The Cloister

by James Carroll

  He never saw the blade with which, in one cut, his penis and scrotum were severed from his body. The pain was as brief as it was intense, because he lost consciousness. With blood rushing out of the gash between his legs, he began to die.

  —

  HÉLOÏSE, FROM HER place in the women’s balcony in the Cathedral, took the alarm from Peter’s absence at Lauds. Straining to find his familiar profile among the Canons in the sanctuary stalls, she left her place, going to the railing, to concentrate on those figures whose cowls had been drawn forward. But he was not among them.

  At the garden wall—his absence there!—she knew. She rushed to his rooms. She found him awash in blood, barely breathing. Oddly, a feeling of cold calm came over her—exactly what was required. Lifting and turning him, she quickly found the gaping wound between his legs. Wadded knots of the woolen blanket haphazardly bunched at his groin had enabled a partial clotting that had slowed the outflow, allowing him to live, but now the blood began to rush again. Clamping down on the bolt of her own nausea, she concentrated on stanching the bleeding with strips of cloth torn from her own underskirts. She dropped him half out of the bed, with his head and shoulders on the floor, to raise his waist above his heart. She steadied him there.

  She rushed out into the Cloister arcade just as a trio of students were entering from the lane. One was Tomas Clare, a favorite of Peter’s, and another was Theobald of Blois—a pair of Peter’s protégés. Her sharp commands brought them to his room. Her example showed them how to ignore their own horror to tend to him, and her instruction told them how to prop him on the pallet, and turn its frame into a carry bench.

  She led them from the porch, into the arcade, past the Chapter House, out of the Cloister, through the garden, into the streets, which were only then, as light crested the rooftops above, beginning to bustle with the morning market. She knew just where to go.

  The young men took care to move Peter without jostling. He was their worshipped hero. Once Héloïse turned her back on them to lead the way, they began to exchange urgent oaths—swearing to see their Master avenged. As they crossed through the stinking fishmongers’ quarter, with its crowd of busy stall-keepers, she whipped around to silence the boys, but was taken aback when Tomas Clare barked at her, “It was Canon Fulbert, was it not?” Instead of answering, she faced away again, to push through the growing crowd.

  At the Jew’s house, she banged on the door. “Please, Your Holiness! Please!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Gongless cow bells, silenced cuckoo clocks, empty oxen yokes, and pewter-capped beer steins lining shelves too high to reach—the Swiss Alps was a profane sanctuary to kitsch. The waitress wore a smocked dirndl dress with puffed sleeves and an apron edged with tiny rosebuds. She was a pretty redhead, utterly at ease in her costume. The lunch crowd had drifted out into the early afternoon, leaving the booths and tables, mainly, to the shadows. Kavanagh nursed a beer, taking the place in, trying to remember when he’d last been in a dive in daylight. Not a dive, he corrected himself, but not so different from the Shamrock or Duffy’s.

  John Malloy’s arrival, when it came, was an event. He swept into the place like an owner, with hi-signs in two directions, and a stop at the jukebox, after which wall speakers jumped to life with the first propulsive notes of Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.” Malloy half danced to the booth where Kavanagh waited, and he slid onto the bench with a small hitch in his shoulders that honored the music. It all seemed natural enough, but, given the contrast with his demeanor at Saint Aiden’s, Kavanagh sensed that his old friend’s snappy air was fake.

  Kavanagh reached up a hand, and they shook. The aroma of Old Spice cologne hit him, the detail he’d first noticed at Good Shepherd. “I’d say welcome, but who am I to welcome you here? Home court, obviously.”

  As if to underscore the point, the waitress promptly placed a V-shaped cocktail glass on the table. “Rob Roy, sweet, Mr. Malloy.”

  The glass was brimming. Rachel Vedette’s Historia was on the table between them. Kavanagh moved it aside, to protect it from a splash. Malloy seemed not to notice.

  “Thanks, Daisy.” Malloy’s smile was endearing, if still not quite authentic. Kavanagh was struck, in these shadows, by how laddered his friend’s face had become—wrinkles, creases, and ridges climbing up the bones of his cheeks, past his eyes, to a heavily furrowed forehead. The skin was flushed, but his crows’ feet featured tiny white claws, as if a permanent squint had kept an otherwise scorching sun at bay. He was a faded athlete whose world-weariness lent him, ironically, an eccentric glamour. In his brown tweeds, natty tan shirt, and perfectly knotted wool tie, he could, even with that face, have been a fashion model: Anglo-Decadence, Clothing and Apparel.

