Sister Celestine’s cell, St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York
Celestine folded her hands across her chest beneath the crocheted blanket, straining to see beyond the bright colors of her bedspread. The room was little more than a haze of shadow. Although she had looked upon the contours of her bedroom each day for over fifty years and knew the placement of each object in her possession, the room had a formless unfamiliarity that confused her. Her senses had dimmed. The clanking of the steam radiators was distant and muted. Try as she might, she could not make out the trunk at the far end of the room. She knew it was there, holding her past like a time capsule. She had recognized the clothing Sister Evangeline had lifted from its hold: the scuffed boots Celestine had kept from the expedition, the uncomfortable pinafore that had so tortured her as a schoolgirl, and the marvelous red dress that had made her—for one precious evening—beautiful. Celestine could even detect the scent of perfume mingling with the mustiness, proof that the cut-crystal bottle she’d brought with her from Pans—one of the few treasures she allowed herself in the frantic minutes before her flight from France—was still there, buried in dust but potent. If she had the strength, she would have gone to the trunk, taken the cold bottle in her hand. She would have eased the crystal stopper from the glass and allowed herself to inhale the scent of her past, a sensation so delicious and forbidden that she could hardly bring herself to think of it. For the first time in many years, her heart ached for the time of her girlhood.
Sister Evangeline’s resemblance to Gabriella had been so pronounced that there were moments when Celestine’s mind—weakened from exhaustion and illness—had fallen into confusion. The years dropped away, and, to her dismay, she could not discern time or place or the reason for her confinement. As she drifted asleep, images of the past lifted through the evanescent layers of her mind, emerging and fading like colors upon a screen, each one dissolving into the next. The expedition, the war, the school, the days of lessons and study—these events of her youth seemed to Celestine as clear and vibrant as those of the present. Gabriella Lévi-Franche, her friend and rival, the girl whose friendship had so changed the course of her life, appeared before her. As Celestine drifted in and out of sleep, the barriers of time fell away, allowing her to see the past once again.
THE SECOND SPHERE
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet:
Praise him with the psaltery and harp.
Praise him with the timbrel and dance:
Praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
Praise him upon the loud cymbals:
Praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.
—Psalm 150
Angelological Academy of Paris, Montparnasse
Autumn 1939
It was less than a week after the invasion of Poland, an afternoon in my second year as a student of angelology, when Dr. Seraphina Valko sent me to locate my errant classmate, Gabriella, and bring her to the Athenaeum. Gabriella was late for our tutorial, a habit she’d developed over the summer months and had continued, to our professor’s dismay, into the cooler days of September. She was nowhere to be found in the school—not in the courtyard where she often went to be alone during breaks, nor in any of the classrooms where she often studied—and so I guessed her to be in her bed, sleeping. My bedroom being next to hers, I knew that she had not come in until well after three o’clock that morning, when she put a record on the phonograph and listened to a recording of Manon Lescaut, her favorite opera, until dawn.
I walked through the narrow streets off the cemetery, passing a café filled with men listening to news of the war on a radio, and cut through an alleyway to our shared apartment on the rue Gassendi. We lived on the third floor, our windows opening over the tops of the chestnut trees, a height that removed us from the noise of the street and filled the rooms with light. I climbed the wide staircase, unlocked the door, and stepped into a quiet, sunny apartment. We had an abundance of space—two large bedrooms, a narrow dining room, a servant’s chamber with an entrance to the kitchen, and a grand bathroom with a porcelain bathtub. The apartment was far too luxurious for schoolgirls, this I knew from the moment I set foot upon its polished parquet. Gabriella’s family connections had assured her the best of everything our school could offer. How I had been assigned to live with Gabriella in such quarters was a mystery to me.
