Chapter 106
PAUL INSISTED THAT WE GO to Mass on Easter Sunday, and I didn’t argue because I was about due for a big serving of Catholic guilt.
The command held a Protestant service at the compound and a Catholic service over in Palau, but among the higher-ups, there was a push—even if you didn’t speak Italian—to attend Mass at the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene downtown.
Politically, it was smart to put in facetime with Father Guglielmo, and this was especially true when NSA La Maddalena was under fire.
We arrived at the church at a little before ten and immediately found the Stearnses seated in a pew toward the back. “Isn’t this just a beautiful little church?” said Roberta as we took our seats.
The church had been built in the seventeen hundreds, and because the community was composed primarily of fishermen and shepherds, there were no stained-glass windows or frescoed ceilings.
Everything was very plain, from the butter-yellow walls to the black-and-white-checkerboard floor—but I liked the simplicity.
It made the place feel less intimidating.
There was, of course, a prominent portrait of Mary Magdalene up near the altar.
She looked very saintly in her billowy robes, and maybe it was Teo’s kiss fresh on my lips, but I started to feel a weird sense of connection to this woman who had possibly also kissed the wrong guy or, in her case, several wrong guys.
We’d never get to the bottom of whether Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, but it did strike me that, in any century, including mine, the easiest way to deal with a woman who didn’t know what she wanted was to call her a whore.
The pews were filling in, and while we waited for the church service to get underway, Roberta told me about a friend whose husband had just gotten assigned to Hawaii. “It’s like here, only you can take a hot shower any time you want. That’s the dream, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, but I wasn’t in a good headspace to be dreaming about our next assignment. Instead, I scanned the crowd.
I recognized the woman who ran the focacceria I liked and a man who had helped me find a tape measure at the hardware store.
The old man who sold me the Herald Tribune was sitting a few pews in front of us, and beside him were the Jenkinses.
Mary Lou was wearing a patchwork dress with giant lapels, and when she turned around at one point to look for someone or something, she made eye contact with me and waved.
The Bornemanns arrived just as Mass was about to begin.
For a moment, I worried they might sit with us, so I was grateful when they slid into the Jenkinses’ pew.
After they were seated, I studied the back of Daniel’s head, trying to decide if he looked especially sad now that Janine was gone, but his posture didn’t give much away.
Someone started playing the organ, and we stood while Father Guglielmo proceeded past us.
He was wearing a gold stole, and I thought he looked very regal under all that fine white linen and silk brocade.
When he reached the altar, he made the sign of the cross and gave us his blessing.
“Fratelli, per celebrare degnamente i santi misteri, riconosciamo i nostri peccati,” he said as he led us into the Penitential Act.
I always liked the way Catholics broke down sin into two categories—venial sins, which didn’t really risk your relationship with God, and mortal sins, which were the biggies.
As a kid, I had only ever been in danger of committing a venial sin.
I might lie to my mother or envy my brother, but those sins could be washed away by attending Mass.
When it was over, I was a blank slate, ready to go out into the world and try to be a good person all over again.
It was different now. The sins I was committing were bigger, and this prayer of Father Guglielmo’s wasn’t going to get me out of anything.
I didn’t know if a kiss qualified as adultery or just marital infidelity, but either way it was a mortal sin, and in the Catholic faith, the only way out of it was to go to confession, which I absolutely was not going to do under any circumstances.
As Father Guglielmo came to the last lines of the prayer, in which he asked God to have mercy on us and forgive us our sins, I started to get a little emotional, but then Roberta, whose Italian was terrible, leaned in and whispered, “Do you actually understand any of this?” and I choked back a laugh.
Amen.