The Prodigal
Fifty-one
VALENTINE’S DAY WAS COMING. I was informed by my family that I would take a four-day weekend and would not be painting that Saturday. They had a schedule of who would be paired with whom on each of the four days. I was to go to the studio on Thursday after I’d finished at the chapel. Melody and Lissa would be together and Kate and Wendy would be together.
“So, Friday you will be with Melody, Saturday with Lissa, Sunday with Kate, and Monday with Wendy,” Melody announced.
“Um… but… um, Mel, I think there’s a problem with that.” I got blank stares from everyone. “Friday is Valentine’s Day. Shouldn’t you be with your wife and I with… um… my fiancée.”
“Don’t be silly, Tony,” Kate said. “We’ll have a lovely day on Sunday. I have it all planned out.”
“We need a new definition,” Lissa said. “Wait right there, Tony.” She hustled Melody, Kate, and Wendy into the bedroom while I sat in the living room trying to figure out what was going on.
“Right,” Kate said when they returned. “We decided that the holiday called Valentine’s Day will no longer be celebrated in this household. This has been decided by unanimous vote of the partnership.”
“I didn’t get a vote!”
“Sure you did. The four of us agreed as your proxy,” Kate laughed.
“The holiday formerly known as Valentine’s Day will hereby be known as Virgins’ Day,” Melody proclaimed. “It will now and hereafter be the day that celebrates two virgins coming together in mutual love and admiration and will be celebrated in an appropriate consummation by said former virgins on this day forever more.”
“Amen,” Lissa and Wendy joined in. Shit! I’d gotten so wrapped up in thinking of Valentine’s Day that I’d forgotten Melody’s and my anniversary again. Well if it was going to be marked on our calendar as Virgins’ Day from now on, I should be able to remember it.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this, Kitten?” I asked.
“My darling husband-to-be, we are not just marrying each other. This gives us each a chance to be with you in the order in which we allowed Tony’s staff of life to enter our hall of joy,” Kate laughed.
“You have been hanging around Father Andrew way too much.”
After I’d talked to Ellis, I didn’t bother talking to Andy about the new piece I was working on. I had models in for various poses. I had all the women I knew and could get to the studio model for it. I even dug out old sketches I’d done of women who were no longer in town. It had only one male figure. Coach Frederickson agreed to model for me. It was a harem scene. Nothing identified the time period. Everyone was nude. And there was no convenient drape across his genitals or anyone else’s. It would have finer detail than my other frescoes—something that would be lost on people viewing from twelve or so feet away, but it would make a lovely print.
The male half reclined on a daybed, flaccid penis hanging between his legs. Kneeling at his side was a slave girl, not touching, but reaching. Two others whispered in his ears. A redhead watched hungrily while two tall amazons, both dark-skinned hovered nearby. A blonde and brunette were captivated by each other. Two Asians sat on cushions to the side, entertained by a plump woman holding her own leash. A woman sat with a lute and sang while a second buxom woman accompanied her. Another woman touched the wrist of a tall, willowy girl accompanied by a short brunette. It was so late when I finished working that I fell asleep in the studio and slept through till morning.
That would make it two nights I would sleep away from home as I was banned from the house Thursday. Adolfo and Morgan prepared a panel for me early in the morning. By eight o’clock, the cartoon was in and I set to work. Adolfo had class, but Morgan stayed to watch the drawing take shape. She mixed paints and used a step ladder next to my painting platform to fetch things for me.
“I wish I was in this piece,” she breathed as I finished the cartoon. “Can you put me in?” I laughed. Morgan who always wore the baggiest of clothes—I could just imagine her posing for a nude.
“Sure,” I said. “I need a serving girl just to the master’s left. Undress and we’ll add you in.” I figured that she’d make some smart remark and we’d drop the subject. I didn’t hear anything and when I glanced down at her, I was just in time to see her panties hit the floor. Morgan was naked in the chapel. And oh, my god! What she’d been hiding.
“How would you like me to pose?”
I lowered myself to the floor and grabbed a sketch book.
“I need you up a little with a tray and glasses. What do we have?” We scrambled around. Morgan grabbed a mortarboard—not the kind you wear at graduation, but the kind we carried plaster around on. All I had were a couple of coffee cups next to my thermos. “Up there,” I said, pointing to the chancel area. It was elevated three steps from the sanctuary floor. “No. Not right hand. Can you hold it in your left? You are serving the reclining master. The tray has to be held out, not up. Can you lean forward just a little? Good. Hold it right there.”
Without her baggy clothes or her glasses, and with her hair down, Morgan was gorgeous. She’s five or six inches shorter than Lissa, but she’d give her a run for being perfectly proportioned. I realized she was a missing element in my ethnic mix. Morgan Dennis was Tulalip Indian. Her breasts were not huge, but were full and round. A full tuft grew between her legs. Her waist-length hair was blue-black, her eyes so dark brown they looked black, as well.
“Braids, Morgan. Can we do braids?” Maybe it was a cliché, but… well, her hair was hiding a couple of her best features.
