The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell Page A

safe, I wasn’t even being hopeful. I was lying.
    As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I look at the animals Sofia has painted on the nursery walls. Dangling from a hook on the door are hangers of baby clothes she’s sewn herself. Even more than usual, I feel the ache of Mona’s absence. Her family still lives here. A handful of cousins and uncles, most of them plumbers, used to brandish lengths of pipe at boyfriends they disapproved of. If I asked for their protection, they would probably take shifts watching over Peter and me. But I would sooner leave town with Peter than put us in their debt.
    In the darkness, I unbutton my cassock and fold it. Lying down beside my son, I try to imagine how to distract him tomorrow. How to erase his memory of tonight. I rub his shoulder in the dark, wondering if he’s really asleep, hoping that he could use my reassurance right now. Since Mona left, there has been no diminishment in my number of lonely nights. Only a fading in their sharpness, which has a sadness all its own. I miss my wife.
    I wait for sleep. I wait, and wait. But I feel I’ve been waiting all my life.
    The gospels say Jesus prepared his followers for the Second Coming by speaking a parable. He compared himself to a master who leaves his estate in order to attend a marriage feast. We, his servants, don’t know when the master will return. So we have to wait by the door for him, with our lamps kept burning. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival. I remind myself that if I have to wait a lifetime for my wife to return, it’s no longer than any other Christian has waited these past two thousand years.
    But the waiting, on nights like this, feels like an ache that rattles from an infinite emptiness. Mona was shy and coy and dark. She echoed some uncertainty within me about who I was and why I needed to exist after my parents already had Simon. I didn’t pay her much attention when we were kids because I was two years older than she was. But then, she was also too self-conscious to be noticed much. Growing up a girl inside these walls probably contributed to that. The pictures in her parents’ apartment show a cheerful, round-faced child who became more attractive each year. At ten she’s nondescript: dark shaggy hair, watery green eyes, thick cheeks. By thirteen that has changed; it’s clear that she’ll be something someday. By fifteen, just as I’m preparing to leave for college, the metamorphosis is beginning. And she knows it: for the next three years, there are new hairstyles and experiments with makeup. It’s as if she’s peered over the walls into Rome and has seen what a modern woman looks like. Her parents’ photographs are carefully cropped, but Mona herself once pointed out to me the low necklines and high skirts still visible in some of them. She told me about the secret excursions into Rome to buy high heels and jewelry, the excursions during which she discovered that the whistles and catcalls weren’t aimed at other women.
    I’ve often wondered whether there was a trauma in her life that she never told me about. There’s only one surviving picture of Mona when she was training to be a nurse, and she’s very thin, with sunken eyes. She explained to me that the work came as a shock after the ease of high school. I always understood this as a request not to pry. I wasn’t the first man she’d slept with, but even so, our marriage night was awkward. I had underestimated the psychological toll of making love to a priest-in-training. Accustomed to the company of other men, I was never ashamed of nakedness, or of walking around our home half-clothed. I thought it would demystify the cassock for Mona to see that I was human underneath it. Yet it was almost a week before we consummated the marriage. I began to fear, after the days of false starts, that our love would be mechanical and cringing.
    It was