A faint smile and the barest color in her cheeks were the only hint of the bashfulness she surely felt. How long had it been since she'd so exposed herself? I pictured her before her childhood mirror, removing her anachronous garments, the black yardage, the linen at her throat, the constricting starched bodice, the layered underwear. And when she saw her parts whole, her breasts with nipples rising and her hips, her broad pelvis, the delta between her legs, her body in its prime come back to her, did her juice flow? Certainly she knew what an apparition of desire she would be to us.
In fact, I heard from Michael's lips a quick short cry, an "Oh!" that made me look at him.
His face was the face of a man who'd taken a severe blow. Without the water to float in I think he'd have been reeling. His disorientation was apparent, and his questions flashed in his eyes. Who was she? And what did anything he'd learned or vowed or prayed over have to do with the agony of this wanting? What were all those memorized verses of Writ to him now? He wanted her and his wanting trapped him. By then the choice was not between her and God or between her and the Church or between her and the priesthood, but between her and himself.
Because I cared for him as a friend my thought for an instant was how to help him. I knew right then of course that his pain would not be soothed until he took possession of her, and I think I knew also that eventually, no matter what promises to whom were broken, he would.
When I looked back at her I forgot him. As she approached the tile apron of the pool her step quickened, and she raised her arms together over her head, flaring her breasts, and then springing into the air, feet together, carving an arc through the heat with her flawless dive.
She swam underwater half the length of the pool, right at Michael, like a predator, and she surfaced two feet in front of him. "Hello," she said. But her meaning was, Here I am. What are you going to do?
"Venus Rising," Michael answered, but the rakish greeting had nothing to do with what he felt. I read his agony, though I didn't understand it yet. He was naked to himself for the first time. What was he going to do? Precisely nothing. Why? Because he was nothing. He would never know humiliation like that again.
She began to blush. Clearly she had planned her moves to this point, but no farther. She folded her arms across her breasts and let her face fall. Neither Michael nor I looked away from her. It would have been the merciful thing to do, for her counterfeit boldness had failed her utterly and she felt terribly exposed. But it was impossible to take one's eyes away. She was simply the most beautiful woman either of us had ever seen.
To my astonishment I was the one to steer us past that moment by saying simply, "Your father calls you 'Syr.'"
She nodded and laughed. "For 'Syrup.' Karo syrup." She laughed again. "My name is Carolyn."
Michael said sadly, quietly, "It's a lovely name, Carolyn."
And she raised her face to him exactly as she might have had he hooked a finger under her chin. I saw the worship in her eyes. For years I would try to forget that moment and its meaning. They beheld each other so steadily, so exclusively and for so long that I became embarrassed and dove under the water.
When I surfaced she had swum away. Her parents were approaching with refreshments. Michael called me, drew close and whispered, "As soon as we can you have to get me out of here."
Carolyn never returned to the convent. As Michael and I left that day, he took her aside for a moment. I saw them kiss, like a pair of figurines. Tears ran freely down her face when she followed him to the car, then stood waving as we drove away. Michael didn't speak.
Finally, as we crossed into Manhattan, I had to ask him. "What did you say to her?"
"I said 'Goodbye.' I can't see her again."
"Why not?" I asked, though I knew the answer. I asked it calmly, though my heart soared with happiness. I cared not a whit for his agony then, and though I was in its debt, I did not for once admire his ruthless will.
"Because I love her," he said simply.
I nodded, as if my only meaning was that I understood.
THIRTEEN
OUR TWA flight from Tel Aviv arrived at Kennedy at 1:45 in the afternoon. My daughter and I took an hour to clear customs. Molly was carrying only a shoulder bag and I had nothing, save my toothbrush and passport, but that heightened the official's suspicion. When he asked me my occupation I wanted to say smuggler.
Then we were in a taxi sailing up the ramp of the Triborough Bridge. Ah, Moses! The cabbie cut dangerously in front of a truck. Molly and I exchanged a glance, then smiled; this was more dangerous than the terrorist-ridden road from Jerusalem.
