The Cloister

by James Carroll

  It was nearly one o’clock when she appeared. He was engrossed in the page, and looked up to find her already standing mutely before him. She was not wearing her cardigan sweater. He was struck at once by her pressed white shirt, the cuffs tightly closed. Without the turban that she wore outdoors, her very short black hair was striking, and it registered freshly how it emphasized her long, gaunt neck, the thinness of her face. She said, “I imagined I would not see you.”

  “I felt bad that our outing ended so abruptly…because of me.”

  She said nothing to that.

  He lifted the book. “After we parted on Monday, I went to the library. First Dunwoodie, then Forty-Second Street. I found it.”

  “The Collationes?”

  “I see what you mean. I’ve been reading the Jew’s discourse. Your father was on to something. Something important.”

  She wrapped herself in her long arms. “He made an important discovery about The Dialogue.” Kavanagh recognized the abrupt shift in her tone of voice, and was surprised that he knew her well enough to be familiar with the way she took refuge in exposition. Docent. She went on, “Before the Statut expelled him from the Medieval Institute, my father had come upon another medieval text, contemporaneous to Abelard, similarly arranged, a trialogue of the same kind: a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, engaging each other in debate before a judge. It was also in the form of a dream. The dreamer, in this text, was the King of the Khazars—”

  “Of what?”

  “Khazars. A nomad people, in Turkey. The King was also the judge, just as the dreamer Abelard, in his text, was judge. The King—after hearing statements in his dream from the Christian, the Muslim, and the Rabbi—the King converted, to become a Jew. The story explains how the Khazars became Hebrews—that is its purpose. My father had discovered the text that Abelard used as his model. For certain. A tremendous discovery, because the author of the text was Judah Halevi, a great Spanish sage. No Christian took instruction from a Jew in the twelfth century. For Abelard, just to read Halevi would have been an offense, not to mention being generous toward Halevi’s point of view.”

  “Did your father publish—?”

  Rachel shook her head so dismissively that Kavanagh stopped, seeing at once the stupidity of his question. Speaking of offense.

  She said: “If he had published, he would have been roundly criticized for a partial reading of Abelard—as indeed he was in private by Catholic colleagues who read his manuscript. After the Statut, I told you, I did his research at the institute. From a certain point on, I became more than his assistant—I became his chief encourager, especially once those colleagues dismissed him. Even when it made no sense to go on, even when it became dangerous, I encouraged him.” She paused, falling silent for a moment. Then she continued, “I told you before that I encouraged him for the sake of his great work. But that is not true. I was protecting the dream I had of my strong, heroic father. I could not allow him to fail because I could not allow him to be just another man. Staying, continuing…was my need, not his. I was locked in myself, and therefore he died.” Her voice drifted off.

  Kavanagh said quietly, “That seems unnecessarily—”

  “Harsh?” she said sharply. “Judgmental? Self-hating? What?”

  He knew better than to speak. To Kavanagh at that moment, she was impenetrable. Having just imagined that he knew her, he saw that he did not. She was indignant, yes—but with herself. He thought of her wrist, its message of the suicidal ledge from which she’d almost leapt. He wanted to pull her back. Indicating the book, he tacked, to say, “Still, the attitudes here are striking. Abelard says that Jewish Law is sufficient for salvation.”

  “Yes. That contradicts what he wrote earlier, which my father’s critic insisted on. The Collationes may come very late—not long before Abelard died, perhaps. You notice that the text is incomplete.”

  “No. I hadn’t noticed that.”

  “You will. Either he did not live to finish it, or scandalized monks destroyed what he wrote.”

  “Heresy.”

  She answered, “Jews are the first heretics.”

  “But not the last,” he replied. The recognition was about himself—heretic. For him, that word had always been tied to a fuse. No more. “I see that now.”

  “Now?”

  In using that word, he hadn’t been aware of its weight. “Now” was a pivot, and she’d invited him to turn upon it. “Since meeting you,” he said, hardly breathing. “I came here today hoping we could…” What? He did not know what to say.

