The Cloister Read online

  “Jesus was killed by the will of God, Joe: ‘Not my will, but Thine be done.’ ”

  Gallen snorted. “ ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children.’ In point of fact, Father, that’s the Jews—not God. Christ-killers. Simone Weil was right. It’s not anti-Semitism to speak the truth.” The priest snapped his paper up.

  Kavanagh was surprised less by what the smug young bastard had said than by his own reaction to it. Theological impeachment of Jews was run-of-the-mill. Visceral rejection of such judgment—that was new. Blood be upon our children: how many children died in the death camps? For the first time in his life, Kavanagh heard the phrase from the Gospel of Matthew as an incitement.

  But Joe McCarthy must have further outraged himself just then, because an unrestrained burst of applause exploded from the television, echoed by the hoots of Frank and Billy. Kavanagh stood, crossed to the oak table, hit his glass with another splash, and left the Common Room.

  In the corridor, by the phone booth, he stopped. “Ask Agent,” Runner Malloy had said all those years ago, and Kavanagh had. “Agent,” as he was known behind his back to seminarians, was Father Sean Donovan, the Church-history professor. Because he was an Irish import, the priest was stamped in the argot as “FBI,” for “Foreign Born Irish.” That, in the razor-sharp remaking of the compulsive nicknamers, led to the moniker “Agent.” The inevitable edge of ridicule involved, in Father Donovan’s case, his being badly overweight, and having the pasty flesh of one to whom athletic fields or shooting ranges would have been terra incognita—the polar opposite of a G-man. Yet Father Donovan, then a man of about fifty, was perhaps the most beloved member of the faculty. Still, Kavanagh remembered being surprised at Runner’s reference, because John Malloy had not been one of Father Donovan’s lads. He’d gone for spiritual direction to someone else—Kavanagh couldn’t remember whom.

  Sean Donovan was still Kavanagh’s good friend, even if, for the last ten years, he had been, as one of the Archdiocese’s two Auxiliary Bishops, Cardinal Spellman’s left-hand man. The Cardinal had a genius for manipulating his clergy, and Bishop Donovan was the designated good cop, nicely balancing resentments stirred by the Cardinal’s right-hand man—Bishop Alonzo Grant, who was known behind his back as “GI,” for “Grand Inquisitor.” Grant, in fact, was the power in the Power House—the enforcer. Compared with him, Bishop Donovan was a sob-sister. What stymied Kavanagh at the phone booth was a mad impulse to give Sean a call, but at this hour? The phone would ring in the Residence Common Room, where Grant could be sitting—or even Spellman himself. Calling the Power House near midnight? Are you nuts?

  Kavanagh took his drink along the dark corridor, then up the narrow stairs, bypassing his own third floor to spiral all the way up to the heavy door that opened onto the roof. The rains of the day had passed, but the air was still murky. In the lee of the mechanicals shed, he found his battered beach chair, stowed up there since September. The canvas contraption, once he opened it, was the instrument by which he turned the remote tar-paper roof-deck into his personal refuge. He had not expected to be up there again until May or June, but the day’s strange and sudden anguish compelled him. He sat, shivered, hugged himself against the November night’s chill.

  Kavanagh had spent the war as a navy chaplain, assigned mainly to the Navy Yard Hospital in Brooklyn, where there was a tar-paper rooftop cubby like this, to which he’d escaped at night. Thousands of the wounded and dying were evacuated from the war zones to that hospital, and his job had been to hold hands with the weeping and the catatonic alike, anoint their foreheads, close their eyelids, then write letters to their parents. Across the nearly three years he was there, the space between hospital beds went from eight feet to six, then three. By the end, even the amputees counted themselves lucky, and by then Kavanagh’s nighttime escape to the rooftop had become habitual. From there, he looked out across at the Manhattan skyline, as if from the bridge of a ghost ship, but tonight, from his ghost rectory, he took in the far less glamorous, if equally familiar, silhouettes of the water towers, stairwell sheds, and stepped-back rooflines looming over Inwood. Here and there, lights were being snapped off. At last, Kavanagh took the truly hefty swallow of whiskey he’d been waiting for all evening.

