A Dove of the East by Mark Helprin Page A

wanted him to be an archbishop. Instead he spoke to deep-brown faces in a dark church with no lighting, while the sand blew outside. He could see it through the window sometimes—perfectly white against the blue sky and billowing like foam on the ocean, and yet it was cool and dry. His mother and father thought he would come back from Arizona as if from some foreign campaign, distinguished and likely to advance. The bishops would appreciate his sacrifice. He knew he was not coming back, but he never told his parents. They died in the Depression, sure that at the end of the Depression he would be called back from Arizona.
    If he thought about being an archbishop, he clenched his fist and banged it on the table. When he had too much to drink, he thought wild thoughts about seeing God, about golden staircases and whitened plumes rising from the wide floor of Heaven, about places where it was so bright you couldn’t see anything at all. He had such prideful dreams only after wine or whiskey, so he drank rarely.
    He arrived in Rome early in the morning. He felt young, for he had slept on the plane and Rome seemed to him not to have changed since 1925, when he was thirty and had been there for two months as a student. Now there were few carriages, but the streets were the same. In Piazza Navona, the old colors still stood; the fountains had been going for almost forty years since he first saw them. He wondered if they ever stopped, for even a moment. Perhaps each time the city died—after the March, or when the Germans were there—the fountains stopped. He thought to ask an old man, but realized that no one man would have watched constantly, and besides, he thought, I am an old man and could tell no one if ever in Arizona the mountains turned pure white or the sky the color of gold, because I have not watched them the whole time. At least, the fountains appear never to stop; at least, I have seen them while they were going.
    His budget for this trip was delightfully large. The Vatican paid much of it, his diocese another great part, and his savings the rest. He thought he would live for this short time in a fashion unlike that of his small frame house on the reservation. There the wind came in a steady stream through an unputtied crack of the window. In the morning gold light glinted off his porcelain shaving basin. At these times there was only silence and cold. After he shaved, he opened the window, and after he opened the window he dressed and prayed—but not in Rome. He would pray, yes, but in Rome he would pray in his own good time. There would be no kneeling on hard wooden floors, no fasting, and no cold.
    He checked in at the Grand Hotel, which was full of priests and extremely elegant—marble, rich Oriental rugs, chandeliers, and in his room French doors with a view of a piazza and its enormous fountain shooting a hundred feet upward. As the weeks passed, he habitually ate his breakfast on the balcony. With high winds, he felt slight droplets of spray from the fountain. His bed was large, with a satin quilt. As always when he stayed in hotels—even in Phoenix—he wondered what people had made love in the bed, and then laughed good-naturedly at himself. He had learned to live with
that
a long time ago.
    Â 
    F ATHER TRELEW’S role at the Council was not very exciting; indeed, the Council itself was not very exciting. He was just a priest. From where he sat near the entrance of St. Peter’s the Pope was only a white spot and the Dove of the Holy Ghost a needlepoint of light—a ray. When he removed his glasses, the sea of cardinals before the Pope was a mass of red, and when they stood their motion made them look like red waves. They were seated on both sides of the aisle. It was as if Moses had spread them back into the galleries. But whom would Father Trelew tell? Helen? Helen thought only of her child, who broke windows and stayed alone in the hills at night even when it was cold.