Angelology

by Danielle Trussoni

  Sometimes Evangeline would watch the train and imagine the shadowy outline of a traveler making his precarious way through the aisle. The train and the man would flash by and then, in a clatter of metal and neon light, move off to some unknown destination. Gazing into the darkness, she longed for the train carrying Verlaine to pass while she watched.

  Evangeline’s room was the size of a linen closet and, appropriately, smelled of freshly laundered linens. She had recently waxed the pine floor, cleaned the corners of spiderwebs, and dusted the room from floor to ceiling and wainscoting to sill. The stiff white sheets on her bed seemed to call out to her to take her shoes off and lie down to sleep. Instead she poured water from a pitcher into a glass on the bureau and drank. Then she opened the window and took a deep breath. The air was cold and thick in her lungs, soothing as ice on a wound. She was so tired she could hardly think. The clock’s electric digits gave the hour. It was just after midnight. A new day was beginning.

  Sitting upon her bed, Evangeline closed her eyes and let all thoughts of the previous day’s encounter settle. She took the pack of letters Sister Celestine had given her and counted. There were eleven envelopes, one sent each year, the return address—a New York City address she did not recognize—the same on each one. Her grandmother had posted letters with remarkable consistency, the cancellation on the stamp dating the twenty-first of December. A card had arrived annually, from 1988 until 1998. Only the present year’s card was not among them.

  Careful, so as not to rip the faces of the envelopes, Evangeline removed the cards and examined them, arranging them in chronological order across the surface of the bed, from the first card to arrive to the last. The cards were covered in pen-and-ink sketches, bold blue lines that did not appear to form any specific image. The designs had been executed by hand, although Evangeline could not understand the purpose or meaning of the images. One of the cards contained a sketch of an angel climbing a ladder, an elegant, modern depiction that had none of the excesses of the angelic images in Maria Angelorum.

  Although many sisters did not agree with her, Evangeline much preferred artistic depictions of angels to the biblical descriptions, which she found frightening to imagine. Ezekiel’s wheels, for example, were described in the Bible as beryl-plated and circular, with hundreds of eyes lining their outer rims. The cherubim were said to have four faces—a man, an ox, a lion, and an eagle. This ancient vision of God’s messengers was unnerving, almost grotesque, when compared with the Renaissance painters’ work, which forever changed the visual representation of angels. Angels blowing trumpets, carrying harps, and hiding behind delicate wings—these were the angels Evangeline cherished, no matter how removed from biblical reality they were.

  Evangeline examined the cards one by one. On the first card, dated December 1988, there was the image of an angel blowing a golden trumpet, its white robes traced in gold. When she opened it, she found a piece of creamy paper fastened inside. A message, written with crimson ink in her grandmother’s elegant hand, read:Be forewarned, dear Evangeline: Understanding the significance of Orpheus’s lyre has proved to be a trial. Legend surrounds Orpheus so heavily that we cannot discern the precise outline of his mortal life. We do not know the year of his birth, his true lineage, or the real measure of his talents with the lyre. He was reputed to have been born of the muse Calliope and the river god Oeagrus, but this, of course, is mythology, and it is our work to separate the mythological from the historical, disentangle legend from fact, magic from truth. Did he give humanity poetry? Did he discover the lyre on his legendary journey to the underworld? Was he as influential in his own lifetime as history claims? By the sixth century B.C., he was known through the Greek world as the master of songs and music, but how he came upon the instrument of the angels has been widely debated among historians. Your mother’s work only gave confirmation to long-held theories of the lyre’s importance.

  Evangeline turned the paper over in her hand, hoping the red ink would continue. Surely the message was a fragment of a larger communication. But she found nothing.

