“Sacrificial suffering, sister, looks different to me now. When we were young, life was grand. That changed, for me at least. Now it is in sorrows that I meet the Holy One.”
“Forgive me if I presume to say…one can be too fond of tribulation.”
At last, he turned back to her. “In my case,” he said, “the sorrows are deserved.”
“Because of me?”
“I was properly punished,” he said firmly. “I do not judge what you were. What you are—that is admirable.”
“People who admire me now as chaste do not know what a hypocrite I am. God knows, however. I have not changed since lust defined me. Lust for you.”
His faced burned at her words, at least that. If there had been another chair by her table, she’d have invited him to sit. That he remained standing was making their encounter all too formal. That formality was the hedge behind which he could hide. But what did she expect, using the word “lust”? Even in their heyday, he colored at that.
She went on, “God knows this of me—my unrepentant longing—and still declines to judge. God is no heavenly magistrate, balancing scales, offense against punishment. I learned this from you as well, Peter Abelard. There is no appeasing God, because God does not need appeasement. God is love, pure and simple. That was your lyric.”
“I no longer write songs.”
“Good. You write theology now. Do that, Peter Abelard. Make your case with power. Speak it aloud. Follow your logic wherever it leads. That is what you used to demand of me.”
“And now, demanding it of me, you would see my books burned.”
“No!” She slapped her hand down on the table. “I would see them read! Once read, your words will fly. Your scholars, and then your readers, will see to your vindication, how the logic of Peter Abelard leads inexorably to the One True Faith.”
“Ah, but there you miss the delicate point, sister. What makes me contentious is that I give primacy to logic, not faith. I think! That begins everything. I think! We cannot believe what we do not understand. I am accused of preferring thought to faith—and of that I am guilty. I presume to contradict the great Anselm, who has become holy writ. But I must do it from afar. To hold what I hold is dangerous. That is why I retired from the schools.”
Héloïse heard these words with a heavy heart. The great man of her youth—still emasculated? But sensing his bleak condition opened her, all at once, to her own responsibility. Her role now was to help Master Peter Abelard to be Master Peter Abelard.
She said quietly, “Far off, in the Celtic hinterland, you are living in the past. The future needs you in the present. The Church needs you in the fray. And so do I.”
“Leave the Church aside, sister. What do you need of me?”
“Apart from another form of address than ‘sister’?”
“There can be no other.”
“Then be a Father to the Paraclete. Be our counselor and guide, even if from a distance, and only by your writing.”
“How so?”
“The Rule, for example. Abbot Suger made it clear that our Rule is inadequate.”
“The Rule of Benedict—”
“—is for men. I need a Rule for women, legislating matters from the ridiculous to the sublime.”
“What is ridiculous?”
“Benedict’s Rule forbids underwear. I care not to speak for monks, but nuns need underwear—for one week a month, at least.” She paused, then added with a soft smile, “Once, I could have said such a thing without causing you to blush.”
But she’d misunderstood his embarrassment, as she saw when he said, “I wear underwear, needing it more than once a month.” This reference to a condition caused by his castration silenced her, but only for a moment. She said quietly, “That has never mattered to me.”
“Still, it matters.” He forced a smile. “So much for ridiculous. What is your sublime reason for needing a Rule?”
She wanted simply to stand, and go to him. She wanted to take him in her arms. But she was confused now. Was this feeling the old longing for her lover? Or was it pity? She reined in the emotion to say, with what detachment she could muster, “The Rule for the Abbey of the Paraclete should measure duties and responsibilities of nuns against the duties and responsibilities of the women whom our Lord called as Apostles.”
“Disciples, not Apostles.”
“But you yourself say otherwise, calling Mary of Magdala ‘Apostle to the Apostles.’ Her anointing of Jesus is what made Him Christ, the Anointed One—so you say. Mary is the exemplar of love. Love must be the soul of the Rule. Teach us that! In your writing you deny that women were taken from Adam’s rib! Women, too—directly from the hand of God! Declare that aloud! Construct a Rule on it! Give us the true mysteries of faith! Write to us! I will turn the refectory into the repository of your instruction. At each meal, my postulants will read aloud everything you send. May I depend on it?”
