The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [61]
They paused at a series of tapestries, scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary. “Visitation,” Pietro said of one Phoebe didn’t recognize: two women conversing in a doorway. “After Mary learns she will birth the Son of God, she makes a visit to her cousin Elizabeth.”
Phoebe found it sweet, Mary rushing to tell her cousin the big news. She gazed at the rich, salmon-colored fabric and tried to listen, but the cathedral’s hum seemed louder now, flowing up from beneath the floor as if a giant machine were whirring under the stone.
“In the cathedral,” Pietro was saying, “is a three-dimension Bible. All windows, all statues, they tell one part in the story …” But Phoebe couldn’t listen, the hum was too distracting, a churn of bright, familiar sound like a schoolyard during recess. A wave of pleasure rolled through her, a warmth low in her stomach, a delicious calm in her limbs.
“I apologize,” Pietro said. “I speak too much.”
“No,” Phoebe said, shutting her eyes.
“We can be silent.”
She smiled. It felt like her first real smile in days, weeks. She opened her eyes and looked at Pietro.
“You feel something,” he said wonderingly.
They stood in silence. The smile just stayed on Phoebe’s face, the corners of her mouth rising inadvertently. In Pietro’s eyes she saw a fierce, burning strength. “I feel it,” she whispered. “All around me.”
“He is here, sì. With us,” Pietro said.
Gently, his arm barely touching her back, Pietro guided Phoebe to a pew. They sat side by side on the ancient, creaking wood. Phoebe smelled its polish. An organ played experimentally; hymns she dimly recognized would collapse mid-passage, change key and resume, each random echoey note floating to the ceiling and lingering there before melting into the larger sound. Phoebe felt the silky pulse of blood through her veins. Pietro knelt to pray, forehead pressed to his folded hands. The position looked so extreme, as if someone had thrust down his head, forced him into supplication. He didn’t fight it. He simply bowed, as Faith had bowed day after day in church while their father was sick.
Phoebe found she was breathing in time with the gentle flex of cathedral ribs. Gradually the border between her own body and the cathedral’s body began to dissolve, and Phoebe herself was dissolving, melting into its oceanic sigh, and what bliss—to be absorbed, to give herself up! The fulfillment of her journey. The fulfillment of all her life, Phoebe thought, as snippets of childhood prayers began drifting to mind. She whispered them aloud—“Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Father, who art in Heaven. Body of Christ. Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us”—each prayer like a glimmer from a splendid, holy pageant that had vanished when her sister died: the games of her childhood, the gaudy echo of electric guitars, Faith arranging her rosary in the shape of a heart on the same glass table where barely a year later she would tease through her fingers a soft green heap of marijuana, pressing it to dust, brushing it over the glass before rolling it into slender white joints. Faith deep in prayer while Phoebe dreamed beside her; returning home afterward to the sweet, intoxicating smell of their father’s illness.
A priest crossed the altar, long white robes making him seem to float. Pietro finished his prayers and resumed his place on the pew beside Phoebe. Concern made a crease in his face. It was only then that Phoebe realized she’d been crying, her face wet. “You have some pains, Phoebe,” Pietro said.
“I did,” she said in a dreamy, distant voice. “But it’s over now.”
“Is good you go to your sister,” Pietro said.
Phoebe nodded her agreement. She was floating like the priest, suspended in warm liquid.
“When you can go?” he persisted. “Maybe today. Perhaps we walk together