  She glanced about her bedroom—the solid edges of which had gone soft as her exhaustion grew—then turned back to the cards. She opened another card and then another. There were identical creamy pages fastened inside each card, all of which had been filled with lines of writing that began and ended without any discernible logic whatsoever. Of the eleven cards, only the one addressed to her contained a definite starting or ending point. There were no numbers on the pages, and the order could not be discerned from the chronology in which they’d been mailed. In fact, it appeared to Evangeline that the pages had been simply filled up with an endless stream of words. To make matters worse, the words were so small it strained her eyes to read them.

  After examining the pages for some time, Evangeline returned each card to its envelope, being sure to keep the envelopes in the order of cancellation date. The effort of trying to understand the tangled pages of her grandmother’s writing made her head throb. She could not think clearly, and the pain in her temples was acute. She should have gone to sleep hours before. Bundling the cards together, she placed them under her pillow, careful not to bend or crease the edges. She could do nothing more until she had some sleep.

  Without pausing to put on her pajamas, she stepped out of her shoes and fell into bed. The sheets were wonderfully cool and soft against her skin. Pulling her comforter to her chin and wiggling her nylon-encased toes, she dropped into the bottomless free fall of sleep.

  Metro-North Hudson Line train, somewhere between Poughkeepsie and Harlem—125thStreet station, New York

  Verlaine had caught the last southbound train of the night. To his right, the Hudson River ran alongside the tracks; to his left, the snow-covered hills rose to meet the night sky. The train was warm, well lit, and empty. The Coronas he had drunk at the bar in Milton and the slow, rocking rhythm of the train had combined to calm him to the point of resignation, if not contentment. Although he hated the thought of leaving his Renault behind, the reality was that he would probably never get his car back in working order. It was a model with a boxy body whose simple design gestured to the early Renaults of the postwar era, cars that—because they had never been imported to the United States and he had never been to France—Verlaine had seen only in photographs. Now it was smashed up and gutted.

  Even worse than losing his car, however, was the loss of his entire body of research. In addition to the meticulously organized material he’d used to support his doctoral thesis—a binder of colored plates, notes, and general information regarding Abigail Rockefeller’s work with the Museum of Modern Art-there were hundreds of pages of photocopies and further notes he’d made in the past year of his work for Percival Grigori. While his formulations were not exactly original, they were all he had. Everything had been in the backseat, in the bag Grigori’s men had stolen. He had made copies of much of his work but with Grigori riding him he’d been more disorganized than usual. He could not recall how much of the St. Rose/ Rockefeller material he’d actually duplicated, nor was he completely certain of what he’d thrown in his bag and what he’d left behind. He would need to stop by his office and check his files. For now he had to hold out hope that he’d been assiduous enough to keep a reserve of the most important documents. In spite of all that had happened in the past hours, there was some reassurance: First, the original letters from Innocenta to Abigail Rockefeller were locked in his office, and second, he had kept the architectural drawings of St. Rose Convent with him.

  Sliding his injured hand deep into the inside pocket of his overcoat, he removed the bundle of plans. After Grigori’s dismissive attitude toward them in Central Park, he had almost thought them worthless. Why, then, would Grigori send thugs to break into his car if they weren’t valuable?

  Verlaine spread the plans out on his lap, his eye falling upon the seal of the lyre. The coincidence of the icon seal matching Evangeline’s pendant was an oddity Verlaine was keen to explain. In fact, ev
erything about the lyre—from its presence on the Thracian coin he’d found to its prominence on St. Rose’s insignia—felt larger than life, almost mythological. It was as though his personal experiences had taken on the properties of symbolism and layered historical meaning that he was used to applying to his art-history research. Perhaps he was imposing his own scholarly training upon a situation, drawing connections where none existed, romanticizing his work and blowing the whole thing out of proportion. Now that he’d settled into his seat on the train and had the peace of mind to think it all through, Verlaine began to wonder if he hadn’t overreacted a bit to the lyre necklace. Indeed, there was the chance that the men who had broken into his Renault had nothing to do with Grigori. Perhaps there was another, completely logical explanation for the bizarre events that had happened that day.

