Pentecost 2019

Commute

Dappled Things

Andrew Frisardi

I.
What did I expect
when I stepped out
into the drizzly morning
and handed coins
to the man at the corner?
The cars and motorini
jolted at the lights,
and the world and all its people
were there to remind me
of something—I’m still
not sure exactly what.

II.

I could just step off the platform
to catch the train
before I miss it
again. That warm
passage is trust.

III.
All the commuters looking out
of windows at the hurtling world
uproot trees, break down
roots and boulders to debris,
even the daylight kindled
from the darkness that light is
without eyes. The world is
in blazes in our brains:
humus in fields,
shadows under ploughing,
litter of torn paper birds.

IV.
The train stops in a field,
where a mare champing hay
watches us watching her.
Bits of straw ray from her lips,
the train reflected in her eyes.
We’re looking at her looking.
The horse of solid earth,
keeper of perfect graves,
is seeing us.

V.
This could take a while,
just a matter of time.
We might wait suspended
until we feel the first slippage of wind
unsettling the tomb’s lid.

The Ghost Keeper by Natalie Morrill

Dappled Things

The Ghost Keeper
by Natalie Morrill
Review by Simcha Fisher

HarperCollins Canada, 2018
$22.99 (CAD); 368 pp

Chapter 5 of Natalie Morrill’s The Ghost Keeper made me set the book down almost in holy fear. In a few brutal pages, the central plot point is laid bare. You don’t realize, until that point, that you’re waiting for this exhumation; but when Josef Tobak, an Austrian Jew, takes up this burden of a long-hidden, infernal inversion of his own love story, you’ll stay with him to the end, to work out his responsibility.

When I first took up the book, I thought it was the perfect novel for our time. Tobak comes of age bewildered and uneasy as his beloved Vienna smolders with fear, hatred, and mistrust in the dreadful months before the Anschluss. “If the country is going to explode . . . . it will explode in a fire of patriotism,” he thinks. He finds a way to keep his head down, to pursue his own concerns: his family, his vocation of caring for the dead. Who can be trusted? This is not clear. “But then in March it is as if this thing that has stayed in the shadows starts to uncoil,” he says. The Nazis grow bold, and the city does explode.

“I am just a number in that crowd,” he recalls. “I don’t have a voice today and I have no words for which to use it—unless those were Go home, everyone. That’s all I can think of wanting: peace, home, family. Everything the way it has always been.”
Very few, it turns out, can be trusted, and nothing will be the way it was.

But despite the contemporary resonances, this is not a political novel. It’s a story about what it means to survive, and what it means to go home; what it is like to love, what it is like to be betrayed. It is about guilt and responsibility, about how to live with unspeakable burdens, and about how to survive when, as one character says, “everyone is excused, but no one is forgiven.”
But this is not a dark novel, either. Or, rather, it’s dark like the earth is dark, sometimes crushingly heavy, but also fertile and alive—partly because of where the story brings us, and partly because the writing itself is so luminous.

Tobak sometimes steps outside himself and uses the third person to tell his story. Here he describes himself at the birth of his son:
“All the roots of his heart are rearranged and knotted up in that one room. When he first sees the baby—little loaf of bread, raisin face—his heart sings a song he’s never heard, a song with one high note that makes the world go quiet.

“We name him after Anna’s father. It makes her cry, but it makes her happy, and she tells me it is like shutting a box she’s kept open for years.”

The book is full of simple but flawless imagery, full of hidden things coming to light and lucid things going cloudy and secret.
When he is five: “There are a lot of things I don’t tell my friends, many things beautiful or frightening—these I carry inside, like coins in my pocket that only my own fingertips know.”

Much of his work is coming to understand why he has always been so at home with the dead. At the end of the book, at home once again, he says:

“The feeling of dirt under my fingernails is one I’ve known almost nowhere besides cemeteries: we never had a garden, and I’ve lived always in cities. In digging, I am a child, and a youth, and a young man and a middle-aged man all in a moment, in the midst of a silence deep as a well. An awareness of faces peering over my shoulder—just here, so near they might lean in and touch me. We all stare together into the dark earth.”

His son, who understands but little of what becomes of survivors, helps him in the graveyard, unearthing the markers laid there to remember the dead they have lost in more ways than one. His son says: “They’re only markers. But perhaps they begin to stand in for what they mark. I can see that.”

Tobak’s response: “I scrape at the soil, cool clay under my nails, and I hold these words of his. The distance between a marker and the thing it marks collapsing into nothing, and then separating again as I note the collapse. And it strikes me that I had better know which it is that I am caring for, and what I am carrying, or else it’s all nonsense.”

Morrill enacts the same responsibility in her writing. She has a deft command of visual symbols, setting out animals and colors, sounds, smells, and sensations for us to savor. They stand sufficient to ground us in the place, but are also carefully selected to carry existential weight. The book is like one long lyric poem, but never self-indulgent. If it were set to music, it would have to be Mahler: So rich in color, so dense and gorgeously dissonant, so tender and so terrifying.

The book opens and shuts, illuminating, clarifying, digging, and gently laying to rest so much of what it means to be human. Like Tobak, we are constantly faced with the choice of just how deeply to become involved.

