Poetry
Murphy, Peter E.
quired—such behavior. Next night, I heard an organ concert in Sant'Ignazio, my favorite of the big Baroque churches, where the nave's ceiling explodes in a funny, sublime vision of heaven...
...Madeleine, thankful for her presence during a critical time of Jenny's illness, was a single parent again...
...Do you understand me?'' We had lunch together in the dining car, where I could not overlook another traveler at the next table, eating alone—poor fellow, I thought...
...Jennifer returned to school, with a reduced course load and weekly therapy, which is just what I might have suggested if I were her dean...
...It would be a long ride, but restful, with the train's taking over the work of travel and the scenery distracting me from my loneliness...
...Remember," it begins, "the train from Rome...
...Next night, I heard an organ concert in Sant'Ignazio, my favorite of the big Baroque churches, where the nave's ceiling explodes in a funny, sublime vision of heaven wedding the continents of the earth...
...M'hai capitol "You are appealing...
...But Madeleine received a call from the college one night a week into term...
...Inevitably, we exchanged a mutually embarrassed greeting, and before I knew it, we were engaged in the most absurd and delightful flirtation, enhanced, if not made possible, by means of a bilingual dictionary...
...adeleine and I reviewed my Roman photographs in a New Haven restaurant one evening, laughing at their Byronic gloom...
...A reluctant departure was made at Milan, and I continued alone on the train into the Alps...
...in our bungling compliance with this desire, all our botched—or "sacrificed"—vacations had opened the door to baffling grace...
...Admission was free, a gesture whose generosity was not lost on me: how much, with the price of European utilities, did it cost the church to burn those constellations of chandeliers in the apse and the candelabra held by the angels of the transepts...
...Meanwhile, the day I finished the first draft of this essay, I received a card from Lago di Garda near Milan...
...It was someone I had noticed on the platform (no wedding ring, but probably too young for me), whose gaze now, I could feel, kept returning from the window to my face...
...In these tender eyes and in this quiet voice, I felt the city of Rome, and perhaps even my divine lover, finally break the silence: Sei simpatico...
...She believed that she had been grieving for her daughter even then, before her reason confirmed her unknown fears about the girl's well-being...
...she drove to Maine to bring Jenny home again...
...As Madeleine keeps caring for her daughter, we, her friends, will try to care for Madeleine...
...In the bigger scheme of things, she conjectured, her botched vacation had been necessary for her to bring Jenny home, which was God's careful desire, or "will...
...The prognosis now, after a stay in the hospital, is hopeful: she is planning to resume classes in July...
...As we rolled out of the station someone slid back the glass door of the compartment where I was sitting by myself, and asked if one of the vacant seats were taken...
...But recovery takes longer than we would like...
...Next day I boarded the train for Zurich...
...Elisabeth had since returned to Zurich...
...To hear Bach and Charles Ives in such a setting offered some proof of Walter Pater's subversive theory that all the arts aspire to the condition of music...
...By now she'd had the chance to ponder some perplexing movements in her spiritual life: she had been weeping in prayer, for no reason it seemed, all summer, long before she left for Zurich and found Jenny so disturbed...
Vol. 119 • July 1992 • No. 13
