The Cloister

by James Carroll

  She said, “This book is in the idiom of Aquinas, so you will know it.” Still, she took the volume. She let her eyes settle on the first page, and, with a placid neutrality, began to translate. “There was in Paris a young creature—ah! Philintus!—formed in a prodigality of Nature, to show mankind a finished composition….” She interrupted herself. “This is Abelard to Philintus, a friend.”

  “Dating from?”

  “From 1132. He is describing Héloïse, as she was years earlier.”

  “Go on, please.”

  She found her place. “Her wit and her beauty would have fired the dullest and most insensible heart; and her education was equally admirable.”

  “Wow,” Kavanagh said.

  Rachel laughed abruptly. “ ‘Gee whiz!’ ” she said, and he realized that, once again, she was teasing him.

  As if in apology, she said, “I told you before how sometimes you make me think of the men in movies, Jimmy Stewart.”

  Kavanagh rocked his chair back good-naturedly, cowboy-wise. But he jolted the table, the coffee. He said, “My goodness,” but self-mockingly. Then he added, “Jimmy Stewart meets Simone Weil.”

  “Vey.”

  “What?”

  “We did this yesterday. Not ‘wile.’ But ‘vey.’ ”

  “Okay.” He grinned. “I stand corrected. But with your turban, if I may say, you don’t resemble the famous”—he hesitated on the words “Jewish” and “French,” and said neither—“martyr.”

  Rachel touched the black fabric at her ear. “There is a story about this head covering in France.”

  “What story?”

  “It became the fashion after the war.”

  “That’s it? The story?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were in France?”

  “But of course.”

  “A ‘young creature in Paris,’ like Héloïse?”

  Rachel Vedette nodded. “My world and hers, so separated by time, coincided in space. Yes, Paris. They say she was about twenty when she and Abelard were together at Notre-Dame. When I was twenty, I used to walk past Notre-Dame every day, twice every day, back and forth, from Île Saint-Louis to the Musée de Cluny, on the Left Bank.”

  “You refer to Cluny in your docent speech.”

  “Yes. The great abbey was in Bourgogne, of course—nothing there but ruins today. But the Abbot had a palace in Paris, his, what do you say, town house. It is well preserved, now a museum of the Middle Ages.”

  “Like The Cloisters?”

  She smiled. “Well, the musée is not a pastiche. But in feeling, yes—like The Cloisters, which, I admit, is what drew me here. I was hired first as a cleaner.”

  “Then they realized how much you know.”

  She smiled again, but vaguely. She rolled the tip of her cigarette in its ashes, and added, “Although in the Paris museum there is also the archive, and the scholarly center, the Institut Médiéval.” She took a drag then, a hefty one. Smoke came out of her nostrils, as if she were a man. She said, “After the Revolution…1789, no?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “I am sorry. The ladies in my tours think, Revolution…1776. So, after the Revolution, the monasteries were destroyed—you know this, too. But the monastic libraries were also looted, the greatest medieval libraries in Europe—Cluny, but also Clairvaux, Clermont, Morimund, Bec. Terrible destruction, the coming of laïcité—you say ‘secularism’? It was the hatred of everything Catholic, including books—including, also, the Roman writers and the Greeks. What was not destroyed was hidden. Thousands of codices, scrolls, and single leaves, many magnificently illuminated, were left on unmarked shelves across the country, slowly decomposing for a hundred years. Only in the twentieth century did scholars rescue the lost works that were suddenly deemed the patrimony of France. The Institut Médiéval became the main repository of the salvaged texts. One of those putting the fragments together was my father. I was his assistant.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Working on what?”

  “Abelard.”

  “But…”

  “But what?”

  “I thought you were Jewish.”

  She nodded. “My father began as a scholar of Talmud, Kabbalah, medieval Jewish texts. Tales of the Midrash: he retold them. The monasteries had collected all that, too. Professor Saul Vedette was famous as an expert on Moses Nachmanides.”

  “Maimonides?”

