The Chapel by Michael Downing Page B

toward my sofa and the familiar furrow of my depression. To check my descent, I put the red bag on the chair beside the door. I still had fifteen minutes to kill. I turned around twice, looking for something else that could be glued into the journal. That ruined page was haunting me. I sat down with the scissors and pressed hard on the spine, but the leather binding was too sturdy to open up for a clean cut. I turned to the spoiled page. The thick lines of the square frame of dried glue were immediately apparent, but the three littlevertical lines I’d painted inside were invisible. I traced my finger slowly across the page. I could feel them, each one. I tilted the page toward the light, and there they were—pale, smooth stains, like tears, so insignificant no one might ever notice. I pulled the pen out of the drawer and labeled this page: #20. Slaughter of the Innocents.

IV

    O n my way to the chapel, I stopped at the desk to thank Ricardo for the glue, and an unfamiliar green-vested man asked me for my room number.
    I said, “414. Why?”
    He said, “Signora Berman, yes?”
    I nodded, and he handed me my passport, which I’d forgotten to collect after checking in. I was another step closer to Cambridge. I said, “Ricardo?”
    He said, “At night only.”
    â€œI see,” I said.
    He said, “And the mornings, yes?”
    â€œOkay,” I said. “Later, he will be here?”
    â€œSometimes, si, si, si ,” he said, smilingly.
    Every conversation I had with an Italian was like walking on the beach and watching the tide erase our trail.
    I followed Sara’s roundabout route to the chapel, certain that any attempt at a shortcut was likely to land me in Bologna. I paused at the post office. Before he died, Mitchell had printed sixty labels for me,thirty addressed to Rachel and her boys and thirty addressed to Sam and Susie—“To save time,” he’d said. He wrote postcards to me and the children whenever he traveled farther than the grocery store, and I think he really believed I didn’t send postcards because I hadn’t paid attention to his routine, which made it easy. He even suggested a few pat phrases I might adopt and repeat. “Don’t try to be original, or it will turn into a chore for you,” he’d said. It was after three, so I convinced myself I should not stop, that I could buy stamps in the airport tomorrow, possibly from someone who spoke English. With a few strategically placed air mail stickers, I could even get away with sending the postcards later in the week from Cambridge.
    In the courtyard of the chapel, there were at least thirty Catholic priests, some in full-length black cassocks or brown hooded robes, others in black suits with white Roman collars, and a few of the men in jeans might have been Jesuits. Inside the visitor center, there was a large contingent of nuns in full headdress. In an American museum, they would have looked otherworldly, like visitors from another era, but here they looked like Management.
    â€œYou have to take a vow of silence.” It was T. in the same blue blazer, a new white shirt. He had apparently been perched on the roof and swooped down when he spotted me. “And I need your passport. Follow me.” He led me inside to the ticket counter and introduced me to a priest in a black suit, who shook my hand. His name was Ed.
    Father Ed said, “You must be E.?
    I nodded.
    T. and the priest headed to the counter, and I stayed where I was. T. handed the priest my passport, then leaned on the counter, and handed his passport to the priest as well. The priest pulled an envelope out of his jacket pocket and handed it and the passports to a stern, squat, blue-uniformed woman. While she examined the contents of the envelope, T. smiled blithely, as if he often traveled with a priest as his personal valet.
    I heard T. say, “No, no, no,” and then the priest nodded toward