The Cloister Page 2

  “That is nonsense.”

  “Perhaps. But Jews murdered their own children in Mainz. That is certain.”

  “To prevent their being kidnapped by the crossbearers and forcibly baptized. That was not murder; it was martyrdom.”

  “Be careful of that! These are fires from which we must protect Peter Abelard’s name. Jews be damned. The battle now is for Peter’s eternal salvation. We must have the anathema voided. Guard those words if you want the papal rescript granted.” Father Abbot took hold of her forearm, fiercely. “For the sake of his eternal soul, Mother. Guard those words.”

  She clung to the pages. Despite the hot rush of what she felt, she nodded. A promise.

  The Abbot held on to her arm for a moment more than was seemly. He said, despite himself, “Your obstinacy is what Peter knew of you. But I see it, too. Beware of your obstinacy, Mother.”

  To his surprise, she leaned against him. “Inside, Holy Father, I am anything but obstinate. I am egg custard, fallen.”

  “The jongleurs sing otherwise.” The Abbot laughed, gave her one squeeze with his enclosing arm, and released her. “You, the infamous Héloïse,” he said, with a sudden rush of affection. “Their lyrics sing happily of your damning of the Church. An Abbess who damns the Church!”

  “And you, the Abbot Primate, who receives her with a gentle hand.” She straightened her spine, an unconscious gesture of will. She clutched the vellum pages close, deliberately pushing the bundle against her breast, to feel the pressure of the small ring of gold, suspended on a chain, hidden beneath her habit, against her flesh.

  The Abbot stepped back.

  But now, with a bolt of feeling, she reached for him. “Will you be at the gate in the morning, my lord? I will pray your blessing.”

  “You will have it, Mother. You will have it always. And now I must order your torches, the oils, and water.” His authority was back. “I will send in bread and fruit, a cup, and the holy image of our Lady.” With that, the Abbot Primate turned and walked out into the Cloister, the budding garden, over which darkness was soon to fall.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Father Michael Kavanagh was at the Communion rail, moving smoothly along, placing the wafer on the outstretched, glistening tongue of each of the ladies and the few gents who had come forward to drop to their knees. “Corpus Domini…nostri Jesu Christi…” he intoned, but under his breath. Rubrics required him to recite the entire formula for each communicant, but no one did that. Aware of the swirl of his vestments, nicely in sync with the sidling altar boy, he kept the clip, speaking a phrase above each open mouth. “Custodiat animam tuam…in vitam aeternam.” The trick was to keep from touching the knuckle of one’s forefinger to the actual tongue, its saliva. “Amen.”

  This was “the Six,” the first Mass each weekday morning. Counting the Monsignor, there were five priests on the staff of Good Shepherd Parish in Inwood, on the far tip of Manhattan—the only Catholic church on Broadway, even if it was a dozen miles north of the Broadway that counts. Kavanagh, at thirty-eight, was senior to one of his fellow curates, and could have drawn a later Mass, but what the hell—his eyes routinely popped open at five. Anyway, he found the jumble of the faith fully convincing only when it was dark outside.

  And here was Mrs. Heaney, in her black shawl and firmly shut eyes, an “Irish divorcée”—a woman whose husband had simply taken off, never to come back. She clutched rosary beads. “Corpus Domini…”

  Sergeant Kelly, uniformed and ready for the precinct follies, offered a trembler, the nervous tongue that, outside of church, habitually curled itself around the unlit stub of a cigar. One of Kelly’s secrets was his Bell’s palsy, a slight facial droop, which that cigar disguised, while plugging the drool. “…nostri Jesu…” The priest knew Kelly’s other secret—that, hitting the bottle, he hit his wife—because Kavanagh’s priesthood was centered more on the Confessional than the Communion rail. He was regarded in the parish as kind, and a long line of penitents stood outside his booth every Saturday, which may have said more about his sternly judgmental brother priests than about him. In truth, sins whispered in the dark made Kavanagh as sorry as the one whispering. He was not so much kind as aware of his own free-floating compunction, which made the priest’s side of the Confessional box his personal holy-of-holies. As for Kelly, the priest knew that the cop never took Communion unless he’d kept his fists in check at home. Good man, Sergeant, Kavanagh thought, but said only, “…Christi…”

