The laughter was like an unknown foreign language, sparking an alienation that drew her back into preoccupation with herself. She was dressed in black, as always, yet today, away from her workplace, she was wearing loose-fitting black trousers instead of a long skirt. That, together with her cloak and turban, set her apart—a woman of sorrows compared with these partygoers, assuming they even saw her. But with her cape flying as she pushed through, of course they saw her.
Rachel chastised herself for being a willful misfit—a gitane, the Gypsy card-reader for whom the rough French cigarette was named. But she rebuked herself for foolishness again. What is a Gypsy here? Who reads cards? And what, for that matter, in this city of Technicolor dreams, is a woman in black if not one hoping to be gawked at? She was pathetic.
Soon she was free of the crowd, and Kavanagh was right behind her. She slowed her pace. He caught up, and they walked shoulder to shoulder, rattling the planking as they went. Again she took in the scene, to escape herself. Across the water, tugboats nudged the magnificent SS America, turning it slowly, so that, soon enough, it once again showed itself broadside.
She turned to him, pointing at the ship. “Your brother, perhaps? You said he’s a tugboat captain?”
Kavanagh laughed. “No. Jerry’s is a push boat—barges and scows, not ocean liners. Nothing glamorous, like this. Staten Island with the working stiffs, not Manhattan with the swells.”
Rachel watched the ship for a moment longer, then resumed walking. At the end of the long wharf, beside a flagstaff flying the eagle-adorned ensign of the United States Lines, was a slatted wooden bench. The sun had broken fully through, a completed shift in weather that invited them to sit.
In silence, they watched the ocean liner gliding downriver, toward the Statue of Liberty. Tugboats drifted away from her—first one, then a second, then a third—leaving the ship to her transcendent solitude. Rachel, for her part, was glad for company now: a rescue from bleak inwardness. She wanted to ask the priest a question, but it refused to take shape in her mind. Obviously, because of the ever-shrinking ship, the question had to do with departure. She toyed with the red streamer on her hand, rewinding it around the spool of her fist.
“During the war,” Kavanagh said quietly, “she carried troops. Her hull was painted a swirling gray and white and silver—camouflage. She’s so fast she would outrun her destroyer escorts, so she would cross the Atlantic alone. She outran the U-boats, too. I used to watch her come and go from Brooklyn.”
“But were there streamers?” she asked.
“No.” Kavanagh laughed. “Although the navy band was there, playing ‘Anchors Aweigh’ instead of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ ”
Rachel surprised herself by saying, “I looked at you back there and thought that I saw tears on your face, but it was melting snow.”
“It might have been tears,” he answered kindly. “Who’s to say?”
But when he smiled, she thought perhaps he was teasing her. Then she saw he was teasing himself. He said, “I saw the snow on your face, too.”
She said, “Yes, snow. Only snow. Still, I was not prepared for such feeling. It was, we say, heureuse et triste. Happy-sad. That young girl at the rail above. Did you see her?”
“In green. Your girl. You had her streamer. Holding the other end, she was calling to you.”
“Yes.” Rachel could not bring herself to say, I think she was calling, “I love you.” Instead, Rachel gestured with the ribbon on her hand, and said, “The surprise was in what this…a établi—you say ‘established’?—established between us. Then, when it broke…”
“You found that sad?” Kavanagh asked.
“I was invaded by feelings. Envahie.”
“There was a man with the girl,” Kavanagh said. “Perhaps you noticed. I suppose it was her father.”
“Yes. I saw.”
“And perhaps that made you think of your father, if you don’t mind my mentioning him. A father and daughter.”
Already in this conversation Rachel felt not only that she was impersonating someone—la gitane?—but that, by contrast, he was being entirely himself. How had he come so quickly back to Papa? He knew to do that because, yesterday, when he broached the subject, she had cut him off, which only flagged her father as unfinished business.
