The Road to Emmaus

For Nathan Gebert I The chair from Goodwill smelled of mildew. I sat with Sister Ann, a Franciscan. In her small office, at the Cenacle Retreat House, right off Dixie Highway in Lantana, Florida, I began my story— it was an interview, much of life is an interview. She said I did not need to pay her, but donations, yes, donations were appreciated: they could be left anonymously in a plain white envelope that she could take back to the cloister. She was dressed in a turtleneck and a denim jumper. She could have been mistaken in a grocery store for an aging housewife. My meetings with her went on for a few years. I had come to speak about Durell. I did not know how to end sentences about Durell. He had taught me—what? To live? Not to wince in the mirror? What? There were so many ways to end my sentence. He was an unlikely candidate for so many things. Outside, it was always some subtle variation of summer. I paused, then spoke urgently, not wanting to forget some fact, but much I knew I would forget or remember in a way my own, which would not exactly be correct, no, not exactly. Durell was dead, I said, and I needed to make sense of things. Sister Ann’s face was open, fragile— parts were chipped like on a recovered fresco. Above her gray head, a garish postcard of the Emmaus scene, the colors off, as if painted by numbers, with no concern for shading— the style of it had an unoriginal Catholic institutional uniformity. There it hung, askew in its golden drugstore frame. It was the scene from the end of Luke, the two disciples, one named Cleopas, the other anonymous, forever mumbling Christ’s name, and with them, the resurrected Christ masquerading as a stranger. They were on their way to that town, Emmaus, seven miles out from Jerusalem, gossiping about the impress of Christ’s vanishing— they argued about whether to believe what they had seen; they were restless, back and forth the debate went— when there is estrangement there is little peace. ii