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Joseph Caldwell: Lazarus Rising

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Joseph Caldwell Lazarus Rising

Lazarus Rising: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The Rome Prize–winning author of In the Shadow of the Bridge “evokes a bygone era and an earlier pandemic…. An affecting turn in [his] long career” (Publishers Weekly). This dark, propulsive novel, the crowning masterwork by ninety-two-year-old Joseph Caldwell, takes place during 1992, when AIDS was still an incurable scourge and death casualties were everyday events. One cold winter night, when the artist Dempsey Coates is on her way home to her loft, she encounters a blaze, several alarms ringing and water jetting every which way from fire hydrants. She ends up offering several firemen a place to get warm. One of them is Johnny Donegan, a passionate lad who falls madly in love with her and is determined, through prayer and sheer perseverance, to make a life with Dempsey unimpeded by the specter of her illness. But when the couple is finally blessed with an unexpected stroke of good luck, this one twist of fate that promises an enduring future will end up coming between them in a very tragic and unforeseen way.

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Johnny was close to the sanctuary. If he was going to make his move to the other side of the aisle, it had to be now. He took another look at the priest whose ministrations he was about to refuse. The man looked like Friar Tuck in an old Robin Hood movie he’d seen on TV. His huge belly would be the envy of any Santa Claus, a promise of merriment and joviality. A second chin and a third seemed suspended from his ears, a beard not of whiskers but of flesh. His eyes bulged, expectant of wonder and delight.

The man in front of Johnny stepped forward. The priest’s husky voice said the sacred words, “The Body of Christ.” “Amen,” the man answered. He accepted the bread and moved away. Johnny had not slipped across the aisle. After a quick glance at the cardinal, at the bouncer, he took his final step up to Friar Tuck. The priest held out the host, the thin white wafer, the bread descended from the unleavened loaves of the Passover meal. “The Body of Christ,” he said. Johnny stood there. He gulped hard, then said, “Because I have to wear a condom when I’m with the woman I love, I can’t marry her in the Church. If I didn’t wear the condom, I’d get sick and die. She has AIDS. With the condom I can’t consummate my marriage in the eyes of the Church and therefore I’m refused permission to marry.”

The priest stared at him, the bulging eyes unmoving, the host still held out toward Johnny. “The Body of Christ.” The priest repeated the words. Johnny took it in his hand. “Amen,” he whispered. He put the bread into his mouth. From the corner of his eye he saw the bouncer stirring.

In his pew Johnny was at a complete loss as to what he should do. He had not expected to go to Communion, to actually accept the host. His life with Dempsey had placed him outside the community of the called and the chosen. Yet here he was, having just participated in the most sacred act available to anyone on this earth. He made a leftward turn of his head as if he might find knowledge and counsel in the stones of the north transept.

The cardinal was seated on the sedelia. No fewer than four priests, Friar Tuck among them, were putting away the Communion vessels, the chalices, the ciboria. Soon the time for private prayer would be over. Now His Eminence was raising his head. He would rise and the closing rites begin. Johnny had yet to say his Communion prayer. He must say it and he must say it now.

“Cure her, cure Dempsey,” he blurted out. “Make her well,” the words flung into the pew ahead of him. The man to his right and two men in front of him turned and looked. One of the men was the lieutenant. Johnny repeated his words, louder than before, and even more intense, as if his plea were to the men around him, that they must hear him and must answer his prayer. “Cure her. Please. Cure her.” He lowered his head. The men faced front. The cardinal stood up. “Let us pray,” he said.

Johnny raised his head just in time to see the mother lead the child out the great bronze door of the transept. The portal closed slowly behind them. He stared at the closed door, then at the empty place in the pew where they’d been. They were gone. And he had failed to ask for and receive their blessing.

2.

Stretched out on the wooden floor, Dempsey heard the rattling chains that told her the old freight elevator was on its way up to the loft. She closed her eyes. She’d wanted to rest a little while longer before having to tell Johnny about the latest symptoms that had sent her to the floor exhausted and twitching. The elevator chains continued rattling and clanking against the loose metal sides of the shaft, sounding more like the approach of Marley’s ghost than the coming of her brave and handsome Johnny.

There, a few inches from Dempsey’s nose, was the paintbrush she’d been using before the giddy rush of new symptoms had drained the energy from her entire body. The brush was one of her favorites, a red sable. She’d been using black paint—Ivory Black to be specific—and even though she knew the brush wouldn’t stiffen right away—she painted with oils—it was her habit to clean the brushes almost immediately after their use. She could at least put it to soak. Or better, she should get up and get on with her work. If she were to stop, if she were to stretch herself out on the floor every time some new wave of nausea or weakness or pain racked her, she’d never get anything done. Lying there, she told herself she was being indulgent; she was being lazy; she was giving in. Not that it would alarm or even worry Johnny to see her there on the floor. She’d explained to him that whenever she got tired, she’d lie down. When she was rested, she’d get up. Rather than expend the final ounce of energy walking to the bedroom or to the couch, she’d lie down in place—and afterward simply continue to paint or do whatever she might have been doing.

More than once he’d found her exactly where she was now, at the foot of a painting, sometimes with a brush still in her hand. He’d also seen her stretched out under the long worktable, under the clutter of paint tubes, solvents, brushes, and palette knives that were the tools of her trade. She’d been known to lie down in front of the kitchen sink, or near the clothes rack that served as a closet in their bedroom, her jeans taken from the hanger crumpled up against her chest there on the floor. She had assured Johnny that she never fell or fainted. She just kept a highly accurate measure of the strength available to her, using the final expenditure to get herself safely to the floor, there to rest or sleep or relax as her condition might demand. He must never worry. If he wanted, he could check her breathing to make sure she was still alive, but beyond that, he should pass her by and allow her to rise in her own good time. She was not, she decided, ready to rise. She’d clean the brush later, giving it an extra soaking as amends for the delay.

Slowly, carefully, the elevator door screeched open and knocked against its metal casing. The inner door to the loft itself creaked on its hinges, then slowly, carefully, the elevator door screeched shut and the loft door creaked and squealed while being closed. Johnny had seen Dempsey resting and was being considerate. If he would just slam both doors open and both doors closed, the noise would be over and done in a matter of seconds. Now it was going to be prolonged. No one is noisier than someone trying to be quiet. Even with the elevator put to rest and the loft door locked, there was the drawn-out squeal of the floorboards as Johnny made his way across the room. A less thoughtful step would have squeaked the boards and gotten it over with. But now Dempsey could hear the continuing protest of the wood as the foot went slowly down, then the repeated complaint as the foot drew slowly up. She couldn’t help smiling to think that if he’d just walk across the floor and forget about disturbing her, the entire ordeal would end then and there. He was finally on the rug.

Dempsey opened her eyes. Johnny had gone toward the table in the kitchen area. He’d removed his ribboned medal and was slipping down the knot of his tie. He hadn’t taken off his white gloves nor the beaked pie-shaped hat that made some people mistake him for a railroad conductor. Johnny slipped off the tie and placed it on the back of a chair. His hat he put first on the arm of the couch, then, worried that it might fall, on the couch itself. He unbuttoned his jacket, slowly, slid one arm out, then the other, and hung the jacket on the back of the chair. Twice he stopped in the unbuckling of his belt, and the zipper of his fly was lowered with such measured care that it became almost erotic, a growing tension preceding a longed-for revelation.

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