  Verlaine took the sheets of blank St. Rose Convent stationery and pressed them over the top of the architectural drawings. The paper was thick cotton bond, pink, with an elaborately woven heading of roses and angels executed in a lush Victorian-era style that, to his surprise, Verlaine quite liked, despite his preference for modernism. He had not said so at the time, but Evangeline had been wrong that their founding mother had designed the stationery two hundred years before: The invention of a chemical method for making paper from wood pulp, a technological revolution that bolstered the postal service and allowed individuals and groups to create individualized stationery, did not occur until the mid-1850s. The St. Rose stationery was most likely created in the late nineteenth century, using their founding mother’s artwork for the heading. The practice had in fact become extraordinarily popular during the Gilded Era. Luminaries like his very own Abigail Rockefeller had put great effort into making dinner-party menus, calling cards, invitations, and personalized envelopes and stationery, each with family symbols and crests pressed into the highest-quality paper available. He’d sold a number of pristine sets of such custom-printed bond at auction over the years.

  He had not corrected Evangeline’s error, he realized now, because she’d thrown him off guard. If she had been an old bulldog of a woman, ill-tempered and overprotective of the archives, he would have been perfectly prepared to handle her. In his years of begging access to libraries, he’d learned how to win over librarians, or at least gain their sympathy. But he’d been helpless upon seeing Evangeline. Evangeline was beautiful, she was intelligent, she was strangely comforting, and—as a nun—completely off-limits. Perhaps she liked him, just a little. Even as she was about to kick him out of the convent, he’d felt a strange connection between them. Closing his eyes, he tried to remember exactly how she’d looked sitting in the bar in Milton. She’d looked—aside from that funky black nun outfit—like a normal person having a normal night out. He didn’t think he would be able to forget the way she’d smiled, just slightly, when he touched her hand.

  Verlaine let the rocking of the train car lull him into a state of reverie, thoughts of Evangeline playing through his mind, when a crack against the windowpane jarred him awake. An immense white hand, its fingers spread apart like the points of a starfish, had pressed against the window. Startled, Verlaine sat back, trying to examine it from a different angle. Another hand appeared on the glass, slapping against it as if it might push the thick square of plastic inward, popping it from its frame. A swift, fibrous, red feather brushed against the window. Verlaine blinked, trying to decide if he had somehow fallen asleep, if this bizarre show was a dream. But upon looking more closely, he saw something that chilled his blood: Two immense creatures hovered outside the train, their great red eyes staring at him with menace, their large wings carrying them along in tandem with the car. He stared at them in fright, unable to pull his gaze away. Was he going crazy or did these bizarre beings resemble the thugs he had watched trash his car? To his amazement and consternation, he concluded that they did.

  Verlaine jumped up, grabbed his jacket, and ran to the train’s restroom, a small, windowless compartment that smelled of chemicals. Breathing deeply, he tried to calm himself down. His clothes were soaked in sweat, and there was a lightness in his chest that made him feel as though he might faint. He had felt this way only once, in high school, when he’d drunk too much at his prom.

  As the train hit upon the edges of the city, Verlaine tucked the maps and stationery deep into his pocket. He left the bathroom and walked quickly to the front of the train. There were only a few passengers to get off the midnight train in Harlem. The stark depopulated midnight station gave him the eerie sensation, as he stepped onto the platform, that he’d made some kind of mistake, perhaps missed his stop or, worse, had taken the wrong train entirely. He walked the length of the platform and down a set of iron stairs to the dark, cold, city street below. He felt as if some cataclysm had hit New York in his absence, and, through some trick of destiny, he had returned to a ravaged and empty city.

  Upper East Side, New York City

  Sneja had ordered Percival to stay indoors, but after pacing the billiard room for hours waiting for Otterley to call with news, he could not tolerate being alone any longer. When his mother’s entourage had left for the night and he was certain that Sneja had gone to sleep, Percival dressed with care—putting on a tuxedo and a black overcoat, as if he’d just been to a gala—and took the elevator down to Fifth Avenue.