Mystery and Metaphor: A Conversation with Suzanne Wolfe

Dappled Things

Katy Carl

Fictionist and believer Suzanne Wolfe is a co-founder of the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society and of Image journal, a literary magazine that explores the intersection of the arts and faith. Her novel The Confessions of X earned the 2017 Book Award for Fiction from Christianity Today. Her first novel, Unveiling (reviewed in this issue), originally appeared in 2004 and was re-released in 2018 by Paraclete Press.

Unveiling is doubly of interest to readers of Dappled Things, as it deals with themes of art and faith: The narrative delves into the inner life of a talented conservatrice tasked with restoring a brilliant triptych altarpiece in a Catholic church in Rome. The technical process of restoration, as it reveals the painting’s surprising history, becomes an analogue for the protagonist’s healing from past wounds and the resurfacing of her authentic self.

Via e-mail, Suzanne and I discussed the craft of writing, faith and feeling in fiction, and more. Here is the conversation that unfolded, with slight changes for text flow.

First, I would love to hear about your writing life. Where and when do you work? What habits and attitudes do you consider vital to the process?

When my four children were small, I wrote mainly at night. This is how the first edition of Unveiling came to be written.
Now that my children are grown, I have my days back, so I have switched to writing in the morning. I get up early and write until noon. I try to do this every day, including weekends. If I am writing to deadline, I will write in the afternoon and evening as well for as long as it takes to get the job done. I’m a great believer in showing up for work and just doing it. This type of discipline is not possible, of course, with young children, but it can even be done with a full-time job (if you’re willing to live with exhaustion and a crummy social life!).
I hear a lot of people say that they write only when inspiration strikes. I can understand this, and for that reason I carry around a small notebook so I can jot down anything that may occur to me when I am out and about. But for the serious work of actual writing—of constructing a whole—I don’t have much faith in my muse. I have found that on days when I feel most uninspired, I may write the best I have written for weeks, and vice versa.
Writing is a craft and, like all crafts, “use makes master.” A carpenter who practices his craft every day becomes sensitive to the material he works with and can, in time, identify the grain of a particular species of wood from the feel of it under his plane. I think words and syntax and plot arcs are very like that. After a while, writing becomes instinctive rather than merely cerebral or emotional. At least, that is what I have found.
Mainly, I have found serious writing to be a rather unglamorous buckling down to work. For me, and I suspect for most writers, the biggest impediment to writing is the self. Writing is a hard thing to do, and I have found that, without discipline and habit, I am just too scared or lazy to do it. For me, showing up for work every day is much more important than having a solitary good day.
If that all sounds a bit grim, I have to say that the days when I become totally absorbed in my characters and their fictional world are some of the happiest moments of my life. Time seems to disappear, and I will look up from my laptop and discover that four hours have gone by. This is the miracle of writing. That the self and all its preoccupations can suddenly drop away in the magical discovery of the other—the characters and the world they inhabit.

What was it like for you to revisit your first novel fourteen years after its first publication?

Honestly, it was a bit strange. I have learned a lot since then, both personally and in my writing. It was like looking at a photograph of myself from my youth—clearly recognizable from the outside but much changed within. So there was a feeling of both recognition as well as disconnect at first. But then the magic of writing began to happen—I became intrigued all over again by Rachel, the main protagonist. I felt I was meeting an old friend who I hadn’t seen in years.

Tell me about the initial research process for Unveiling. Without giving away the content of Rachel’s discovery, can you point to any historical examples of unexpected provenance of an artwork that inspired it?

The inspiration for Unveiling came from a couple of paintings I saw in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. One was a triptych by Rogier Van der Weyden and one was a portrait of a woman by Modigliani. As you can tell, they were very different paintings—the triptych was a religious painting from the fifteenth century and the portrait was a secular painting from the twentieth century. The Modigliani woman looked very sad and I wondered why she was so sad; the triptych depicted Christ’s Deposition (his descent from the Cross) and Christ’s mother and Mary Magdalen were weeping. Somehow the emotion of these women in both these paintings fused in my imagination.
I was not inspired so much by the unexpected provenance of artwork so much as the process of art conservation itself. The act of restoration of something lost or obscured or damaged by time, neglect, or hard use, became a metaphor for the possibility of the restoration of the soul after personal tragedy.

Did you make any changes in the re-released edition? What (if anything) would you do differently if you could approach the same project for the first time right now?

I did not change the plot or characters, but I did try to nuance the emotion in the novel. I would say that one of the things I have learned in writing over the years, at least in terms of rendering highly charged moments, is that “less is more.” It’s important to learn when to suggest and evoke rather than merely state—readers need space to feel the emotion, and the writer’s obligation is not to crowd them. No one likes a movie where the soundtrack is so insistently telling you how to feel that you never get a chance to have the experience yourself.
On the other hand, if I wrote Unveiling now, I’d flesh out the characters and their backstories a lot more. Still, I hope they come alive enough for the reader to imagine their lives beyond the words on the page.

Could you say more about representing emotional depth in a more restrained or minimalist mode: What do you look for on the line level of prose—and how do you get from draft to finished project—with a scene like, for example, the difficult reunion between Rachel and her mother in the “Center Panel” section of Unveiling ? There is a lot of challenging history in their relationship that is successfully hinted at in that scene, and later revealed piece by piece, in such a way that the desire to discover the history compels the reader along. I’m interested in the mechanics of the composition of a passage like this, as well as your experience of the process.

