Free Vatican Waltz by Roland Merullo

you’ll be ready.”
    ON THE SUBWAY RIDE BACK to Revere that day I tried and failed miserably to picture myself anywhere near Vatican City, in any cardinal’s assistant’s office, for any reason. Even the idea of going to see the archbishop had made me start to fret from the minute I’d heard his name spoken. I wondered if this would end up being a kind of ongoing torment, a penance for the sin of my presumptuousness, my spiritual egotism: I’d be sent from one office to the next for a series of humiliations.
    It was late by then, but instead of going directly back to Tapley Avenue, I went by St. Anthony’s, still the home of my heart. Matilda let me in, and I sat in a pew about halfway up on the left side, where I usually sat, and I looked up at the mural of Jesus floating there among the people who loved him, and I thought that the quality I’d neglected to attribute to him was courage. Kindness, compassion, assertiveness, wisdom, godliness, yes, always, but, on the human level, the pure bravery of doing what he did was something I hadn’t really given enough thought to before. It seemed to me that the most important quality we could have on Earth besides kindness to others was courage. The tremendous courage required of someone like Mary, pregnant, unmarried, too young, who said, when she discovered she would bear a holy child, “Let it be done to me according to Thy will.”
    I vowed then that I would make Mary my patron, my supporter. I would let her move me where I needed to be moved. If that meant meeting the archbishop and having him mock me, I ought to be able to have the courage to deal with that. I would pray to her in particular from that moment on. I would ask her to give me the strength to face my humiliations and failures. And I would let God take me where He decided I should go.

CHAPTER FIVE
    In the last year of nursing school the ratio of classroom to hands-on work flips fairly drastically and we spend most of our time in “clinicals,” making the transition from theory to practice. It’s one thing to know that the liver cleans toxins from the blood and then passes it on to the kidneys for further cleansing; it’s something else entirely to care for a patient who’s dying of kidney failure. It’s interesting to read about the role of the placenta in a pregnancy, but that’s like a small, hummed tune next to the painful, messy, glorious symphony of an actual birth.
    My classmates and I were rotated through various parts of the hospital—Med-Surg, Ob-Gyn, Pediatrics, Psych, and so on, partly to give us a broad base of experience, and partly so we could make an educated decision about where we eventually wanted to specialize.
    It was during those last months of training that I discovered I could affect people’s health by touching them. Not every patient, not every time, but it began to happen fairly often, and I began to be able to tell when it was happening. Sometimes it wasn’t a matter of actually healing or curing them as much as lessening their discomfort, and it’s possible some of that came from the simple power of one human body touching another.
    But in moments of complete honesty I knew it was more than that. I also knew it had been going on long before nursing school. When I’d touched my grandmother in her last weeks, when I’d put my hand on Father Alberto after his accident, there had been the feeling of something passing from me to them, a spark, a line of love with a silent force to it. This was difficult for me. On the one hand, I knew it was common for people, when they’re very ill, to respond to the voice or touch or presence of a person they love. Any nurse has stories of patients awakening from a coma long enough to say good-bye to a spouse or child. On the other hand, especially as I spent more and more time in the hospital, I saw—beyond any denying—that I could often change a patient’s condition just by laying a hand on him or her.
    I tried to hide it,