  “Nachmanides. Someone else.”

  “Oh. I am sorry, I…”

  “No matter. But then, of course, everything changed in France—little more than a decade ago. With the darkness, my father moved to the study of Abelard, who was his light. He was researching why such a figure was condemned by the Church.”

  “I don’t know much, but I know Abelard was condemned because of Héloïse.” Kavanagh gestured toward Rachel’s book. “Maybe not hedonism, as you say, but as her lover, no? That was the offense.”

  “Oh, Father, forgive me, but that is a terrible distortion.”

  “Why, then?”

  She laughed, “Well, for the much better reason that he was a heretic.”

  “A heretic? For what?”

  “For what, among other things, he believed about Jews.” Rachel Vedette pierced him with her dark eyes. Kavanagh recalled the image occurring to him earlier, that in this woman’s presence he’d been dragged into another room, but now he thought, not a room, but a ledge—a ledge from which one could fall. It was a feeling he’d had before. When?

  With Runner, that’s when.

  He saw it when she registered that he had no reply to make. She went on, “Saint Bernard saw to Abelard’s being condemned, and he ordered his writings burned, which is why you have not studied them; why, apart from these letters”—she indicated the book—“you have not heard of Abelard’s work.”

  “But Jews?” he asked, finally.

  “Abelard was charged with multiple errors, one of which was his suggestion that Jews were not condemned by God for murdering Christ. Therefore—so my father argued—Jews remain beloved of God.”

  “I hold that. I’m not a heretic.”

  “You believe Jews are saved? Outside the Church?”

  “If they act in good conscience, yes.”

  “Outside Jesus? Jews have no need of Jesus?”

  “Well…” The words of Jesus from the Gospel of John popped open in Kavanagh’s mind: “No man comes to the Father, but by me.” But he pushed those words away to say, “During the war, I closed the eyelids of dozens of boys. It never occurred to me that God’s love for them depended on their being baptized.”

  “My father found that to be Abelard’s position. Exactly. Abelard was condemned for it.”

  Kavanagh could not think what to say.

  She said, “Abelard believed—and taught—that every person is saved by virtue of being created by the Creator. God is available in the human capacity for thought. That’s all. No Church. No Jesus. Just Creation. Reason. For that, they burned his writings. My father was trying to retrieve them, from manuscripts that were hidden in medieval monasteries, then lost.”

  “But your father was a Talmud scholar?”

  “Until 1940, yes.”

  “But…1940?”

  “You know of the Statut des Juifs? The Jewish Law. My father was creating an argument against those laws. Against Vichy. Not an argument, precisely. Un récit—a story. Its hero, Abelard, the great French Catholic, was to be my father’s witness. A witness for the Jews. That was my father’s great idea. But, naturally, the witness was never called.” She lifted the book. “I nevertheless, ever since, have kept faith with Abelard. And with Héloïse.”

  “As witnesses? Or what?”

  She shrugged. “I cannot let them go. What was your phrase yesterday? ‘Death grip.’ ”

  He shook his head. “I was thinking of the Irish—how we nurse the hurts of the past.”

  “Hurts need nursing, perhaps.”r />
  “Until the hurt is gone.”

  “And when is that, Father?” She fell silent.

  Kavanagh sat in silence, too. Finally, he asked quietly, “What is the hurt?”

  She lifted her shoulders. “That my father’s great idea was foolish. He should not have been encouraged in it.” Her shoulders fell.

  “Who encouraged him?”

  Rachel brought her eyes to the priest’s. “I did.”

  “You say that as if you are admitting to something.”

  She shrugged again.

  “Why foolish?” Kavanagh asked.

  “Because it was dangerous.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Dangerous,” she said sharply, “for a Jew.”

  Kavanagh could not think what to say. The silence fell once more. At last, he asked, “You were twenty?”

  “As the climax came, yes.”

  “That’s young.”

  “And a long time ago.”

  “Walking past Notre-Dame every day,” he said.

  Rachel was relieved to laugh. “You pronounce it like the American football team.”

