Gallen said quietly, “It’s a mystery, Mike.”
“Mystery, Joe? That’s the word we throw over what makes no sense. When we do our job and the great thing happens—a miracle! But what is it? One child saved, the others dead? If that’s not a killer-God, what is? Who, actually, are we praying to? And for what?” Kavanagh sipped his drink as a way of veiling the cloud in his face. He forced a smile. “Just wondering.”
A waitress came through, saying with an Irish lilt, “Please be seated, Fathers. Dinner is served. Thank you, Fathers.”
Gallen moved swiftly away from Kavanagh, who did not blame him. Kavanagh had not realized how unsettled he’d been by the baby in the incubator, and he felt guilty for having wielded that memory as a blade. But he could not pretend that the hospital scene was all that had cut him adrift. For a week now, he’d been unmoored.
His colleagues began to circle the tables and seat themselves, and as he watched them, Kavanagh was buoyed by the recognition of their virtue. A happy throng right now, but they were a collection of men in whom the habit of empathy was ingrained. There were Frank Russell and Billy Mitchell, jostling each other like the chums they were. There was Kavanagh’s own boss, Monsignor Stevens, with his red collar notch and ample waistline. They were generous, kind, and surprisingly unselfish for a group of sanctified bachelors. Then, too, the priests of New York also included savvy operators who knew how to budge City Hall in the interests of parishioners; who did not hesitate to weigh in with employers, landlords, neighborhood thugs, and cops; who played, depending on circumstances, mean games of stickball, gin rummy, candlepins, and—skirts high—hopscotch. He knew of the inbred loneliness of their kind, born of the necessary limit of every encounter, but he also knew of their rare capacity for fraternal good feeling—and that was powerfully on display right here.
Kavanagh’s affection for the group blanked the fact that no particular man in the room qualified as what he would call an actual friend, what Runner would surely have been had he survived. As the crossed wires of his conversation with Gallen and Riordan just emphasized, there was no one to whom he could possibly explain what he was experiencing. No one but Bishop Donovan, although that explanation, which was what had brought him here, would not be offered in friendship.
There was a bustle at the entrance, and the clergy, having mostly taken their seats, immediately stood again to offer chipper applause as Cardinal Spellman glided into the sprawling restaurant. Short and rotund, he smiled broadly and waved at his priests, crossing into the room. His crimson cassock hid his legs, of course, and his movement was more like floating than walking. Not for the first time, His Eminence made Kavanagh think of the Little King, the cartoon character who never spoke, and whose shenanigans made the very idea of divine-right rule ridiculous.
Behind Spellman, in a procession of flashing purple and red, came the Auxiliary Bishops, Seminary Rectors, and Vicars, led by His Excellency Sean Donovan, the Vicar for Priests. He was the only prelate wearing a street suit. Spellman and his apparatchiks took their places at the round table under the largest chandelier. The idea for this banquet had been Donovan’s, which is why Spellman deferred to him when it came to Grace.
“Oculi omnium in te sperant, Domine,” Donovan intoned. And the responsive antiphon came in one full-throated voice that boomed through the room, “Et tu das escam illorum in tempore opportuno.” The eyes of all look to Thee, O Lord…and Thou givest them food in due season. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritu Sancti…” And the pack they’d become as they signed themselves with the cross answered, “Amen!”
It was like Donovan—to the point, a little loose with tradition, jovial—to offer an abbreviated Grace. Also like him that it would be the Latin verses the men had recited three times a day through their seminary years. The room now became noisy with scraping chairs—the renewed bustle of conviviality. Kavanagh remained where he was for a moment, ready for Donovan to look his way. But the Bishop did not. So Kavanagh headed into the heart of the room and took a seat between priests who were glad to see him.
As the main-course plates were being cleared, Bishop Donovan rose and made for the restroom, down one of the wings that bracketed the courtyard. Kavanagh bunched his napkin, dropped it, rose, and followed. He waited opposite the restroom, at the pair of French doors that opened into the winter garden.
Donovan appeared, and Kavanagh stepped into his path.
“Michael,” the Bishop said, surprised.
“Hello, Bishop.”