  Back in the day, at the seminary, Father Sean Donovan’s history classes had been marked by levity. Even lecturing in Latin about the quaestiones of Thomas Aquinas, he’d toss off wiseacre asides—“Carpe noctem,” in warning about an upcoming exam—that thrilled the lads just because they got the joke: spend the night studying. Like all priest faculty, he doubled as a spiritual director, and more young men lined up at his door for counseling than at any other professor’s. He was Kavanagh’s Confessor—an intensely trusted mentor from whom Kavanagh kept no secrets.

  That day of Runner’s departure, immediately after breakfast, in the work period during which Kavanagh was supposedly mopping out the shower stalls, he went instead to Father Donovan’s room on the priests’ corridor, aware of a tangled knot in his breast, feelings for which he had no name. He hesitated at the door, fingering the top buttons of his cassock. Finally, he knocked.

  “Come,” the priest said, his voice muffled by the stout door.

  Kavanagh entered. “Good morning, Father. I’m sorry, but—”

  “Never mind that, Michael. I expected you.” Then Father Donovan added, as always, the Irish pleasantry, “You’re very welcome indeed.”

  At the priest’s lilting brogue, Kavanagh’s spirits lifted.

  Father Donovan was seated at his desk, his breviary open before him. Like Kavanagh, he wore the floor-length soutane, although the hefty priest’s collar was unfastened, as usual. He stood and offered his hand. The grip was strong, conveying an unexpected depth of feeling, which Kavanagh knew to take as a declaration. In the corner opposite the neatly made narrow bed stood a pair of cracked leather wing chairs. The men sat, each one knowing which chair was his.

  “You’ve come about John.”

  “He’s gone?” Kavanagh asked.

  The priest lit a cigarette, and used the waving out of his match to dispel the first cloud of smoke. “He is, Michael. He resigned yesterday.”

  “Resigned? I assumed kicked out for some reason. If Runner was going to quit on his own, he would have told me.”

  “I gather he did tell you.”

  “But only this morning, on his way out the door. He left while it was still dark.”

  “He didn’t want a fuss. And you know how the Rector deplores display when a lad is moving on.” There was consoling sadness in Father Donovan’s eyes.

  “But it seems like something shameful is happening.”

  The priest said nothing to this.

  “Is there?”

  Again, silence. Kavanagh shuddered to think he was intruding on the seal of Confession. “Father,” he said at last, “Runner told me you would explain.”

  “Yes.” The priest nodded solemnly. “He gave me permission to explain to you. Only to you. And he expects you to keep the confidence.”

  What confidence? Kavanagh could hardly breathe.

  The priest took a long, deep drag, not lowering his gaze. He let the smoke out and tapped the ashtray on the table that stood between them. Kavanagh sensed the pulsing behind his own eyes. He looked down at the rug, a threadbare Oriental, along the edge of which the priest’s shoe tapped nervously at a comb of fringe.

  “Will you?” the priest asked.

  “What?”

  “Keep John’s confidence.”

  “Of course. But what gives? I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t he have talked to me?”

  “John was struggling with his vocation, Michael. For some time.”

  “He loved it here, Father. Ace student, best jock in the class—who didn’t like the guy?” At some point here, Kavanagh knew, there would be no holding back his tears. Father Donovan was the only one in whose presence he ever wept. “Runner wanted to be a priest more than I do.”

  “But you’re
still here, son. He’s not. It was really quite simple. John felt a need of love that he could not satisfy as a priest.”

  “Jeez, Father, who doesn’t have that feeling?”

  “I don’t.”

  “I know, but you’re…” It took an awkward long moment for Kavanagh to add, “…already ordained.”

  “He made a prudent choice, lad. Prudence may not be the greatest of virtues, but it’s the most useful one.” Silence fell between them then. Excruciating silence. Endless silence. At last, Father Donovan said, “Michael, he told me to tell you something.” The priest paused. He puffed his cigarette. He batted at the smoke. He said, “John made his decision because of you.”

  “What?”

  “After much prayer and discernment, he had concluded that his feelings for you were out of bounds.”

  The stark declaration stunned Kavanagh, flummoxed him. Instead of reacting with the spilt rush of emotion he’d been dreading, he simply clamped down on all feeling. Dive! Dive! The hatch covers of a plunging submarine swirling shut, like in a movie. And dive Michael Kavanagh did, ever after.

