“Father Donovan?”
“On my knees on the floor in his room, I collapsed. I told him the whole thing. Hoc est enim Corpus Meum—and all. Donovan and the others took it from there. You know the rest.”
“But you were kicked out.”
“Encouraged to see that ‘I did not have a vocation.’ That seemed right to me. I was the occasion of sin. That’s how fucked I was. The whole thing was my fault.”
“You came to my room at dawn. You wanted to tell me.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You told me to go ask Agent why you were leaving.”
“ ‘Agent’! Christ! What was it with the nicknames?”
“He told me you left because of me,” Kavanagh said. “He didn’t mention any of the other horror.”
“Of course not. I was terrified—more than of anything, of you finding out what I was. I just wanted him to tell you that I cared about you. Nothing else.”
“He said you had ‘out of bounds’ feelings for me. He said that was why you had to leave.” Kavanagh paused. He was only now piecing the thing together. “Obviously, he needed to deflect attention away from the real problem. Quinn. Whether you meant him to or not, Donovan used me. Christ! ‘Out of bounds.’ His telling me that made me feel guilty. It panicked me, made me feel that I was…”
“Perverse,” Malloy said with a snort. “There’s the word.”
“But our friendship was the furthest thing from perverse.”
“Not to me, Mike. Here’s the real secret…the real disgrace.” Malloy suddenly drained his glass and held it up, casting his yellow eye about for Daisy. She swooped by and took the glass. He brought his gaze back to Kavanagh, now staring. He said, “When Father Quinn kissed me, it was your face I saw. Et cetera. I’d close my eyes, and it was always you. There’s the grim fact of it, Mike. I dragged you ‘out of bounds,’ without your knowing it. I told Donovan as much, when everything poured out of me. So what Donovan told you was the truth. It did mean I had to leave. Even if Father Quinn had never come to Dunwoodie—I was already bent by then. I loved you, yes. Was in love with you. The purest affection…but still perverse. Bent! I couldn’t be a priest.”
“You’d have been a great priest. What I just saw with Tommy makes the point. I see again—so clearly—what was special about you.” Kavanagh paused while the waitress placed Malloy’s fresh drink in front of him. When she’d gone, Kavanagh leaned forward to say, with careful deliberation, “I would not have dared call what I felt for you ‘love,’ but that’s what it was. After you left, I never felt that way again, about anyone. I clamped down.”
“I clamped down as well, Mike. Ironically, the catastrophe made me chaste. A chaste prep-school teacher, anyway. I’m terrified of acting on my feelings for the boys, and so I never do. Never have. Not even close. We teachers are to protect these lads, not rape them. That’s why what that fucker did to Tommy…what he obviously has done to others…so infuriates me.”
“I see that,” Kavanagh said. Then he added, “So you’re alone?”
Instead of answering, Malloy sipped his drink, savoring it. Then he said, “I’m a Yankee Mr. Chips. I have the school. It’s been enough. I said ‘chaste teacher.’ Emphasis on ‘teacher,’ not on ‘chaste.’ I slip away from Lake Durham now and then, in my cups. I head to Sheridan Square, certain bars where some guy will call me ‘John’ without knowing that’s my name. Good enough. That’s where I headed the other night, after leaving Donovan’s office. Sh-boom.”
Kavanagh edged his cigarette in the ashtray with one hand, fiddled with his glass with the other. Seeing his friend so clearly was seeing, also, himself. He said quietly, “What I’ve realized over these last few days, John…” He paused, letting his friend’s name resonate, briefly. “…is that what I felt back then for you was the best thing about me.”
“But we are not talking about the same thing, Mike. I don’t act on it except furtively and drunk, but I am defined by the erotic pull of men for men. You’re not. You never were.”
“How do you know?”
“Comes with the territory. We can tell. You were the straightest arrow in the quiver, pal. Still are, from what I can see.”