“My goodness, you startled me. And as I recall, you told me you wouldn’t get here this evening.”
“Change of plans. I need a minute with you.” Kavanagh opened the French door, and gestured into the courtyard.
“Oh my, I should get back.”
“Just a word or two.”
“Call my secretary, Mike. Come and see me—anytime.”
“I’ve called her three times this week,” Kavanagh said easily. He felt surprisingly sure of himself. “She said she told you as much. You won’t see me until the week before Christmas. A month from now.”
“Well, I’ll be in Rome—”
Kavanagh took the Bishop’s arm. “So give me a minute. Now.”
The Bishop shook his head no.
Kavanagh said, “Paul Quinn.”
Donovan stared at him. The mask of geniality fell away, replaced by a stone-cold stare.
Kavanagh said, “I saw John Malloy. I know what you did.” Kavanagh released Donovan’s arm, and led the way into the chilly atrium. Once the Bishop had joined him, he closed the door behind them. It was eerie. They were all at once alone, yet surrounded, through the muting glass, by hundreds of black-clad partygoers.
Kavanagh and Donovan faced off. Kavanagh said, “Deceit and self-deceit, Sean. I finally see why I’ve never trusted my vocation. Except for snatches of time during the war, I’ve been going through the motions—a pretend priest. I thought it was me, something wrong with me. Like a virus. But it’s a virus I got from you.”
“What are you talking about?” The Bishop’s hand went to the gold pectoral cross at his breast. He clutched it.
“My priesthood rests on a lie. Your lie. You betrayed Runner. You betrayed me. You did both to cover for Paul Quinn. Last week, you did it again.”
“I did not betray John Malloy. I protected him.”
“By making him a scapegoat? He was Quinn’s victim. From childhood on. For years. He turned to you for help. He told you everything. He told you how Quinn would recite Hoc est enim Corpus Meum as he pushed into him. Didn’t he tell you that?”
Donovan flinched, but managed to say, “And I’m telling you, I protected that boy.”
“You threw him overboard. You protected Quinn.”
“I protected John from scandal. The scandal would have ruined his life.” Donovan’s eyes were wide. His head was back. He seemed ready to run. He added, “I got Father Quinn removed from Dunwoodie.”
“To a parish! Jesus, Sean.” Without consciously deciding to, Kavanagh poked the Bishop, the tip of his forefinger just below the pectoral cross. “You made him a pastor.”
“Not me.”
“Spellman, then. Is that because you failed to tell the Cardinal what Quinn was? Or because the Cardinal didn’t care?”
“Of course he cared. We all cared. From then on, Father Quinn behaved.”
“Those bastards behave when they’re dead. Is that why you have him in the secret RIP file you have in your drawer? Keeping track of the priest-perverts? Obituaries to show their victims when they finally come to you from the wreckage of their lives?”
“You were in my desk? How dare you!”
“Is that the offense here, Sean?” Kavanagh’s face by now was only inches from Donovan’s. “My little burglary?”
“This is all confidential. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” By now, the Bishop’s hand was a clenched fist around his cross—a shield from Kavanagh’s poking.
“How many �
�private altar boys’ did Quinn go on to have?” Kavanagh demanded. “That’s what Runner was. His ‘private altar boy.’ ”
“You have no evidence—”
“So you’re denying it?”
“No. Not denying—”
“You let Quinn keep running that summer camp for boys.”
“A choristers’ camp. Father Quinn was the archdiocesan music director. He behaved, I tell you.”
“Then why was the boys’ choir eventually disbanded? I wondered that at the time.”
“That had nothing to do with Father Quinn.”
“Sean, you’re lying to me still. Right now. You know it. I know it.”
“These are things I cannot discuss with you.”
“The Seal? The private forum of the Sacrament of Penance? You used that with me before. You told me that I was Runner’s problem. He and I were ‘out of bounds,’ you said. You didn’t seem to remember that phrase the other day. I never forgot it. Do you know what that did to me? All these years? And I could never discuss it with anybody, because it was God’s secret. What you did was a sacrilege. But even that wasn’t the crime, Sean. It was the evidence! Something far deeper has been wrong with us all this time.” Kavanagh threw an arm toward the restaurant. “Look at them. Good men all. But there’s a lie at the bottom of everything they do. Everything they believe.”
