“It’s allowed,” he said. “Especially to discuss theology.”
That he laughed seemed off to her.
“Anyway,” he said, “here we are.” He offered her a cigarette. She took it, and leaned to the flame. As she exhaled, she tugged absently at the edge of her turban. Her sleeve, having come loose from the elastic band that held it, began to fall from her upraised arm, baring her wrist. She lowered her hand promptly. It fell to her book. “So?” she asked, implying the text.
“Astounding,” Kavanagh said.
“You did not know of them?”
“I knew their names, of course. But I told you, we studied Saint Bernard, not Abelard. And Héloïse, to us, was a temptress.”
“And now?”
“As I say, astounding. Humanism and mysticism, you said. And I see what you mean. The human and the holy. Very human. Very holy. All the letters. But what strikes me most is his initiating letter—his misery. He calls it the story of my misfortunes.”
“Calamity. The word is stronger than ‘misfortune.’ Catastrophe.”
“Okay. But what a contrast to her devotion. She is unrelenting. She refuses to see their story the way he does. She regrets nothing—except their separation. She loved him, totally. There’s the astonishment: Héloïse.”
Rachel was aware of his intensity of feeling, and saw that a blush had come into his face. She herself felt strangely awkward. But they were discussing lovers whose depth of passion had made them immortal. Why should such discussion not be awkward? Yet she found it possible to reply, in her usual docent-tone, “He learns from her—constantly—but, as she insists, it all starts with him. His Historia demands that we measure what we believe against what we actually experience.” Rachel used a teacher’s gesture, overturning her hand. “Experience over doctrine. Like Galileo, but five hundred years earlier. Abelard is the first ‘modern.’ In fact, he may have invented the word, taking off from modo, the Latin for ‘now.’ ”
“Ah. There’s the rub.” The priest nodded, and with his hand—as if replying to hers—he waved dismissively. “ ‘Modern’ is a word the Church distrusts to this day. We have a heresy called ‘Modernism.’ I had to take an oath against it.”
She laughed. “Mon Dieu. An oath against Abelard.” The thought threw Rachel off. She took the reactionary character of Catholicism for granted, but in America she had not brushed up against it quite this closely. It was hard to square the priest’s evident goodwill with his apparent readiness to surrender good thinking. But, then, which was more important? In a voice free of judgment, she said, “His thought would still be contentious, then.” She added, “And Héloïse would still be prompting him to act. His love for her took the form of great courage, a magnificent struggle against his critics in the Church.”
“Saint Bernard.”
“Precisely. Known as the White Monk.”
“Heresy, you said the other day. About the Jews.”
“Yes.”
“But he does not mention Jews in this book.”
“True.” She idled her cigarette. How to put this? “But the Historia Calamitatum shows the basis of his rare empathy,” she explained—docent still. “Reflecting on his own suffering, he comes to see suffering itself as a sign of God’s grace—not punishment. When he argues that God is close to the brokenhearted, and then when he looks about at the most brokenhearted of all God’s creatures…” Despite herself, an unwanted emotion edged into her voice. Part anger, yes; but also part hurting wonder. How could these things have happened? How can I be speaking of them? “The first pogroms in Europe had occurred just then. Crusaders, rushing through the Rhineland en route to the Holy Land, attacking, first, the ‘infidel near at hand.’ Thousands upon thousands of Jews murdered in the name of Christ. Just then.”
“By Crusaders? Why don’t I know about this?”
“That is a good question, Father,” she said with unwilled bitterness. She let the silence fall. One beat. Two beats. Three. Then she said, “Some local prelates denounced those attacks. Others encouraged them. But Abelard did something else entirely. He said that God is with the murdered Jews. With the Jews, Father! Do you hear me?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Not with their attackers. That changes everything.”
“I see that. I do.”
She checked herself. This man was not an attacker. She need not be a defender, therefore. Instructing again, she said, “Abelard takes the implications up in another work that might have been written later.”
“What work?”
