But Barb didn’t want to hear any more about saints. “The Vomero, this was the doctor’s idea? It was him who set it up?”
“Sure it was him.” The chaplain circled the altar, adjusting the cloth cover. “Who else could’ve arranged something so comfy?”
“But there’s the UN relief—”
“Oh, the UN, Lord no. That housing stipend of theirs, huh. Most of the staff live two to a room.”
“Niente,” the doctor said, pocketing his light.
“Housing stipend?” Barbara asked.
Behind the altar, the riser, Interstate squatted to unlock a trunk full of Bibles. “It’s peanuts I know, but then, after all.” His long face regained its smile. “None of us came to Naples for the money.”
His arms full of the floppy black books, he strode back past Barbara. He lay one on every fourth or fifth chair. “This isn’t about having a nice apartment.”
As he angled between the rows of chairs, in limp khakis, his body language seemed to call the Center’s flock to worship. Refugees began to duck in under the far tent flap. They came in respectfully, buttoning their thin shirts or pulling off their spangled caps. A couple stopped to brush daubs of the reeking pesticide out of their Afros. Barbara hadn’t expected this, and there in Maddalena’s spotlight she couldn’t do anything about the sham of her good dress and morning makeup, settled and bourgeois. A Vomero mother. Under the surface of course she remained another business altogether, a feral clawing for scraps. She wondered how much she should tell the chaplain about his Saint of Energy.
“Signora Lulucita?”
This was DiPio, fingering his neckwear. “Signora, perhaps the sympathy of a mother. Perhaps if you held her hand for the, the messa.”
It came to Barbara that he was speaking about the crippled gypsy.
“Well,” the chaplain put in, “it’s not a Mass, strictly speaking.”
“But for the service,” DiPio said. “Would you come hold the girl’s hand?”
Interstate (was his accent from Missouri?) had no objection. He handed a Bible to a refugee woman a good three times his size, an African Fat Venus, tucked sausage-tight into a t-shirt that bore the words Lido Parthenope. She had a chest scar — though nothing ritual, no mark of initiation. The wound on this obese clandestina had left a ridge of tissue clearly visible under the fabric, a line that cut down one breast in a jug-handle curve. It crossed and dented the nipple.
“Signora,” the doctor said. “You may help.”
Per carita, she hadn’t come simply to pray. Certainly the need in this crowd had touched her, chilled her; that dented nipple reappeared each time she blinked. But Barb doubted that she could deliver much at today’s service. The tent was filling, a sensation like children clustering under a beach umbrella, and she could feel already how distant the German’s prayers would seem. She’d have to squeeze into a packed row of folding chairs, and there wouldn’t be room for the spirit-muscle. There’d be nothing like that, the flex out of nowhere, despite the tremor Barbara had felt when she first stepped into this artificial twilight. There wasn’t even a crucifix.
But the doctor was only asking for, what, half an hour? DiPio wasn’t the one suggesting she spend the rest of her life in a lie. Besides, who could say what else Barbara might discover during the service? Interstate might poke another glowing peephole in Jay’s high moral screen.
The mother sidled past a few of the seated worshippers, holding her breath against the worst of the pesticide. She settled into the chair the doctor had pulled up beside the gypsy. But when Barbara took the girl’s hand, the invalid responded with a squeeze. Her fingers found a good fit. Barb looked up startled, and the gypsy’s lashes fluttered.
DiPio didn’t miss a moment of it. “Yes,” he said. “Sympathy.”
Whatever that meant. The man had his crucifix in his goatee, picking, scratching, and Barb shifted her attention back to the chaplain. Pacing the riser, Interstate looked eager to start. The voices behind Barbara’s back sounded the same, and judging from the air the place was nearly full. For something like the fifth time the German adjusted the purple throw across his knee-high altar, then returned to the box that held the Bibles. He fished up a scarf, striking, Prussian blue.
She had to ask. “So what happens now?”
The chaplain kissed the silk and hung it around his neck, evening its ends around his dangling T, and explained that he worked freeform. “As far as I’m concerned, the terremotati can do anything this side of animal sacrifice.”
“What? What are you saying? Is this a church service or not?”
“Mrs. Lulucita. In here, it’s new heaven, new earth. If someone’s in the camp, that means they’ve seen their world destroyed twice over.”
“But, seems to me, that’s why they need something reliable. If you show them one God one day and another the next, you’ll only confuse them.”
Somebody laughed, somebody American. American, with an accent more Southern than the minister’s. Silky Kahlberg, sure, and Barb couldn’t suppress a scowl. She hadn’t been joking. She wondered whether, just by coming to the Center, she’d asked for everything and the kitchen sink.
The NATO liaison had already worked his way to the front of the tent. He’d made it through the congregation even though he was walking backwards, cupping to his stomach one end of some long stick of furniture. In his ice-cream suit, and still chuckling, he backed past Barb. Behind him, carrying the other end of the piece, came Paul. The boy acted on the officer like an anchor, stumbling, never knowing where to put his feet. As his mother watched, the eleven-year-old had to stop and hike up his carpenter’s belt. Yet Barb remained where she was, her hand in the gypsy’s. When she wasn’t watching Paul, she eyed the two reporters who trailed him.
Of course Silky had brought along the remaining media. He and the Americanino toted a great visual, a freshly constructed cross. Freshly treated pine on a simple box stand, it went up tall and bare as chaplain Interstate.
“We heard you could use one of these,” the liaison announced.
Barb looked the thing over. Insta-Icon, the cross revealed uneven stain along its upright and furred sanding at the corners. Then there was her child, his face drained, his gaze intent. He wasn’t two feet from his mother and her quake victim, yet he squinted at the two women as if trying to make out some distant temple frieze.
Kahlberg turned and squatted beside Barbara, finger-combing his hair. “A little lay ministry?”
Barb made no answer. Paul too ignored everyone other than her and the invalid. The boy hardly gave a jiggle when Interstate opened the service by clapping him on the shoulder and loudly giving thanks.
“You don’t know the good you do,” the chaplain declaimed. ‘You and this gift from God you call a family.”
“Mn,” the Lieutenant-Major whispered, “if I were you, Ma’am, I’d be careful about the way Paul’s looking at that girl.”
What? Barbara’s grip on the gypsy’s hand retightened.
“A girl like her, you’d never find her in church before the quake, know what I mean? Not unless there were a hundred Euro in it.”
Now the mother was angry plain and simple — her first entirely clear and justifiable emotion all morning.
“Fact is, anybody who comes to church in this place, he’s playing catch-up ball. These people’re nothing but lowlife.”
Another word and she would’ve clawed out the man’s eyes right there before the altar. But in the next moment Paul stepped away from the cross and the coffee table, away from the preacher. Interstate had let go of him and launched into some swaying prayer, and as the man’s arms rose the boy went down. He knelt between the girl’s useless legs. Clumsy preadolescent though he was, Paul managed this without interference from his tool belt, his movement in fact appeared seamless, and he tugged off his heavy gloves too, he flung them aside, all nothing like the hobbled mess he’d made of coming in. Also he was talking, Barbara’s middle child, though she couldn’t hear what he was saying, muttering, since to see him like this, easing himself between those young legs, mounting the helpless girl — to see Mr. Paul like this sent the mother’s emotions into whistling new cartwheels, and she herself began to speak.