added, “Listen, Deborah, it’s a sad fact of life that sometimes our young husbands go off to the Army and … don’t come back. I am sorry to say we have two widows even younger than you with five children between them.”

  He leaned over and slammed his hand on his desk. “But the kids are fine! The community gives them all the love they need. Right now, it’s more important that you watch your diet, take your vitamins, and think happy thoughts.”

  Deborah knew his prescription was impossible to follow. She would walk out of the clinic into the real world and be alone—yet not alone. And having resolved never to love anyone else, she was prepared to be a mother without ever having been a wife.

  By now the doctor was aware that she had other anxieties.

  “Are you worried about your parents?” he asked solicitously.

  “Yes,” she confessed. “My father seems to have a way of finding these things out.”

  Dr. Barnea understood only too well.

  “Deborah, do you want to know my definition of an adult? It’s someone who wakes up one morning and says to himself, ‘I no longer care what my parents think.’ To me that’s the real psychological bar mitzvah.”

  She nodded, rose, and slowly left the clinic. The searing midday sun reminded her how long she had been inside—for it had been cool when she’d arrived to hear the news.

  As she walked slowly to her srif, a thousand warring thoughts swept her mind and shook her like a sandstorm in the desert.

  She was reasonably sure that she no longer cared what Moses Luria would think.

  But the only thing she yearned for was impossible.

  She wanted Tim to know.

  32

  Daniel

  As my lust intensified and my faith diminished, I realized why I was so attracted to Ariel: In one stunning package, she was the incarnation of everything considered taboo by my religion.

  She had told me she was studying Art History at NYU, and seemed to be going about it in a big way. The walls of her apartment were hung with impressive works of modern art, including an authentic Utrillo oil, a Braque, and several Picasso drawings. The living room shelves were packed with what must have been hundreds of illustrated books on the works of contemporary masters.

  I’d never seen a place quite like hers before—and certainly not a grad student’s.

  To begin with it was huge and furnished entirely in white. The only exceptions were silver serving dishes, yet even they were filled—I kid you not—with white chocolate.

  Her Frigidaire was stocked with champagne, caviar—and Birds Eye frozen dinners.

  I should have guessed by the fact that she could never see me on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. Sure, I knew it was possible to have evening classes, but when once or twice I proposed coming over around midnight, she laughed.

  I finally caught on one Friday night (yes, I was besotted enough to violate the Sabbath) when she accidentally poured red wine over me, and lightheartedly offered to lick it off as “penance.” She undressed me and shoved me into the fancy multispigoted shower in her bathroom.

  When I stepped out, she handed me not only an extra bathrob
e, but a man’s shirt and pants as well.

  I tried to rationalize the presence of these masculine garments by thinking that they had belonged to some previous lover—or even a husband.

  But somehow the pants were too neatly pressed, the shirt too freshly laundered. And when I looked at its diamond-shaped monogrammed initials CM, curiosity overcame me.

  “Who belongs to this?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  “A friend,” she answered offhandedly, and beckoned me to come and play.

  But even during the preliminary embraces, I persisted.

  “What kind of friend?”

  “Nobody important. Leave it, huh?”

  “He’s obviously important enough to hang his clothes in your closet.”

  Finally she lost patience. “For Christ’s sake, Danny. Are you that far out of touch with the world? Isn’t it obvious that I’m a kept woman?”

  I was, to tell the truth, knocked off balance—and very hurt. “It wasn’t obvious to me,” I murmured. “You mean this is his apartment?”

  “No, it’s mine, but he pays the rent. Is that too heavy a trip, little Rabbi?”

  “No,” I lied. “It’s just that where I come from this sort of thing is—”

  “Lover, where you come from is another planet.”

  “You’re right,” I replied, feeling embarrassed for having the vestiges of conventional values. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand.”

  “Yes?”

  “What the hell about me attracts you?”

  She answered unabashedly, “Your innocence.”

  She smiled broadly. “And aren’t I like a whole salad of forbidden fruit to you?”

  I nodded and grabbed her hungrily.

  As she grew pliant in my arms, she murmured throatily, “You won’t be able to go back to nice Jewish girls after this.”

  On many of those muggy nights I spent cramming for courses I would only begin in the fall, part of me was grateful that her boyfriend had invited Ariel to join him on the Riviera. I was living at home for the summer and it would have been impossible to speak to her without going to a pay phone.