New York was golden in the afternoon sun and my eyes feasted on the skyline, the most familiar sight there was. Only then, beholding the jagged frieze, did I realize how I had hungered for this city. I was nearly overwhelmed by a longing for the life I had denied myself.
The taxi took us directly to the cathedral.
Not Saint Patrick's; the funeral was to be held that night at the Anglican Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue near Columbia University, and that had loosed a flood of feelings that surprised me and disturbed me. At first I thought Carolyn had preferred the Episcopal Church and I was shocked. Had they converted? I asked Molly, and she said no. They had quietly continued to worship as Catholics all those years, mainly at the Jesuit parish not far from their apartment on West Seventieth Street. Since it was a church staffed by Order priests who had never known him personally—though perhaps some of them had played basketball against him—Michael had been able to go there with a certain, essential feeling of anonymity. Molly said that he and her mother had come to love the place.
But it hadn't mattered.
When, after Michael's death, Carolyn had called the Jesuit pastor, he had regretfully referred her to the chancery of the archdiocese. The chancellor had told her that Michael would not be allowed to be buried from a Catholic church. As an unlaicized but married priest he was an excommunicant, the archbishop had said. Canon law forbade him both a Church funeral and burial in sacred ground. The archbishop regretted it too, and he was sorry it came as a surprise. But, he'd said, he was sure Michael Maguire himself had understood the consequences of the decisions he'd made.
I was too stunned, when Molly told me, to realize how furious I was and how hurt, for myself as well as for Michael. What an obscenity such a last rejection was, even if, by Church standards, it was somehow defensible. I was confused by the fact that Molly seemed to have no particular reaction to the profound insult her mother had suffered. Was that because she expected no better from the Church? She didn't believe in God, she'd said. Wasn't it to her advantage to be free of those petty distinctions, as if, on any rational scale, it mattered, now that Michael was dead, which church he was buried from? Hell, from Molly's point of view Saint John the Divine would have been preferable. It at least was an authentic Gothic masterpiece, far more beautiful and, even unfinished, more imposing than the Fifth Avenue bauble, Saint Patrick's. And no mere museum like the Cloisters, Saint John the Divine had at least been the scene of vital human events of broad significance: huge ecumenical gatherings on the crisis of the city, on the meaning of the Holocaust, on ending racial conflict. Duke Ellington conducted his concerts of sacred music in that cathedral and was buried from it. Great festivals with jugglers and aerialists and minstrels, and countless productions of plays and chorales and symphonies reaffirmed the ancient connection of religion to art. And once, while FBI agents waited nervously to arrest him, Michael preached against the war from the cathedral's great pulpit.
Aside from Cardinal Spellman's famous sermon condemning—and therefore launching—the movie Baby Doll, and the funeral of Bobby Kennedy, what had ever happened of more than parochial interest at Saint Patrick's? Ironically, of course, Michael was ordained in its sanctuary, but that would be cited by the chancellor as the very reason his funeral could not happen there.
As the grotesque meaning of the archbishop's statement became fully apparent
I involuntarily but graphically conjured an image of him, at once ingratiating and hostile: "The archdiocese regrets, the cardinal might wish otherwise, but the new pope, you see, has reinstated the traditional emphasis on the absolute and permanent character of priestly vows. After a regrettable period of laxity in the wake of the Vatican Council, the Church no longer contradicts herself in these matters." He smiled sadly, in my fantasy, shrugged, turned his hands out. What could one do?
And I was thinking, yes, the new pope. Not the Hamlet Paul VI was, but Shakespeare's Brutus, slayer of brothers. The new pope ran the Church the way the Party wanted to run Poland. Michael Maguire was for a time the Lech Walesa of American Catholicism, and he was not forgiven. It was my mistake, of course, to think he might have been.
So the taxi took us to Saint John the Divine. As we paid the cabbie and got out, the heat blasted us. It was as hot as the desert.