Our Montparnasse apartment was a great change in my circumstances. In the months after I had moved in, I basked in its luxury, taking care to keep everything in perfect order. Before I’d come to Paris, I had never seen such an apartment, while Gabriella had lived well all her life. We were opposites in many ways, and even our appearance seemed to confirm our differences. I was tall and pale, with big hazel eyes, thin lips, and the foreshortened chin I had always considered the hallmark of my northern heritage. Gabriella, by contrast, was dark and classically beautiful. She had a way about her that caused others to take her seriously, despite her weakness for fashion and the Claudine novels. Whereas I came to Paris on scholarship, my fees and board paid entirely through donations, Gabriella came from one of the oldest and most prestigious of the Parisian angelological families. Whereas I felt lucky to be allowed to study with the best minds of our field, Gabriella had grown up in their presence, absorbing their brilliance as if it were sunlight. Whereas I plodded through texts, memorizing and categorizing in the meticulous manner of an ox plowing a field, Gabriella had an elegant, dazzling, effortless intellect. I systemized each piece of minutia into notebooks, making charts and graphs to better retain information, while to my knowledge Gabriella never took notes. And yet she could answer a theological question or elaborate upon a mythological or historical point with an ease that escaped me. Together we were at the top of our class, and yet I always felt that I had stolen my way into the elite circles that were Gabriella’s birthright.
Walking through our apartment, I found it much as I had left it that morning. A thick, leather-bound book written by St. Augustine lay open upon the dining table alongside a plate with the remains of my breakfast, a crust of bread and strawberry preserves. I cleared the table, bringing my book to my room and placing it amid the mess of loose papers on my desk. There were books waiting to be read, jars of ink, and any number of my half-filled notebooks. A yellowed photograph of my parents—two sturdy, weatherworn farmers surrounded by the rising hills of our vineyard—sat next to a faded photograph of my grandmother, Baba Slavka, her hair tied in a head scarf in the way of her foreign village. My studies had occupied me so completely that I’d not been home in over a year.
I was the daughter of winemakers, a sheltered, shy girl from the countryside, with academic talent and strong, unwavering religious beliefs. My mother came from a line of vignerons whose ancestors had quietly survived through hard work and tenacity, harvesting auxerrois blanc and pinot gris all the while bricking the family savings in the walls of the farmhouse, preparing for the days when war would return. My father was a foreigner. He had immigrated to France from eastern Europe after the First World War, married my mother, and took her family name before assuming responsibility of managing the vineyard.
While my father was no scholar, he recognized the gift in me. From the time I was old enough to walk, he put books in my hands, many of them theological. When I was fourteen, he arranged for my studies in Paris, bringing me to the school by train for testing and then, once my scholarship had been secured, to my new school. Together we had packed all my belongings in a wooden trunk that had belonged to his mother. Later, when I discovered that my grandmother had aspired to study at the very school I would attend, I understood that my destiny as an angelologist had been many years in the making. As I set about locating my well-connected and tardy friend, I wondered at my willingness to trade the life I’d led with my family. If Gabriella were not at our apartment, I would simply meet Dr. Seraphina at the Athenaeum alone.
As I left my room, something in the large bathroom at the end of the hallway caught my eye. The door was closed, but moveme
nt behind the frosted glass alerted me to a presence beyond. Gabriella must have run a bath, an odd thing to do when she should have been at school. I could see the outline of our large bathtub, which must have been filled to the top with hot water. Waves of steam rose through the room, coating the glass of the door in a thick, milky fog. I heard Gabriella’s voice, and although I found it odd that she would speak to herself, I believed her to be alone. I raised my hand to knock, ready to alert Gabriella to my presence, when I saw a flash of scintillating gold. An enormous figure passed behind the glass. I could not trust my vision, yet it seemed to me that the room was filled with a soft light.
I drew closer and, endeavoring to understand the scene before me, pushed the door ajar. A mélange of clothes had been scattered about the tile Hoor—a white linen skirt and a patterned rayon blouse that I recognized as belonging to Gabriella. Twisted alongside my friend’s clothing I discerned a pair of trousers, crumpled as a flour sack, clearly thrown aside in haste. It was obvious that Gabriella was not alone. And yet I did not turn away. Instead I stepped even closer. Peering deeper into the room, I exposed myself to a scene that shocked my senses so thoroughly that I could do nothing but watch in a state of horrified awe.
