The Cloister

by James Carroll

  “Episcopal Vicar for Clergy,” he read at Bishop Donovan’s door. In short order, Kavanagh applied the key, threw the lock, and entered the outer office. The portrait of the Risen Christ now struck him as another watchman, and he avoided the Lord’s gaze, to go directly to the file cabinet. The top drawer was marked, as he’d unconsciously noticed, “Current Correspondence,” and he opened it. He found a rack of folders, the tabs of which were marked with numbers: dates, he realized. He quickly calculated—one folder for each week. He withdrew the first three and positioned them on the clear surface of the cabinet. He opened first one, then the second, and the third, arranging stacks. He fingered through odds and ends of letters and note cards, unsure what, exactly, he was looking for. John Malloy. Runner. No, John Malloy.

  A school. New Jersey. “That kind of school,” Agent had said. Therefore, quality paper, proper stationery.

  Through each stack, Kavanagh found no Malloy. Complaints from pastors about curates, requests for transfer, condolence letters, recommendations—nothing from John Malloy. His pulse had quickened, and now he felt the muscles in his chest tighten, his heart rush. The crushing headache of the day before was gone, but he was alert for its return.

  Once he’d visualized the file cabinet, and the drawer label; once he’d recalled Bishop Donovan’s reference to the letter, “Special Delivery, out of the blue,” he’d imagined a way forward. But this was a dead end.

  “Out of the blue.” The letter, he realized all at once, would have been addressed not to an official, the Vicar for Clergy, but to a long-lost friend. Personal. Therefore, not the bureaucracy file cabinet, but somewhere else: Donovan’s desk.

  Kavanagh gathered the letters and cards back into their folders, the folders back into their drawer. Now, though, there was a tremor in his hands. What was he doing? What was he thinking? A letter kept apart, out of the secretary’s purview—what would that imply?

  He went to the Bishop’s door, ready to try the master key again, but the door was unlocked. He entered, crossed, and quickly found himself at the window alcove, inside the U-shaped desk. He was moving fast. If he stopped to think, he would simply stop. Instead, he efficiently set about opening drawers, first the center one, then the column of three on the right, in one of which, lying prone, was a pint of Jim Beam and a shot glass. Under the pint was a manila envelope with the letters “RIP” scrawled across it.

  The left topmost drawer was cluttered with pencils, a pair of scissors, a box of clips, a blotter, a ball of rubber bands, erasers, a bottle of Carter’s ink—all of which, as if set to do so, pressed down on a single business-sized envelope. He picked it up, like an item of contraband. Addressed in clear handwriting to “Bishop Sean Donovan, the Chancery, Archdiocese of New York, Madison Avenue, New York,” the envelope, aside from the Special Delivery stamp angled across the lower left corner, was otherwise blank—no return address.

  The letter had been slit open, and Kavanagh withdrew its page—a formal, longhand note beginning, “Dear Bishop Donovan,” and signed “Sincerely Yours, John Malloy.” No address. The letter declared in three sentences Malloy’s intention to come to Bishop Donovan’s office for a brief visit at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, November 13—three days ago, the afternoon before Runner turned up at the Communion rail at Good Shepherd. The brevity of the note, its formality, the lack of any explanation or way to return contact, added up to the writer’s wily caution. What was up with John Malloy? Not a hint. As had happened the other morning, such self-protection stymied Michael Kavanagh.

  But he thought of Rachel Vedette: “There is a way to learn what you need to learn. You must find it.” That was all.

  He refolded the letter. As he returned it to its envelope, he looked at the written address again. Was it only the passage of time that made the penmanship unfamiliar? Yet the looped cursive, with a flourish of tag lines at the ends of words, conveyed a bright self-assurance that Kavanagh had associated with his old friend, and he felt the pang of having missed him all these years—and now, at this dead end, of missing him again.

  But then he saw the postmark, with its flutter of lines canceling the stamp in the upper right-hand corner. The smudged black ink showed the date inside the circle of words: “Lake Durham, Sparta Township, N.J.” He stared for a moment.

  He put the envelope back in the drawer, replaced the desk paraphernalia as it had been, closed the drawer, and quickly left the Bishop’s office. Clipping down the palazzo stairs, he glanced ahead and saw, just entering the grand hall, the schoolmarmish woman from the day before, Bishop Donovan’s secretary. Caught!

