The Cloister

by James Carroll

  Alone, he unzipped his jacket and put his books on the bench beside him. He resolved to block out the canned Gregorian chant, but then realized the ersatz music was sparing him the problem of a deadly silence: in holy silence, so the prophets say, men like him are supposed to hear the voice of God, but Kavanagh never heard a thing. He picked up his breviary again, and reflexively flipped the ribbon to the appointed page. He began to read the day’s Psalms as if he were a monk.

  “Cloister,” he heard some moments later. “From the Latin, claustrum. For ‘closed.’ ” A voice had finally come to Kavanagh, but it was some woman’s. He did not look up. “In French,” she continued, “we say cloître. In this museum, we have five distinct cloisters: hence the plural of the museum’s name: ‘The Cloisters.’ But this one—dating to the twelfth century—is the jewel, the one around which all the others are organized. The reason we are here.”

  When Kavanagh raised his eyes, it was to find that, instead of along the arcade or at the closed-in quad, the woman was looking directly at him. She was a museum docent, clearly. She was giving instruction to a clutch of ladies whose look was fixed the other way, down the aisle of the colonnade along which the docent had been pointing. She had spoken enough so that Kavanagh took in her French accent. There was an aphonic quality to her voice, low-pitched, rough, suggesting a whisper, even though she could readily be heard. When their eyes met, they held each other’s gaze for a long moment.

  Then she faced away and resumed, “When this cloister was in its monastery, La Chapelle-sur-Loire, in southern Bourgogne, its dimensions were twice this size.” The ladies earnestly looked about the quadrangle, taking in its pink marble arches and supporting columns, capitals elaborated with carved pinecones, acanthus leaves, and animal heads. A gray pallor hung over the scene, because the glass roof above showed the weather. The ladies, in from Scarsdale or someplace, wore tailored suits of coral, mauve, pale green, but even those colors seemed subdued by the downwash of murky air. They wore flat-crowned hats and sensible shoes, with handbags at their elbows.

  “Constructed most of a thousand years ago”—the docent took several steps away from the group, letting her long, thin arm carve a graceful arc, encompassing the entire scene, an unfeigned gesture of delight—“this was the enclosure onto which all of the monastic buildings would have opened—the chapel, refectory, dormitories, kitchen, and Chapter House.” At this last phrase, she threw a sidelong glance Kavanagh’s way, which made him realize that “Chapter House” referred to the room he’d settled in. She resumed: “The Cloister provided the monks or nuns with isolation from the world outside. In this courtyard, the monks or nuns grew vegetables, prayed, read, took meditative walks—and washed themselves. Here. In this very place. Picture them. All in silence. Magnum silentium.”

  As if in emphasis, she stopped speaking, quieting even her gaze, which lifted to settle on the roofline of the arcade. Through the glass could be seen ocher tiles with lips curving over the limestone entablature resting on the ranks of columns and arches. It seemed wrong, suddenly, that the rain was blocked from falling into the courtyard.

  The docent turned, taking a few steps along the arcade. The ladies followed. “This cloister,” she continued, carefully pronouncing each word, but with that Gallic intonation, “formed the center of one of the network of Benedictine foundations attached to the great abbey at Cluny….” She described Cluny’s place on the plain between the Loire and the Rhône, strategic river openings to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean both. “Cluny,” she said, “was a fulcrum of culture, or, as we say in French, le point d’appui.” Her spiel was practiced, but did not seem canned. She simply knew what she was talking about. She had fallen into an unselfconscious pose, letting her fingers rest in a stone crevice joining a pillar to its sculpted capital, her hand at a level just above her head.

  She was tall. She was dressed unremarkably in black laced Oxford shoes, a long dark skirt, and a white blouse whose pointed collars were slightly askew above a formless, fully buttoned cardigan sweater. She wore no jewelry. The slender hand at her hollow cheek emphasized an overall litheness. Her black hair was cut short, like a man’s, close against her skull. Her clothing hung on her loosely. She was not lithe, he saw now, but extremely thin, as if her body had known malnourishment. A wasting disease in her past, perhaps—consumption, tuberculosis. The only skin showing was at her hands and face, but it carried the hint of an ashen hue.