Now Kavanagh was gently returning to it, having prepared the way by speaking of the ship and its service in the war; by taking seriously the implications of her red ribbon; by having noted what passed between her and the girl. But, then, was this not what a good priest did? Observe. Listen. By observing and listening, understand? Then she wondered, how had she come to the knowledge of his goodness? Yesterday, she had pictured him with patients at the hospital, but that had been abstract. Was this what priests did when hearing Confessions?
She turned her face to him, the day’s first direct meeting of their eyes. Yes, he listened. He understood. And he offered an opening—one through which she was not yet prepared to go. She veered, saying, “I thought, in bringing me to the West Side docks, you were inviting me to know your father, the longshoreman. Was that not the point? What this place means to you?”
He answered, “This pier wasn’t here in Pop’s day. There was a shorter one, all slanted pilings and creosote and splinters galore, but out here, jutting into the Hudson, it feels the same. This was my special place. My brothers and I were river rats, taking every chance we got to clamber aboard a boat, usually a work skiff or a dinghy. It’s how Jerry wound up in tugboats, and I would have, too, but…” He hesitated, and had to make a fresh decision, whether to go on. He said, “Actually, I was a solitary boy, most myself out here alone, looking across the river to the other shore. In those days, you saw no buildings over there, just woods. I used to feel that I was looking not so much at Jersey, but at the whole rest of the country. Go west, young man, go west! After Pop died, this was where I did my thinking about him, the feel of my hand in his, which was callused but always gentle. The aroma of his skin, the rough stubble on his cheek when he kissed me good night. He was everything I loved about where I was from. But where was I going? Out here, the past bled into the future. So what I saw, stretching out past Jersey, was the whole span of time, too. I loved the feeling, here, that I was looking at my life to come.”
“Your life in the Church?”
“From a certain point on, sure. From harbor boats to the Barque of Saint Peter.” He laughed, and he looked away. His discomfort showed, and she sensed how rare this was, his explaining himself. With his gaze soft upon the far riverbank, he went on: “The parish priest was the neighborhood hero, and it seemed normal—inevitable—to want to be like him. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to get the connection between the father I’d lost and the father I soon found. Becoming a priest, obviously, was the answer to a question I’d begun to ask when Pop died. But it took me a while to get there. Looking back, I see that that’s what I was doing, with my solitary brooding out here on the pier.”
“Brooding?”
He shrugged. “I would learn to call it ‘contemplation.’ But before I settled on the seminary, I wasn’t attuned so much to ‘a’ future, with a whole lot of specifics defining it, but to ‘the’ future, if you catch the distinction. Open-ended, the way that landscape across the river struck me, rolling on from sea to shining sea. Looking west is an American habit, they say, because it’s as wide open as tomorrow. Geography and time—reflecting one another. Is that the difference between Europe and the States? One looks back, the other looks ahead? The past is what makes you French. The future is what makes you American.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Am I American?”
“If you want to be.” He faced her again, to say emphatically, “You get to decide.”
“One does not get to decide about the givens of the past.”
“That’s true. But you decide what they mean to you. Isn’t that what your father’s project was, regarding Abelard? Trying to change what Abelard’s me
aning was?” He waited for her to affirm what he’d said. When she remained silent, he went on, “From what you said, your father didn’t regard the givens of Abelard’s past—or past understandings about him—as closing off a different future. Or is that presumptuous of me?”
“No. It suggests that you have been listening.” She did not know when she had looked so steadily into the eyes of a man.
He did not look away. He said, “You told me you wanted to talk about it.”
“Yes. About Abelard and Héloïse.”
“Which means your father.”
“Yes. Although I did not realize that…until…you…” At last, she dropped her gaze; her eyes settled on her hands, which were clasped in her lap. She’d forgotten the red ribbon. Feelings stirred up in the wake of the ship’s departure still washed through her, a complicating countercurrent to far older feelings from which she was normally walled off. Though it seemed obvious, now that she saw it, Rachel was startled to recognize that her impulsively giving the Historia to the priest was as much about her father as about the text. With this stranger, she was at last forcing herself to reckon with her own, yes, grotesquely unfinished business.