  It used to be that contact with the outside world left him indifferent. As a young man, when he’d lived in Paris and could not help but be confronted with the stench of humanity, he had learned to ignore people entirely. He had no need for the ceaseless scurrying of human activity—the tireless toil, the festivities, the amusements. It had bored him. Yet his illness had transformed him. He had begun to watch human beings, examining their odd habits with interest. He had begun to sympathize with them.

  He knew that this was symptomatic of the larger changes—those he’d been warned would occur, and that he had been prepared to accept as the natural progression of his metamorphosis. He was told that he would begin to feel new and startling sensations, and indeed he found that he recoiled in discomfort at the sight of these pitiful creatures’ suffering. At first these odd sentiments had poisoned him with absurd bouts of emotion. He knew very well that human beings were inferior and that their suffering was in direct proportion to their position in the order of the universe. It was just so with animals, whose wretchedness seemed only slightly more pronounced than that of humans. Yet Percival began to see beauty in their rituals, their love of family, their dedication to worship, their defiance in the face of physical weakness. Despite his contempt for them, he had begun to understand the tragedy of their plight: They lived and died as if their existence mattered. If he were to mention these thoughts to Otterley or Sneja, he would be ridiculed without mercy.

  Slowly, painfully, Percival Grigori made his way past the majestic apartment buildings of his neighborhood, his breathing labored, his cane aiding his progress along the icy sidewalks. The cold wind did not hinder him—he felt nothing but the creaking of the harness about his rib cage, the burning in his chest as he breathed, and the crunching of his knees and hips as the bones ground to powder. He wished he could remove his jacket and unbind his body, let the cold air soothe the burns on his skin. The mangled, decaying wings on his back pressed against his clothes, giving him the appearance of a hunchback, a beast, a deformed being shunned by the world. He wished, on late-night walks like this one, that he could trade places with the carefree, healthy people walking past him. He would almost consent to be human if it would free him of pain.

  After some time the strain of the walk overwhelmed him. Percival stopped at a wine bar, a sleek space of polished brass and red velvet. Inside, it was crowded and warm. Percival ordered a glass of Macallan scotch and chose a secluded corner table from where he could watch the revelry of the living.

  He had just finished his first glass of whiskey when he noticed a woman at the far end of the room. The woman was young, with glossy black hair cut in the style of the 1930s. She sa
t at a table, a group of friends encircling her. Although she wore trashy modern clothing—tight jeans and a lacy, low-cut blouse—her beauty had the classical purity Percival associated with women of another era. The young woman was the twin of his beloved Gabriella Lévi-Franche.

  For an hour Percival did not take his eyes from her. He composed a profile of her gestures and expressions, noting that she was like Gabriella in more than appearance. Perhaps, Percival reasoned, he wanted to see Gabriella’s features too desperately: In the young woman’s silence, Percival detected Gabriella’s analytic intelligence; in the young woman’s impassive stare, he saw Gabriella’s propensity to hoard secrets. The woman was reserved among her friends, just as Gabriella had always been reserved in a crowd. Percival guessed that his prey preferred to listen, letting her friends carry on with whatever amusing nonsense filled their lives, while she privately assessed their habits, cataloging their strengths and faults with clinical ruthlessness. He determined to wait until she was alone so that he might speak to her.

  After he had ordered many more glasses of Macallan, the young woman finally gathered her coat and made her way to the door. As she walked by, Percival blocked her path with his cane, the polished ebony brushing her leg. “Forgive me for accosting you in such a forthright fashion,” he said, standing so that he rose above her. “But I insist upon buying you a drink.”

  The young woman looked at him, startled. He could not tell what surprised her more—the cane blocking her way or his unusual approach to asking her to stay with him.