  “Listen to those rails a-humming, Mike,” he said, raising his glass to the swing. “In honor of Inwood.”

  Kavanagh lifted his beer, to clink. He said, “Good Shepherd would be marooned without the A Train.”

  “ ‘A Train’ equals Harlem,” Malloy replied. “Who’d have thought the Darktown Express runs all the way to the Emerald Isle?”

  “You would have—the other day. You took the A Train.”

  Kavanagh’s comment stopped Malloy. He said, “What the hell, Mike?” Apparently, the “other day” was not on the table yet. That quickly, Malloy’s jovial air was gone.

  They watched their drinks. They listened to the Duke’s music, the depth of longing, Sugar Hill, the excited rush of uptown dreams.

  Kavanagh said at last, “Did you get to the boy’s father?”

  “Yes.” Malloy grimaced. “Tommy hadn’t told him about Camden. I was about to stumble into it. With a glance, the kid pleaded with me to hold my fire—not my place to lay the thing out. Tommy has to do that.”

  “Why does the father think his son is being expelled?”

  “Booze. Cigarettes. Curfew. Grades. Call it—the usual. All true, as a matter of fact. The kid is a mid-century Bolshevik, or a slow-motion nervous breakdown. Take your pick. The only thing he’s on top of is track.”

  “You.”

  Malloy shrugged and sipped. He said quietly, “Camden. Walt Whitman. Song of Himself, exactly—that teacher fuck. He has to be nailed. I am going to the trustees.”

  “The headmaster won’t block you?”

  “I’ll nail him, too. He just threatened to fire me for being a drunk.” Malloy grinned. “Which, of course, is true. But that won’t stop me. I play tennis with the Board chair—Rodney Evans. A bigger lush than I am. Pulls on his flask between sets.” Malloy took a hefty swallow, then said, “But I start with Mr. Rohan. I asked him back there if I could come visit. Morristown—not that far away. He said yes. I’ll get to Tommy ahead of time, to help him….” Malloy’s voice faltered—no counterfeit breeziness on which to glide. “To be continued, as they say.” He sipped his drink again.

  In the silence now, Kavanagh picked up his smokes. He offered the pack to Malloy, who shook his head no. Kavanagh lit up, saying, “You saw yourself in Tommy?”

  “Tried not to. After Tommy came to me last week, I told you: I put him off. His being gulled was the last thing I could deal with. But a blue rage hit me, and my mind leapt from Tommy right to Father Donovan. Bishop Donovan—Jesus Christ! Bishop! Holy shit, Mike, I went to his office—how stupid was that?” He shrugged. “What did I expect? Same old brick wall. Fucking stiff arm. From there, naturally, I hit a bar on Madison Avenue. Sh-boom! Sh-boom! The next thing I knew, Greenwich Village, here I come. One minute, I’m on my knees in an alley behind a Christopher Street bar, and then…I’m on my knees at the Communion rail in front of you.” He stopped. “I’m sorry I said that, Mike.” He shook his head, staring at his drink. “Oh, man.” Silence, then. When he resumed talking, his voice had dropped. “I have no idea how I got up to Good Shepherd. The A Train, obviously. When I saw you in your vestments…just exuding goodness…as I said, fucking epiphany! The sky opened. I saw. I saw, Mike.”

  “Exuding goodness?” Kavanagh
said quietly. The phrase stabbed him. He didn’t know much, but he knew that, in his case, goodness was beside the point.

  Malloy continued, “In you the other morning I glimpsed, intact, the innocence that was mine once. And, yes, I saw Tommy. I woke up. What am I doing here? I thought. I have to get back to Saint Aiden’s, to stand with that boy. So I took off again. Sh-boom! It was crazy. I admit it.”

  Nor was innocence the point, Kavanagh thought. Something more like willful ignorance. What had Runner called it? Kingdom of the Blind Eye? Kavanagh asked quietly, “How were you and Tommy alike?”

  Malloy stared at his drink. “He had his English teacher. I had Father Quinn.”

  “Father Quinn? At Dunwoodie? The Assistant Rector?”

  “He was Assistant Rector in your day. Before that, he was a teacher at Saint Peter’s—my day.”

  “The junior seminary?”

  “You didn’t go there.”