  Then he did. It was obvious. “I am sorry that I intruded on you Monday, when we were on the pier. I was out of bounds.” When those toxic words—the goddamn “bounds” again—snapped from his mouth, he realized how off balance he was. He glanced around. “In the Chapter House, we tell the truth. Isn’t that it?”

  “They say.”

  He nodded. “I came here at lunchtime on purpose, thinking you might take your break with me. I wondered if you, too, felt like we’d begun a conversation we haven’t finished.”

  Instead of answering, she just stood there, holding herself, hiding behind her dark eyes. Kavanagh felt remarkably calm. No matter what happened, he would have all that had passed between them up until now—and he would have it forever. He would have the recognitions and the resolutions and the truth that had changed his life. He would have the recovery he’d begun to make, and he would go ahead with it. He would have all of that, no matter what she said or what she thought. But he wanted her to understand that he had it because of her.

  He said, “I know you prefer not to eat at lunchtime, but the park outside is sunny. The paths are sheltered from the wind. It’s not so cold. We could take a walk.” He lifted the book. “A wise man by listening,” he said, “will be wiser.” He grinned. “Imagine, then, how much wiser a dolt will be.”

  He waited for her at the museum entrance, feeling self-conscious in his navy coat, the rakish collar of which he had not turned up. When she appeared a few moments later, she was in her cloak and turban, a getup that took him back to the gleeful scene among all the fancy people at the SS America, where, at first, she’d seemed a different person—almost glamorous. Diana Vreeland.

  But no. Rachel Vedette was authentic to the bone. Kavanagh, on the other hand, sensed something of the impostor in himself, and hated it.

  The silence, as they walked along the serpentine path, was easy. Neither seemed in a hurry to break it.

  Kavanagh had slipped the Collationes into the ample pocket of his pea coat. He closed his fingers around the book, and it gave him, finally, something to say. “What made the difference between the early Abelard and the later?” he asked. “You told me the other day that the key was his suffering. The ‘calamity.’ Is that it?”

  “In part. Sure,” Rachel answered. “But, of course, something else. Something far more important.”

  “What?”

  “Héloïse,” she said so simply.

  A man under the influence of a woman. There was the simplicity. “I think I get that.” He laughed. “I think.”

  “Except for him, she was détachée,” Rachel said. Then added, “Unbound.”

  That word again. It hit Kavanagh—that if any two people were ever “out of bounds,” Héloïse and Abelard were. But “unbound,” as Rachel’s use of French suggested, meant detachment, too. Detachment from everything but each other made the lovers masters of everything else—even faith. “Out of bounds” was the point.

  As for Kavanagh himself? The strangest thing about his unsettled condition was the way in which he had begun to face it expressly in relation to this woman, yet that she was a woman was not the point. He, too, was a man under the influence of a woman, but differently. She was the entirely unexpected occasion of this reckoning, but was nothing like its cause. How was that?

  Night after night, shivering in his beach chair on the tar-paper deck of the rectory roof, he had examined this. He was at the mercy of his habitual scrupulosity
, yes, but this examination of conscience had been for the sake of a purification—for her. What were his motives? He had taken the celibate life and its disciplines for granted, which, he could admit, had more to do with inhibition than with virtue. He knew what it was to be snagged by the glimpse of a well-turned ankle, the sway of pleated dresses, moist pooling in wide female eyes, but he knew nothing of unleashed erotic impulses. The ready flow of feeling for his patients at the hospital, for the kids he sprang from jail, for rosary sayers at the wake, or for the heavyhearted mothers who knelt before him at the Communion rail rarely equated to feelings about or for himself. Sublimation, in his case, meant redirection—that’s all. That he was almost unacquainted with sexual longing must, of course, have had to do with the vise he’d closed on desire of every sort after Runner Malloy. There it was, indeed: vise, not virtue. He knew nothing real of intimacy, or its pursuit. His navy years had scraped him free of naïveté, but had, ironically, reinforced his repression. He was not a man on the make. That was why, he saw just then, this otherwise inscrutable woman was walking with him along this winding path. Her evident history of troubles had not stopped her from trusting him at least this much. He was relieved to believe that she could.