  Kavanagh blushed, the rube again. “Yeah, well…”

  Veering away from both his embarrassment and the pit of her anguish, she said, “Coming from home on Île Saint-Louis, I approached the Cathedral from the rear, where there was an expanse of grass. I always stared up at the arcs-boutants, you say ‘buttresses’…”

  “Flying buttresses.”

  “…yes, because I did not want to look at the men who were…at rest…lounging on the grass in that park beside the Cathedral. They were German soldiers. We Parisians called them haricots verts, because of their gray-green uniforms.” Realizing that Kavanagh had missed the meaning, she said, “Green beans.” Then she added, “But when I passed, they were half naked sunbathers, happy to be seen as decadent. They displayed themselves. I hated knowing that they were looking at me.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, forcefully. “But this is all too much about me.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You began to explain. ‘Thrown for a loop,’ you said. A stranger at the Mass yesterday, the Bishop this morning.”

  “Not a stranger.”

  “Who, then?”

  “This fellow from the seminary in Yonkers…when I was young. But it’s embarrassing, really. Trivial. Compared to what you were dealing with at that age.”

  “Still, something is at stake, no?”

  “His nickname was ‘Runner,’ because he was a track star. I was very close to him all those years ago. He disappeared. And then again yesterday, he disappeared. Suddenly, it mattered to me to find out why. I went downtown today and asked the Bishop. He knows, but he wouldn’t tell me.” Kavanagh shrugged. “That’s all. It’s nothing.”

  “But to you, the unknown answer carries weight, nonetheless.”

  “I guess so.”

  “So you should find it. You should go to this man ‘Runner,’ and ask him.”

  “But that’s the point. I have no way to find him.”

  “That is not true. He came to you yesterday. He wants to be found. You can find him.”

  Kavanagh stared at her, marveling at the simplicity of her statement. He almost asked, And how would I do that?

  As if in reply, she said, “The Bishop knows?”

  “Yes. It surprised me, how unsettled I was when I realized he was keeping something from me, and had been all along. I am surprised at how shocked I was to recognize some kind of deception from the Bishop. He is a friend, but more than that. He is the Church itself to me, and he has deceived me. That is what I saw. ‘A vocation that stakes everything on the absolute,’ is that what you said before? Abelard and Héloïse, perhaps. But not me. In my case, I am realizing, the vocation is staked not on the absolute, but on something very shaky.”

  “All the more, then, Father. You must have your questions answered.”

  “You don’t understand. There’s this thing called ‘the Seal.’ Secrecy. The Bishop is bound by it.”

  “But you are not.” She eyed him steadily. “There is a way to learn what you need to learn. You must find it.” That she said this with such certainty made him realize that she had been through so much more than he had. She was a veteran of grim accomplishment.

  Kavanagh found it possible to hold her gaze, but as he did, his mind went elsewhere. All at once, he was back in Bishop Donovan’s outer office, with his eyes casting about the room. The receptionist, bent over her ledger, was resolutely ignoring him. What he saw now was the file cabinet behind her, the top drawer, a label that he had not consciously registered, but which he now saw as reading “Current Correspondence.” He recalled Bishop Donovan’s words, “a letter from him…Special Delivery, out of the blue.”

  “Yes,” Kavanagh said. “I see what you mean.” But he said it with finality, shutting the lid on the subject of his own uneasiness.

  Rachel Vedette placed her hand on the leather-bound book of letters. She gave it the slightest nudge, bringing it together with his breviary, so that the two edges of leather touched. “Will you take this?” she asked. “My book? Read what’s written here? To discuss it with me?”

  “I’ve just told you. I know little or nothing of the absolute.”