“That’s foolishness. What lie?”
“The Jews.”
“What?”
Kavanagh was as startled by his blurted statement as Donovan was. The Jews? He had drawn no conscious line of connection between Donovan’s lie about Runner and the—what?—lie of the ancient slander against the Christ killers? But there it was. Malloy had said recognitions come in bursts of the unexpected, and if ever a recognition was unexpected, this was.
Yet, even as he’d spoken the words, Kavanagh knew they were true. A silence opened between him and Donovan, a yawning abyss across which their locked eyes fell like an iron plank. But there was also a kind of abyss separating Kavanagh from the man he’d been an hour before. “The Jews,” he repeated at last, but with an assurance that surprised even him. “What just happened in Europe: where did that come from?”
“You are talking nonsense now, Father.”
The Bishop turned to go, but Kavanagh seized his arm. “Where?” Kavanagh’s voice had dropped into an unyielding whisper.
“The Germans. The Nazis. That’s where.” The Bishop’s hand fluttered up from his cross, as if to ward off blows.
Kavanagh said, “The Jews are God’s mortal enemies, Sean. Because they crucified Christ. That’s Church teaching. The Jews are damned to hellfire in the afterlife. Why not hellfire in this life? That comes from us.”
Donovan pulled his arm, but Kavanagh only tightened his grip. “You were our professor of Church history, for Christ’s sake. You never mentioned what the Church did to the Jews. Why did we never hear about Abelard?”
“Abelard! Good God, what are you talking about now? Are you drunk?”
Kavanagh said, “Abelard said the Jews were not damned, and the Church condemned him for it.”
“Where are you getting this?”
“Denzinger, the Enchiridion. Decrees of the Solemn Magisterium. ‘Abelard’s Errors: That they have not sinned who have crucified Christ.’ The Jews were not guilty! So said Abelard.” Donovan winced at how fiercely Kavanagh was squeezing his arm. Kavanagh’s mouth was by Donovan’s ear, but his fury was so efficiently channeled now that his voice came in the steady cadence of an indictment reciter. “And the Church Council declared ‘Damnamus’! When you wouldn’t see me yesterday, I used the time to go to the theology library up at Dunwoodie. The Church said ‘Damnamus’ to Abelard because he refused to say it to Jews. They put his books on the Index.”
“Well, maybe that’s why I didn’t teach him.” Donovan jerked his arm, attempting to free it, but Kavanagh held him. Despite the chill in the courtyard, a broad film of perspiration had broken out on the Bishop’s ample forehead.
Kavanagh said, “Abelard wrote a dozen major treatises—on ethics, the Trinity, Scripture. Dunwoodie has none of them. At the New York Public Library, Sean, I found a copy of his Collationes, in which Jewish suffering is described from the point of view of Jews! The Public Library! At Dunwoodie, the librarian has never heard of it. Abelard was one of the greatest Catholic thinkers who ever lived, and the only text that Dunwoodie has is the famous love letters exchanged with Héloïse. Why is that?”
“You just said it. Heresy, that’s why.”
“So God did damn the Jews? Is that what you believe? Do we learn nothing from what just happened in Germany? And not just Germany. Catholic France. Catholic Italy. Catholic Poland, too. Something evil in us was just laid bare. An epiphany! The Jews are central to the revelation, but the lecherous Quinn is part of it, too.”
“They have nothing in common.”
“They have a damning God in common. A killer-God, who’s just panting to send His enemies to hell. Including those of us who are declared ‘out of bounds.’ Out of bounds, there is no salvation! There’s the heresy.” Finally, Kavanagh let Donovan’s arm go, and Donovan immediately made for the door. Kavanagh said, “You should ask the Cardinal about this killer-God. When you’re in Rome, you should ask the Pope. Damnamus! There’s a lie at the heart of the faith, Sean. I’m telling you—a lie!”
Donovan went through the door, back into the restaurant.
Kavanagh stood there like a man in a glass chamber, wholly disoriented at one level, but entirely clear at another. Clear for the first time in his life. Kavanagh only now understood what John Malloy had told him: No more blind eye for me.