  Out of the silence, she said, with the directness he’d learned to expect when the subject was not herself, “How has it been with you, going around your ‘loop’?”

  He laughed. But also he realized that she was inviting him to declare himself. If not with her, with whom? He said, “I have come to a big decision. I made a mistake when I was young…when I became a priest. I have decided to undo it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I am going to leave Good Shepherd. Not immediately. But soon.” In these straightforward words, he was laying before her the jumble of his whole life. He had never imagined speaking the words with such equanimity. “I am going to leave the priesthood.”

  She stopped and faced him, her face alive with surprise. “You are such a good priest.”

  He laughed. “How would you know that?”

  “I know it because already that is what you have been to me.”

  She turned away from him, which at first he misunderstood. But she crossed to a bench before a great overgrown juniper shrub that gave the seat a thronelike aspect. She sat and looked back at him, regally. We must discuss this, her manner declared.

  He joined her. Now he did lift the collar of his navy jacket, for warmth.

  She pulled her cloak closed in front of her, hiding her hands, which she clasped on her lap. She faced him. “ ‘A big decision,’ you said. Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I am fine. I’m not quite at peace with myself, but I’m getting there.” He might have added, That’s what brought me here today.

  “I have never known a priest. Never heard of a priest stopping.”

  “It’s like leaving a marriage, I imagine. But no one’s heartbroken.”

  “Perhaps the Church, in some way.”

  “The Church gets pissed off, then pretends you never existed.”

  “But your people…?”

  “The parish? Sad, yes. Some of them, when they hear. Disappointed. But not for long. And it will only be discussed in whispers. Because of the violation, the shame. I will be a shamed person. But I am not ashamed.”

  He was aware of her taking this in, and he expected her comment. But she said nothing. She looked down at her hands, hidden in the folds of her cloak, as if she could see them. Eventually, she said quietly, “A good priest helps sinners acknowledge their sin. Just now, what I told you about my father’s project—how I encouraged him past the point of prudence; how I failed to trust him, that he could be a simple man, without heroic work; that I willfully refused to face the truth of our situation—all that was a grievous failure. I have never before spoken of it. I spoke to you.”

  “I understood what you were telling me, how it pains you.”

  She nodded. “You took the trouble to learn what my father saw. You told me he was ‘on to something…something important.’ You told me that, wanting to relieve my remorse. A good priest does that, too. It does not relieve what I feel, but it reverses a prior verdict.” She shrugged. “Anyway, one must reserve despair for what is unforgivable.”

  “I hope you won’t think me presumptuous if I say nothing is unforgivable.”

  She smiled thinly. He knew to take her silence as rebuttal.

  He said, “My friend who reappeared at Good Shepherd last week, and whom you encouraged me to find, is homosexual. I had been blind to that, and to much else. When we were young, I loved him, but naïvely. The Church made him its whipping boy. I cooperated in that. I’ve lived a lie for more than a dozen years. This week, with your help, I began to face that, and many other things have become clear. The Church has other whipping boys. Which means I do, too.”

  “Jews,” she said calmly.

  “Exactly. I know how outrageous it is—to compare anything to what…just happened in Europe…what just happened…to you….” He paused, waiting for her to stop him, lecture him, rebuke him. She sat unmoving, but listening. He continued, “The Bishop told me the two things have nothing in common, but they do. The whipping. They have the whipping in common.”

  “I do not presume to speak of your friend. I have had my say, with you, speaking as a Jew. But, in other realms, some whipping is deserved.”

  “Realms? Like what? Realms of yours? You can tell me more, Rachel, if you like. You can tell me the story.”

  “No. I cannot,” she said, so simply.

  Kavanagh realized only now that he had called her by name. She seemed not to notice. He said, “You told me the other day that we are at the mercy of ‘the givens of the past.’ That’s been my question this week. Do you believe that I can change my life?”

  “If you tell me you can, I believe it.”