“I have a couple of ties in my bag. Can you help?” She had joined fully into the role of a model and moved as comfortably around the room naked as she had fully clothed. She produced a comb and hair ties and together we proceeded to braid her hair. When it was finished, we moved back to the chancel. This was going to take some time away from painting, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. As she posed, I reached to position her leg and jerked my hand back.
“Uh… could you… uh…”
“You can touch me to move me into position, Tony. It’s not permission for anything else, but you may position me,” she said. You simply never touch a model without permission. Never. I pushed her right leg forward, placed my hand on her shoulder and turned her. God! It was beautiful! She was beautiful. I started sketching.
I was nearly finished when I heard footsteps coming up the nave. I turned to see an elderly priest coming toward me. He looked up at me and saw Morgan posing next to the altar. His mouth started working but no sound came out. He turned around and scurried back out of the sanctuary as fast as he could.
“You may be the first naked woman he’s ever seen,” I laughed.
“Well, he’s the second man who’s ever seen me naked,” Morgan said flatly. I looked up at her.
“Shit.”
“Just draw.”
I drew. It only took about five more minutes before I was finished.
“Thank you, Morgan. This is beautiful. You are beautiful. I love it.”
“May I dress now?”
“Yes. And… just thank you. For everything.”
I went to my lift and using my new sketch as a reference, painted the outline of the new figure onto the wet plaster.
“I’m free for the day, Tony. How can I help?”
“I need a good palette of wide-ranging flesh-tones, Morgan. Everything from Asian to Black to Caucasian.”
“Including Native American,” she said. “The red woman lives.”
A very nervous Andy showed up about four in the afternoon to look at what I was working on. Surprisingly, no one else had been in the chapel all day. There was usually a stream of workers and artists in and out, and several priests who always seemed to have something to do.
“Oh my,” he said.
“Is something wrong, Andy?” I asked from my perch.
“No, no. How long before you are finished with this one?”
“Another couple of hours. It’s been a quiet day with Morgan helping me. We’re getting a lot done.”
“We never talked about having models in the sanctuary, Tony. It was a bit of a shock to Father Bartholomew. Most of us wouldn’t have minded, but he’s a bit old and a traditionalist.”
“Sorry we shocked him,” I said. What’s the big deal? It isn’t even a church until it’s dedicated. Andy told me that in one of our sessions.
“Nothing to worry about. For you. We put a sign on the door. I’ll be back in a little while. Please don’t leave without telling me the story.”
“No problem.”
It was six o’clock when I came down off the lift and Morgan and I started cleaning brushes and salvaging what paint we could. I was pleased with myself and the new piece.
We cleaned up and were ready to leave when I heard voices in the vestibule and Andy came in through the main doors. Two men in a plain black business suits and clerical collars accompanied him.
“Tell us the story,” Andy said, as he always asked.
“This looks like a man with a harem. What possible parable could this relate to?” asked the smaller, rather grouchy priest.
“Please, Vicar. Your Excellency, let us let Tony tell the story and then ask the questions.”
“Very well, Father Andrew. Let’s hear what the artist has to say.”
Your Excellency? When did America get a monarch? The dude was dressed only slightly different than what I normally saw Andy in. Wait. Vicar? Kate’s grouchy priest Victor? That would… Oh, hell. Tell the story.
“This guy has every reason to be happy. He has money, servants, wine, women, and song. He has a good job and is a respected member of the community. There’s always someone there for him. There is no reason for him to be unhappy. But he is. Look at his eyes. He isn’t focused on what he has. He’s looking off somewhere else.”
“I can tell from here he has exposed genitalia,” the Vicar groused.
“Cut or uncut?” I asked. “This is the ‘after’ part. He was a successful man with a good job and a lovely family. Lots of friends and money in the bank. But it only took a couple of canceled orders and a blip in the stock market to get him laid-off. His company had stripped out his retirement package and the bank had written a bad loan on his home. He sold his Beemer to try to keep his daughter in private school, but then real tragedy struck. He lost his wife and daughter. He was distraught, broke, and homeless. In mere months he was standing on a street corner with a sign that said ‘Anything helps.’ He was filled with despair, loss, anger, and bitterness.”
“Looks like everything turned out for him,” the archbishop said.
“Oh yeah. Like his bankruptcy, his salvation was no fault of his own. A friend gave him job that launched a new career. Friends gathered around him, filling in the empty spaces in his life. He fell in love, built a home, bought a car. He rose to the top. That’s the man you see. The man with everything—and a haunted, unhappy look on his face.”
“It sounds like Job. Only Job wasn’t unhappy. God replaced all he had lost,” the Vicar said.
“You’ve never lost a child or a lover, have you? Do you think that because Job got a new wife and more beautiful daughters, and more camels, and stronger sons, that he didn’t continue to mourn for those he lost? No one can just replace the love of his life. No other woman can have the hair he’s reaching to touch. No matter how beautiful, or brilliant, no other is the daughter he lost. No one can heal the scars.”
“The parable, Tony?” Andy asked, trying to quell the growing fire.
