Paper Lantern by Stuart Dybek

Author:Stuart Dybek
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780374710545
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Caller

Let us love, since our heart is made for nothing else.

—Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul

The phone is ringing in the crummy downstairs flat where Rafael lives, ringing and ringing, but Rafael isn’t home. It rang this morning at five and on and off all day through the hot afternoon. Now it’s after midnight, still sweltering as if the satin nickel moon is throwing heat, and this time the ringing doesn’t sound as if it’s going to stop. Someone really wants to talk to Rafael, someone who obviously hasn’t heard he’s disappeared.

That’s the word on the street: Rafael’s gone—as thoroughly as people disappeared in Argentina, removed as efficiently as if he’s been ethnically cleansed, or maybe one of the death squads from Central America went out of their way one night to stop by the southwest side of Chicago and pay Rafael a visit.

He’s joined the disappeared, but in the barrio incongruously called Pilsen, a hood famed for its graffiti art, there won’t be mothers with the mournful Madonna look, bringing down the government by holding blowups of Rafael’s picture—the self-portrait with respirator and nighthawk wings—pasted to placards that read MISSING. At St. Paul’s on Hoyne Avenue, or St. Procopius on Alport, or St. Ann’s on Leavitt, where Rafael was baptized, there won’t be radical padres risking martyrdom by protesting from their pulpits that Rafael must not be forgotten.

A stooped, veiled figure lights a candle for a soul. It’s Sister Two Teresas, who chose her name in honor of both the Little Flower of Lisieux and Saint Teresa of Ávila. Her life has been lived by the words of Saint Teresa of Ávila: Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul. She once oversaw the altar boys when St. Ann’s still had a grade school and now, in her dotage, arranges the altar flowers. She can’t remember yesterday, and yet recalls how twenty-three years ago Lance Corporal Milo Porter, the most devout boy she’d ever coached, stood in his dress blues as if they were a surplice, cradling the son he’d named after an angel, while Father Stanislaus dribbled the water of eternal life over the wailing infant’s head. And she remembers how two years later when Lance Corporal Porter, missing in action, couldn’t attend his own requiem mass, she wept and prayed: Oh, how everything that is suffered with love is healed again.

In the years after the requiem, first Rafael’s mother deserted—paid off by the alderman whose bastard she was carrying, or so the rumor went—then one by one the extended family scattered into oblivion, until only Rafael was left in the care of Tia Marijane, his “beatnik aunt,” an exotic dancer half blinded by lasers, who spent her days painting watercolors of the cosmos and her nights praying the rosary to the opera station. Rafael liked to say he was raised by the spray-painted streets of Pilsen in the way that kids in fairy tales are raised by wolves.

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