  Kavanagh slowed his pace so that their paths crossed at the foot of the stairs instead of closer to the night guard. He touched his forehead nonchalantly. “Morning, ma’am.” She was startled, of course, and might have spoken—a query, at least; perhaps a challenge—but he kept going. At the door, still moving, he dropped the key ring on the square table, beside the lunch box. “Thanks, Sarge,” he said, and tossed another salute. “Catch up on your sleep, now.”

  The parking garage at the Waldorf Astoria, two blocks away, welcomed the Cathedral clergy gratis, and that was where he had parked. He returned to the car, then had another thought. He grabbed his books and went into the hotel. From a phone booth in the lobby, he called Good Shepherd and asked Frank Russell to cover for him at the hospital. He thought of asking for the Monsignor, to request permission for use of the car, but instead told Frank to let the boss know he had it. What the hell.

  He had to kill some time. He went to the corner coffee shop, took a table, and, leaving his breviary aside, opened the leather-bound book, picking a page at random. Translation, in truth, did not come easily to him: The gossip at last reached Fulbert’s ears. It was with great difficulty he gave credit to what he heard, for he loved his niece, and was prejudiced in my favor. Kavanagh looked up, afraid all at once of appearing foolish. As had been true all those years before, in theology class, he marked the work of puzzling through Latin by moving his lips as he read, and he realized he’d been doing that now. He looked around. The shop was a-bustle with businessmen and tourists. No one cared a damn for a solitary priest with his little book of Latin. He focused on the page again, listening for Peter Abelard’s voice, the story of his calamity. But, upon closer examination, Fulbert began to be less incredulous. He surprised us in one of our quieter conversations. How fatal, sometimes, are the consequences of curiosity! The anger of Fulbert seemed to moderate on this occasion, and I feared in the end some more heavy revenge.

  Kavanagh looked up again, and this time he closed the book. “Readiness to stake everything on the absolute”: Rachel Vedette’s words weighed more in Kavanagh’s mind than did the words of Abelard. A woman’s words. For Abelard, hadn’t the absolute come down to his feeling for a woman? Or was that Héloïse, in her feeling for a man? Kavanagh was struck by his own ignorance—how little he knew of these lovers, or any lovers. Across hundreds of hours, in the darkened booth on the priest’s side of the Confessional, he had heard described every variation in the eternal saga of man and woman, but he knew as little of its deeper meaning as he did, well, of God’s. The Absolute? He was struck, too, by his own distance from any sense of that word’s meaning, whatsoever.

  Had he presented himself falsely to the Frenchwoman at The Cloisters? The intensity of her declaration came back to him, the fierceness of her interest “Abelard finds it possible to stand against the whole world—for the world. For the human, and for the holy—both! How was that? What sort of faith makes that possible? I have never discussed this with a priest.”

  He was a “priest”—okay. But he was not remotely what she meant when she used that word. Of course, he’d presented himself falsely. To escape the shame of that recognition, Kavanagh lit a cigarette, distracting himself with the business of the match, the flame, the ashtray. But the train of thought ran on: The human and the holy—two realms in each of which he had, separately, constructed the fittings of a life, but the human and the hol
y both? What did he know of the realm in which they were joined? Nothing.

  It was nine o’clock. He stubbed out his cigarette, paid his bill, and returned to the hotel lobby, for the phone booth. From Information, he got the number of the Sparta Township Chamber of Commerce. To the woman answering, he introduced himself as a prospective home-buyer interested in school options for his teenaged son. Private school, he said, close to Lake Durham, if possible. And that was how Kavanagh learned of Saint Aiden’s School, for boys in grades seven through twelve. “They take boarders,” the Chamber woman said, “but with you living in the area, you won’t want that. They have some day students. It’s Protestant, if that matters to you. College prep. Ivy League. Like that.” Kavanagh thanked her, and marveled, once again, at how easy it was to lie.