Writing scenes that communicate emotional depth is very hard to do, as the writer needs to leave space for the reader’s own interpretation and this will depend on the reader’s own life experience which, of course, the writer cannot know. So, like film, it is a matter of showing a scene and hoping that the characters’ words and actions give enough of a hint to what lies beneath without ever directly spelling it out.
In Unveiling, the scene in the hotel room between Rachel and her mother was especially challenging; I had to show that there was a lot of history between them—I had hinted at it before—and this history meant they were in separate worlds . . . as if there was a sheet of glass between them making communication impossible. So I had to make their interaction oddly at cross purposes but, at the same time, intelligible to the reader. In the entire novel, this was the most difficult scene to write.
One of the “tricks” I used in order to get into Rachel’s mother’s head was to write the scene from the mother’s point of view. Then I switched back to Rachel’s point of view for the final version. This exercise enabled me to understand the mother more deeply.
Of course, the shared history in the relationship between mother and daughter, as well as the themes of loss, are metaphorically the same as the process of restoration. At first, the layers that obscure the original picture have to be dissolved and scraped away to reveal what lies beneath. The hotel scene was the beginning of this restoration process; that is why it only hints at, and does not fully reveal, that the process has begun—and also why it is rather painful! The full revelation for Rachel comes in the hospital room.

In your view, how does the expression of emotion in a piece of fiction relate to the expression of the experience of religious faith in the same medium? Unveiling deals subtly with some aspects of belief, whereas The Confessions of X addresses faith much more directly; I think both novels succeed in their treatment of faith insofar as they both extend an invitation to the reader to investigate an aspect of experience, rather than presenting claims to be accepted or rejected: can you expand on this a bit?

For the writer, conveying religious experience is a bit like conveying emotion. The “less is more” maxim also applies. Both states have to be firmly rooted in the characters’ experience rather than floating somewhere outside them as an intellectual or doctrinal proposition. In both Unveiling and The Confessions of X, both protagonists come to a kind of revelation via enormous personal loss. This loss reveals to them the depth of their longing for healing and wholeness.
One way I suggest this longing is by the use of metaphor, an indirect way of approaching emotional and spiritual experience. Here is one example from the final chapter of The Confessions of X: “I am the living heart of a tree uncovered by the axe, still pliable, still green and full of sap.” This line conveys (I hope!) not only X’s suffering at the hands of another (the woodsman’s axe/Augustine) but also her resilience and courage (still green and full of sap). It conveys all her history and character in this one metaphor. In this way, our hearts’ deepest longings—our desire for peace, and wholeness—are enacted rather than stated. And the use of the first person shows that she herself is aware of this inner strength and the fact that, after so much suffering, she is still standing. The quality of her awareness is the religious experience, that not only has she survived loss but that she has, mysteriously, become stronger by it. This is the mystery of redemptive suffering. The key to X’s revelation is that she does not come to this understanding intellectually, but through experience. It is earned rather than merely acquired.

So may I ask what you’re working on now?

I am currently working on the revision of my second novel in an Elizabethan mystery series. The first is A Murder by Any Name (Crooked Lane Books, 2018); the second is The Course of All Treasons (Crooked Lane Books, 2019). These are very different novels from Unveiling and The Confessions of X in that they are genre fiction (I hope to keep writing more literary novels but writing a novel a year in a series is currently taking up all my creative energies). There is a lot of humor, skullduggery, and bawdiness in these novels—fitting for the time of Shakespeare, who is a minor character in the novels.

Pentecost 2019

Dappled Things

Feature

Mystery and Metaphor: A Conversation with Suzanne Wolfe Katy Carl

Fiction

Webs Jane Wageman
Narbonne Cathedral Sean Murray
Luigi Anthony Lusvardi, SJ

Poetry

Out and Back in Rome Andrew Frisardi
Commute Andrew Frisardi
On the Cutting Down of a Pine Tree Andrew Frisardi
Snowfall in Lent Andrew Frisardi
El Niño Joyce Schmid
For Evangeline Kirsten Kinnell
Altar Serving Kevin Coyne
Winter of 2015 Kevin Coyne
Elegy for John the Baptist Kevin Coyne
Genesis Romana Iorga
The Riddle Romana Iorga
Lizard Romana Iorga
Cicadetta montana Zachary Bos
Mud Daubers Zachary Bos
Birches Rebekah Spearman
Dandelions Rebekah Spearman

Nonfiction

On Discovering the Undiscovered Novel Samuel Sweeney

Book Reviews

The Ghost Keeper by Natalie Morrill Simcha Fisher
Unveiling by Suzanne Wolfe Katy Carl

Visual Art

Carl Schmitt (1889-1989) was an American artist who received his formation at the Chase School in New York, the National Academy of Design, and then the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy. He exhibited his work at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, the Chicago Art Institute, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Brooklyn Museum. He was one of the founding members of the Silvermine Guild of Artists in 1922 and was a guest at Yaddo in 1928. From 1940 to 1988, he worked primarily from his home studio in Connecticut. A lifelong Catholic who lived and worked in communication with notable artists, writers, and thinkers of his time, Schmitt passed away on his seventy-fifth wedding anniversary.

Luigi

Dappled Things

Anthony R. Lusvardi, S.J.