  “But I knew about it. Upstate someplace.”

  “Glens Falls. Near Albany. Boarding school, natch. I did all four years of high school there, before I knew you.”

  Kavanagh’s breathing had slowed, a function of his wholly focused attention. “At Dunwoodie,” he said, “we passed ourselves off as College Joes, but you Saint Peter’s grads made the rest of us feel like rookies, like we’d missed something. Latin, for example. You guys actually understood it.”

  Malloy said, “You were—what?—eighteen when you entered? At Saint Peter’s, that’s what we called ‘delayed vocation.’ I went in at thirteen. Too young to know the difference between seminary and cemetery, which is what I kept calling it.”

  “Thirteen is very young.”

  “Fucking kidnapping.”

  “Except your mothers were thrilled.”

  “At Saint Peter’s, Father Quinn was our Pat O’Brien, the fantasy priest, movie star….” Malloy’s voice had softened, taken on a disembodied tone. “He called us his Knights of the Round Table, and we loved it. Total magnetism. Masculinity. A jock.”

  Kavanagh could not picture it. He said, “The priests at Dunwoodie were removed—”

  Malloy shook his head. “At Saint Peter’s, he was King Arthur….We were his good soldiers of Christ, the cross and the sword, him on a horse, leading the charge.”

  “And you—?”

  “His chosen squire! In my mind, I held his fucking stirrup. I polished his armor. Beginning when I was fifteen…Tommy’s age.”

  “Why don’t I know about this?” Kavanagh stubbed out his cigarette, sharply.

  Malloy shrugged. “ ‘We few. We happy few.’ You weren’t one of us. ‘We band of…little boys.’ I served his Mass in the side chapel every morning during the school year. During the summer, I was head counselor at the choristers’ camp he ran at Lake George. Do you remember that?”

  “I heard of it.”

  “Then I graduated to Dunwoodie. Yonkers is a long way from Glens Falls, or so I thought. I expected to feel homesick for him, but in fact I felt free. I did not know until then how much I’d longed to get away. I didn’t know shit from Shinola, but I knew that I’d been released. I loved Dunwoodie.”

  “That’s how I remember you. Your loving the place helped me to love it.”

  “And then…when we were in First Theology—”

  “What, two years later?” Kavanagh’s memory quickened. He saw the place, the long, highly polished corridors, the gloomy chapel, Father Quinn striding into the refectory like a procession of one. “Quinn showed up at Dunwoodie as Assistant Rector.”

  “Three years later,” Malloy corrected.

  “I remember the impression he made,” Kavanagh said. “You could focus a camera on the part in his slicked-back hair.”

  “Brylcreem.” Malloy snorted.

  “Man’s man. Priest’s priest.” Kavanagh paused, then added, “Not to me, though. I didn’t get the glow. He put me off; I didn’t know why.”

  Malloy shrugged. “I remember that about you—your skepticism about Father Quinn. You kept your distance.”

  “Struck me as vain, his hair just so.”

  “Do you remember, one afternoon on the golf course, when I asked you to wait with me, while the other guys stowed their clubs?”

  “No.” Kavanagh leaned forward. What was this?

  “I was desperate to talk to someone,” Malloy said quietly. “I wanted to talk to you….” His voice trailed off.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “You didn’t wait,” Malloy said, with a hint of accusation. But he shrugged. “The chapel bell had rung.”

  “Christ, John, we played golf dozens of times. You could have…Why didn’t you stop me again?”

  He shook his head. “At a certain point, talking about it was not an option. Not with you. Not with anyone.”

  “What was it, Runner? What did you want to tell me?”

  “There it is again. ‘Runner.’ ”

  Kavanagh lit another cigarette, unsure what to say. What an unseeing youth he’d been.

  After a time, Malloy said quietly, “At Dunwoodie, he left me alone at first. But just knowing he was back in my life undid me. He’d catch my eye at Meditation. He’d wink. Sure enough, one day he stopped me during the bustle after Sunday Mass. He put his finger to his lips, which I knew meant, Wait for the others to leave the sacristy.