  —

  LAKE DURHAM, he read, was the largest private man-made body of water in New Jersey, with its westernmost shore just kissing the Pocono foothills that ran on into Pennsylvania. On that day, the lake was salted with whitecaps, running with the wind directly toward him. He stood near the town information board, on the edge of a tiered boardwalk. The planned community, a first of its kind, had been created by highflyers before the Crash, and, for the most part, it had maintained itself as an enclave of privilege ever since. Under bright sunshine, the lake rolled on for distant miles, in the bowl of hills that, with sharp peaks and jutting ledges, evoked an Alpine fantasy, although in miniature. Large houses—mansions—dotted the hills, dozens of them. The place looked to be a kind of inland Newport.

  It had taken nearly two hours to drive here from New York. He was dressed now in the plaid shirt he’d worn under his rabat, and the windbreaker he’d tossed in the backseat of the car. The town center behind Kavanagh was defined, along the boardwalk, by a row of shops and offices in joined buildings that reiterated the Alpine motif, with steep roofs, timber-and-stucco siding, and fancifully cut gingerbread trim. At each end of the row stood a massive, multi-story chalet, each with exterior wooden stairs and craft-worked balconies. From the sharp peaks of both chalets wafted long red-and-blue pennants, showing the wind, despite the cloudless sky, for the near gale that it was.

  Beyond the town center, the land sloped gradually away from the lake and its ring of hills, leveling out into pastures set off by pristine white fencing. Horses could be seen nibbling at the shorn November grass. Jump railings dotted the fields. Along the boardwalk, closer, town-and-country ladies in jodhpurs and hacking jackets crossed from the stores toward a parking lot and station wagons. The entire scene struck Kavanagh as a high-pedigree dream village. The only thing missing was a train set with railroad trestles and crossing posts ready to flash, ring, and bring down pole gates.

  The hills, the bowl, the lake, the Alpine town, the fenced-off horse farms—all of it was, in addition to being so smugly itself, an exquisite setting for Saint Aiden’s School, which stood at the far terminus of the boardwalk, on the other side of the hundred-foot-long river dam that held in place the water of Lake Durham. Through a sluice in that distant end of the dam crashed a waterfall over which, as it did everything in sight, presided the main school building. It was a Victorian version, in dark granite, of a sprawling Norman castle, with a pair of crenellated towers from each of which proudly flew—there, too—a red-and-blue pennant. On the two visible sides of the building, expansive lawns sloped down to the lake, meeting it at a cuticle-shaped beach, where overturned sailboat hulls were arranged like piano ivories. A neo-Gothic chapel shared one remote stretch of grass with a U-shaped building—a dormitory?—which also featured blocked granite and arched leaded windows. In the distance, beyond the castle, rose a tall chimney, suggesting a stand-alone powerhouse. From back there, Kavanagh heard the faint pop of what sounded like a gunshot.

  He followed the curving walkway up to the main building’s large oaken door, which was so well balanced on its pins that it opened easily. Inside, in an office to the left, was the receptionist. She was a pleasant-looking young woman, standing at a bookshelf behind the desk, about to insert a volume into a set of matching books. When she saw Kavanagh in the threshold, she started to smile, but checked herself, assuming a willed solemnity. “Mr. Rohan?” she said.

  “No, no. I’m not.”

  “Oh. I was expecting Mr. Rohan. A parent.”

  “I’m just passing by,” Kavanagh said. “I thought I’d stop.”

  Now the woman smiled, patently pleased to be able to do so. “Oh, that’s nice. Visitors are always welcome here.”

  “Thank you. Actually, I’ve dropped in, hoping to see an old friend. He’s a teacher here. John Malloy.”

  “Oh.” Once again her face darkened. “Yes, well…”

  “I know it’s a bad time. Classes are meeting, I assume.”

  “Yes. It’s fourth period. Normally, Mr. Malloy would be in class, but…” She channeled her worried uncertainty into the act of pushing the volume into its place on the shelf.

  Not knowing what else to do, Kavanagh waited her out. She said, “Mr. Malloy is out on the track, with Tommy Rohan. They are waiting for Tommy’s father, who’s coming to pick him up.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t want to interrupt. Is it okay if I just wander around the grounds a bit? It’s beautiful here.”

  She did not answer. Kavanagh realized he had intruded on something, without any sense of what it was, but Mr. Malloy seemed to be involved. The young woman clearly had no authority, and he did not want her calling on someone who did. He backed out of the room. “I’ll check in another time,” he said. Leaving the building, he noticed in the foyer now what he had missed before—a midsized steamer trunk, a pair of suitcases, a braced tennis racket leaning on the trunk.