  “If you please,” the woman said, moving the group along, “this carving of a double-headed monster…” They began to drift away, toward a new threshold. “…which invites the viewer to contemplate, as the monks and nuns always would have…” Her last words carried back to Kavanagh. “…the great struggle between vice and virtue.” Then they were gone.

  His reading of the breviary amounted to going through the motions. He put the woman out of his mind, but then had to fend off memories of Dunwoodie again. In fact, the museum’s piped-in syllabic chant fueled the distraction, since Runner had chaired the schola, the small seminary choir that led the way each day through the communal incantations of Matins, Vespers, and Compline. Here the recorded music, with antiphons and responsories, was on a ten-minute loop that circled from the Kyrie to the Spiritus Domini to the Laetatus Sum, and back again, but under it all, Kavanagh kept hearing Runner muscle through the high notes of Panis Angelicus.

  “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  Kavanagh looked up, surprised to find the docent standing before him, at the threshold of the so-called Chapter House. She was hugging herself against the chill, which made her seem even more slender, as delicate as one of the thin pillars in the arcade behind her. Her fingers were long, bony.

  The expression on her face was neutral, but Kavanagh felt rebuked nonetheless, as if he’d stayed past closing time. He lifted his book, letting its ribbons drape, and attempted a smile. “No actual prayers allowed?”

  She smiled, but thinly, ignoring the little gibe. “I simply wanted you to know there will be another general museum tour in fifteen minutes, if it pleases you.” He sensed that her job depended on having people actually show up in this remote outpost, and then bother to follow her around.

  Kavanagh was relieved to have his brooding interrupted. When he looked at his watch, though, she took it as refusal, and half turned away. He stood. “I’m Father Kavanagh, from Good Shepherd, the church up Broadway a few blocks.” He stepped toward her and offered his hand. He smiled. “Out of uniform.”

  “Hello, Father.” She took his hand. Her grip was firm, but her fingers, yes, were very bony. Still, something soft was showing itself, something vulnerable. “I am Rachel Vedette,” she said.

  “You’re French.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a coincidence.” He turned back to the bench, to pick up his other book. “I’ve been reading a French woman’s book.” He displayed it.

  The docent glanced at the volume. “Simone Weil,” she said, but with a sort of wince.

  Her expression surprised him. Weil was much written about that year; her book was something of a sensation, even among New York intellectuals.

  “Why do you cringe?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, really,” the priest said. Her slight but visceral recoiling could not have been more surprising.

  But she deflected him. “Perhaps you could say what you admire about her.”

  He gestured with the book. “It’s called Waiting for God.”

  “Yes. Letters she exchanged with a priest.”

  “That’s right. But that’s not why I’m reading it.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Because ‘waiting for God’ implies she doesn’t have Him. Nothing pious here. She is with the misfits and the outsiders.”

  “She is with the anti-Semites.”

  “What?”

  “Simone Weil was an anti-Semite.”

  “An anti-Semite?” he answered. “I thought she was a Jew.”

 
“She was born a Jew, but her embrace of the Church fueled her contempt for her native Judaism. The worst kind of anti-Semite.” Her hand went to her mouth, as if to shut it. “But I am sorry,” she said. “It is rude of me to speak so bluntly.”

  “Embrace of the Church? She could never accept baptism. She writes harshly about it.” Kavanagh was thrown that the docent had indeed spoken so directly. Her accent lent authority to her surprising statement. Still, lifting the book, he ventured, “She says she would never join an institution that regards itself as identical with Christ.”

  The woman checked herself. “You are correct, Father. I spoke wrongly. Her embrace was of Jesus, more than the Church. Although, as I recall, she spoke of her love for Him as remaining—how do we say this?—unconsummated.” She lowered her eyes, suddenly shy, as if the word’s implications embarrassed her.

  Kavanagh suddenly saw the docent’s gaunt appearance as a version of the French mystic’s. Weil had been famously malnourished. Indeed, she died from a self-imposed hunger strike—an ultimate identification with victims of the war. To Kavanagh, Weil had seemed a kind of martyr, and he’d found her book, with its rejection of conventional religiosity, an astonishment. But now he saw that this woman before him, even in deriding Weil, was like her—not only gaunt, but brusquely candid. She said what she thought.