That thing can’t be doing much for property values,” Uncle Herb observed to Uncle Mike upon alighting from the rental minivan, luggage and my whining cousins tumbling out onto the curb behind him. Towering over Nonno’s rose bushes and menacing the mailbox in front of my grandparents’ modest brick rambler, sat a decommissioned World War II Italian army ambulance. The sleek lines of Mussolini’s crack engineering corps had been marred by various additions—compartments bolted to the roof of the cab, asymmetrical windows, spigots protruding from the body, mysterious doors secured with mini luggage locks. As if to compensate for its militaristic past, the whole thing (except for the windows) had been painted pale yellow, like an aging Big Bird nesting in the driveway. It had edged onto the grass just enough to allow the Oldsmobile to eke out of the garage.
“A dago RV,” Uncle Mike observed.
A bickering conversation between my aunt and grandmother over what to feed the kids began in medias res. “They won’t eat tortellini, mom. I have hotdogs in the cooler.” And on it went from there.
In due course my oldest brother, Peter, stepped out of the front seat of the minivan; either he had been sleeping or just deciding when to grace us with his presence. Peter had been allowed to fly to the wedding—separate from the rest of the family—so he wouldn’t have to miss a day of some camp he was attending for the “leaders of tomorrow.” His attendance at Camp Dorkiss, as I called it, meant that he had also missed the moment when the dago RV arrived at our house in Minneapolis earlier that week. I had just come inside after mowing the neighbor’s lawn and saw that my mom had set the table with wine glasses, something that usually only happened on Christmas and Easter. “Dad is bringing home a guest,” she announced.
“Who is it?” I asked, wiping sweat off my forehead with my sleeve.
She answered slowly, letting me see the hint of a smile in her eyes. “I’m not really sure, Andy. Someone from Italy. A friend of Nonno’s.”
“Did he come for the wedding?” I asked.
“I—I’m not really sure about that either, Andy.”

Glyph

“Oh my,” she said an hour later, as the dago RV pulled into the driveway.
Our guest, as it turned out, spoke not a word of English, not hello, not thank you. He had appeared in the lobby of my dad’s law firm on the forty-eighth floor of the IDS Center in Minneapolis, waving a wrinkled business card in the air and gushing streams of Italian at the bewildered secretary. Now he introduced himself with elaborate formality, bowing his head as he shook our hands, placing his free hand over his heart as if so moved by the experience he was willing to pledge allegiance.
“LU-I-GI.” He pronounced each syllable so distinctly that at first I thought he had three different names; then I realized
that he bore the name of the younger (and underappreciated) Mario Brother.
My dad had grown up with my grandparents’ Lombard dialect and could communicate with Luigi, who was gesturing, with some amazement, around our kitchen, complimenting, so my dad said, the beauty of the cabinetry, our house, my mother. Even I could tell, however, that he was leaving vast swathes of the conversation untranslated as he tried to keep up with our guest.
Luigi was dressed a bit like a plumber, I imagined, though probably more like a painter, a white t-shirt tucked tightly into white pants, accentuating a slight paunch. His shoes were shiny, black, and formal, excruciatingly stiff-looking, with little tassels lacquered rigidly to the top. He fell into that vast stage of life I thought of as “old”—anyone older than my parents—but he exuded a rather disconcerting vigor, seeming to thrust every gesture, facial expression, and word into an orbit around him so that if one stepped too close, he was in danger of getting hit. He was short—at thirteen, I stood eyeto-eye with him—and bald, his head shaved to complete the process begun by nature. His skin was pale, pinkish in spots that had been exposed to the sun. Luigi’s most impressive feature, however, was his nose, which reminded me of a particular sandstone cliff in Wisconsin that we drove past on our way to my grandparents’ home; traced on the surface of its mass, distinctly, almost delicately, were an artery and a vein, one red, the other a shade of blue close enough to green to put me in mind of Christmas. As dinner wore on, I imagined the bulb removed from Rudolph’s nose, leaving only the wiring exposed.
Luigi was on a trip around the world, my dad explained. I picked the words “India,” “Australia,” and “Los Angeles” out of the machinegun-fire Italian, and at one point my dad interjected to explain that meeting Mother Teresa in Calcutta had been the central object of his journey. Now apparently he was taking the scenic route home.
“How did he get from India to Los Angeles?” my mother asked politely, giving Luigi an encouraging smile.
My dad translated.
“In nave,” Luigi said.
“By boat,” my dad translated back.
I thought I should try to follow my mom’s example of politeness but felt silly when I spoke, as if Luigi’s incomprehension were the result of my own poor English, so I drifted into my own thoughts for the rest of the meal, calculating how many lawns I still needed to mow before I could afford an N64—since my parents were too cheap to upgrade Peter’s hand-me-down Nintendo, already an antique. As I sat next to him at the table, I also noticed that Luigi had a very European sort of body odor.