“Collationes, or Dialogue Between a Jew, a Philosopher, and a Christian, which is unique for engaging the conflict not between Church and synagogue, which had defined the entire genre for a thousand years. The antagonists here are the Jew and the philosopher; their argument is over the relation between reason and morality; and the Jew is given to articulate Abelard’s own ethical position—the primacy of conscience. Do you see this? The Jew speaks for Abelard!”
“I see. Yes.”
“Abelard gives us a Jew to be respected, a peer figure, not one to be baptized, and not one fated for an eternity of hellfire. In this book, written nearly a thousand years ago, the Jew is a kind of hero. And why should Abelard not have been condemned?”
“You’ve thought about this.” Kavanagh’s smile had nothing of the grin about it. He was only appreciative, only impressed.
When she nodded now, she meant it as a kind of thanks. He had been patient with her. He had, perhaps, learned from her. She said, “I can get a copy of the Collationes for you, which is itself a miracle. Unlike the highly romantic Historia et Epistolae, which the poets loved and, you could say, mass-produced, almost no manuscripts of the Collationes survived the twelfth century. After Abelard’s condemnation, it was dangerous not to burn this text. Some heretically inclined monks saved it for us, in secret. By now, of course, I can get a copy for you…in English, if you prefer.” She smiled, briefly.
Kavanagh laughed. “Is my mulishness with Latin that obvious?”
But she was still intent on what she was saying. “The mental spaciousness went beyond his kind portrayal of a Jewish character. Abelard attacked the ideology that made attacks on Jews inevitable. Not ideology. ‘Theology.’ He invented that word, too. Did you know that?”
“No. How do you know it?”
“I told you: my father….” The thought of him made her stop. As she put the cigarette to her lips, she saw that her fingers were trembling slightly. In this priest’s presence, she was strangely buffeted by an unprecedented impulse to reveal herself, which, at this moment, meant revealing her father and her father’s hero. “I told you,” she repeated. “I was my father’s helper. At Cluny, he tracked down other writings by Abelard, records of disputations and councils; anonymous treatises; and notations of his students. Abelard inevitably criticized Jews for rejecting Christ, and my father’s Catholic critics emphasized that. But my father saw that Abelard’s innovation went further—to the very idea of God. His concern was with God, which is why he coined that word. Theology. For Abelard, everything follows from the first principle: The Creator loves what the Creator creates. Creation itself is God’s act of love.”
“You said something like that the other day,” Kavanagh recalled, “that we’re ‘saved by virtue of being created.’ No Church is needed. No Jesus. Just Creation.”
“Including Jews.”
The priest said nothing to that, and for a moment Rachel feared that he’d taken offense—or, worse, that he was appalled.
But then he spoke, and she saw that she was wrong. He said quite simply, “The idea stuck with me. I tried to work that…expansiveness…into my sermon this morning. Not successfully.” Now his smile did have the aspect of a grin, and she was relieved to sense his self-deprecation. “At Good Shepherd,” he continued, “the pews were full of blank stares.”
“It is not such a hard idea,” Rachel said softly.
“Actually, for us…it is. Jesus matters. Obv
iously. I mean, matters to us.”
“Of course. But your theology, avec tout mon respect, mon père, follows from a fork in the road; a fork lit up by burning texts. There was another way to go at that fork, one the Church chose not to take.” She extinguished what little remained of her cigarette. “That, at least, is what my father saw. He wanted the Catholics of France, of his own time, to claim this great Catholic champion from another time.”
“Because of what was happening to Jews in your father’s time.”
“Obviously,” Rachel said, picking up his word. “Which was my time, too.” She regretted the edge in her voice as soon as she heard it. But she had stopped herself from saying “when more than texts were burned.” She disliked herself. She was lecturing this man—had been lecturing him all along.
After a long silence, Kavanagh asked, “What was your father’s name?”
“Saul Vedette. A professor at the Sorbonne.”
“Jacques Maritain was at the Sorbonne. The Catholic philosopher. He was a big deal in our seminary studies.”