I stood looking up at the mammoth dark structure with its rose window, the tracery dominating the glass in daylight, its portal gargoyles leering down at me, its tympanum saints indifferent, and the carved stonework ribs of the entrance arches soaring to their crowns. The cathedral was too large, as if a mere human person was unworthy to enter alone. We should have gone in as members of a throng. But I reminded myself: This cathedral has welcomed outcasts. This cathedral has bent itself to Michael.
But I was immobile there before it.
It will be cooler inside, I told myself. The Gothic windows will be brilliantly illuminated by the fierce summer light. Saint John's was a perfect rendition of man's most magnificent expression, and, compared to it, all the box-forms of Manhattan's architecture, from the looming Behemoths downtown to the sterile dwellings across the avenue behind me seemed as impoverished as the thatchedroofed mud cottages in medieval villages, as if contemporary people too invested all their greatest treasure, skill and art, despite themselves, in the house of God.
Still, I did not want to go in there. Michael was laid out in some crypt chapel under the vaulting, tracery, clerestory, triforium, arcade; under buttresses, capitals, mullions, voussoirs, keystones and acres of leaded glass. A cruciform jewel.
But I knew Michael and knew then with a certainty infallible as the pope's that where he belonged that night was at the head of the aisle of even the most undistinguished Catholic church in New York. Good Shepherd, say, in Inwood, which I was sure he never ceased to love. "Durk!" I could hear him screaming at me. "Durk! Don't let them do this to me! Get me back where I belong!" And even in my imagination the panic in his voice was absolute.
In primitive religion the worst fate was to be a lost soul, a spirit improperly dispatched from the world and condemned therefore to an eternity of aimless wandering. And whose religion, when it comes to death, is not primitive? The new pope was right. My fury at him showed it. These things do matter. Scratch us and we are all primitives, desperate for the ancient rites done in the ancient way. The pope was only doing what he had to do to protect those rites. Michael Maguire was a priest forever, bound by vows he had renounced. Were we now to say his ordination in Saint Patrick's didn't matter? If that most solemn act of the Church did not matter, what did?
And who was I to judge the chancellor for pronouncing his anathemas? I had cut Michael off before the Church did. I had turned on him even more heartlessly. He had been bound by the implicit vow of our friendship and he had disregarded it. More than anyone he had known what Carolyn meant to me and he had been the only one who could have taken her and he had. Was I now to say his betrayal didn't matter? Hadn't Michael understood, as the chancellor put it, the consequences of his decisions?
What, that he should wander aimlessly forever? Could we mean it? Without the only blessing, the only forgiveness that he'd have wanted? Of course the Protestants could welcome him now, and the dean of the cathedral no doubt would asperge the coffin himself. But why not? Michael had not offended the Protestants. He had not betrayed them. To an entire generation he'd been a hero, the Prince of Peace. Only to the few of us who loved him most had he been the vilest enemy. I saw suddenly what I had in common with the cardinal. And also, since the Church had so resolutely condemned Michael, why Carolyn had needed me to come home. I was there, I understood finally, to pronounce the absolution that saves a soul from hell, and I knew, to my horror, that I could not do it.
Molly and I mounted the stairs and at the huge center portal—the lower of the pair of wrought-iron hinges was above the level of my eye—I found the ring handle that indicated which panel served as the quotidian door. But it didn't budge. I went to the side portal and tried its door, but it too was bolted. Only then did I recall that in the cities of America, God's house, even in the middle of the day, is locked from the inside.
Our path around the side of the cathedral took us through the garden which was elegantly laid out around a stunted steeple, a relic from some English town perhaps, which looked, when seen whimsically, like the topmost part of a church that was otherwise completely buried in the earth. An underground church, as it were. In fact the structure was an outdoor pulpit that hadn't been used in years, and I remembered being struck by its archaic beauty once before. I had been standing by it years ago when the agent of my destruction ambushed me.
"Molly!"
A boy of about eight, dressed nattily in a little blue blazer, had called her from a bench and was now running toward her. He was sobbing.