  “The priesthood, the ultimate given, is supposed to be for keeps. I will be a pariah to my kind. If my parents were alive, this would kill them. My sisters won’t disown me, but they’ll never forgive me.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Jerry’s the only one I’ve told. I’ll start my new life at his tugboat company—business manager, deckhand, something. He’s divorced, so he welcomes me to the Pale.” He paused, then added, “Do you know what ‘the Pale’ is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the part of Ireland that the Protestants control.”

  “You’ll be a Protestant?”

  “No. I’ll always be a Catholic. Which means I’ll always be responsible for what we did.” He let the two words hang there—“we” and “did”—obvious.

  After a long time, Kavanagh became convinced that their conversation was over. He saw that she was exhausted, emptied. Because of his forcing, she had forced herself to come with him, out of mere politeness. Or was it pity? To have imagined in her any semblance of the wish that had returned him to The Cloisters, to her, was not only foolish but selfish, and insulting. Yet he could not bring himself to end their time together. The stillness between them was the furthest thing from tranquillity. But it went on.

  At last, she said, “I was in Drancy, what you would call ‘the camp,’ for a full year after the liberation. I referred to this, but incompletely. You should understand that I was une femme tondue, a shorn woman.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s why we took to wearing this.” Without raising her eyes, she touched her turban. “The postwar head covering de rigueur. So the baldness would not show. We were the collaboratrices horizontales. Many, many of us. Our Nazi jailers were replaced by Heroes of the French Resistance. They took turns with us. As our defilers, the Frenchmen were worse. Punishment, they called it. Although…in my case, it was justified.”

  “I doubt that.”

  She lifted her eyes and looked at him so sharply that he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Only then did he realize what a further defilement cheap courtesy could be. He knew from secrets entrusted t
o him by bedridden lads at the navy hospital that a chasm had separated him from the real ravages of the war. That chasm was open here, between him and this woman.

  She had, however, begun to speak to him from her side of that pit, and, with her voice not much above a whisper, she continued. “I was released from Drancy by the Resistance fighters only when I became pregnant by one of them, a troubled pregnancy. I was sent to the Bon Secours Sisters. I lost the child, of course.”

  When she fell silent, Kavanagh had to rein in the impulse to reach a hand across to her.

  As if she’d read that in him, she looked away.

  With her eyes averted now, she resumed, “From the hospital, free, I went at once to Île Saint-Louis, the neighborhood in Paris where we lived. I went to our apartment. I was like a madwoman. The concierge was still there from before the war, Madame Boudreau. I terrified her. Why not? Once, I smashed her statue of the Virgin to the floor—a grotesque act, which, to this day, I do not regret. Naturally, so afraid, she admitted me. Our apartment had been stolen, but the thieving occupant was not there. Madame Boudreau gave me the key and let me go up. The last thing I had done on the day my father was arrested was hide his manuscript—Abélard et Israël—under the floorboards of the closet. I went directly there and threw myself on my knees. Some stranger’s clothing and shoes—I pushed it all aside. Already I could hear scurrying noises from below. I knew where to press. The boards came loose, and my father’s pages were there, still in their satchel, undisturbed by all except the rats whose nest I had disturbed. But then I saw: the leather of the satchel had been chewed away, into gray tissue. Reaching for the pages, I found that the rats had shredded the paper—all of it—into millions of fine pieces. And, with urine, into paste.”

  “Dear God, Rachel,” Kavanagh whispered. “Dear God.”

  She said, “I had imagined that, with my father’s treatise on Abelard, I could keep my father alive. That purpose had kept me alive. I was living to retrieve that text into which he had poured himself at the end. I aimed to finish it by correcting any errors his critics had identified. With that work, I was going to repair my terrible mistake. When I saw what the rats had done…an utter obliteration…that was the end. C’est tout. My father dead. His Abelard dead. Because of me. That is when…” She uncuffed her sleeve, to display her wrist. She ran her forefinger across the scar, gently—but still retracing the slice of the blade. What had been Kavanagh’s imposition on Monday was now her act of trust. She said, “Madame Boudreau found me after I cut myself. She did me one great service. Through everything until then, for three years, I had clutched my father’s small copy of the Historia. That book was all I had of him. It was on the floor beside me. She put it on the stretcher when the police took me away.”