  Unlike me, Kavanagh said to himself. He was a maestro of indirection. For example, this unexpected exchange had made apparent that the docent herself was Jewish, yet the priest could not ask the question that prompted: what is a Jew doing here, in this artificial homage to Christendom, giving tours on medieval monasticism? Instead, trying to demonstrate some further appreciation of the French writer, he said, “Perhaps it is for her seriousness in the face of what happened in Europe that Simone Weil is valued.”

  “Is it serious,” Rachel Vedette said with fresh severity, “to analogize the ancient Hebrews with the Nazis?”

  “Does she do that?”

  “Yes. Despite having been forced out of her teaching post because of Vichy laws against Jews. Ancient Israel, to her, was ‘the beast.’ Although you may not know this, because I doubt that her cahiers…notebooks…have been published in English.”

  “It’s true. I don’t read French. This is the only book I know.”

  “That one is a good book. I agree. It displays her empathy with suffering, which was limited, but quite real.”

  “And her longing for transcendence,” Kavanagh dared to say.

  “Yes, that, too.”

  “And as for the complications of her being Jewish…”

  Miss Vedette shrugged. “You are right. ‘Complications of being Jewish.’ ” She smiled. “Why not?”

  That she had no interest in judging him, or in puncturing his pretensions, made it possible for him to ask his question, although still obliquely: “So your expertise is Catholicism?”

  “French history, in point of fact. Le Moyen ge. The Church, of course, is necessary for that.”

  “Of course.”

  “Although, unlike Simone Weil,” she said, “I do not know priests.”

  Kavanagh bowed slightly. And she returned his gesture with a slight bow of her own. She looked at her watch. “So, I said before, fifteen minutes. Now it is five minutes.”

  “I wish I could join you,” the priest said. He placed Waiting for God together with his breviary and slipped the pair of books under his arm. “Some other time, perhaps.”

  “Yes,” she said, and put her hand out. They shook. “Bonne chance, mon père.”

  She turned and walked away. Kavanagh knew that, given his response to her, the expected thing would be for him to zip up his coat and leave. He’d made it seem that the press of his schedule precluded his joining the tour, but in fact his next obligation wasn’t until midafternoon, religion class for the sixth- and seventh-graders. He had turned down her invitation reflexively. It wasn’t a docent’s spiel he wanted. What, then?

  Instead of resuming his place on the stone bench of the Chapter House, he turned and entered the ambulatory, falling into the slow pace proper to a monk reciting the Office. Would he resume the business of seeming to pray? He could not have explained his impulse to remain in the museum. Had the enchantments of the place trumped his parochial resentments? No. Something else.

  He took up his breviary again. Priests like him called the black Psalter with gold leaf pages “the wife.” That they called their chosen spiritual reading, his other book, “the mistress” did not seem funny now; indeed, the Simone Weil volume rode with fresh awkwardness beneath his arm. Kavanagh flipped the breviary ribbon and read, Exaudi, Deus, orationem meam cum deprecor; a timore inimici eripe animam meam. He muscled his way through the Latin: Deliver my soul from the fear of the enemy.

  Cradling the breviary, pressing the Weil against his side, he had made two complete circuits of the colonnade when he saw the woman again, this time without a group. She was unaware of him as she entered the Cloister, and when she stepped into the arcade, as it happened, she cut him off. He stopped.

  “My goodness,” she said, startled. “I am sorry.” Now she, too, was holding a book, a thin leather-bound volume.

  “My fault,” Kavanagh said. “Please, pardon me.” He adjusted a ribbon and closed his breviary.

  “I thought you had gone,” she said.

  “Wasn’t ready to face my afternoon.” He smiled. “Sixth-graders.” Because Kavanagh had been walking, and because the arcaded promenade invited it, he started to resume his pace, then stopped. With a gesture, he invited her to walk beside him. She hesitated.

  He apologized: “I’ve cluttered your space, haven’t I? You came in here to—what do we say?—perambulate?”