Molly dropped her bag and took a few steps toward him, and they embraced violently. He left the ground and for a long time she held him. I marveled at her strength, at the strength of her affection for the child, and I was filled with awe at that epiphany of her goodness. She was my daughter! And it ripped me anew that the degradation of my love for her mother had degraded in turn my fatherly love for her. Else would I have left? Else wouldn't I have fought Michael for at least my daughter's love? If I had been there she would never have taken his name. I was filled with regret, but also stern acknowledgment that opaque hardening is the only law that heartbreak knows.
When finally Molly turned to me with her arm around the boy's shoulder, I was in no way prepared for it when she said, "This is Eddie, my brother."
But I must have suspected it. Surely otherwise I'd have consciously entertained the possibility. Staring at the boy whose face, even wrecked with emotion, had the dark Irish charm peculiar to his father, I knew that I was looking at an extension—no, the consummation—of the adoration I'd seen in his parents' eyes that first day at the house in Dobbs Ferry. No wonder I hadn't wanted to contemplate this possibility. For the first time in many years I felt the full force of Carolyn and Michael's love for each other. It was glib of me to claim earlier that I had put my resentment behind me. Perhaps I could even have felt bitterness toward this child, but the intensity of his grief overcame me. Michael was his father! I knew what it was to feel bereft as he felt. And I knew what it was—though I had broken faith with this knowledge—to comfort a child who yearned for a father's touch. "The fathers of families..." Suddenly, I longed for Michael anew, to clap his back for what we had in common now, and quote Peguy: "...those great adventurers of the modern world."
"Eddie," I said, while he shyly avoided my gaze, "Are you named for your grandfather?"
The boy nodded and collapsed against Molly again, and I sensed that Carolyn's father had died at some point too. I looked at Molly with my question, and she flicked her eyes, yes.
When the boy pulled himself together I wanted to tell him I was sorry, but the words seemed cruelly glib, and I suddenly felt exhausted. Was I up to this? How many time zones had I crossed? I rolled down the sleeves of my shirt; that child was dressed the way I should have been. What was I doing there?
"Mommy's in the church." He indicated the doorway at the south transept. "I can't go in there because Daddy..."
Molly took him again. Without speaking we agreed that she would wait with him in the garden. He clung to her gratefully, and I crossed slowly to the stairs. At the threshold of the chu
rch I stopped. Inside the darkness beckoned, soothing and cool. I thought of the threshold stone of the ancient gate of Jerusalem, the one Jesus crossed. Then I entered the everlasting moment the cathedrals preserve for us.
It took some moments for my eyes to adjust to the dark, and at first all I could see were the brilliant blues and reds of the towering windows. There was not a sound in the vast church. As I moved to the center of the cruciform, my sight sharpened. Stairs to my right led into the sanctuary. The elaborately carved wooden stalls of the choir framed the space in which the high altar stood. Beams of sunlight filtered down upon it magically.
I did not presume to enter the sanctuary—lay brother, still—but crossed to the far aisle and followed it into the apse of the cathedral because I knew that in the classic plan the chapels are behind the choir in the alcoves formed by the easternmost buttresses. As I wound past the sanctuary and the altar and the bishop's throne, it wasn't Chartres I thought of but Saint Patrick's. For all their differences, those places inside were very much alike.
As I approached the chapels I instinctively slowed my pace, all at once conscious of the click of my sandals on the stone floor. I was aware of Carolyn's presence even before, as I passed a last column, she came into view. She was kneeling with her back to me before a subtly illuminated statue of the Virgin, and I froze. The sight of her, bent like that in prayer before the icon of Mary, that great sufferer, confounded me. An avalanche of emotion—love for her and infinite sympathy, grief for my friend, infinite loss—crashed down on me. I had no choice but to turn away and retrace my steps, back around the aisle to the choir. I could not breathe, and for an instant the dread phrase "Heart attack!" flashed before me. I slipped into a choir stall, a monk's stall, and collapsed, burying my head in my arms, weeping.
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