At the far side of the bathroom, draped in a mist of steam, stood Gabriella, entwined in the arms of a man. His skin was luminous white and appeared to me—so startled by his presence—to have an unearthly glow. He had pressed Gabriella against the wall, as if he meant to crush her under his weight, an act of domination that she did not attempt to repel. Indeed, her pale arms were wrapped about his body, holding him.
I stole away from the bathroom, careful to mask my presence from Gabriella, and fled the apartment. Upon returning to the academy, I spent some time wandering through the warren of halls, attempting to recover my bearings before reporting to Dr. Seraphina Valko. The buildings filled many blocks and were strung together by narrow corridors and underground passageways that gave the school a shadowy irregularity that I found strangely soothing, as if the asymmetry echoed my state of mind. There was little grandeur to the dwellings, and although our quarters were often unsuited to our needs—the lecture halls were too small and the classrooms without proper heat—my absorption in my work did much to distract me from these discomforts.
Walking past the dimmed, abandoned offices of the scholars who had already left the city, I tried to understand the shock I felt at finding Gabriella with her lover. Aside from the fact that male guests were restricted from visiting our apartments, there had been something disturbing about the man himself, something eerie and abnormal that I could not fully identify. My inability to understand what I had seen and the chaotic mix of loyalty and rivalry I felt toward Gabriella made it impossible to tell Dr. Seraphina, although I knew in my heart that this was the correct path. Instead I pondered the meaning of Gabriella’s actions. I speculated upon the moral dilemma her affair thrust upon me. I must give Dr. Seraphina an account of what kept me, but what would I say? I could not very well betray Gabriella’s secret. While she was my only friend, Gabriella Lévi-Franche was also my most ardent rival.
In reality my anxieties were pointless. By the time I returned to Dr. Seraphina’s office, Gabriella had arrived. She sat upon a Louis XIV chair, her appearance fresh, her demeanor calm, as if she had spent the morning lounging in a shaded park reading Voltaire. She wore a bright green crepe de chine dress, white silk stockings, and a heavy scent of Shalimar, her favorite perfume. When she greeted me in her usual terse manner, kissing me perfunctorily on each cheek, I understood with relief that she was unaware of what I had seen.
Dr. Seraphina welcomed me with warmth and concern, asking what had kept me. Dr. Seraphina’s reputation rested not just upon her own accomplishments but on the achievements and caliber of the students she took on, and I was mortified that my search for Gabriella would be construed as tardiness on my part. I harbored no illusions about the security of my stature at the academy. I, unlike Gabriella with her family connections, was expendable, although Dr. Seraphina would never say so overtly.
The Valkos’ popularity among their students at large was no mystery. Seraphina Valko was married to the equally brilliant Dr. Raphael Valko and often conducted joint lectures with her husband. Their lectures filled to capacity each autumn, the crowds of young and eager scholars in attendance expanding well beyond those first-year students required to take it. Our two most distinguished professors specialized in the field of antediluvian geography, a small but vital branch of angelic archaeology. The Valkos’ lectures encompassed more than their specialization, however, outlining the history of angelology from its theological origins to its modern practice. Their lectures made the past come alive, so much so that the texture of ancient alliances and battles—and their role in the maladies of the modern world—became plain before all in attendance. Indeed, in their courses Dr. Seraphina and Dr. Raphael had the power to lead one to understand that the past was not a far-off place of myths and fairy tales, not merely a compendium of lives crushed by wars and pestilences and misfortune, but that history lived and breathed in the present, existing among us each day, offering a window into the misty landscape of the future. The Valkos’ ability to make the past tangible to their students ensured their popularity and their position at our school.
Dr. Seraphina glanced at her wristwatch. “We had better be going,” she said, straightening some papers on her desk as she prepared to leave. “We’re already late.”