  And here was Benjy Foley, the proprietor of the candy store across from the church, whose clientele was divided among schoolchildren, policy players, numbers runners, and whackers. Never one for the Sacrament of Penance, Foley knew that if he ever showed up on the other side of the sliding screen from Father Kavanagh, he’d be forbidden to take Communion, despite the priest’s famous kindness, until the rackets went. Too many paychecks left at Foley’s, too many legs broken by Foley’s collectors, too much hidden juice. Kavanagh knew that the bookie’s throwing himself on his knees next to Sergeant Kelly was all part of the game. But it wasn’t a priest’s part to openly refuse Communion—“…custodiat animam tuam…”—even to this bastard.

  When Father Kavanagh moved toward the next bent person along the rail, the sharp scent of Old Spice cologne hit him. The man was a lean, hunched-over figure, with linked fingers clamped like a helmet to his head, which bent forward from the upended collar of a gray tweed overcoat. Because he was out of place in that company, Kavanagh quickly took in his appearance. His trousers, emphatically displayed by his kneeling, were dark, sharply creased. He wore expensive-looking brown wingtips. His longish hair, in the interlocking thatch of his fingers, was a silvery blond. There was something supplicant, or defeated, in the posture, which did not square with the well-cut downtown clothing. The priest broke stride, hesitated. The altar boy missed his step, tilting the golden plate he carried, the paten. Then the man lowered his hands, raised his head, and brought his sad black eyes up to Kavanagh. His straight and steady gaze belied its bloodshot rheuminess. His necktie was loosened, and his collar was unbuttoned. There was exhaustion in the man, but also a kind of ferocity. Kavanagh froze, because, despite smart grooming rarely seen at Good Shepherd, and despite how the face had been touched by time, he knew it at once. Runner!

  The man met Kavanagh’s recognition with his own, but only for a moment. Without extending his tongue, he lowered his head again, bending forward, clasping his fingers atop his hair. The posture itself was an utter rejection of Communion. Kavanagh was stock-still, confounded. This had never happened before. The man’s refusal to open his mouth and take the Host seemed personal, a refusal not of God, but of the priest. An indictment?

  There was nothing to do but move along the rail. The next communicant—another rosary-clutching, shawled grandmother—had left space between herself and the well-dressed man, yet Kavanagh came at her aslant in order to keep the man in sight. By the time she had received and made the sign of the cross, the man was up and moving away. He was tall, and still had the smooth stride of an athlete. Yes. Runner.

  After Mass, in the sacristy, Kavanagh removed the vestments quickly, assuming the man would be waiting in the shadowy rear of the church. But when the priest went out there, he was gone. Had this just been a dream? No. The air in the far vestibule, when Kavanagh reached it, carried the lingering aroma of Old Spice, the rooting detail. He went out the heavy oaken doors. The damp November chill hit him square. In fact, that weather—vividly dank and gray, an endless threat of true winter—perfectly matched how Kavanagh had come to feel about himself, a perpetual inner bleakness, yet always short of the true misery he’d have had to acknowledge. He could still deny the state he was in.

  He stood on the landing atop the wide staircase that ran down to the Broadway sidewalk. In the early-morning fog, he glimpsed the lanky form, heading south at a steady clip. The man made his way past the rarely shuttered Green Acres Bar, the A&P, Connors Funeral Home. There were a couple of liquor stores on
that block, but he passed them quickly. “Go, Runner!” the guys had called after John Malloy at track meets. His speed in footraces had given him his nickname. “Runner” could do the hundred-yard dash in eleven seconds, the 220 in twenty-three. Because of him, the much-disdained Saint Joseph’s Seminary out of Yonkers, an unofficial entry, had unforgettably beaten Columbia and Fordham both, in the 1935 Eastern States Interscholastics, fifteen years ago.

  John Malloy, assuming it was him, crossed 207th Street, moving purposefully. Why would he so pointedly show himself, then disappear? Kavanagh, in his cassock, was not dressed for the street, but he followed anyway. He practically had to run to begin to close the distance. By the time he neared the corner, he had fallen in with the line of early-shift workers making for the subway, and his billowing black robes drew glances as the people made way.