“My father knew him. Perhaps they were friends—I do not know. Once the Germans came, Professor Maritain fled to New York. Had he stayed in Paris, he might have helped my father—unlike those who remained. I do not know. Back then, getting out, Professor Maritain saw what I failed to see. My father and I stayed in Paris because we thought we needed medicine from the nearby chemist, but of course there are many ways to get medicine—as I learned.” She paused, blanking from her mind that particular memory. Then she said, “We could have left. There came a moment when, had I insisted”—she blanked, as well, the hate-filled face of the bald inquisitor, in the threshold of their apartment—“my father would have agreed to leave. I misread the moment, and encouraged him to stay—to continue with his great work. I failed to imagine what was coming, at the start…” She looked away, then added, more quietly, “…and at the finish.”
A silence fell between them then.
For a moment, she feared that she was sounding like a Catholic penitent, in one of their darkened booths. It panicked her to think the priest would now be pressing a Confessor’s questions—questions about her. But to her surprise, he asked simply, “Medicine?”
“My father was diabetic.”
“What happened to him?”
Rachel clasped her hands, a decisive gesture of self-protection. She knew it was impossible for her to answer. She knew, also, that, with unwilled coyness, she had made that unspeakable question inevitable. Not dislike, but loathe. She loathed herself.
—
KAVANAGH SENSED THAT his question about her father had shut her down. Yet his inquiry had seemed natural, the result of an instinctive pastoral feel for what she herself had wanted to discuss—a direct line from Abelard and his fate to Saul Vedette and his. But not so.
He let his eyes drift around the tidy coffee shop. The other tables, as usual, were empty. The waitress was hovering behind the counter, intermittently eyeing the clock and idling through a magazine. He brought his gaze back to Rachel Vedette, who was focused on smoke rising from his cigarette in the ashtray. He said, “Professor Vedette sounds like a very special man.”
She did not react.
He said, “May I tell you about my father?”
Rachel looked up, surprise having brightened her face. “No one in America has ever said that to me.”
“Pop was not special, except to us. His kids. Big Irish family. He was a lumper.” Registering her quizzical look, he added, “A stevedore. We lived on Thirty-Eighth Street, Hell’s Kitchen, near the West Side docks. That’s been prettified by now, with a stretch of midtown piers for the big liners, mostly. Swell people wanting to arrive back from the Grand Tour within a short cab ride of the Plaza. Before the war, the dock trade was farther south, in Chelsea. Pop would show up at the wharves in the morning without a job, hoping to be tapped. Three days out of five, he would be. Unloading everything from steamer trunks to furniture to automobiles to bricks of salted meat and smoked fish. I can still smell the stench off my father’s overalls—everything from motor oil to mackerel. But if he were here, he would sum up a lifetime of lashing barrels and hooking crates by telling you he helped unload the ship that had plucked survivors out of the sea after the Titanic.”
“The Titanic?” Her surprise was complete.
“Yes. He never stopped talking about that day. Forty thousand New Yorkers showed up to stand on the docks when that accidental rescue ship pulled in, all completely silent. My father was given mooring lines to man. The ship came into its slip with no whistles, no horns, no sounds. They dropped the gangway, he said, without the usual noise. The first ones to disembark were the Titanic people. Pop said it was like watching a line of the walking dead come down the planks. Hundreds of them, many still wearing blankets, like cloaks. Dead people, he said, brought back to life—but barely. Their eyes, he said, were incapable of blinking. Mostly, it was women and children. He never got over it.” Kavanagh stopped. After a moment, he said, “Goodness, how did I veer into that?”
Rachel said, unsteadily, “Yes, I ask myself that. How did you?” She stared at him, deciphering. Then she said, “The image is striking, le débarquement of the dead.” She pulled her own pack of cigarettes from her pocket, and, with an agitation that made him think of her rush from the museum the other day, she had to strike her match repeatedly to get the flame. He recalled the womanly ease with which she’d leaned to his flame earlier, but he now understood that he should hold back from offering a match again. He knew not to intrude on whatever it was that had come over her.