She said, “I have not talked about my father, or ‘his project,’ as you call it, because he failed.” Rachel stopped. What she had just said was false. The truth was, she did not talk about her father because of her failure, not his.
She allowed the silence to settle, and soon the silence became its own palpable presence, like a third party between them. Once again, her mute immobility was a cul-de-sac from which there would be no exit. But no: this time she was not alone, and her partner in the silence could break it.
Understanding, apparently, the need for a pivot, Kavanagh said with a self-mocking laugh, “That was some U.S. civics lesson of mine, eh? The great American narrative: looking west; the mythic power of the future; time and space joined on the wild frontier—which is what we New Yorkers call New Jersey!”
His inflection signaled the punch line of a joke, but she did not get it.
He continued, “That unfenced future is why, though I could never become French, you could certainly become American. Open-endedness makes for the famous American innocence.”
“Innocence?”
“Innocents abroad. How we Americans are always starting over. Moving on. Who knows what’s out there? Believe it or not, I’ve been feeling that way myself, for the first time in years…this week, since I met you. ‘Experience over doctrine,’ you said yesterday. You were talking about Abelard and you mentioned Galileo, but you could have been talking about me.”
“Your business with the Bishop?”
“A long time ago, he lied to me. That lie—experience—is like a flawed brick down low in a wall—doctrine. If you cut into the wall to replace the brick, pretty soon you’re having to move every other brick in the entire structure.”
“Does the wall fall?”
“That is the question, Miss Vedette. That sure is the question. I have to take it up with His Excellency. I’ll begin by explaining about ethics over creed.” Kavanagh grinned. “Maybe I’ll quote Abelard.”
“Quote Héloïse. She’s the true genius.”
He laughed, and nodded—a wholehearted gesture of agreement. Then he veered: “Maybe I’ll just tell the Bishop about the coming and going of ships—what started us on this.”
“Us?” she asked. What had she to do with his Bishop?
He shrugged. “Yesterday I suggested we come down here to the docks just for the fun of it, but ‘fun’ hardly applies to this chat of ours. Wouldn’t you say?”
“You have a history here, and it carries weight.”
“Because of Pop, that’s true. But also because of the war.” He was suddenly solemn. “Did I say I was in the navy?”
“You said Brooklyn, just now.”
“The Brooklyn Navy Hospital. Chaplain.”
“And you still serve a hospital.”
“Yes. It’s the heart of what I do. A priest at the side of the patient’s bed. That experience, actually, is what passes for my doctrine. The bedside of those in pain is where I most belong. But during the war I was down on the docks all the time, too, sending my lads off on troop ships. And then…receiving them when they came home. Speaking of sad.”
“And, in your case, haunting everything—the Titanic.”
“So we have a theme going here. What was it you said, ‘heureuse…or triste’?” Kavanagh pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. A bit presumptuously, he put two in his mouth and lit them, then handed one to Rachel. She took it, gratefully. He said, “But you must have arrived in New York by ship, no?”
“Yes. Down there.” She tossed her head toward the Statue of Liberty.
“Ellis Island,” he supplied.
“And the very long lines.”
“When was that?”
“More than a year ago. Nearly two years.”
“You mean 1948?”
“Yes. Why?”
“The year Truman let the DPs in. Was that you?”
She considered what to say, then spoke slowly. “It was carefully explained to me that I was not ‘displaced.’ I was not ‘stateless.’ I was French. Nevertheless, I was expelled from Europe. We were all called ‘DPs,’ because Truman could not bring himself to call us Jews. But that is what we were. Israélites. In France, I stopped being French.”
“You were in a camp?”