  Kavanagh could just see him when Runner veered west at Dyckman Street, heading onto the overgrown pathway of the hilly bushland that separated Inwood from the Hudson River. To the working-class Irish of Good Shepherd, this end of Inwood Hill Park, running into Fort Tryon Park, was a forbidding place—forested and cleft by ravines and gulches, an old-growth nature preserve more than a playground. Younger boys made use of the near margins of the park to drift behind ill-kempt hedges for a smoke, and older ones, with girls, found nooks for making out, but otherwise all but the wildest kids avoided the place. There were caves, it was said, in which Indian bones and arrowheads could be found. More likely, the “caves” were the hollowed-out undersides of untended shrubs, ad hoc housing for the fearsome vagabonds who jungled in the park—but that was not Runner Malloy. Kavanagh had lost sight of him.

  He stopped, checked his watch. He was the duty priest until midmorning, and had to get to the hospital, to administer Viaticum in the intensive-care ward. “May the Lord Jesus Christ protect you”—the words popped into his head—“and lead you to eternal life.”

  —

  A COUPLE OF hours later, dressed now in a plaid flannel shirt, sweater, and windbreaker, the priest tucked his breviary under his elbow, together with the small volume that was his current spiritual reading, and set out for the park again, not to find Runner Malloy, but simply to dispel the energy the phantom had ignited in him. That Kavanagh had last glimpsed his old friend disappearing into the rough preserve lent the park a kind of mystical aura that morning, and it drew him. By the time Kavanagh had finished the morning rounds at the hospital, he’d begun to wonder if he’d been mistaken at the early Mass. He hadn’t seen Runner Malloy since the seminary, not long after that astounding track meet. But who presents himself at the Communion rail and then rejects the sacred Host? What the hell?

  Fort Tryon Park was nestled under the pinnacle, and to the north, of Washington Heights, the city’s highest point. The only vista from which the park’s own sharp elevation could actually be appreciated was across the river, in New Jersey. Once a stroller left Broadway to enter the reserve, the air of an aboriginal landscape quickly imposed itself, and the place felt alien.

  Kavanagh did not know what he was looking for. There might have been vagrants lurking in the hollowed-out shrubs, leftovers from the summer, when the park was said to be alive with hoboes, down-and-out drifters whose encampments the police would have ignored as long as they kept their distance from the museum that stood atop the hill. In fact, not so many tramps made their way this far uptown, a hardscrabble district, home to doormen and hacks, where panhandling wouldn’t pay and free soup was scarce. As for the museum, it was an obscure outpost of the Met downtown, and the Irish of Inwood gave it a good leaving alone.

  At a parking lot inside a pair of tall stone pillars, it occurred to Kavanagh that Runner might have left a car here. But at the far side of the park, at 190th Street, there was an out-of-the-way subway station, so perhaps he’d simply headed there, for the A Train that would take him all the way to Lower Manhattan, where his fancy duds would fit in.

  Parking lot? Subway? That Kavanagh did not know what the striding John Malloy had been gunning for underscored his perplexity.

  As he wandered the paths, he thought of those first days that had made them friends. They arrived at Saint Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers on the same day in 1932, alike in being twenty years old, and in having a tremulous readiness to throw themselves off the cliff of God’s grace, as the retreat master described what they were doing. With God’s help, the priest said, they would find a way to fly. And did they ever!

  Dunwoodie, as the place was called for the once-pastoral corner of Yonkers it occupied, was the former country estate of a railroad baron. The already opulent mansion had been expanded—a license to crenellate, in old country argot—into Patrick Cardinal Hayes’s neo-Gothic fantasy of an Irish great house. Its demesne consisted of a hundred acres of rolling lawn, which the Sulpician Fathers had seen fit to turn into a golf course for the lads. It was easy to believe in miracles if, in the thick of the Depression, you went from being the unpromising second son of an unemployed Hell’s Kitchen longshoreman or, in Runner’s case, of a long-laid-off Poughkeepsie millworker, to being a connoisseur of golf clubs, knowing the difference between a brassie, a spoon, and a mashie niblick. On long, easy strolls between tee and green, Runner and Kavanagh had become chums. That Runner had later dropped out of the seminary, and of Kavanagh’s life, had left Kavanagh in a lurch from which, apparently—given the sense of dislocation just triggered by the man’s abrupt reappearance—Kavanagh had yet to extricate himself fully.