Glyph

During part of the conversation when I was paying attention, my dad mentioned traveling to my uncle’s wedding, coming up that weekend. Luigi seemed utterly flabbergasted that my grandparents lived in a different state, in a little town outside Peoria, a full day’s drive away.
“Madonna santa!” he exclaimed, eyes widening theatrically as my dad explained the distances involved, distances that became excruciating that weekend as we traveled in motorcade with the dago RV, which could not go more than eighty kilometers per hour due to a mechanical problem that required a part that could only be ordered from an Axis Powers Surplus Store.
Afterwards my dad claimed that he had never issued an actual invitation to Luigi. Luigi had simply assumed he was invited. My soon-to-be-aunt Alexis regarded him as she might a stain on her wedding dress or a pimple that appeared on her forehead the morning of the ceremony. “He’s not going to drive that thing to the church, is he?”
Even my grandmother, whose whole existence flowed out of the joy she took in doting on others, was soon irritated with Luigi. The man had by now half-circled the globe, but in the presence of an Italian woman he proved utterly incapable of performing even the most elementary tasks; not only couldn’t he cook or do laundry, he couldn’t even walk his used silverware from table to sink. I’ve since wondered at how the Luigi we met could have traversed the ex-Soviet Union and negotiated passage across the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps his cluelessness was the temporary result of feeling suddenly so comfortable again. After months away from home, surrounded by people who spoke the dialect of his village, in the presence of his boyhood friend, the world’s vastness receded and he reverted to childish provincialism.
The one person who accepted Luigi’s presence quite naturally was my grandfather, who was also possibly the only person more bored with the bridal weekend than I was. The night of our arrival, Alexis and the rest of the females had a forty-five minute conversation about whether the white napkins at the reception were cream, eggshell, bone, pearl, old lace, vanilla, seashell, or latte. Nonno didn’t even like eating at restaurants. “Your Nonna, she cooks how I like, why I need to eat at a restaurant and pay somebody more to cook something not as good as what I eat at home? Ecco.” Nonno was a retired baker—my grandmother used to decorate the cakes he’d make at the bakery—but Alexis wouldn’t hear of a traditional wedding cake. “Everybody has a cake; I want my wedding to be unique.” Instead we had a cupcake bar, an idea she’d seen in a bridal magazine. Though it made me feel slightly treasonous, I confess I made multiple trips to the cupcake bar at the reception.
During the day Luigi and Nonno sat on the brick patio behind the house, Luigi occasionally standing to illustrate some point of conversation. At night I was allowed to join them at the kitchen table for cards: first briscolla, the rules of which I knew, and then scopa, the rules of which remained obscure. For briscolla I was on a team with my grandmother, who used an ever-evolving system of winks and nods to communicate which cards I was to play. The result of her stratagems was confusion and defeat for our side. “Anna, nobody understand a thing you say! Ecco,” Nonno said. She was soon called into the living room, where the women were engineering the next morning’s shopping expedition while passing around heavily marked and annotated wedding catalogues. When we switched to scopa Luigi proved willing to cheat on my behalf, craning his neck to peer at my cards, frowning melodramatically if I started to make a bad play. Even without mastering the rules, I managed to break even. When she returned, my grandmother mentioned casually that she hoped they might someday bake the cake for my wedding. She mentioned it casually another three times that weekend.

