The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [60]
When finally she’d made her own First Communion—years late, taller than the other girls and wearing the wrong kind of dress—she was disconcerted to find that the Host had no taste at all. It stuck to the roof of her mouth like a cardboard chip from a board game, then melted away. As for the promising wave of intensity she’d felt while coming away from the altar, it proved no more than the dizzying power of her longing for something to happen. By the time she left the church, it had already passed.
“Your father,” Pietro said. “He is well today?”
Phoebe hesitated, beguiled by further stories she might invent. But lying to someone so religious seemed deeply wrong. It was almost like lying to God.
“He died,” she said. Grade school, high school—“Your dad, what does he do?” As if dying were his sole achievement.
“I am sorry.”
Phoebe shrugged. These exchanges always made her uncomfortable; in the end she felt obliged to make light of her father’s death, just to get things back on a cheerier note. “It was ages ago,” she said.
They sat in silence. Countryside yielded to city, modern apartment buildings, bright laundry flapping on cramped terraces. Soon the ride would end, they would go their separate ways.
The train jerked and swayed pulling into the station at Reims. Phoebe felt lightheaded getting off; from the platform Pietro took her hand and gently guided her down. She heard church bells, big, silvery peals like heavy objects plunging into water.
“I have some hours before my train,” Pietro said when they reached the street. “If you are not occupied, I can show to you the cathedral.”
“Oh yes!” Phoebe cried, grateful for this reprieve.
He led her to an older, residential part of the city, stone buildings four or five stories high, shallow grille balconies. Dozens of squeaking birds hopped among the fussy trees.
At the far end of a square the cathedral loomed suddenly before them. Phoebe had never seen anything like it, a massive honeycomb of nooks and crannies and statues, points of gray stone rising like stalagmites toward the sky. She and Pietro crossed the square, sluggish pigeons flapping halfheartedly out of their way. The cathedral’s massive rounded doors were bordered by carved figurines laid one above the other, up, up and around the top, where the hapless saints looked like passengers stuck on a Ferris wheel.
“We see the West Façade,” Pietro said. “There, you can find”—he pointed above the left doorway—“Smiling Angel. She is famous, maybe you have seen from pictures.”
With her sly, beatific smile, the Smiling Angel might have been the Mona Lisa’s sister. Two pigeons roosted on her head.
They entered the cathedral through a small rectangular door carved in the right portal. A vast space loomed around them, filled with a cavelike smell of wet stone. Phoebe followed Pietro down the nave, feeling cool rock through the soles of her shoes. Pairs of fluted columns rose to the ceiling and curved back down like the ribs of a giant beast. Phoebe sensed them flexing in and out with its breath. The dusky air was streaked with seams of color from the stained-glass windows, purple, crimson, gold, colored puddles on the stone floor. The vast silence was like a sigh, the hum you heard inside seashells.
They traversed the aisles, Pietro pointing out paintings and statues in a manner at once reverent and familiar, as if these saints were his family members. “Here is Saint Sebastian,” he whispered.