“That’s your department, isn’t it?” I snapped. “How about if a man has ninety-nine sheep in the fold, he’ll still go out and risk everything to find the one that is lost?”
“The Lord Jesus Christ was not speaking of a man with a harem. This is demeaning to women. It has exposed genitalia. Your Excellency?”
“I’d have to agree,” the other priest said. “I can’t let this remain and consecrate the space as a church.”
“Maybe you’d like to paint it yourself,” I growled. I was getting pissed off. I knew who I was talking to and didn’t care if he was the Archbishop of fucking Canterbury.
“Maybe Father Michel should have followed the Holy See’s directive to hire a Catholic painter for the new chapel,” the Vicar yelled back.
“Maybe the Holy Father and the Archbishop of Seattle and his sour vicar should be more concerned about protecting children from pedophile priests than trying to set nuns in their place and cancel the rights of gays to marry.” The vicar jumped back as if I’d hit him.
“And who are you to criticize the church?” the archbishop joined.
“I’m an atheist, thank God! Who are you to criticize art?” The vicar was apoplectic. I didn’t care. There were enough hypocrites in the world I didn’t have to deal with one more.
“I’m the…” The Archbishop paused. In a second, he was laughing. “An atheist who thanks God. How the hell am I supposed to respond to that?” he asked the vicar. I had to laugh. Neither Andy nor the vicar could get words out and Morgan had retreated all the way to the other side of the chapel. “Are we truly going to start a war over a painting?” the archbishop asked, turning back to me.
“No, Your Excellency. Like all wars, we’ll start it over religion.”
“Harsh. Not entirely untrue, but harsh. Walk with me, Anthony.”
“No one calls me Anthony, Your Excellency.”
“And no one calls me James. This way we can leave the artist and the archbishop with the monk and the vicar and talk about politics.”
“I was under the impression you didn’t want to start a war.”
“I want you to tell me the real story. I did not expect such a passionate response. What loss did you suffer that left you unable to enjoy the company of all those women? Who are they?” We walked out the doors of the chapel and took the path around the impressive building. There was still scaffolding around the bell towers.
“It is personal,” I said flatly. “Suffice it to say that I am surrounded by people I love but the wound of what was lost will never heal.” I proceeded to tell him, instead, the story of the Christmas tree.
We’d walked as far as the wall at the athletic pavilion and the archbishop paused to look at it before we headed back toward the chapel.
“That wall is why I overrode the Vicar General’s objections to having you paint the chapel,” James said. “There is power in what you paint. Maybe too much power.”
“Certainly, you can’t be threatened by a single panel out of forty that I’m painting. Especially one that when viewed from the ground will be so far away from people, they can’t possibly see the detail, even of the exposed genitalia. No one even mentions Adam’s junk hanging out on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, nor even notices that God has his arm around a naked girl.”
“Let’s talk politics, Anthony. You’ve shown me that I can’t out-passion you. The Vicar General is not individually powerful, but has powerful friends in places higher than mine. These friends have determined that a victory in Seattle, no matter how small, is needed to facilitate certain advancements. Seattle is a battleground and the Church will fail to win the war. Homosexuality is anathema to our doctrine, yet in Washington it is legal for people of the same sex to marry. The American Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a kind of nuns’ union, is clamoring for the ordination of women as priests and liberalizing their ancient vows. The Jesuits are an independent lot that have often stretched the bounds of Catholicism to the edge of heresy—sometimes for the better. You know Father Andrew as your contact, but as admonitor to the Rector, Father Michel, his responsibility, among others, is to rein in the Rector when he approaches heresy. In Seattle, the Society has shown its social conscience and academic excellence, but has defied the vicar’s instructions to hire a particular painter distantly related to one of his patrons. Into this, the archbishop is sent to win a battle. Which do you think he should pick? He’ll have to fight them all, but he needs to win one.”
“The censure of my art is the only battle I have to fight.”
“The Church is not a democracy. The archbishop has the authority to decide what can be in that room.”
“You may have my resignation. I don’t need a degree to be an artist. I’ll leave the panels as they are and you can do with them as you wish.”
“Which would force me to refuse to dedicate the chapel until every piece of art is removed—including the crucifix and the Stations of the Cross. Now that would be a loss.”
“You are telling me that if I don’t agree to take down my painting, you will have Katarina’s mosaics and Jerome’s crucifix removed? They are exquisite. There is nothing like them in any church!”
“Which would be reason enough to have them removed. The archbishop doesn’t need the excuse of your painting.”
“I have to think this through.”
“Of course. I will be meeting with the Rector and his admonitor this weekend and I am sure they will call in the Father Provincial—Dr. Haywood as well. That piece will be removed and the archbishop will have his victory. It will be up to you to determine the collateral damage. That is politics, not religion.”
“And if I agree to remove that one piece, you will not harm or object to Kate… Katarina’s mosaics or Jerome’s crucifix?”
“I promise I will not even look at any other panels as long as Father Andrew verifies there are no genitalia displayed.”
“In writing?”
“No paper trail. I am a man of my word. Trust me.” Right.
“Do you know the image that ‘trust me’ brings up when talking to a politician?”
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