Rachel, instead of replying, focused on the study of her cigarette. That this man—a stranger, really—had pushed through to that question might have surprised her, but she coldly acknowledged its inevitability. She herself had made it inevitable. Now that the word had been spoken, and spoken by him, there was no question of not answering. “More than one,” she said. “A camp for Jews, run by Germans. And then, after the liberation, a second camp, for, shall we say, les délinquantes. Liberation, for some of us, was delayed.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
She looked at him sharply. “Collaborators. Traitors. C’est moi. Surely you heard how we French turned on one another at the war’s end.” She shrugged—a willed gesture of indifference. Of course he would not understand. She went on: “And then, third, a ‘relocation camp,’ which was organized by the Americans. From that camp, I came here, to the United States. By then I was, yes, ‘displaced,’ no matter what they called me.” She took a hefty drag on her cigarette. In exhaling, it was as if she had just taken her first breath in years. Also as if she would not be allowed another. “It is a long story,” she said, by which she meant there was nothing more to say. She would go back to holding her breath.
She looked downriver. The ship was small, beyond the statue, approaching the mouth of the harbor. Its one streamer now was a thin line of smoke, trailing from one of the two funnels. She thought of the ship, suddenly, as an emblem of herself. She was gone like that, sailed away. She said, “It is cold. Are you not cold?”
“Yes, but…”
She looked at him and, despite herself, asked, “What?”
“I am trying to understand what has brought us to this moment. I came upon you at The Cloisters, a place, to my surprise, full of implication for both of us. I did not intend to impose on you, but, because of events unleashed in my own life just now, I seem to have done just that. You have been helpful to me—as I navigate some unexpected swells. Also, I get the feeling that I can, perhaps, be helpful to you. That is all I mean.”
“Thank you, Father. You do help me. I am glad to have come here to be with you. But there is a limit. We have reached it.”
“Sometimes it is at the limit that breakthroughs occur.”
“Breakthrough? From what to what?” It was true: she had stopped breathing.
“Well,” he said, “in your language…perhaps…from triste to heureuse? Isn’t talking about it what we’ve been given to do? I do not mean to be presumptuous, but you can talk to me.”
“What do you imagine I could possibly talk ab
out with you?”
“Besides Abelard and Héloïse, you mean?”
The delicacy in his statement made her realize how she had used the medieval couple as an invitation to this unfamiliar intimacy. He was careful. He was respectful. For these reasons, suddenly, he seemed dangerous to her. When, nevertheless, she then said “Yes,” she knew she was in some way giving him permission.
He nodded and said, “Well, then…I have noticed your sleeve. How you protect your forearm. Your left sleeve is always tightly buttoned, unlike your right. You wear that elastic band.”
Rachel was taken aback. “That is not your concern, Father,” she said sharply. Her use of his title, at this point, was a withdrawal of whatever permission he thought he had.
“I know that, miss,” he said. “And I know it is rude of me. But my concern by now is with you. I am concerned to know you, and you have seemed concerned to let me know you. Am I wrong?”
Rachel began to say, Yes, you are wrong, but, unaccountably, she did not.
Therefore, he continued, “Your forearm tells the story, no?”
She stared at him, astounded. He held her eyes. She snapped her cigarette away.
She lifted her left arm, free of her black cloak. She unbuttoned the cuff of her sleeve, pulled away the elastic band, and pushed the cloth roughly back. “Voilà!” she said.
Kavanagh lurched back with surprise.
She said calmly, “For sure, you imagined numbers, a tattooed line of numbers.”
What she showed was a savage, knotty scar at her wrist. Not numbers, but the gnarly evidence of self-mutilation, a failed attempt at suicide. Searing her open hand, tangled with the shirt elastic, was the tightly wound farewell streamer, as red as blood.
“ ‘American innocence,’ you said before, Father. But you should have said ‘American ignorance.’ ” She was speaking calmly. This was her civics lesson. “Americans hear lurid stories about tattoos, how the German guards put numbers on the arms of prisoners. That was at one camp in Poland. One camp! There were dozens of camps, hundreds of camps. Everywhere in Europe. Camps everywhere! In Paris, too—the City of Light. Imagine! And not just German guards. During the war, and for a year after the war, my guards were French. Fascists first, and then heroes of the Resistance. Good Catholics all, Father, by the way. Then my guards, for another year, were American, and they were not innocent, either. Believe me. Tattoos were the least of the impositions.”
The Cloister Page 31
