A Dove of the East by Mark Helprin Page B

Perhaps Father Wohlen from Los Angeles, who was Father Trelew’s friend simply because they were both at the Grand Hotel; Father Wohlen had an idea that anyone from west of the Mississippi was somehow a loving brother. But Father Trelew did not like Father Wohlen, for he ate too much and had an unconvincing laugh. There was no one to tell. “There is no one to tell,” he said. “Maybe I will sketch it.” He had not sketched since he had last been in Rome. He was in a drawing class then. He was mainly interested in architectural form; Rome offered him that, while the desert did not. He had tried to paint the Indians and the things they did, but there was not much left of them by that time, and he suspected not much left of him—or, rather, of his talent to draw.
    Did he dare begin again? “I must,” he said, the blood coursing to his face. The hair at his temples was silver. When his face lit up, he looked like giltwork. I am the only priest in the world, he thought, who looks like a church. He would have to buy a pad and charcoal.
    One day, he left the Council early and began to walk back to his hotel. He passed through Piazza Navona, and somewhere off it on a side street he found an art store. “Could I have,” he began but found that he was not able to speak the words. “Could I have...” and then, like a madman, he rushed from the shop.
    He was disturbed by this, knowing precisely what it was. He tried not to think, flooding his mind with words that formed in silence on his lips, like the cries of men in dreams of sinking ships. “Flood it with good cheer. Fill it up, fill it up, for life is short.” If he could somehow get supplies, he could sit by the fountain and sketch.
    What is the power of a priest’s life? It is that he need not fear. “Father Wohlen,” he said next day, too nervously, “do you think that on the way back from the Cathedral tomorrow you could stop in an art shop and get me a large pad and some charcoal?” He gasped for breath. “Because I must stay late for chapel vespers. I don’t mean to trouble you...”
    â€œNo trouble, no trouble,” said Father Wohlen. “I’ll do it. You just give me the money, tell me where to go, and I’ll do it.”
    Father Trelew did not go to vespers; he did not even go to the Council that day. It was an important day, too. He stayed in his room, and it seemed to him that God was working wonders with his body. If he had been a proud man, he might have presumed that he was undergoing Divine revelation, that he was receiving saintly visions. Only once in his life, only once, had the rest of his body responded to his mind and made him tremble. No, it was the body responding to the
heart
which caused trembling.
    He sat on the edge of his bed, with his glasses off, and the blur of outside sunlight made him feel the enlivened world. “Oh my God, my dear God,” he prayed, “I am not having visions, am I?” He said this to a shaft of sunlight in his room at his feet, and the golden dust danced in center beam.
    When Father Wohlen gave him his materials, Father Wohlen thought Trelew was sick. Something was wrong with the man.
    Father Trelew ran his hands over the pad, took the charcoal out of its box, and felt the smooth rectangular blocks. The cool of the blocks reminded him of the desert at evening, their blackness of the night, but the night was full of white stars. That was an advantage he would not have had as an archbishop—seeing the Milky Way stretched as a shimmering band over the great dome of his little life. The power of a priest’s life is that he is unafraid. All is concelebration. “I am beginning to realize this,” said Father Trelew. “That all is concelebration—all of the city, all of the stars. The Church is for me. A man need not fear his loneliness. He need not fear his loneliness, for God is strong and all is