“Yes, sister. You may.”
“Thank you, Peter Abelard.”
She had succeeded in restoring the necessary equilibrium, and so had he. It wasn’t what she wanted, but it was what their condition required if they were to have a future. A future! Enough!
She stood. She came out from behind her table. When he made no move toward her, she simply pointed the way with her hand, and, obedient, he turned. Héloïse walked with him then, but only as far as the pile of stones that would become the garden wall. They parted without touching. As she watched him go, she touched her breast, for the substance of his hidden letter, and for the compact mass of the ring she had from him. She thought, He imagines me as a bride of Christ, but I am a Stoic of Rome.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Rachel Vedette routinely rode the bus from Hoboken into the city, but today, instead of filing with the morning commuters into the tunnel complex of the subway, she found herself strolling in the early afternoon from the bus terminal at Forty-First Street to the western extremity of Fiftieth Street, where, if he was right, she would find Pier 88.
A dusting of snow was swirling about, but the November sky was brightly organized around the yellow haze of an insistent sun, a benign promise that seemed wrong, given the dark weather of her own feelings. What did she want? Why had she agreed to this? She was a fool.
First to appear as she approached the river was neither a moored ship nor the massive terminal he had described but, rather, the hulking elevated highway that cut the city off from its Hudson waterfront. In the shadows of the steel-and-concrete structure, the cobblestone street bustled with trucks and taxis, vying for curb space or pushing into the cavernous cargo halls of the pier storehouses. Men in overalls and caps tugged at dollies or shouldered wheeled carts loaded down with steamer trunks and luggage. At corners, policemen waved and whistled as streams of well-dressed New Yorkers moved at a happy clip through the chilled underworld below the highway. Rachel fell in with them, to all appearances just another gawker come to see a ship set sail. But to her, the scene, extending for blocks, was chaotic, not festive. The frenzy only heightened her sense of dislocation. She had been at these piers once before, but not like this.
Rounding a corner at the last of the looming storehouses, and suddenly emerging from beneath the highway, she found herself in the open, confronted with a long view of a mammoth ocean liner moored to a pier across a broad stretch of harbor backwater. The ship was the size of a Manhattan skyscraper, as if toppled on its side and reaching far out into the river. The hull was black, the decks rising up were white, and from a pair of slanted-back oval-shaped funnels flew lines aflutter with hundreds of triangle pennants—red, white, and blue. Strains of some snappy show tune could be heard drifting from the ship across the distance, and reflections off an orchestra’s brass and silver instruments could be seen to shimmer on the deck just below the captain’s bridge. Tiny figures lined the railings. Emblazoned across the hull, in gleaming white letters amidships, was the word “America.” Now the lightly falling flakes, salting the scene like the flitt
er of a child’s crystal snow-globe, seemed a function of magic. For a moment, Rachel let go of her habitual wariness, releasing herself to the spectacle.
“Amazing, eh?”
She knew his voice at once—Father Michael Kavanagh, speaking from only steps behind her.
She turned. His face was vivid with delight. He seemed slightly winded, having apparently just crossed out from under the girders. He was bareheaded, wearing an open-collared blue shirt, but also, against the chill, a long black topcoat—the outer garb of a priest. At the sight of him, her heart, from its place of uplift, sank.
She was alone on Mondays because solitude was her natural state. His evident accessibility, by contrast, underscored the depth of her reticence, which, in turn, made this defiance of it feel dangerous. Why had she come here? But instead of turning to walk away, she found it possible to say, “Hello, Father.”
Her diffidence was nothing to him, nor, she realized then, had his elation to do with her. His eyes were on the ship. He seemed younger than before. “She casts off in less than an hour,” he said. “We should make our way over there, to the port-side dock, where the send-off gang gathers. That’s us.” Now he looked at her, grinning. She sensed that he was going to take her by the elbow, but instead he pointed, “Here come the tugboats.”