  He wandered the park for most of an hour, and was in the thickly wooded well of a glen when it began to rain. He wasn’t sure which way was out. The path ahead ascended steeply, and he took it, cursing himself for not having worn a hat. At first, the rain was light, but it began to come down sharply, and he picked up the pace, moving steadily uphill. Because the path was serpentine, the foliage overgrown, and the downpour heavy, he could not see ahead, and it surprised him when, as he was taking a last turn, the huge museum building appeared above, looming like a granite butte. He headed for it.

  An American Catholic should have loved that place—the museum took the form of a medieval monastery, with elements plucked from the rubble of a long-lost Europe and lovingly restored on a pinnacle overlooking the Hudson River—but at that point, few Catholics did. The Cloisters housed the Metropolitan Art Museum’s masterpiece collection of tapestries, altarpieces, frescoes, sculpted figures, fountains, and stained-glass windows—all dating to between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. But The Cloisters was not a true monastery, or even an authentic imitation. It was a Rockefeller-funded fantasy structure, a mishmash of belfries, architectural fragments, aged pillars, arched doorways, stairways, arcades—all tastefully reassembled to evoke the high romance of Gothic revival that had so quickened the patrician imagination of the Gilded Age. The inspiration here was not Saint Henry, the patron hallow of the childless and the handicapped, but Henry Adams, for whom Chartres’s triumph was only aesthetic.

  In fact, the museum was a stunning monument to the artistic achievement of Catholic high culture, but Kavanagh’s parishioners knew better than to consider it theirs. What were a bunch of moth-eaten old wall hangings or limestone statues with smashed faces, anyway? What counted in monasteries were the monks and nuns and their spiritual works of mercy—men and women on their knees, not gawking at pictures. To the good people of Good Shepherd, The Cloisters seemed a peculiar, haunted emptiness, and, but for the handful of Irish who found employment there as guards or maintenance men, the parish was content to ignore it.

  Kavanagh rushed into the place, for its shelter from the rain. Inside the entrance, a prim woman sat at a desk. She looked up, startled. There was a box for a voluntary contribution. “Cats and dogs out there,” Kavanagh said. He threw some change into the box, picked up a brochure, and turned to enter, shaking water off his shoulders. His books were tucked under his jacket. He’d be a Prod tourist for an hour. What the hell.

  He’d been in there once, years before, but h
ad forgotten that the first sensation was of claustrophobia: the entranceway was a long, low, windowless corridor, sloping upward, evoking the dark tunnel of a mythic initiation. The corridor led to a set of rough stone stairs that spiraled up to the next level, to a great stone octagonal antechamber, higher than it was wide, that served as the museum’s true entrance hall. From clerestory windows above, the dull November light washed down on the several artworks that decorated the walls: artworks here, but once they had been consecrated altarpieces. Kavanagh recognized, because of the pictured staff and animal-skin cloak, a primitive portrait of John the Baptist, together with a rendering—the lion—of Saint Mark. Another woman sat at a desk in a corner, focused on pages under a gooseneck lamp. Several doorways led, multidirectionally, out of the hall, and Kavanagh chose one at random, having to stoop slightly as he passed through. He was startled to hear the atonal chanting of monks, just audible, as if coming from a nearby, closed-in chapel. But it was newfangled piped-in music, fake.

  A short walk down a stone corridor—hung with a gruesome crucifix, a penitent Magdalene, and a sorrowful Madonna—led into a large rectangular enclosure organized around a glassed-in courtyard, a classic rendition of the ancient monastic hub. The quadrangle was defined by a long four-sided arcade that begged to be walked around. Originally, the space would have been open to the air, a garden for growing herbs and fruit, centered on a fountain. The limestone fountain was there, but dry, and the few potted plants suggested that most others had been taken to some greenhouse for the winter. Above, on the paneled glass canopy, the rain danced, but soundlessly. At the far opposite side of the colonnade, a small group of people were gathered around a painting, too far away to notice or care about the complications of a momentarily thrown middle-aged priest.

  To his right, through a semicircular arch whose Romanesque sturdiness jarred with the more delicately pointed Gothic-era arches of the arcade proper, was a vacant, unfurnished, low-ceilinged hall with a stone bench running along all three walls. He went in, as if the room had been his destination all along, and he took up a place on the bench, as if he had a right to be there.