  “This was my father’s book. I have not parted with it since…”

  In the silence, even Kavanagh knew better than to require her to finish the sentence. “Yes,” he said. “I will be careful with it.” He picked up her book, and also his own. Her request meant he would see her again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The deck cabin to which Héloïse had repaired, to be out of the sun, was one of two ad hoc structures standing at either end of the long, narrow river vessel. Since they were running with the current downstream, toward the river’s mouth at the sea, only one sail had been deployed. For nearly four days, the wind had been fair, the boat’s progress smooth. Now, as the sailing barge approached the voyage’s end, Héloïse heard the pair of pole-men, who stood ready fore and aft, calling out numbers, alerting the barge master to the depth of the water. Soon enough, she felt the jolt when the boat ran aground. She lifted the tarp clear of her cabin opening, to look out. It was late afternoon, and though the sunlight had lost its edge, still, she found it necessary to shield her eyes, blinking in the brightness. The cutwater of the boat was at rest in the shallow elbow of shoreline between a watermill and a muddy beach from which the ground sloped gently up to a quayside thoroughfare. Along it, stone buildings and houses were organized around a stout Merovingian basilica.

  So this was Nantes.

  One crewman was dropping the sail, and another was looping the line around a stump on the shore. The party’s second barge banged into them from behind, and the third approached. That last and largest barge was given over to the war dogs, who had offered protection from night bandits at their campsites, and the supplemental oarsmen and dray horses that would be needed when the barges made the return voyage, upstream. But the second boat, just kissing hers, was Peter’s. She turned to see him.

  From his place in the prow, Peter waved at her. Across the distance that separated them, his beaming smile spoke eloquently of their happiness. For Héloïse, the days since their departure from Paris had been dreamlike, especially once, away from the city, they could drop the pretense that they were not traveling in the same party. At a tributary of the Loire, below Chartres, they had bidden farewell to the wagons and armed escort her uncle had insisted on providing to that point, for what he took, with his leap from her half-truth, to be her journey to Bourgogne. From there, they had launched themselves on the soothing rhythms of flowing water. When their three-boat flotilla had come to the main river’s northern bend, at Orléans, they had followed the flow to the west, instead of heading east, toward the ducal palace in Dijon. The barge master alone understood that their course was not what had been implied. Peter had smothered an outright deception with ambiguity, but he had also seen that
the boatman’s discretion was well rewarded.

  Though Peter and Héloïse had not found it possible to be alone, in a trinity of small vessels carrying gossip-prone servants and crew, the simple fact of their escape from the confines of the Paris Cloister had been enough. As darkness fell at the end of each day, the barges had tied up on the shore, and in the servant bustle of encampment—the hour or so of boats being secured, dogs deployed, horses fed, fires stoked, shelters erected, and bedding laid—they had come together casually on the crossbeam of her vessel, pretending to share nothing more than a taste for the clean air and the golden flare of sunset. But for them, the air was freedom itself, and the fading light, glowing across open bogs or filtered through towering woodlands, offered a glimpse of heaven. For the first time in their lustful history, Héloïse sensed something wholly new in Peter—his capacity for calm affection. Until she felt herself the object of his quiet devotion, she had not known how, in addition to the ecstasies of Eros, she had been longing for this chaste counsel of contented intimacy, too.

  Oddly, it was here, on the untamed river, that she felt her wild, uneven life coming finally into balance, and she wished that everything and everyone, except herself and Peter, as they were at these moments, would utterly disappear. Nothing on earth but the two of them: no past or future, only now. Surreptitiously at such instants, with one hand resting on her abdomen, where their child nested, she had reached with the other to take Peter’s hand. When, in the magic of twilight, she felt his hand pressing hers in turn, a secret fever coursed through their fingers, heat beyond, if possible, what she’d felt in their frenzied, naked coupling in the dangerous shadows of Paris.

  Now they were arrived, and Héloïse turned from looking at Peter to take in the sight of the prosperous river town, with its mill, grain house, animal pens, boatyard, stone dwellings, and substantial church. To her surprise, in this first glimpse of Nantes, the future seemed to show itself. She sensed that here events would form the hinge between the lost, if blustery, girl she’d been until now, and the unperturbed woman she would be once she had a healthy son and his faithful father settled, however their bond of love took shape in the world as it was.