  In recalling that moment now, from the shiplike deck of the rectory roof, Kavanagh recognized what he had snuffed: the unfamiliar feeling from that very morning, what had sent him reeling through the thickets of Inwood Hill and Fort Tryon Park. Not guilt, as he’d have predicted if he could have foreseen this recollection, but grief.

  Even in his mid-twenties, Michael Kavanagh had been a callow boy, far younger than his years. He now looked back on the lad he’d been through the distorting lens of a parish priest’s long experience of the Confessional, listening to ugly secrets, but he still recognized himself as that tenderfoot. In being green, naïve, unaware, young Kavanagh had not been special, but typical of the kind of Catholic kid who welcomed the chance to sublimate the deepest, but also most frightening, specimens of desire.

  Beginning with his mother, who’d lullabied him, a chosen child, Kavanagh was raised to a status apart. Wasn’t he blessed with a heightened sensitivity to the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of all that is unseen? Wasn’t his a capacity for depth of which his brothers and sisters, through no fault of their own, knew nothing? So went the story told to young Michael. He had the feel not just for God, they said, but for God’s grandeur in all that is. He was born to be a priest.

  Well, he thought now, they don’t call it parochial school for nothing. Ignorant of boundaries—so what was “out of bounds”? He had not known in particular what Father Donovan might have meant by that phrase, and, actually, he had not known in general, either. If, in Kavanagh’s own personal bubble at Dunwoodie, the love of women was remote, the erotic love of men for men was simply unimagined. Such a totality of denial suggests what terrors the homoerotic held for the seminary culture, and that culture had fit Kavanagh like a glove. His affection for Malloy had been as absolute as it was unselfconscious. Kavanagh would have said, if the question had ever come up, that his feeling for Runner was absolutely chaste.

  But all at once, in the priest’s room, that bond had somehow been made to seem sinful. Filthy.

  Malloy, by leaving Dunwoodie like a thief in the night, had himself declared it sinful—a moral flip of which Kavanagh had known nothing. Yet that not-knowing, he understood now, was its own offense. Such innocence—here was the lesson—is not a virtue, and at a certain point, for sure by the time a man is shaving every day, it becomes mere self-deceit. Looking back at that moment, Kavanagh saw in a flash how his entire youth had been fraudulent. And now?

  His world—beginning when the nuns joined his mother in the conspiracy of “vocation,” but continuing right through the seminary equivalents of college and graduate school, with black-robed professors affirming him—was an enclosed terrarium that pretended to be the unfenced frontier. How hedged in were they? If the word “seminary” shares a root with “semen,” the linguistic joke was not one the lecturing Father Donovan would have tossed off in class, nor would his precious lads have found it funny.

  But all of this, oddly, was key to what had made John Malloy attractive in the first place. Without the seminarians’ being aware of it, one effect of the implicit but potent restraints on feeling that defined experience at Dunwoodie—the wages of repression—was to paint the tone and tenor of the place with the gray that makes warships invisible at sea. But Runner Malloy, by personality and force of will, had been color itself—with no one more attuned to his standing apart than Michael Kavanagh had been. Malloy had carried himself with a lighthearted flair that—in the haunted house on the hill in Yonkers, with its dark hallways, musty stairwells, gloomy dining hall, and faux-Gothic chapel—seemed forbidden. His easy masculinity was marked by small notes of personal style: black leather belt worn with buckle to the side; watchband a loose-fitting Speidel of stainless steel, which hung on his wrist like jewelry; slip-on shoes that flapped slightly at his heels when he made the genuflection during Mass. In fact, his genuflecting way of touching his right knee to his left heel displayed an unselfconscious grace that seemed akin to the astounding moves he routinely made on the basketball court. There was, that is, something princely about Runner, a smiling tough guy who, in making a point, could rest his hand effortlessly on Kavanagh’s shoulder, an intimate gesture that, because it couldn’t be helped, couldn’t be wrong. How could any of this—then or now—be “out of bounds”?

  “Because of you.” Father Donovan’s words hovered in Kavanagh’s head.

