“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
Dr. McGrath rubbed his long chin, pondering this question. He had just had the misfortune of telling me I wouldn’t be realizing my dream of becoming a doctor—not yet, anyway—advising me to take some time off from my studies before applying to medical school. And his ‘advice’ was a big deal, because I couldn’t complete my application without a letter from him.
“You’ve talked about going to Europe? Why don’t you give that a try?”
Although I wasn’t sure what kind of plan ‘going to Europe’ was, I was sure my parents—who had paid most of the bill for my undergraduate education—were going to think it was a bad one.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he said, with finality. “Go to Europe, and when you get a back, I’ll write you a letter that will get you in to medical school.”
He ushered me out the door before I could think of something to say. On the way back to my dorm, I tried to think of some clever way to break this to my mother, who had been telling everyone that her son ‘was going to be a doctor’ ever since I had signed up for Organic Chemistry. Luckily, my father answered the phone, and his response was both a huge relief and a huge surprise.
“Dr. McGrath is right, Peter, you’re too immature to go to medical school right now. You have to grow up a little.”
I was immature? Stunned by the revelation that both my father and my premedical advisor thought I needed to grow up, I took Dr. McGrath’s advice and went to the career office and made out some applications to teach chemistry in Austria. Now, I know that sounds pretty random, but what else was I going to do? A few months later, I trotted off to Salzburg, Austria, with two brown duffels stuffed with just about everything I owned to begin my three-year stint as a Chemistry and Math teacher at the Salzburg International Preparatory School. And things started off auspiciously, by which I mean that I left my un-listened to German tapes on the plane, slept through my train connection and ended up in Graz, and missed the first faculty meeting because I miscalculated the time change. Immature? Huh, me?
But things did get better… a lot better. The next three years unfolded like some kind of dream, the kind where you wake up and try to fall back asleep and keep the dream going. I hiked and skied the Alps, rode my bike through the rolling hills, strolled the cobbled streets of Salzburg’s epic old city, and enjoyed coffee and torte at the cafes. I also drank a lot of beer, but don’t tell Dr. McGrath that!
And I travelled, extensively, visiting nearly every country in Europe. I will always remember my trip to the Cinque Terre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the rugged seacoast of Liguria, Italy. We got off the train in Vernazza and I remember staring at the landscape, as if such rugged beauty had to be a figment of my imagination. But it wasn’t. On that trip as well as several others I have taken to the Cinque Terre over the years, I took extensive notes, convinced I would someday incorporate the ‘five lands’ into a novel of some sort, not just as a setting for the novel, but as a character in it as well. There is a sentence in the very first chapter of the book that comes more or less straight from my notes: “Marco had stood there many times, mesmerized by the splashes of bright color in the harbor—the pink and orange buildings squeezed against the gray sandstone, and the blue and yellow rowboats littered along the winding path to the water—letting the words to a sermon drop into his head.”
In those days, the area was still pretty isolated and unknown, and I felt like an art lover touring the Louvre by himself, gawking at the mountains erupting straight out of the Ligurian Sea as if they were the Mona Lisa. I will never forget the smell of the place, the nose-pleasing aroma of sea salt, caper blooms and frying sardines. Its sound is just as memorable, the crashing of the breakers against the rocks, the continual arguing of the gulls, and the whisper of the wind through the olive trees growing on the terraced slopes above the sea.
With Salzburg and Vernazza in mind as the setting, I just needed a story. And it turns out that, although I didn’t come up with the premise for the story until 2009, more than twenty years after I graduated from the College of the Holy Cross, the seeds for that premise were actually sewn during my years on the hill overlooking Worcester, Massachusetts. Holy Cross is a Jesuit college, which means that Jesuit priests not only teach there, but live there as well, many of them in the same dormitories as the students. As I interacted with them in their roles as professors, dormitory heads, and chaplains, I was so impressed by their intelligence, their thoughtfulness, and most especially their humanity.
Fast forward to 2009. I had just abandoned my first manuscript and sat down to begin my second, mulling over everything I had learned in the process, the general gist of which was that, in order to be publishable, a manuscript from a debut author had to bring something new and different to the table. No ex-FBI agents battling old demons and substance issues; no former Navy Seals haunted by the dead lovers they failed to save. Something new and different. And that’s when the idea hit me, to put a thoughtful, peace-loving Jesuit priest into the role usually occupied by the aforementioned stereotypical main character.
The other big lesson I learned from my first attempt to write—and publish—a manuscript is that tension and conflict are the flesh and bones of a story; without tension and conflict, there is no story. As I mulled this over, the skeleton of the plot formed in my head. A young priest is visited in the confessional by his former lover who has unwittingly gotten into trouble with a group of violent men. He tries to talk her into going to the police but she is unwilling; he wants to alert the authorities but he is unable, bound by the seal of the confessional. When my chest tightened and my breath stuck as I typed out that first chapter, I knew I had the beginnings of a real novel.
I’ll leave it at that, but just in case you are wondering, I have kept in touch with Dr. McGrath over the years. Without him—and the courage it took to say no to me at a time in my life when I needed to be told no—I don’t think The Vatican Conspiracy would ever have come to be. And I still made it to medical school, three years later.
