John Domini

I did experience a cross-generational synchronicity with my father’s war experience. My own can’t begin to match his, it left no such deep scars, but given my family’s receptivity to the Spirit, the Divine it’s even in the name, Vicedomini, “helper to the Lord” but nonetheless there’s an overlap between us, one in which my relatives might see God’s hand. I did learn of the 9/11 attacks in a Naples convent.

September, again. One of the sisters pulled me into her office. On a pint-sized black-&-white, the antenna began to suggest the Twin Towers. Didn’t they look likewise easy to snap, those Towers? The devastation unfolded before us, gathering in the small room, now three, now eight. Often the only sound, with the TV on mute during work hours, was a woman praying the rosary. This was in Santa Chiara, Clarisse, still staffed by members of the order if no longer a convent. The church stands along Spaccanapoli, a landmark really, in its way as prominent as the Towers. Out back, you might almost be in Camaldoli. The garden cloister, bordered by cooling galleries, startles a newcomer with how it subdues the roar and hustle of downtown. All at once you’re in the Peaceable Kingdom, the greenery almost bonsai, the majolica everywhere and painted with bucolic 18th-century scenes. I never tire of playing the tour guide, and on that after- noon in ’01, I was speaking American English with some visitor. The nun who took my arm may even have heard me say “New York.” Together we spent, I don’t know, almost an hour with the news. When I had to back away, I did manage to thank the Chiara sister, but only the power of her look, commiserating, penetrating, brought me out of my shock enough to notice she was dark, perhaps Egyptian, perhaps Syrian. She might have been a refugee. And my friends in lower Manhattan, friends and relatives and, for that matter, the whole city? I wound up in the sanctuary, in a pew. Between prayers, I’d lift my eyes to the 14th-century vaults, barren and gray. At one time the church’s tall interior had been a show- case, smothered with painted majolica of its own, here Gothic and there Baroque. The ornamentation couldn’t survive summer ’43, when a blockbuster hit left fires burning out of control for days. Many died, including clergy.

Myself, in ’01, I remained lucky. Lucky or blessed, I lost no one in Bin Laden’s attacks. Still, that afternoon in a Naples church, in shocked communion with other, older killing rains—it takes me to rest of my father’s story….