  Runner’s laugh could roll across a room, clearing whatever clogged the air. When Kavanagh, in literature class, had learned about irony, he understood how Malloy’s regular bemusement at the many incongruities of seminary life fell short of mockery. Kindness, manliness, intelligence, and beauty had come together so easily in him that it seemed everyone should have been kind, manly, intelligent, and beautiful like that—but no one else was.

  “Because of you.”

  After that day, Sean Donovan, as Father Donovan and then as Bishop Donovan, had never again mentioned John Malloy to Michael Kavanagh. Nor had Kavanagh to Donovan. Kavanagh, sitting now on the midnight roof, swirling what remained of his ice cubes, saw how absurd that was. And how inhuman. As Bishop, Sean Donovan was no longer Michael Kavanagh’s Confessor, but he was still as good a friend as he had on Planet Earth. And they had never discussed Runner? Kavanagh saw the rough outline of what he had deflected all these years: that, if Runner Malloy had been thrown off course by some inchoate, wrong-seeming feeling of love for him, he, Kavanagh, had mercilessly stayed that course, which then took him into a life with a hole at its center. He had successfully papered the hole over, but it had been there always, a hollow void where once had pulsed a pure feeling of lift.

  When Runner so suddenly disappeared because of a dread attached to him, Kavanagh had found it the most natural thing in the world to shut off instantly the youthful lightness of heart that had attracted Malloy in the first place—the lightness that their friendship had intensified, and that had defined, for Kavanagh, the meaning of the State of Grace. Across the years since, Kavanagh had unconsciously refrained from thinking of Runner, but on this night he had to admit to having forgotten nothing. Yes, this was grief. Raw, unfinished grief—not just at the long-ago loss of a friend, but at the loss of nothing less, despite appearances, than his own—what to call it?—wholeness? Integritas.

  Kavanagh sipped. He’d been shivering all this time. He let his eyes drift across the nightscape, acknowledging the wish to be somewhere else, as if the looming tenements could be the walls of canyons; the squared-off silhouetted rooflines the buttes and flat-topped mesas of a John Ford location, shot with blue tint. Indeed, the walls of the buildings opposite could have been prehistoric rock faces, with each lighted window the marker of a cliff dweller’s fire, a scene thick with primitive humanity. Fort Apache. But this was not the West. The people whose cramped rooms were across the way—dozens and dozens of them—were the furthest thing from exotic aboriginals. They were post-office
clerks and grease monkeys and widows and meter readers and bus drivers. They were all clinging to hopes of which they spoke in whispers to no one but their beloved priest, their kind Confessor, their Father Mike.

  Kavanagh felt a rush of worried affection for his parish, and, becoming more kind to himself, acknowledged his satisfaction that, whatever the celibate’s clamp on warmth, tenderness, desire, and longing had done to his capacity for true intimacy with another, still, he had somehow emerged from his years of disciplined pastoral service as a priest on whom the people could depend—not to mention God, whoever that was. He was a connoisseur of other people’s moral complexity, but what of his own?

  “Oh, the hell with that,” he said out loud. Kavanagh raised his glass toward the darkened tenements, a toast to the fact that, yes, as he insisted silently, the widows and clerks and telephone operators, and all their raucous kids, were enough for him.

  But then Kavanagh’s gaze lifted to the ink-black shape of the distant landscape, a subtle backdrop against which the foreground buildings took form—Inwood Hill, and beyond it Fort Tryon Park, of which he’d hardly ever taken note from his rooftop aerie. He saw jutting above the trees the barest upper edge of what he now could note as the monastic bell tower, The Cloisters, which promptly brought the image of the woman to mind.

  Grief. Runner Malloy, yes. But also her. “You should complete your obligation, Father.” Her last words to him. But what obligation? Was there an obligation to an unfinished grief? There it was—the feeling that she had sparked in him and which, even now, he’d only partially fathomed. Rachel Vedette. Simone Weil. “Her refusal to be modern. Her empathy with suffering, which was limited, but quite real.”

  Kavanagh’s mind went back to Gallen, and his sanctimonious contempt for Jews. Suddenly, Kavanagh realized why that routine Catholic denigration had cut him: the Passover Angel like Hitler? Ancient Hebrews like Nazis? Kavanagh took offense because he had heard Gallen as if he himself were Rachel Vedette. A Jew.