  He wandered out into the grassy campus, and nonchalantly made his way across the lawns that led behind the castle. He saw the track, a great gray oval with a facing pair of goalposts as its elliptical focal points. The track and football field centered the even broader set of wide-open athletic fields that stretched off into the distance—including a pair of baseball diamonds, and a second football field. The expanse of green was broken only by a large boxlike building, up a slight incline from the track. That would be the field house. Looming over one side of the scene stood a monumental oak tree, with its gray cloud of bare branches. On the track beyond the tree, a lad in sweats could be seen crouched at starting blocks, the only runner in the middle of half a dozen lanes. Close by stood a lean man in a tweed suit and fedora, with his arm raised above his head. The only figures in the panorama, they seemed, at this distance, delicate, unreal. Kavanagh heard the pop again, a gunshot, and the boy took off, sprinting down the center lane. The man had fired a starter pistol.

  After running perhaps fifty yards, the boy slowed, then stopped.

  “Better,” the man called to the boy, and the wind carried the word back to Kavanagh, who knew, despite the man’s facing away, that it was Runner. He called, “Let’s go again!”

  The boy turned and jogged back to the blocks. Once more, he took his position, arched up, froze, waited. Runner raised the gun, and fired. Smoke puffed from his hand. The boy leapt forward into his sprint. After a dozen paces, as before, he pulled up. Malloy called something else again, words lost in the wind.

  Kavanagh drew nearer, instinctively heading for the tree, which he kept between himself and his old friend. The boy glanced Kavanagh’s way once, but took no notice.

  Regretting the surreptitiousness of it, Kavanagh took up a place by the tree to watch. The drill continued: gunshot, jump, sprint, return; gunshot, jump, sprint, return. Shaving milliseconds off the completed dash was only one of the drill’s purposes; winning the start was part one of winning the race.

  Kavanagh was close enough to sense Runner’s benign patience, and the sprint athlete’s willing determination. But as he watched, Kavanagh saw that the boy, when he wasn’t running, seemed high-strung, electric with nervousness, his arms jostling and tics jolting his head. Only once settled into his crouch, at the blocks, did he
seem capable of focus. Into the instant before the start he poured concentration and discipline that seemed otherwise to elude him.

  But if Runner was the coach, why was he in street clothes? Once more, Kavanagh was struck by his tailoring—the three-piece tweeds, the stylish hat, ankle boots. In the outdoor setting, from that distance, Runner came off as a gentleman farmer, but Kavanagh recalled from the other morning his ravaged face, his bloodshot eyes, misery etched into the way he carried himself. From where Kavanagh stood now, though, he could not see Runner’s face.

  Out of the wind, from behind Kavanagh, came the sharp cry, “Tommy!” It carried across the distance with urgency, and anger. The boy came up from his crouch at once, and he looked toward the voice with an expression both forlorn and frightened. Kavanagh turned, and saw crossing toward the track a pair of hatless men, one in a flapping tan topcoat, the other in a dark business suit. They took no more notice of Kavanagh, by the tree, than Malloy had. The man in the topcoat had rage in his face as he closed in on the boy.

  I feared in the end—Abelard’s words popped into Kavanagh’s mind—some more heavy revenge.

  Kavanagh guessed that this was Mr. Rohan, come to collect his son. The trunk and suitcases at the door suggested an expulsion, which would account for the father’s anger. Yet, if the boy was leaving the school, why was Runner still coaching him?

  The man charged toward the track, but before he reached the boy, Malloy stepped in his way. That Malloy was still holding the starter gun made the scene seem dangerous. Malloy spoke, but Kavanagh could not hear. The boy’s father, if that’s what he was, attempted to step past Malloy, but Malloy blocked him again. The boy shrank back. The third man began to berate Malloy, then to plead with Mr. Rohan. Among the words that Kavanagh caught were “…disgruntled Latin teacher…track coach…don’t listen to him…” The loud phrase that came most distinctly from John Malloy, addressed to the parent, was “Not true! Not true!” A moment later, Malloy turned to the other man and repeated it, more angrily.