Finally, she regained her composure, and said, “You report that so powerfully. But you were…”
“I was an infant, but that day was famous in our family. The older Pop got, the more he talked about it. He’d mock himself, and say that the shipwreck survivors cured him of the wish to go to sea. But we knew from Mom what a turning point it was. He quit drinking that day. She told us proudly that he never hit her again. He went to Mass every morning after that. Still, he never went up to Communion, because, as he would say, he felt unworthy. Somehow, in his mind, the gangplank-walking dead and his unworthiness were linked. But, in fact, he was a good man, and we all saw it. Odd, but our admiration for him, not to say affection, was tied to the Titanic.” Again, Kavanagh stopped. He was astounded at himself. He had not spoken in this way, of such things, in years—to anyone. But he knew that his thought was unfinished. He said, “We were humble people, but it lent us a kind of grandeur—the Titanic—that such a historic event should have touched us so personally. As I grew up, I would dream about those people, on the gangplank, with their eyes unblinking, as if I’d been there. I had that dream not long ago.”
Rachel said quietly, “A parable of empathy, how a mere glimpse of such suffering changed your father.” She spoke smoothly, having stifled her first reaction. She added, “Perhaps it explains something about yourself?”
Kavanagh laughed, claiming nothing. As if to scale back on the tragic grandiosity of what he’d reported, he resumed speaking, but more mundanely. “I have three sisters, and two brothers. One nun, Sister Teresa; one tugboat captain, Jerry; one office girl, Marie; one Brooklyn housewife, Sheila…Let’s see, how many is that?”
“Four. You have neglected one.”
“My brother Joe.” Kavanagh nodded gravely. “I still count him. He died on Okinawa.”
After a long pause, Rachel asked, “And your parents?”
“Both deceased. My mother died of pneumonia ten years ago, although my sisters swear she died of slow-motion grief. Pop had been taken off by a stroke years before that, but he was always part of us.” Kavanagh fell silent. Then he added, “I am very lucky in my family.”
“I can see that. And your friendships? The man you were seeking? Runner?”
Kavanagh laughed. “He hardly remembered that nickname. It’s so vivid to me, like yesterday. He’s a good man, too. A teacher. He showed up at Good Shepherd last week in the
middle of some personal distress—”
“ ‘Thrown for a loop.’ ”
“Yes, him too.” Kavanagh laughed. “But he’s handling it. For me, seeing him was a big relief. A recovery of something I’d thought I’d lost. Though it gives me some big business to tend to. Whether I can handle it is to be determined.” He raised his brows. “It’s more than you want to know. But, actually, you helped me the other day. I was stuck. And you told me to just get moving, and so then I did.” He moved his hand to her book, covering it. “I brought this with me to New Jersey. You gave it to me, you said, so that we could discuss it. But your book…accompanied me.”
She nodded. “It accompanies me. That is precisely what it does.”
He sensed the block between them—what she would not or could not discuss. But he sensed also that that discussion had, perhaps, begun.
He said, “On Mondays, the biggest ocean liners set sail from the West Side Terminal. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Have you ever seen an ocean liner set sail? It’s a festival. When I was a kid, it’s what we did instead of the circus. It’s still one of the best things in New York.” He grinned. “And it’s free.”
She did not reply.
“The Cloisters museum is closed tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I told you,” he said. “Tomorrow is my day off, too. Would you let me show you? Three long, deafening blasts on the horn. Then the ship inches away from the pier, while all the dockside well-wishers are waving goodbye. The bands are playing. The whistles blow. People laugh and sing, the ship eases out, and when at last it’s gone, everybody cries. It’s grand. Only in New York! Plus, I could take you around my old neighborhood.”
She smiled. Then, after a long time, and more quietly still, she said, “How could I resist, Father?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
To his most beloved Lady, the memory of whom no forgetting can steal away, her most faithful one. May the first time I forget your name be when I no longer remember my own.
The Cloister Page 27