  “I recall thinking, Pretend you don’t understand and get out, too. But I waited. And then we were alone. He drew close to me. I remembered from before the particular aroma that clung to his cassock: part tobacco, part Burma-Shave. His eyes were moist. He said in a whisper, ‘Johnny, you’ve hurt my feelings.’ My heart sank. Just fucking sank. I’d hurt his feelings: those three words defined my worst nightmare. What had I done to hurt his feelings? But I knew! I fucking knew! I had hated him—that’s what. It was my deepest secret, but somehow he knew it. But of course he knew it, since he was the instrument of the Holy Ghost, who could read all minds. The Holy Ghost, the little turtledove, had told Father Quinn how I despised him. No—worse!—how I wanted him dead.”

  Malloy stopped, a faraway look in his eyes. His voice had become even quieter, and Kavanagh realized that he himself had leaned forward, to hear. His own face was only a few inches from Malloy’s.

  Malloy continued, “But, Mike…Mike…do you know what I said when he told me I’d hurt his feelings? I said, ‘Oh, Father, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ ” Malloy now was almost whispering, his words weighted and slow. “Jesus Christ, Mike…‘I’m sorry.’ How fucked up is that?”

  “It’s fucked up, John.”

  Malloy nodded. “ ‘I forgive you, Johnny,’ Quinn said. Then he went on to explain that at Dunwoodie things would have to be different between us. As Assistant Rector, he couldn’t be seen as having favorites, so we would have to be careful, since—‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course!’—I would always be his favorite.”

  Malloy stopped abruptly. Kavanagh had an impulse to tell him he needn’t go on, but then recognized the impulse as itself the problem. He said nothing.

  “At Dunwoodie…” Malloy was staring at his hands. He’d fallen into an inexpressive monotone. “I couldn’t be his private altar boy anymore, but I could be one of his designated acolytes—the Holy Hours two or three evenings a month, sacred moments in the night, which were the Introibo to the liturgy that mattered, afterward, when all the others had drifted from the sacristy.” Malloy stopped again. Kavanagh realized that the inexpressive monotone was itself the expression. He thought Malloy had finished.

  But a moment later, Malloy continued, with the same dull cadence. “ ‘We must put away childish things,’ Father Quinn told me, which meant putting away the shy fondling that had defined our intimacy at Saint Peter’s. Now we built the Temple of the Holy Ghost with the temples of our whole bodies.” Malloy looked up sharply, meeting Kavanagh’s eyes. “ ‘Hoc est enim Corpus Meum,’ he would whisper as he pushed into me. Not into me, but into the Body of Christ, which, he told me and told me and told
me, is what I had become.” Malloy stopped speaking, but he held Kavanagh’s eyes.

  Kavanagh longed to look away, but did not dare to. He leaned back, too stunned to speak.

  Malloy said, “I’m sorry, Mike.”

  “Jesus, John! Don’t say ‘sorry’ to me!”

  “But it’s true. I am sorry!” Tears had spilled onto Malloy’s cheeks again. “I should have said no to him. At Dunwoodie, I could have said no.” Malloy pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, a cauterizing gesture he had used before. When he took his hands away, he was nearly in control.

  Kavanagh said, “You were my best friend. I thought I knew everything that mattered about you. I knew nothing.”

  “I did not know it about myself, Mike. With Father Quinn, I was someone else. That’s all. I was two different people. The one you knew—”

  “Runner.”

  “All right, ‘Runner.’ There was Runner, and there was ‘Johnny.’ ”

  “I never heard you called ‘Johnny.’ ”

  “No one called me ‘Johnny’ except Father Quinn.”

  “But then what happened?”

  “It took two years. Finding someone to tell.”

  “I’m sorry that wasn’t me.”

  “You’d have been disgusted. As you are now.”

  “Not disgusted with you.”

  “So, obviously, since I was dutifully submitting to the Sacrament of Penance every Saturday—to Father Quinn, for Christ’s sake—elaborately ticking off my litany of venial sins…well shit, what about my ongoing mortal sin? Debauchery committed by concubinus clerici, sacrilege raised to the power of infinity—and then not referred to in the Sacrament of Penance, because my Confessor himself was my socius carnalis. Do you see what good use I make of my Latin?” Malloy forced a grin that itself seemed degenerate, creepy. He quickly squelched the grin.

  Kavanagh could not think what to say.

  Malloy went on, “But that spring of Third Theology, our class was about to get ordained to the Deaconate. Remember that? Crossing the Rubicon. Holy Orders, at last. Our own perpetual vow of celibacy. My morals were in shreds, but still I couldn’t do it. A solemn oath before God? I was to vow chastity for life? How about chastity for one night? I could not fucking take that oath. So I found another Confessor.”