On the other side of the windows, the priests were still happily at one another, laughing, gossiping, clapping shoulders, breaking out cigars, passing along bottles of brandy and port. To that company, Kavanagh simply did not exist—much less belong. Good men all, he thought again. Which made the hidden truth all the sadder—their sanctifying power, and their precious clerical status, depending utterly on a lie.
To collect himself, he lit a cigarette. Now, when he looked around the courtyard, with its paving stones, illuminated boxwood hedges, and potted plants, he saw it as the winter garden of a medieval Cloister.
—
WHOEVER THINKS THAT we shall receive no reward for continuing to bear so much suffering through our loyalty to God must imagine that God is extremely cruel. Indeed, there is no people which has ever been known or even believed to have suffered so much for God. The voice was that of a Jew, explaining himself to a philosopher and a Christian. The author of the voice was Peter Abelard. How was this possible? Michael Kavanagh, as it were, took a mental step back from the book he was holding. If turning it this way and that could have made it seem less exotic, he’d have set the book rotating. The Jew’s narration felt like something bootlegged, properly delivered in a brown paper wrapper. He continued to read. Dispersed among all the nations, without a king or earthly ruler, are we not alone encumbered with such demands that almost every day we pay an intolerable ransom for our wretched lives. Indeed, we are thought by everyone to be worthy of such hatred and contempt, that whoever does us injury believes it to be the height of justice and a deed pleasing to God.
Kavanagh brought his eyes up from the book. He was sitting, as at the beginning, on the cold stone wall-bench of the Chapter House in La Chapelle-sur-Loire, which, a thousand years after its original construction, now sat on its bluff overlooking the long-tamed Hudson.
It was late morning, Friday—his hospital day. This time, Billy Mitchell was covering for him. The Inwood hospital was a mile and a world away. It surprised Kavanagh how its wards, many of whose patients he knew by name, might as well have been in Brooklyn—the navy yard, so central to his identity before, now so forcefully a matter of the left-behind. Once, he’d have asked Billy to take his rounds only for an acute emergency. But what, in fact, was this? This…this…
This museum, a hospital in whic
h to put the past itself on life support. A few yards away, a steady stream of visitors was funneling through the monastic arcade, an attendance uptick on this day after Thanksgiving. From her place at the head of a tour group, nearly half an hour ago, Rachel Vedette had registered his presence with a quick double-take, nothing more.
He was dressed in his navy-issue turtleneck, fetched that morning from the high shelf in his closet. His pea coat was on the bench beside him. The day outside was cold but sunny, and light washed in through the glazed canopy of the Cloister garden.
He returned to the book. Even when we sleep, we may think of nothing but the danger of being murdered, the threat looming over our throats.
Throats being slit—that stopped him. Kavanagh recalled Rachel Vedette’s words from the week before: “The first pogroms in Europe…Crusaders, rushing through the Rhineland…Thousands upon thousands of Jews murdered in the name of Christ.” That he had been ignorant of all this shamed him now, but one thing he had always known: the Crusader’s cry was “God wills it!”
We are allowed to possess neither fields, nor vineyards, nor any sort of landed property because there is no one who could protect them for us from open or covert despoilment. And so the main way which remains for us to earn an income to support our wretched lives is by lending out money at interest, and this just brings the hatred of Christians who think they are being oppressed by it.
The Jew’s voice was direct, unflinching, coldly factual—the furthest thing from pleading. Most astounding, the Jew’s lament was offered as a Jew would make it, not a Christian. Yet a Christian was its author, writing while other Christians committed sanctioned murder.
This was Kavanagh’s third or fourth plunge into the text, and it confirmed what set Abelard apart—an intimate grasp of a despised people’s tragic experience, at a time when the tragedy was taken to be the Gospel’s triumph. Who was this man? Where did such empathy come from? The so-called Dialogue Among a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian purported to be a dream, with the three figures carrying out a debate of which Abelard himself was to be the judge. But after hearing the Jew’s testimony, he declined to judge. Abelard declined to judge. He preferred, instead, to go on listening: A wise man by listening, he declared, will be wiser.
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