“Maybe not,” Kavanagh said. “I was a navy hospital chaplain. I loved the men I cared for, loved them. But I know what you mean, the difference.” He paused. The straight-arrow image of Jimmy Stewart was what came to mind, the aw-shucks movie star meets Simone Weil, whose name he can’t pronounce. “Still, I’m not as…unbent…as you think,” he said.
“Try me.”
The woman at The Cloisters, his tutor. To his “another time, another place,” the day before, she’d said, in French, “Impossible,” as if he’d propositioned her. The memory mortified him. He could not speak of her. Instead, he said to Malloy, “I am most myself sitting at midnight in a canvas beach chair on the tar-paper roof of the rectory.” He nodded at Malloy’s glass. “Drink in hand.”
“I don’t see you as a drunk, either. I have antennae for that, too. I see you saying Mass, hearing Confessions, anointing the sick. Isn’t that when you’re most yourself?”
“I love all that. It’s what has kept me at it. Not a day goes by that I don’t help someone. At the hospital, I help a lot of people. It’s just that…”
“What?”
He thought of Madison Avenue, the corner behind the Cathedral, how he’d almost fainted. He lifted up his glass, then put it down. “How do you say ‘I do not believe’ in Latin?”
“Non credo.”
“Huh.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I blurted yesterday. I guess I knew what it meant. The opposite of Credo.”
“Si non credimus!” Malloy said. “ ‘We don’t believe.’ I’m with you.”
“No, I’m serious. I’d stumbled into a recognition.”
“That’s how recognition happens, Mike.”
“Has to do with you, actually, your showing up the other day. The sight of you rang in me like a general-quarters alarm—‘Man your battle stations!’ Were you in the navy?”
“No. Infantry. Alabama. Never left the States.”
“Me, either. But ‘haze gray and underway’…ship alarms…We were trained to hear the whole panoply of signals in our sleep. Seeing you that morning was like surfacing when I didn’t know I’d been submerged. I went to my beach chair on the roof that night—battle station on the deck—seeing something, but not knowing yet what. Then I went downtown to Bishop Donovan. I saw that he’d lied to me about you all those years ago. That lie was the rock on which my life was built. Not rock, therefore, but sand. I left his office, and outside, on the avenue, I was ambushed by those two words—Non credo! The loss of faith not in God, but in the Church.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Mike. If you lose faith in one, you lose faith in the other. There is no God without the Church.”
“Then I am in trouble.”
“All this because of a lie fourteen years ago?”
“Donovan is still lying to me.”
“He did not want me talking to you.”
“Obviously,” Kavanagh said. Then he asked, “So what about Father Quinn?”
“I’d never imagined it, but turns out—what I did learn from Donovan—Father Quinn is long dead. Heart attack. A parish in New Rochelle. Seven years ago. You didn’t know that?”
Kavanagh shook his head.
“The Bishop showed me the obituary. He’d kept it in a special drawer.”
“In a manila envelope? ‘RIP’ scrawled across it?”
“Yes.”
“I saw that envelope in the drawer, a pint of bourbon holding it in place. What other obits are in that envelope, do you suppose? I had no idea Quinn was dead. I’d had no reason to keep track of him.”
“I felt nothing at the news….Quinn dead? Turns out I did not give a shit. But I realized that, actually, my issue was as much with Bishop Donovan as with him. Saint Aiden’s School protecting a lecher by tossing Tommy Rohan
overboard—that was my issue now. And, of course, that’s what Father Donovan had done for Quinn, tossing me. A lie as the rock of your life? This was mine. It’s what had blocked me from helping Tommy right away. Made me a coward. It was about time I dealt with it. At the Chancery, I confronted Donovan about Donovan. When I brought you up, he forbade me to get in touch with you. He said the Seal of the Confessional was still in force. What a crock.”
“How odd, John. You start living in the truth, and it forces me to. I left Donovan’s office yesterday, and nearly fainted on Madison Avenue with what I understood. Not just his lie, but my own. Going all the way back to my solemn vows. Even before I knew it, I knew it. Beginning with you. All along, at some level, I’ve known. The life is a lie. Hence my beach chair on the roof.”
