As ever, Pearse was trying to float on his back, his eyes locked on the stars. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the shriveled balls theory of resolution.”
Andy let out a laugh and immediately sucked in a mouthful of water. Blessed with an Adonis-like build-six foot four, 220 pounds-he didn’t have an ounce of athletic talent to go with it. He began to cough up water as he tried to stay afloat.
“You drowning on us, Lurch?” asked Pearse.
“I’ll let you know.”
“At least I’ve got some,” Jack piped in.
Pearse laughed. “And this from a man who’s getting a Ph.D.”
“Well, it is freezing.” Jack began to backstroke his way to shore. “You and Aquaman can figure it out. I’m going in.”
The sound of lapping water grew more distant as Pearse let his feet drop down, only his head now above water. He could just make out Andy about ten feet from him.
“You think I should go back?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
“The philosopher speaks.” Pearse waited. “No, what do you really think?” He heard Andy take a few strokes to his left.
“I think it would make your life a whole lot easier if it was only about her.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, if it was just her, you would have stayed.”
Pearse didn’t answer.
“So it’s not just about her,” said Andy. They floated silently for several minutes before he spoke again. “You should read Descartes.”
“What?”
“Descartes.
“Okay?”
“Except that’s not really it. It’s not the thinking that tells him he exists; it’s the doubting. Because if he’s doubting, then he must be thinking. So it’s
“How much did you have to drink?”
“You’re not listening, E. Look, I’m probably the closest thing we have to an atheist in this family, but even I know faith begins with doubt. If you don’t question it, what’s the point in having it? So things got a little rocked over there. That was the whole reason you went, wasn’t it? If you hadn’t come back a little disillusioned, then you’d have a problem. I might not get it, E, but I know you do. You always have. This is the first time something’s forced you to defend it. And that’s what’s making it so tough. Until you figure that out, she could be out here with us right now, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.” Pearse heard Andy duck his head underwater, then come back up. “One thing is for certain. It’s fucking freezing out here.” Andy started in for shore.
Pearse stayed out a few minutes longer, always happiest giving in to the isolation, his utter insignificance within a seemingly empty sea.
“Thanks, Andy.”
And, somehow, the ball began to fall into his glove again.
All through seminary, he had managed to hold on to that feeling. That connection. That sense of absolute wonder. A life of cloistered contentment. The surest way to keep Petra at a distance.
And, for a time, the questions faded, even the doubt that Andy had said was so essential. Pearse preferred it that way. Pure reflection. A proximity to God felt in the shadowed recesses of an afternoon prayer.
But only for a time. Once on the outside, he began to run into even greater confusion, especially in the role of priest: too much responsibility ceded by a willing congregation; too easy a reliance on detached hierarchy. Church dogma had a way of clouding everything. And what had been so pure, so personal at the seminary came to resemble that arm’s-length quality he had seen with his parents. Genuine connection no longer made sense. There was too much standing between believer and Christ to allow for it.
Not surprisingly, the emptiness from Bosnia slipped back in, threatening everything he had built for himself. He knew he needed to find another venue for his devotion, one more isolated, safer, where church structure couldn’t undermine his ever-tenuous belief. And where he wouldn’t allow Petra to find her way back in as a different kind of answer.
Walking alone one afternoon near Copley Square, it had suddenly dawned on him where he might find it. Or at least how. Everything had become a little too dark; he needed to lighten things up. So he’d gone back to the games, the fun of fragments and puzzles. This time, though, it wasn’t Paul, whose approach had always seemed colored by a Pharisaic past, nor the writers of the Gospels, each too caught up in his own agenda, but Augustine, where the insights remained acutely personal and therefore somehow less limiting-the fun and wonder reclaimed all at once.
And so, in an act of self-salvation, he’d dived in. He found himself consumed by it, simple translations leading to the more complex world of liturgical analysis. Somewhere along the way, he even began to make a name for himself-conferences beyond the walls of the church, papers beyond the scope of personal faith-a scholar of language, everyone so surprised, no one more so than himself. Except, of course, for John J. He’d known all along. The onetime Bosnian freedom fighter caught up in a world of minutiae, intricacies of meanings-energy focused on the subtleties of belief rather than on belief itself.
So much easier to “take it and read” than to take it and know.
He was, after all, his parents’ son.
Unwilling to admit that he was falling into that same trap, he’d pressed on, back to Ambrose, Augustine’s mentor, inspiration for the most brilliant mind the church had ever known. The most reasoned faith it had ever known. Find clarity in that wisdom.
So, when the opportunity to sift through a sixth-century palimpsest of the letters of Saint Ambrose at the Vatican had presented itself, he’d jumped at the chance. Not just for the scholarship but also for the place itself. Maybe in Rome he’d be able to reconnect with the purity he’d somehow lost along the way. The certainty.
It had been two years since then. Two years in which to find other projects so as to keep himself busy, keep him in Rome, insulated in a world of abstract piety. The answers might not have been any easier, but at least the questions were once again more distant.
The congregation rose, Pearse with them. Communion. He moved out to take his place in the line, when he noticed a familiar face some thirty feet ahead of him, the man looking back, trying to catch his attention. Dante Cesare, brother of the monastery at San Clemente-and an avid digger in the church’s storied foundations-stood by one of the half dozen vaulted archways that stretched the length of both sides of the nave. One of its few non- Irishmen, Cesare stood almost six foot five. And at no more than 180 pounds, he virtually disappeared into his robes, all thoughts of a torso lost, only scaly hands and feet protruding from the outfit. His equally elongated head bobbed above, aquiline nose stretching the skin taut around his cheekbones. An El Greco come to life.
They’d met just over a year ago in the Villa Doria Pamphili, a park just south of the Vatican, and the best place to find a pickup game on weekends. Pearse had gotten into the habit of taking a handful of kids from the American school out on Saturdays, play a couple of innings, keep himself in shape. Cesare had appeared from behind a tree one afternoon, keeping his distance, but clearly fascinated by it all. When a stray ball had rolled past him, he’d gone after it with the enthusiasm of a five-year-old. The image of those skeletal arms and legs thrashing around still brought a smile to Pearse’s face. It turned out that what the monk lacked in physical ability, he more than made up for in his understanding of the game. Cesare had been a rabid Yankee fan for years, knew all the statistics, the stories. The kids loved him. Pearse handled the drills; Cesare handled everything else.
Once a week, priest and monk, two topics off-limits: Thomas Aquinas’s thoughts on eternal law and Bucky Dent’s affinity for the Green Monster.
The relationship had blossomed.
The Cesare who now waited beneath the archway was hardly the man Pearse had come to know over the last year. The chiseled face looked even more gaunt than usual, not all that surprising, given how close he had been to the late monsignor. Still, Pearse saw more apprehension than grief in the eyes as the monk nodded to his left-an
