The Secret Price of History. Gayle Ridinger
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rule prohibiting priests from marrying once they had been ordained was drawn up during the Council of Nice in 325. Despite pressure from the Bishop of Rome (later Pope) to require already married priests to leave their wives, the Council's decision went in the completely opposite direction: married priests were required to keep their wives with them…
"The necessity of having unmarried clergy had much to do with the widespread fear during the Middle Ages that the inheritances traditionally left to the Church would be threatened should there be heirs to contend with…"
It is a love letter.
These lines contain the intimate justification—using the stones and arrows of history, and the words and ideas of long-dead religious heretics—of what they, Kevin and Brenda, had done as man and woman, as a priest and his love. A union like theirs had been right for a while in the Catholic Church and could return to being right again.
Kevin and Brenda together. For just a moment, her eyes shut there on the bus. Ok, she believes them, it's imaginable. She even envies them their intimacy, in spite of the hard road they had, going against the rules like that. She herself hasn't had a boyfriend since she left George Mason, and even then it wasn't a real boyfriend but just a guy two years older than her with whom she had sex sometimes. She had a first love in high school, whom she'd broken up with but couldn't quite shake off, for he still sent her postcards when he took a trip somewhere, with the stamp upside-down, which had been their way of saying I-love-you. It was actually a bit pathetic.
The bus gets bogged down in one of the traffic circles. She glances at the sweaty-looking people, most in business suits, going into coffee shops and restaurants, wondering if there really could be dangerous self-appointed guardians of official doctrine hiding out somewhere. Somehow she couldn't believe it was a plausible reason for why Kevin was killed.
At home she checks the AP website. The wire reports are now calling it 'the Chinese bear case' because Kevin was tortured the way bears are tortured. They are still, however, using the same two images as before—the cage emptied of Kevin's body and the blurry photocopied photo of her medallion.
Do the Italian police have this photo now?
And if she went over there to Europe?
Would Stan give her the money to go? Her mother obviously can't afford it.
The phone rings. Her mother. She is going to be a half hour late and asks her to boil some potatoes to go with the corn on the cob and chicken breasts. Angie puts the pot in the sink and opens the faucet. The phone rings again.
"Hello, Angie? This is Brenda Sherwin."
"Hello Brenda."
"Am I disturbing you? Are you getting dinner?"
"No, no." She shuts off the tap.
"Have you by any chance spoken with Arjan yet?"
"Yes, I have. Five minutes ago," she lies.
Something made those words well up from deep inside her. She has never consciously heeded any such inner voice before, not while speaking to someone anyway. If she'd had known to listen to this voice, she'd be ready to graduate from college by now.
"Was he—helpful? Sorry, but I keep fretting about it. I believe I should do more but you know, the baby's due and--."
"Of course, Brenda."
"But he was upset of course."
"Very upset, Brenda."
"And...there were things he told you?"
"Well, he wants to tell me. In person. Of course, it's just happened now and I'm looking at flights...which are expensive."
"Come back to my house tomorrow, Angie, I want to see you."
"See me...a second time?"
"I want to give you a check, Angie." And then, timidly, "It's not doing enough, is it?"
"Why do you want to give me a check?" Angie asks softly.
"I don't want you getting into any trouble."
"I'm just going to talk to Arjan."
Brenda cries at that. At length she is able to say, "You're doing what I should do but can't. You're going in my place."
It is true. Only Angie can go off to Europe in her place to follow the police investigation to find Kevin's murderer. Brenda can't travel in her state, and Angie, as the sole other victim, is the only possible substitute. She wants to tell Brenda, You may be saving my life, but it feels out of place to stress that. It's Kevin that counts tonight.
"All right, Brenda."
She lets the gallery owner do what her heart desires. She goes and collects the check.
Rome, Italy - June 30, 1849
It is just another late afternoon of war when a French cannoneer rams his bayonet through the groin of a garibaldino, who manages to lurch his way back to the roof-less villa called headquarters and collapse literally at the feet of his commander, General Giacomo Medici.
"Get this man taken care of," Medici orders a Roman woman at the long ex-banquet table, busy with three others at putting ammunition powder into bullets.
"And who can stop for him?" scoffs the woman, without raising her eyes from the metal shell she was filling with the same rapidity she would ravioli.
Medici bends down and gently rolls the soldier on his side. The wounded man breathes that he wants some water. Medici turns towards Sandor and Kemenj.
"Take this man to the hospital."
Goffredo crouches down. Only now does he recognize the blackened face. "Swissman, it's Goffredo." He leans his ear to his travel companion's mouth and listens to a faint plea, as Sandor tries to tourniquet what he can with an abandoned jacket.
"Carry him straight to Isola Tiberina," says the woman rolling bullets, raising her apron to wipe her damp forehead. "This quarter's too exposed to shelling."
They run with Swissman and his stretcher through an insidious, erratic rain of rifle fire, crossing fields and abandoned Republican trenches until it is possible to descend the hill towards the river and make their way south into the Trastevere just as another French cannonade begins. They see a young Roman boy dash with wet rags towards an unexploded shell in an alley and throw himself on top of it to keep it from going off. He is one of the lucky ones; his bomb doesn't explode. They continue through the cobblestoned streets, with Swissman bouncing and swaying in his stretcher, biting his lower lip, his hands in fists, his eyes squeezed shut.
As they cross the bridge to the island they can hear, in the intervals between the heavy artillery booms, an intermittent drone.
Swissman thrashes his head at the sound.
"Hey, you breathing?" Goffredo asks.
"No. Just alive."
They pass beneath the windows of the hospital combat wards. The drone is the insect-like sound made by so many dying and wounded. A stout nurse points at the doorway to a room of stretchers and screaming men, into which they carry Swissman. "Out with you," she orders. "The doctor needs to operate." Swissman's head continues to beat back and forth, saying no to all the pain in his body, and they limit their farewell to a touch of his naked shoulder, not sure they will ever see him again. In the hall, the orderly who they stop to ask where Eleonora might be recognizes Goffredo as the one who fixed their supply wagon, and offers to go and look for her himself. As the two friends wait outside in a numb state of weariness, Margaret Fuller, Cristina Belgioioso, and a tall man with grey hair and a long grey beard exit from the hospital, all three gesticulating and flushed.
"Ladies, I will say it once again!" says the man irately, waving a piece of paper in one hand. "I am Minister of War for the Roman Republic, and I am telling you once again that I do not intend to stay here listening to a Milanese aristocrat who chooses this moment—THIS moment!!—to ask me for all these things, and who has the courage to write--,"