Malloy placed his hand on the leather volume. “Hence Abelard?”
“No. That would be something else.”
“Patron sanctorum of lovesick priests and nuns.” Malloy grinned. “You’re not involved with some Mother Héloïse, are you, Mike? Some Sister Marie in the parish school?”
“How stupid do I look?”
“Not very. But I’ve heard the rumors—tunnels between convents and rectories.”
“Also known as sewers. You spout the old slander like a teacher at a tony Protestant prep school.” Kavanagh forced a smile, stubbing out his cigarette, aware that Malloy’s reduction of Abelard and Héloïse, like his own a few days before, was a gross caricature. Malloy’s grin made Kavanagh uneasy. He did not want to bring Rachel Vedette into this. This what? This thicket of malice and deceit.
But no. This was John Malloy. Runner. His best friend, once. And now? Then it hit him. Here was a good man to whom, already, he was explaining himself as he hadn’t to anyone in years. And why should he not keep doing so? “I told you before,” Kavanagh said, “that I’m reading the Historia because of you. When I followed you into the park the other day, I wound up at The Cloisters, where I met a Jewish woman. A museum docent. An expert on the Middle Ages.” He stopped. Why had he characterized her as Jewish, not French? He toyed with the dead butt of his cigarette in the ashtray. Explain himself? But how? Only two things occurred to him: Just as he’d begun to drown, Rachel Vedette had appeared out of nowhere, correcting his pronunciation and offering him rescue. And—her being a woman was incidental to why he’d reached toward her.
He said only, “This book is hers. I have to get it back.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I cannot live like this,” he whispered to her. She was bathing him, leaning close. The steaming cloths had been brought to the boil in the great kettle in the shed behind Prince Isaac’s house. For almost three weeks, Peter had lain amid animal skins and coverlets on the sleeping bunk against the wall. Above him were the shelves holding jars and pots, from some of which had come the healing ointments, and the clotted spiderwebs used to purify the wound.
The room’s table, with its lamp, inkhorn, parchments, and codices had been pushed against the far wall. The Jew, in caring for Peter, had surrendered the room to him, taking his own rest in some other corner of the house. Héloïse had come here from her cousin’s place every day.
She replied to his whisper with one of her own: “Then do not.”
“What?”
“Do not live like this.”
“I am incontinent,” he said, still a whisper, now an admission.
She smiled, indicating the cloth with which she was washing him, if now at his armpit. “I know.” Her method was to respond to his bursts of despair with calm, mundane affirmation. She added, “And Prince Isaac assures you that control of your fluids will return. Why would you doubt him now?”
“I do not.”
“Well, then.”
“You should have let me die.”
“Not true.”
“They thought to kill me….” Peter turned his face to the wall. “But, living, I am punished in the offending part. I am disqualified now from being yours, a fate that is meet and just.”
“The only fate meet and just is what befell my villain uncle’s henchmen.”
“Ah, so now my own lads have joined in the evil. Eye for eye, blade for blade. Manhood for manhood. Where is justice there? One dishonor begets another, ad infinitum. As if the justice of God requires such mayhem. What God is that?”
She answered, “The God who welcomes Christ’s death in atonement for Adam’s sin.”
“No,” he said, “no. I will not hear of it.”
“Then you are deaf, as well as wounded. That is the only God spoken of since Anselm.”
“Anselm is poison to the faith. The honor of God has nothing to do with Christ’s death, which was for love, not appeasement. As for honor, the only honor I care for is yours, and I bespoiled it.”
She turned his upper body, to reach the warm moist cloth below his other armpit. “Are we in the hall of disputation here?” she asked. “Have you—yet again—reduced me to the role of victim in your tragic drama?”
“Do not make light of me, woman.”
“You misunderstand if you sense lightness here. This is simply the refusal to die. My solemn request is that you join me in it, husband.”
“Do not ‘husband’ me.”