Glyph

The next day I found myself conscripted into the shopping campaign since I needed, apparently, a belt to match my suit. There is nothing like a pre-wedding shopping spree to make a thirteen-year-old boy pray he’ll suddenly slip into a coma.
On the drive to the mall, elaborating on her philosophy of bridal registries, Alexis announced to the car, “Of course, I only want one child. And after that…” There was a slight glance in my direction before she completed the thought by making a scissors motion with her fingers, a gesture intended to hide its meaning from me, like when parents spell words they don’t want their toddlers to understand. The ploy succeeded—I couldn’t figure out what Alexis intended, though it seemed horrific—and its success galled. As the youngest of three children, I sensed in her phantom snipping some vague judgment against my existence and began to imagine her as one of the deadly piranha plants that rose from the pipes on Mario Brothers and, on the higher levels, spit fireballs at Mario and Luigi.
As soon as we returned from shopping I retreated to the spare room in my grandparents’ basement, where, amid spare furniture and extra blankets, they kept a boxy old television. One of Uncle Mike’s high school classmates and drinking buddies, Sal, had spliced an auxiliary cable from the main television in the living room to the TV in the basement, a circumstance that seemed not particularly legal, especially if you knew Sal. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Ronchetti. It’s all OK. You just remember to call me first if you have a problem, before you call the cable company.”
The result of Sal’s creative wiring was that the TV in the basement got reception of channels not included with basic cable, among which were a few dedicated exclusively to themes of rather urgent curiosity to the mind of a thirteen-year-old boy. In fact, the television got only partial reception of such channels; what came through were mostly blurry lines and a lot of moaning. But at an age when prurient curiosity had not yet blossomed into true lust, the suggestion of any body part—a thigh, a breast, an elbow, it didn’t matter—through the sequences of distorted lines seemed desperately alluring.
Unlike the picture, the TV’s sound resounded with crystal clarity, though of course I kept the device on mute—except for a brief, terrifying moment when I hit the wrong button while trying to adjust the picture quality. The whole house seemed to shake with, well, the dialogue. I was sure the reverberations would be strong enough to send the crucifix over my grandparents’ bed crashing to the floor in the room above, provoking the whole family to rush down the stairs in outrage, Alexis brandishing avenging scissors in the front of the pack. Instead, nothing whatever happened, and I went back to straining my neck to try to pick out limbs in the static.
A quarter hour later, when I thought I was safe, the door suddenly rattled without warning, and the voice of Luigi thundered, “Ai, ragazzo!” followed by a chain of incomprehensible Italian. I’d kept a finger primed on the channel button for just such an eventuality, but I started and fumbled, and there was an agonizing delay as the ancient television’s internal gears creaked from one channel to the next. I’d kept the door locked, but it was a flimsy lock, the kind you can open with a coin, and the door didn’t fit snuggly into its frame anyway, so the lock only hindered Luigi for a moment before he was in the room. The channel changed, but I wasn’t sure if it had changed in time, what Luigi saw or didn’t see—an uncertainty more tortuous than any pang of conscience.
Luigi was mercifully oblivious. He spoke rapidly and loudly, not finding it strange that I was watching Oprah on mute. He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, my guilty terror having rendered my will infinitely malleable. We walked outside through the garage, in the shade of which Uncle Herb and Uncle Mike sat in lawn chairs drinking beer and exchanging learned opinions about politics and the economy. Luigi stopped in front of his camper, lecturing about its provenance and upkeep (I imagined) while making broad circular motions around it with his arms, as if demonstrating how to buff a larger invisible incarnation of the vehicle. He led me around behind the truck and opened the enormous rear doors, which reminded me of the giant freezers in the school kitchen or the refrigerator units where bodies are stored in the morgues of police dramas. Then he stood to the side, one arm outstretched before him in a show of the sort of elaborate hospitality one usually demonstrates only if wearing a top hat and a cape, and all I could think of was the exceptionless commandment drilled into American schoolchildren from infancy: never get in a car with a stranger.
Was Luigi a stranger? I asked myself, not so much concerned with my safety as with transgressing such an absolute decree of the moral law. He was a friend of my grandfather and had been staying with our family for almost a week, but I hadn’t understood a word he’d said the whole time and he was undeniably a little weird—strange, if not a stranger. The capacious rear of the ambulance brought to mind an instructional video we’d watched at a first grade assembly in which children were lured by a man with thick sideburns and a matching mustache into the back of an ice cream truck for purposes unseen, unimaginable, and indubitably nefarious, at the end of which the school principal had made us all repeat in chorus, “NEVER GET IN A CAR WITH A STRANGER.” Luigi, sensing my hesitation, repeated his baroque gesture of welcome and added a slight bow.
I clambered up into the dago RV, and Luigi followed, the high step requiring him to grip the camper’s side and revealing a slight stiffness in his movements that reminded me of his age and utter harmlessness. Stepping into the Luigi-mobile felt like touring the captured German U-boat or the coalmine at the Museum of Science and Industry; it reminded me of the forts my older brothers and I had constructed out of odds and ends in the hollow spaces under the pine trees in our back yard, before Peter had grown too cool for that sort of thing. Inside, not an inch was wasted. A desk and a cot with green blanket and stiff sheets folded up against the walls; a sink had been fashioned out of a small bucket and embedded into a cabinet; a strap held books securely to a shelf; tools and a coil of rope were fastened to the wall around a little round window that looked like it had been salvaged from a submarine.
Luigi was not interested in showing off the vehicle’s contraptions, however, but instead pointed toward the back wall, in the center of which was a larger than life gilt-framed portrait of Mother Teresa, her familiar wrinkled face beaming against a gauzy blue background. Luigi paused, glanced back and forth between the picture and me, as if to double-check that I had noticed it, and then he launched into a passionate discourse, of which I understood not a single word. His brow knit seriously; his eyes opened wondrously; his hands spun upward in little epicycles toward the heavens; then they covered his chest, as if shielding a tender wound; then caressed the air in front of him as if rescuing a wounded butterfly; and at last his head rolled dreamily from side to side, like a love-struck teenager.
It took me a moment to realize he must have asked a question because he had paused for a response.
I smiled and bobbed my head and shoulders up and down in affirmation.
He laughed, thrust his hands outward at his sides like Charlie Chaplain, and put a hand on the side of my head while saying something friendly with lots of drawn-out vowels as we turned to exit.