He led the way through the crowd, moving gracefully, a man accustomed to deference but not forcing it. He was easy to follow. They lost sight of the ship as they drew even with a three-story red-brick building with a flamboyantly carved pediment reaching skyward above a columned portico—the marine terminal, standing between the endpoint of the pier and the street. They joined a line patiently filing through the terminal gate and out onto the dock. When Kavanagh and Rachel cleared the entrance, the first thing that registered, immediately to the left, was the looming bow of the ship. Seen up close and from below, it seemed more like a mammoth black wall than the graceful cutwater Rachel had seen from the distance. But then, coming fully onto the pier, as its planks broadened and ran out into the water for nearly the entire length of the SS America, Rachel saw the most startling vista of all: down from the soaring decks of the ship were drifting dozens—hundreds; no, thousands—of delicate ribbons, thin streamers in every color of the rainbow. Most were already fixed, wafting in the breeze, and impossibly tangled, a gossamer web, but other streamers were still falling, unfurling, like lines connecting the dots of the tiny bits of snow. Indeed, the snow itself was compounded now by, in addition to streamers, thrown confetti. The very air had color. The sight made Rachel gasp—a visceral elation with which she was entirely unacquainted. She almost reached ahead to Michael Kavanagh, but he pressed on through the crowd. Still, as if he’d sensed her uncharacteristic impulse, he did then let his arm drift back toward her, apparently aiming to pull her along. Though she did not take his hand, she quickened her pace, to stay up.
The streamers fluttered. She saw what was happening: from the decks, the ships’ passengers were throwing colored discs into the air, while holding fast to one end. The ribbons spooled out as they fell. Only when Kavanagh, half leaping, caught the loose end of a ribbon did she realize that such snagging, on the pier, was the point. All around them, the festive well-wishers were seizing streamers that linked them randomly to the travelers high above. With shouts and waves, though, some landlubbers were ecstatic to find themselves joined to particular people who, equally thrilled, could be seen craning down over the ship’s railing. Kavanagh clutched a second streamer, and turned and handed her the end. Red.
“Look up,” he said happily. “Figure out who this ribbon pairs you with. That’s who you’ve come to send off.”
Through the tangle of elongated tapes, confetti, and the swirling snow, Rachel traced the color red of her particular thread, up and up. Well free of a snarl above the midpoint of the hull, the red streamer, proudly distinct, looped up to the rail of the main deck. There, holding the other end, was an adolescent girl in a bright green beret and a matching green coat. She was wearing white gloves, which made the wild waving of her free hand all the more jubilant. With her other hand, she held the red ribbon up in the triumph of having identified Rachel, her partner! The girl called down to her, words that Rachel could not make out in the cacophony, which included, as she heard it now, the orchestra’s rendition of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
“Wave to her,” Kavanagh said gently. Only then did Rachel realize that she’d been standing like a statue, conveying nothing of her buoyant absorbedness. She did wave, but cautiously.
Kavanagh’s streamer was purple. He leaned to Rachel and said, “The red ones are the best. Red means you, too, will take a trip.”
“Why should red mean that?”
He shrugged. “Red for the navigational slogan ‘red right return.’ You’ll be sailing home.”
His words meant nothing to her. She wrapped the end of her ribbon twice around her hand, while still waving shyly. Above, the girl in green tugged at the man beside her, a father perhaps, and now he, too, waved down. Rachel was aware of the snow upon her own upturned face, but otherwise the field of her concentration had been taken over entirely by the girl.
The sounds of music, laughter, joyous shouting were all surpassed suddenly by the soaring blast of the ship’s horn. Like the hands of many others, Rachel’s went involuntarily to her ears, although she, like the others, continued to clutch the ribbon. The horn fell silent as abruptly as it had sounded. All other noise had quieted.
Kavanagh leaned to her again. “Brace yourself. Two more blasts. The signal that she’s moving astern.”
The second sharp horn sound was, if anything, louder.