Walking quickly, the stacked heels of her shoes clicking upon the floor, Dr. Seraphina led us through the narrow, darkened hallways to the Athenaeum. Although the name suggested a noble library studded with Corinthian columns and high, sun-filled windows, the Athenaeum was as lightless as a dungeon, its limestone walls and marble floors barely discernible in the perpetual haze of a windowless twilight. Indeed, many of the rooms used for instruction were located in similar chambers tucked away in the narrow buildings throughout Montparnasse, scattered apartments acquired over the years and connected with haphazard corridors. I learned soon after my arrival in Paris that our safety depended upon remaining hidden. The labyrinthine nature of the rooms ensured that we could continue our work unmolested, a tranquillity threatened by the impending war. Many of the scholars had already left the city.
Still, despite its dour environs, the Athenaeum had offered me much solace in my first year of study. It contained a large collection of books, many of which had been left undisturbed upon their shelves for decades. Dr. Seraphina had introduced our Angelological Library to me the year before by remarking that we had resources that even the Vatican would envy, with texts dating back to the first years of the postdiluvian era, although I had never examined such ancient texts, as they were locked in a vault out of the reach of students. Often I would come in the middle of the night, light a small oil lamp, and sit in a corner nook, a stack of books at my side, the sweet, dusty smell of aging paper around me. I didn’t think of my hours of study as a sign of ambition, although it surely must have seemed that way to the students who found me studying at dawn. To me the endless supply of books served as a bridge into my new life—it was as though, upon my walking into the Athenaeum, the history of the world lifted out of a fog, giving me the sense that I was not alone in my labors but part of the vast network of scholars who had studied similar texts many centuries before my birth. To me, the Athenaeum represented everything that was civilized and orderly in the world.
It was thus all the more painful to see the rooms of the library in a state of total dismemberment. As Dr. Seraphina led us deeper into the space, I saw that a crew of assistants had been assigned to disassemble the collection. The procedure was being carried out in a systematic fashion—with such a vast and valuable collection, it was the only way to go about such a move—and yet it appeared to me that the Athenaeum had descended into pure chaos. Books were piled high on the library tables, and large wooden crates, many filled to the top, were scattered across the room. Only months before,
students had sat quietly at the tables preparing for exams, carrying on their work as generations of students had done before them. Now it felt to me that all had been lost. What would be left once our texts were hidden away? I averted my eyes, unable to look at the undoing of my sanctuary.
In reality, the impending move was no great surprise. As the Germans drew closer, it was unsafe to remain in such vulnerable quarters. I knew that we would soon be suspending classes and beginning private lessons in small, well-hidden groups outside the city. Over the past weeks, most of our lectures had been canceled. Interpretations of Creation and Angelic Physiology, my two favorite courses, had been suspended indefinitely. Only the Valkos’ lectures had continued, and we were aware that they would soon be disbanded. Yet the danger of invasion had not felt real until the moment I found the Athenaeum in shambles.
Dr. Seraphina’s manner was tense and hurried as she brought us into a chamber at the back of the library. Her mood reflected my own: I could not calm myself after what I had witnessed that morning. I stole glances at Gabriella, as if her appearance might have been altered by her actions, but she was as cool as ever. Dr. Seraphina paused, tucked a stray hair behind her ear, and straightened her dress, her anxiety plain. At the time I believed that my delayed arrival had upset her and that she was concerned that we would be late to her lecture, but when we arrived at the back of the Athenaeum and found an altogether different sort of meeting under way, I understood that there was more to Dr. Seraphina’s manner than this.
A group of prestigious angelologists sat arrayed about a table, deep in heated debate. I knew the council members by reputation—many had been visiting lecturers during the previous year—but I had never seen them all gathered together in such an intimate setting. The council was composed of great men and women stationed in positions of power throughout Europe—politicians and diplomats and social leaders whose influence extended well beyond our school. These were the scholars whose books had once lined the shelves of the Athenaeum, scientists whose research on the physical properties and chemistry of angelic bodies made our discipline modern. A nun dressed in a habit of heavy black serge—an angelologist who divided her time between theological study and 6eldwork—sat near Gabriella’s uncle, Dr. Lévi-Franche, an elderly angelologist who specialized in the art of angelic summoning, a dangerous and intriguing field I longed to study. The greatest angelologists of our time were there, watching as Dr. Seraphina brought us into their presence.
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