Glyph

In the rear of the old ambulance, hanging over the foot of the bed in a clear plastic garment bag, I had noticed a powder blue suit. At that age the difference between a suit and a sports coat was still lost on me, though I could recognize a tuxedo. I had no idea why one garment should be preferred to another at a wedding, and they all seemed equally uncomfortable to me. Nonetheless, on the morning of the wedding when Luigi appeared on the church steps, the sun reflecting radiantly off the concrete as if someone had sprinkled glitter on the sidewalk, even I could tell there was something gauche about the suit. Elvis meets the Godfather. The pants flared outward well above the ankles so that Luigi’s white socks and stiff dress shoes got full display; a dark blue, satiny stripe ran around the border of the lapels and collar; the shirt was a garden of ruffles, like Santa’s chest hair; and the tie, too skinny and too short, seemed literally to point to the fact that the suit had been fitted when Luigi was a much, much younger man. Like the hare trailing the tortoise, jacket and pants were running to catch up with his paunch, both just a little too late.
Since my two older brothers were ushers—and I had been relegated to handing out programs—we arrived at the church an absurdly long time before the ceremony. I asked my mom if the extra time in church counted for Sunday and in reply got a glare and, “Watch it, young man.” None of the guests had arrived yet, except Luigi, who had ridden with my grandparents. My station in the entryway meant I was continuously cuffed by the muggy August air, making my collar and necktie that much more suffocating.
One of the reasons everyone was there so early, I was told, was to take pictures. As I slouched next to the door, waiting for guests needing programs, one of the bridesmaids came fluttering up the stairs from the basement and tisked the groom and groomsmen out of the church and into the sacristy. The rest of the bridal party soon followed, like a gaggle of geese, honking little gasps of emotion, fabric rustling, gauzy white trains spilling in every direction, with a mousy little photographer darting in and out between bridesmaids snapping pictures like a paparazzo. Alexis paused in front of me and scrunched up her face as she fanned herself with both hands, which I thought might break off at the wrists without having caused the least circulation of air. I almost handed her my stack of programs. And then I felt the back of the photographer’s hand, pushing me out of the way, backing me out of the shot without even a downward glance in my direction. Alexis unscrunched her eyes, stopped fanning for a moment to adjust the angle of the shot, and then resumed the pose.
I wriggled away from the photographer and thought I’d use the photo session as an excuse to plop down under an air conditioning vent for a while, when who should come bounding down the aisle, like the Penguin’s benign greatuncle bursting from a comic book, but Luigi. He stood before Alexis, hands erupting like fireworks, ejaculating Italian phrases with gusto, from which I could pick out only “mamma mia!” and “che bella!”
“YOU CANNOT BE IN THE PICTURE. YOU CANNOT WEAR THAT AND BE IN MY WEDDING PHOTOS.” Alexis stopped fanning, her sugary squint dissolving instantly, and she spoke with the intensity of a priest performing an exorcism. I froze in place and stood rigidly at attention. “He cannot be in my wedding photos,” she said to the photographer.
Despite his complete ignorance of the English language and apparent inability to register social cues, not even Luigi could mistake the ice beam fixed upon him like one of Mr. Freeze’s weapons. My mother whispered something in my older brother’s ear and shoved him at Luigi, like a frustrated swimming instructor pushing a cowardly pupil into the pool, and he grasped Luigi’s arm like a floatation device and steered him back toward the pews. I imagined all four tires simultaneously deflating and the dago RV sinking slowly to the pavement.
The photographer started giving orders again, and the gaggle of dresses followed him down the aisle for pictures around the altar. For a moment I was alone. I peered into the church at the bald head poking up from the back pews. I felt huffy—that’s how my mom would describe it, as in, “Don’t start getting huffy with me, young man”—and with a snort, when I was sure no one was close enough to hear, I tossed my stack of programs onto a table in the church entryway, displacing flyers, holy cards, and a wicker basket full of plastic rosaries. I thought I’d find a bathroom and lock myself inside for as long as I could before someone noticed my absence or, more likely, had to go. But then I glanced, next to the table onto which I’d launched the wedding programs, smiling up at me from one of the scattered holy cards, the face, sweet and wrinkled as a cinnamon roll, of Mother Teresa.
I slunk down the side aisle, hoping my mom was too distracted to notice me abandoning my post. Luigi looked up at me without emotion, just a dull oldness in his eyes, and I thrust the card at him, awkwardly so that it hit his shoulder and bent a little. He glanced down at it and then up again, and I was rewarded with a passionate string of whispered Italian and Luigi’s personal imitation of the nun’s beatific smile. I motioned for him to scoot over, trying to put my whole torso into the gesture like a good Italian, and sat down. To hell with Alexis and her wedding. Let my overachieving brother hand out the programs.
I like to think I gave Luigi his gusto back, though the wine at the reception probably helped more. His performance on the dance floor was everything one might have expected or hoped for. It turned out he was dressed perfectly for it. He decided to stay at my grandparents’ for another week, ostensibly to wait for the replacement part for his dago RV.
My grandmother called after we returned home and told my dad she was worried he’d never leave, but eventually he was off to the next stop on his circumnavigation of the globe.
Graceland, as it turned out.

Snowfall in Lent

Dappled Things

Andrew Frisardi

Mimosa came unsought
in sunbursts on my hill.
Then snow hid, dot by dot,
my straightedge windowsill,

which, like a guillotine,
had severed out from in.
Now that the cut is clean,
Contrition, pull the pin.

Out and Back in Rome

Dappled Things

Andrew Frisardi

Periphery

A sphere compressed with refuse rolls through the city.
The urbs* is like a tumbleweed blowing
across this ghost town in the commonwealth
of garbage. I have no idea where I am going
when I get lost in Rome’s periphery.
Whatever’s left of me I keep by stealth.

Return

The pastel pink and peach palazzi*
have cornices that slash the sky.
A dreadlocked woman with a pack
of mutts under the Ponte Marconi
reins her hellhounds in on leashes.
They snap at me like something meaty,
growling, Let’s rip him, shred by shred!
When the woman hollers, Scemi! Zitti!*
her dreadlocks snake around her head.

Transit

My arms are swaying while I stand,
bending my head as the bus ride
jolts my body side to side.

We passengers are urban trees.
Resolutely reaching, our hands
are sprouting from deciduous sleeves.

