The Assassini by Thomas Gifford Read Free Book Online Page B

know him any more than we knew the man who kept the skating pond neat and smooth or the fellows who came to do the lawn, mow it and rake it and prune the trees in the orchard.
    It wasn’t until our father came home from the war that we really noticed a priest as a human being, and that was a matter of comparative necessity. He brought one with him, an actual Italian who spoke English with a heavy accent. Val and I somehow got it into our heads that Father—or was he Monsignor?—Giacomo D’Ambrizzi, in his long cassock and high-topped, bulbous-toed, thick-soled black shoes, was a trophy of the war that Father had bagged in some peculiar way—akin to the dusty, moth-eaten stuffed bear standing in one corner of the tack room and the lion and rhino heads in the lodge in the Adirondacks. In some childlike way little Val, who was nearly four, and I figured that Father D’Ambrizzi belonged to us. He seemed to enjoy the relationship, too.There’s no way to count all the piggyback rides, the games of checkers and animal lotto and croquet he played with us that summer, how many hours he spent with us in the first autumn of peace, taking hayrides and learning to bob for apples along with us, carving jack-o’-lanterns and trying to get the hang of ice skating out on the pond beyond the orchard. He seemed as innocent as Val and I certainly were. If the other priests I came to know had shared his virtues, I suppose I’d be a priest now, but that kind of supposition is pretty much of a dead end these days.
    Father D’Ambrizzi liked doing things with his hands and I used to sit by the hour, entranced, watching him. He built a swing out in the orchard, hanging the ropes from the stout limb of a large apple tree. I’d never seen anything quite so wonderful—but then he surpassed himself with a tree house reached by a rope ladder. And even more impressive than that was watching him lay bricks, the way he slapped the mortar around and leveled them with such certainty. He did some work on the chapel, which had taken to crumbling in a couple of places. I was spellbound. I took to dogging his footsteps wherever he went other than when he closed the study door to do his “work.” I could tell that his work was terribly important. No one ever bothered him when he was at his work in the study.
    But when he emerged, there I’d be waiting for him. He would pick me up in his long, hairy, simian arms as if I were a doll. His hair was thick and black and curly, cropped close to his boulder of a skull like a cap. His nose was like a banana, his mouth curled like a prince in a Renaissance painting. He was a good six inches shorter than my father. He was built like Edward G. Robinson, according to my mother. I asked her what that meant and she thought for a moment and said, “Well, you know, Benjy. Like a gangster, darling.”
    Father didn’t have D’Ambrizzi’s easy grace with children. He must have felt moments of jealousy at the crushes Val and I had developed on this exotic specimen. We never thought to wonder why he’d come to stay with us: we were just content to worship him. And then, oneday, he was gone, had gone in the night as if we’d made him up, as if he’d been a dream. But he left us each a cross of bone, Val’s filigreed like lace, mine solid and masculine.
    Val still wears hers. Mine is long gone, I suppose.
    Father talked to us about D’Ambrizzi a little later in what for him was a pretty subtle tactic. He didn’t mention D’Ambrizzi’s name, but Val and I exchanged a glance because we knew. Father was explaining to us why we shouldn’t confuse priests—“men of God”—with God Himself. While the one had feet of clay, the other had no known feet at all, not so far as anyone knew. That’s what it boiled down to, though it was quite a long time in the telling. Afterward I can recall sneaking looks at the feet of the priests drinking scotch in the library with Father or marching off to say mass in the chapel for