“I used to say as much to you—do not ‘wife.’ But that was before your own pronouncement: ‘What therefore God hath joined, let not man tear asunder.’ ”
“But, Héloïse”—he faced her—“this was God. God’s just punishment. I was torn asunder so that our marriage would be torn. Our marriage was false. It was a sin.”
“Never, never will I join you in that belief. If it can be called ‘belief.’ I call it infidelity.”
“Another sin. Which makes my point.”
“Can you roll over?” She dipped the cloth in the steaming vat, and wrung it. “I would rub your back. That, at least, is innocent.”
Behind Héloïse, Prince Isaac had taken a place in the threshold. Peter’s eyes rose to him, and Héloïse turned. The Jew’s white beard struck her, as always, like the white of milk, or of clouds, or of the skin inside her own thighs—which was an admittedly odd association, since the thought was that the whiteness of his beard was a signal of his goodness, his purity. Her thighs, so Peter would tell her now, were impure.
The features of the Jew’s craggy face fell naturally into a consolingly benign expression. Where once she had seen him as Simeon, lately he had been striking her as the Prodigal’s father, a man who could stand looking out at the lost horizon with longing for his lost son, with nothing but love in his eyes. More than ever, given Peter’s mood, Héloïse welcomed the sight of the kind physician.
She said, “You have come to cleanse the dressing.”
“Yes,” Prince Isaac said. “That, too.”
“What else?”
“To make my report to Master Peter. And you should hear it also.”
“No,” Peter said. “Not Héloïse.”
Héloïse said nothing to this. She adjusted herself back from Peter’s bed, to settle on the stool. She let the cloth fall into the steaming vat. She waited.
Prince Isaac, with his three-pointed hat, had to stoop slightly to cross into the room. He remained standing. He addressed himself to Peter. “What I have proposed for you, I know now, seems possible. Lady Héloïse is affected. It is right that she be included in our deliberation.”
Peter touched the sleeve of Héloïse’s gown. “Prince Isaac is leaving Paris. He was meant to depart weeks ago. He put the time off for my sake.”
“Until I was certain that you would sustain yourself,” the Jew said. “Now I believe you will.”
Peter said to Héloïse, “Once I knew what was possible, I was going to tell you.”
Héloïse had clamped down on herself. She turned calmly to the Jew. “Depart, Your Holiness?”
“Yes,” he said. “To Ashkenaz. For the restoration of the Talmudic school.”
Peter said, “The kingdom on the Rhine, Mainz.”
; Héloïse well knew of the place—how the cross-marked berserkers had descended on it, murdering Jews, torching their academies.
Peter pulled at Héloïse’s sleeve, but she remained focused on the Jew. Peter said, “The Rishonim have summoned Prince Isaac. The Rabbis. They are rebuilding the yeshiva on the Rhine.”
Héloïse choked off the alarm she felt, to remain focused on what was in front of her. She said to Prince Isaac, “But Peter is far from well. How can you leave him? He needs your ministrations still. Needs them badly.”
“I am seeing to his future needs,” the Jew said. “The Abbot granted my request for an audience. I have just come from meeting him.”
“What Abbot?” she asked sharply.
“Saint-Denis.”
“Abbot Adam?” Héloïse turned to Peter. “He was one of those preparing the subpoena against you! Forcing your disputation with Bernard!”
Peter said, wearily, “There will be no subpoena now, woman. No disputation.”
Prince Isaac said to Peter, “Father Abbot was surprised that you are alive. The talk of Paris had come to him that you had taken refuge in the Vicus Judaeorum, but he did not believe it. When I explained, he counted your presence here, among the deicidii, as yet another offense.”
“I warned you, Your Holiness,” Peter said.
“But he seemed genuinely relieved to learn of your coming back to health. I believe that he bears you no ill will. Quite the contrary. He told me the best young monks of the entire Benedictine federation count themselves your disciples. The order needs their commitment. Your presence would reinforce it, even if unlicensed. On the terms you propose, he is prepared to welcome you.”
“What terms?” Héloïse asked, with forced calm.
Neither Peter nor Prince Isaac answered.
The Cloister Page 24