It’s Bloody Spring

If Rome is fun, in sun it’s even more so,
and I just bought some wingtips on the Corso*
to glide along where couples smooch and play,
and hear a woman with her lover say
his yellow tie is molto elegante.*
The sapphire sky, like angel’s breath in Dante,
absolves us from resolve, while mannequins
in decked vetrine* envy us our skins.
A migrant peddler pesters me to barter,
his raw hand proffering some cheesy loot he
gets his meals with. O Saint Agnes, martyr,
many are the ways of dying into beauty.

urbs = city/Rome
palazzi = apartment buildings
Scemi! Zitti! = Idiots! Shut up!
Corso = Via del Corso, a main street in central Rome
molto elegante = very elegant
vetrine = shop display windows

On the Cutting Down of a Pine Tree

Dappled Things

Andrew Frisardi

The pine tree has been chopped outside the window
that frames the backdrop to my armchair life.
A Christmas tree a neighbor planted years
ago,it grew—gangly, inelegant—above
the balcony and roof, its upper branches
lacking an angel, but favored by the doves
in pairs that used to pass their summers there

Once a gathering place for gifts and carols,
in its dotage the tree became a gnarly realist,
impassive to traffic, rigid and imbalanced
as a man who can’t recall when he last danced.

The town decided all such trees are perils
to plain priorities of cars and wires.
But local finches loved its shade and seed,
and its scaly bark and scrawny branches oddly
fit in, like a grubby, kindly corner store.
I’m looking toward what’s missing now, aware
my gaze has gone off giddy in the air,
leaving me here to make friends with my words.

The whistling in my head is memory’s birds.

Commute

Dappled Things

Andrew Frisardi

II.
I could just step off the platform
to catch the train
before I miss it
again. That warm
passage is trust.

V.
This could take a while,
just a matter of time.
We might wait suspended
until we feel the first slippage of wind
unsettling the tomb’s lid.

Unveiling by Suzanne Wolfe

Dappled Things

Unveiling by Suzanne Wolfe
Review by Katy Carl

Paraclete Press, 2018
$16.99; 182 pp.

Reader, I hope you’ll allow the following intrusion of personal essay into what is meant to be a book review. It may be the quickest way to explain how heartily I wish now that I had known years ago about Suzanne Wolfe’s recently re-released novel Unveiling:

For many years, some words from Forster’s A Room with a View —“One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness, but for life”—kept their place on a quote board plastered up with scotch tape over my workspace. As an undergraduate in St. Louis, and then as an entry-level editor in Washington, DC, I was working on a novel whose main action took place in Italy and whose aesthetic banner was the pursuit, not of niceness, but of life. The action of that work has since become the background narrative of a second, I hope more mature, attempt at engaging similar themes. But at the time, I was devouring every piece of literary prose I could find written on or set in Italy; I was hoping that without the resources to travel there again, following a brief tour in 2001, I could still bring to life on the page the aesthetic and emotional valences of a transformational encounter with culture and art.

Unveiling heralds similar ambitions in a different key. It originally came out in 2004, around the same time as I was working through my first draft. Wolfe’s first novel, Unveiling won an Award of Merit for Fiction from Christianity Today in 2005 and was re-released last year by Paraclete Press. Unveiling covers a transformational encounter with art that takes place in, and is catalyzed in part by the cultural richness of, the city of Rome. In the process, the novel profoundly honors a value that Forster identified as central to effective fictions and to honest lives: It records and acknowledges a full range of phenomena, pain and trauma as well as beauty and transcendence, without sentimentality (“niceness”) but instead with careful fidelity to lived experience.

This fidelity represents, with neither endorsement nor flinching, the wounds of human nature. Without giving spoilers, it may be helpful for some readers to know that the trauma from which protagonist Rachel is healing involves a rape and subsequent forced abortion, surrounded by abusive family dynamics in which those who should have protected Rachel betray her instead. In the conversation that is the feature of this issue, Wolfe identifies the late conversation between Rachel and her mother in the “central panel” section of the novel, containing certain revelations about Rachel’s trauma, as having been the most difficult scene in the novel to write. It is a testament to Wolfe’s skill that the difficulty does not show on the surface of the prose. (As Wallace Stegner puts it in Crossing to Safety, “hard writing makes easy reading.”) Easy, but not facile: the scene lands with an emotional force in sharp and effective contrast to Wolfe’s gentle, reverent handling of it.

As a whole, the narrative is profoundly and unapologetically on the side of healing and wholeness, in contrast to trends in contemporary fiction and culture that celebrate “messiness” and brokenness for their own sakes. The scenes that encompass Rachel’s growth in freedom from her past and progress toward the light are gorgeously concrete, blessedly free of unnecessary abstraction, and wholly earned.

It might be appropriate to think of Unveiling as in some ways a conversion story, although the suggestion of faith elements in this conversion toward the end of the novel is just that, a suggestion. It is especially appropriate in this sense: that no one issue in Rachel’s life—neither her sexuality, nor her professional work, nor her emotions, nor her approach to worship—is treated as a complete and unproblematic metonym for Rachel’s transformation. Even the central metaphor identified by the title, the “unveiling” of an artwork’s history as allegory for the unveiling of personal history that allows for healing—retains its centrality, yet doesn’t overwhelm the thread of narrative.

In the midst of all this, Rachel appears as a richly drawn and complex character, for whom the rising tide of grace in her life lifts all the smaller boats. In popular terms, her transformation doesn’t make her someone different than she was before: instead, it makes her more herself. Conversion is defined not even so much by the content of character, certainly not by the layers left upon its surface by time, but by the direction in which the person faces. Rachel’s healing frees her to face in what direction she chooses, and her choice is subtle but unmistakable: Rachel’s final decisions in the novel, marked by total professional and personal integrity, fly in the face of moral compromise, an unapologetic victory for goodness without a trace of self-righteousness.