  “It’s true. When no one arrives for the guided lecture, I come in here alone.”

  “ ‘Preserve your solitude,’ Simone Weil says.”

  The woman only looked at him.

  “I feel bad, then,” Kavanagh said. “I should have joined you for the tour.”

  “Why are you still here?” she asked.

  Her direct question threw him. Also, it made him want to answer. He looked up. The rain was drumming the glass canopy. “I was hoping it would stop,” he said. But the rain was not what had kept him here, and it suddenly seemed deceptive to imply that it had. He said, “Something bothered me this morning. I came to The Cloisters by accident, but it feels like the place to be.”

  “I understand.” She looked around. “I imagine the men and women who built this place, a thousand years ago. It consoles me.”

  “Consoles you…” Kavanagh said slowly, surprising himself. “From what?”

  Instead of answering, she stared at him coldly. Or rather, as he realized then, her stare was her answer. He said, “I’m sorry.”

  She said calmly, “It would be rude of me to ask, ‘What bothered you this morning?’ How could you imagine I would explain myself to you?”

  He glanced around. “A thousand years, you said. The place surprised me, that’s all. You surprised me.” What had she said about Weil? “Her empathy with suffering, which was limited but quite real.” This woman and Simone Weil, he thought again, were alike. He said, “You seem to say what comes to mind. For a change, that’s what I did just now. Not like me. But I take your point. And, yes, it was rude. None of my business. The Cloister is no excuse. After all, it is not real.”

  “But it is. This very place. Abbots and Abbesses; monks and nuns; we know their names. They were trying for something that cannot be seen. Something that lasts. Such men and women should not be forgotten.” With that, she made a slight gesture with her book.

  “Cluny, you said.”

  “La Chapelle-sur-Loire.”

  “But now a museum.”

  She shrugged. “Cluny itself is a museum now.”

  Kavanagh felt entirely displaced, as if he and this woman were meeting in a realm apart, speaking a language that, whatever it was to her, was new to him. “The place no longer serves its purpose,�
�� he said.

  “But its purpose was always to remember, no? A museum, a sanctuary—all the same.”

  “But in the museum the past is dead,” Kavanagh said carefully. Such a portentous statement was unlike him, yet he pushed it further, saying, “Remembering can be a death grip. The sanctuary is for life.”

  A dark expression came over her face, unpleasant, almost mean. But she banished the dour look and held up her thin volume again. “You have your books, Father. I have mine. History. Le Moyen ge.”

  The priest thought, finally, of Runner again. He wanted, all at once, to tell someone what had happened at Mass that morning. That strange, unsettling apparition. And now this woman, too. Another sort of visitant. He had met her because of Runner. She was a match for Runner. Strange. Unsettling. He said, “You say it would it be rude of you to ask what bothered me, but what if, despite myself, that’s why I mentioned it? Hoping you would ask.”

  Rachel Vedette, again, answered with her stare. Finally, gesturing at his breviary, with no hint of her public face, she said, “You should complete your obligation, Father.” With that, she turned and walked out of the Cloister.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rachel Vedette carried it with her everywhere, a gnarled scar on memory, the sweltering day when all had changed—July 16, 1942. Life can be transformed in a snap, a cosmic shift determined by one hour that glows red through the chilly gray of mundane experience ever after. Since then, she had sought not to undo what had happened—impossible!—but only to find again, and claim, any one of the many aspirations that had belonged to her before.

  She was twenty. As she hurriedly set out for home from the Musée de Cluny that afternoon, even the wide sidewalks of Boulevard Saint-Germain were deserted, which had not been the case the other times. The vacant street amplified her alarm. She was already running, and now ran faster. The skirt of her loose-fitting summer dress flared at her knees. Unruly wisps of her dark hair, having come loose from the plaited coil of her tightly pulled-back bun, flew at her face. Rumors had yet again swept Paris. But this afternoon, in the archive of the Institut Médiéval, housed in the Musée, a clerk, who had often looked her over but never spoken to her, approached her work-table, under the cone-shaped hanging lamps of the high-vaulted reading room, to lean close and whisper, “The Germans are arresting the Jews.”