Chapter 12
WE WANDERED THROUGH THE FORUM, along the Tiber, and up through the Jewish Quarter, hand in hand, until we found ourselves in this pretty little square lined with cafés.
“What’s that?” I asked, staring up at the pockmarked edifice of an old church, which had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
Paul consulted the map. “The Pantheon?”
The front of the building reminded me of Hibernian Hall, back in Charleston. There were these massive columns, which created a cavernous portico, and in the center of it all sat a pair of gargantuan wooden doors that beckoned us inside.
I was so impressed I wasn’t forming coherent sentences. “It looks so…”
“Old?” Paul offered.
“I was going to say beautiful.”
He shrugged. “That, too.”
There was something about the proportions of the place that got to me. Everything was oversize, which made me feel small, but in the best kind of way.
“Can we go in?” I asked Paul, and he didn’t say no, so we took the steps that led to the entrance and deposited a few coins in a slotted box labeled OFFERTE.
Inside, the rotunda echoed, and when my eyes adjusted to the light, I didn’t know where to look first. I took in the marble floor and the niches that at one time contained statues of pagan gods but now paid tribute to some of Italy’s most revered artists and statesmen.
In one of the niches was a Madonna and Child, but underneath the pair sat a strange-looking sarcophagus with the name Raphael engraved in funny letters.
I leaned into Paul and whispered, “Wait, is that the Raphael?”
A few feet away from us, a straight-backed Italian woman toting a handkerchief around on a stick was telling a group of tourists that the temple had been built in the second century AD and that the dome under which we stood was the largest of its kind anywhere.
“You will notice the oculus in the center of the dome?” she said, and everyone, including Paul and me, looked up at the hole in the coffered ceiling.
“It lets in light, yes? And reduces the weight of so much concrete. But ancient Romans believed that it also connected them to the gods. That it was a door between earth and the heavens.”
The tourists nodded and moved along, but Paul and I remained where we were, staring up at the aureole of sky above our heads. My brother had been dead for almost three years by then, but there wasn’t a day I didn’t wonder where he’d gone.
“Do you believe in heaven?” I asked, and only after the words were out of my mouth did I realize it was a funny thing to ask a man I’d already married. Like, weren’t we supposed to have gotten all these big conversations out of the way already?
Paul must have thought the same thing because his head snapped around, and he looked at me, perplexed. “You don’t?”
I glanced at him, then back up at that small disc of light. We’d both been raised Catholic, but whereas he still attended Mass at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart when he was home visiting his parents, my family hadn’t stepped inside a church since the day of my brother’s funeral.
I wanted to believe Lenny was up there somewhere, staring down at me, and that maybe one day—if I did all the right things—I’d get to see him again. “I guess I do,” I said, but I was lying. The truth was that, when I looked up at the magnificent ceiling, all I saw was a gaping hole.