and his weight. Walter lost days every winter to lung ailments.The training of Stoud took on a new imperative, as he felt his decades of heavy smoking closing in.
Walter was especially moved by Frank and Jan’s plight.
“Frank, I won’t pray for you,” he said, “because that’s not what I do. But I will bake some cookies and come down to Philadelphia and we will smoke and drink and enjoy life together. We will all have a marvelous time.”
That morning in July 2007, Bender returned to the only job he had allowed himself while supporting Jan through her battle with cancer. It was, ironically, a death mask, one of the crowning works of his career.
Bender had been commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church to sculpt the death mask for Saint John Nepomucene Neumann, the nineteenth-century Bishop of Philadelphia and the first American male saint. Neumann had died in 1860 and was buried in the basement of St. Peter’s Church at the corner of Fifth Street and Girard Avenue. The body was being fitted with new vestments, a new Episcopal ring, pectoral cross, and the new mask to mark the bicentennial of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
The body of the saint, now 147 years old and wearing the bishop’s miter and white robes, lay in a brightly lit glass case beneath the altar of the old Baroque stone church. Thousands of people from around the world visited the national shrine, pressing their hands against the glass and praying for intercessions, for favors and miracles. It was the intact skeleton of the saint, except for small bones that had been reverently removed many years before and cut into tiny pieces and set in very small, glass-covered containers that priests carried, sometimes set in crosses. These were the relics of the saint.
Bender, feeling a bit like Michelangelo, who had labored for popes, had to be approved by the Vatican itself to perform the sacred act of touching the body of a saint. Cardinal Justin Rigali, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, oversaw the opening of the saint’s casket and the exchange of the Episcopal garb. Bender was rebuilding the face from a single nineteenth-century photograph of Neumann.
That morning he gently caressed the plaster contours of the face again, and felt the familiar sense of awe and mystery he found hard to describe. Surely it was not the face of God he was touching, but to millions of people around the world, it was the next best thing.
He was pleased with his work. The Redemptorist Father Kevin Moley, the pastor of St. Peter’s, was coming to visit the studio that day to inspect his progress. Bender loved to talk to Father Moley about the amazing miracles attributed to the saint.
Within days of Bishop Neumann’s death at age forty-eight in 1860, devoted Catholics began coming to the church and praying at the tomb for special favors. Word spread that favors, even miracles, were being granted. Epidemics of typhoid and cholera that killed thousands of Philadelphians between 1891 and 1900 did not claim a single parishioner of Bishop Neumann’s church.
According to Father Moley, the first of the three documented miracles that led to sainthood occurred in 1923 in Sassuolo, Italy. Eva Benassi, eleven years old, beyond medical help with acute peritonitis, was given the last rites, as doctors said she could not survive the night. While praying over Benassi, a nun touched the girl’s abdomen with a picture of Neumann; that night the peritonitis disappeared.
The second miracle occurred in Villanova, Pennsylvania, on the Main Line of Philadelphia in 1949. On July 8, Kent Lenahan, nineteen years old, was standing on the running board of a moving car when it struck a telephone pole. His skull was crushed, his collarbone broken, a lung punctured. He was admitted to Bryn Mawr Hospital in a coma, and doctors said nothing could be done. Kent began his recovery after his parents prayed at the shrine of Neumann, and then touched him with a relic, a piece of cloth from the bishop’s cassock. A month later, he left the hospital on his own power.
In 1963, Michael Flanigan of Philadelphia, six years old, was dying from Ewing’s sarcoma, a usually fatal form of cancer. Doctors said the boy had little hope of recovery. His parents took him to Neumann’s tomb, where a parish priest blessed the boy and touched his body with a crucifix containing a relic of the bishop, a chip of bone from the bishop’s remains. Another chip of bone, encased in glass, was pinned to the boy’s clothing. Six weeks later, all traces of the disease had disappeared.
Father Moley arrived on South Street that afternoon with a young priest. Bender showed them the death mask, nearly complete. The project had taken nearly a year of planning by the church, and now Father Moley was thrilled. “It’s magnificent,” he said.
Jan appeared, and Frank introduced her.
“My wife has cancer,” Bender said.
“May I pray for her?” Father Moley asked.
He looked at Jan, who nodded. “Please,” Bender said.
His assistant priest placed on her the saint’s relic, a tiny peice of Neumann’s bone. Father Moley gently laid his hand on Jan’s head and said the prayer to Saint John Neumann. It is a prayer for his intercession to bring a miracle from Jesus Christ that ends, “May death still find us on the sure road to our Father’s House with the light of living Faith in our hearts.”
Jan felt a warmth coursing through her body. “It’s not like a bolt of lightning. It’s soft,” she said.
Within days, the pain began to fade. Jan rose from bed and returned to work. Six weeks later, test after test confirmed the inexplicable: She was completely clear of cancer. Doctors were baffled; the local NBC station reported the “medical miracle.” The Benders were awed. Jan wept with joy with Frank; she believed his devotion to her and to his work with Saint John Neumann had saved her. Father Moley said, “Maybe Saint John Neumann wanted this intercession as a gift” to the artist for his magnificent work. Fleisher jubilantly shared the news with the Vidocq Society.
Walter, ever skeptical, didn’t believe it. He saw Bender talking about his wife’s illness in a firestorm of publicity. It didn’t work for him. It didn’t seem right.
• CHAPTER 56 •
KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLES
Richard Walter, the thin man in black tie, was nearing the end of a Chardonnay and his patience, listening to a society woman prattle on about this and that. The Pen Ryn mansion, 250 years old, glowed with yellow light on the west bank of the Delaware River, America’s first mansion row. Music and laughter floated out into the darkness over the broad lawn down to the river. Ladies were greeted by a string quartet, a flute of champagne, and a rose from a smiling federal agent who specialized in busting drug lords. Men had tucked Berettas and Glocks into the jackets and pants of tuxedos; women swapped DNA and blood sample kits for gowns and pearls.
Suddenly without a word Walter pirouetted and walked away from the woman, the back of his starched- proper figure disappearing swiftly into the crowd. She flapped her mouth open and closed like a magnificent egret.
“My God! He walked away right in the middle of my sentence!”
“Oh, it’s OK,” said the woman standing next to her. “He does that to everyone.”
No ball was quite like it: the Vidocq Society annual black-tie fete, event of the year for men and women dressed to kill.
“Where else can you see Frank Bender in a tux?” asked Bill Fleisher, magnificent in black tie with the bronze Vidocq medal around his neck on the tricolor ribbon. He raised a glass of champagne, toasting Bender’s remarkable identification of Colorado Jane Doe, fifty-five years after the young woman’s corpse was discovered by hikers in a Boulder canyon in 1954. The Vidocq Society’s latest triumph had unearthed another possible victim of Los Angeles’s “Lonely Hearts Killer” Harvey Glatman. Fleisher impulsively grabbed Bender and gave him a hug.
Walter stood to the side, frowning at the public display of affection. In his classic tuxedo, Walter looked like a gaunt double for Holmes in the original Sidney Paget illustrations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in
The round tables in the great hall were crowded with detectives from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East on this Sunday in October 2009. Bottles of wine and sprays of alstroemeria lilies had replaced crime- scene photos and autopsy reports de rigueur the rest of the year. This one night of the year, the Murder Room, a portable feast, was decorated for butter, not guns, for celebration and sheer joy.