The girl on the deck above was clutching her ears, too, but her gaze was fixed upon Rachel, and then she was waving again.
No sooner had the third blast sounded than the ship began to ease away. Now a cry went up, in unison, from the dockside crowd, and their waving took on a frantic edge. The onboard band broke into “Auld Lang Syne.” As the ship moved, the streamers, held fast in a thousand fists, began to go taut. Curls and loops disappeared as, one by one, the ribbons stretched. On board the ship, the passengers waved and waved. Hands went to mouths for the blowing of kisses.
The draping red ribbon that joined Rachel to the girl in green went straight, and other ribbons now began to snap as the ship pulled away. The rainbow tracery was breaking apart.
No, Rachel thought. It suddenly mattered that her one precious streamer not break. Eyeing the girl, Rachel pushed past Kavanagh to go with the ship, to keep the tape intact. It grew tighter and tighter, but held. The ribbon held! How could such a thing have significance? Yet it did. Rachel began to throw kisses to the girl, who threw them back, and once again began calling to her. Now, though, Rachel heard the words: “I love you!” the girl cried. “I love you!”
At that, Rachel’s streamer went slack, and the broken end fell from high up—curling down, down, into the channel of seething water that separated the dock from the hull. Rachel continued to hold on to the remnant tape, unconsciously winding it around her hand. The ship made way, ever more swiftly. The bow, passing by, loomed with a menace that drew Rachel’s gaze high up to the word “America,” emblazoned above the anchor flukes. She cast her eyes forward once more to find the girl in green, but the child was lost in the suddenly undifferentiated mass of passengers at the rail. Gone.
Rachel realized that Kavanagh, standing nearby, was staring at her. She saw that his cheeks were awash with tears, which startled her, but also underscored how unmoored she herself had become. She was given neither to tears nor to ready sentiment of any kind—yet she had just been unaccountably moved by a stilted commercial ritual, a debarkation she knew was staged. Still, the stirred feelings were real. She felt drawn to the priest simply because he was a fellow human being who had, for his own reasons—a long-lost father? a mystery friend returned?—been ambushed by a grief of farewell to which he was, unlike her, capable of giving expression. His show of feeling forced her to ac
knowledge, if only to herself, that she, too, had been waylaid.
Then, abruptly, she realized her enormous mistake. His face was wet not with tears but with melted snow. Her own cheeks, she realized, were wet for the same reason. She turned away from him. Mere foolishness could not define her. It was not that she had misread the man. It was that she had wanted him to be weeping, so that the difference between them could be clear. She had forgotten for a moment what she was—an orphaned animal, alone, hungry, and perhaps dangerous.
That an abyss had opened between her and everything else was the indelible fact of her condition. Who was she to imagine that a line could be thrown to her, or that she would, in any case, know how to reach for it? To have been dropped, with the snapping of that ridiculous streamer, back into the bottomless pit of desolation made her joltingly short of breath. She brought a hand to her chest, to press her lungs, the hand around which, by now, was wrapped the red ribbon.
With the ship under way, the send-off gang slouched back toward the city, lazily funneling through the gates at the marine terminal. As abruptly as the flurries of snow had come, now they disappeared, as if its own romantic weather accompanied the departing ship. Without waiting for instruction from the priest, Rachel turned and went the other way—toward the river, not the streets. He followed her, but she did not care.
They advanced against the crowd, pushing farther out toward the pier head, as if hawsered to the ship, which was sliding into the open river with remarkable speed. Having begun to move her legs and arms, blood pumping, Rachel found that the unexpected flood of emotion started to ebb, which enabled her to resume breathing almost normally. Yet she was still in the grip of the oceanic free-fall through the cavern of her chest. To come out of herself, she focused on the surrounding scene, and was immediately struck by the dapper look of the ladies and gentlemen shouldering past: the coiffed hair, bright scarves, suede gloves, fedoras, coat collars upturned just so—an inventory of style. Most seemed paired off as couples, with arms linked. They carried on an easy interchange of laughing chatter.
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