“I still treasure it,” she said haltingly. Rachel’s breath caught, and she clutched her book back to her breast, nearly overcome. Tears flooded her eyes, but did not overflow. She had a rigid grip on herself. “It fills me…that you found your own copy…” She stopped, nearly overcome. Then she went on, “After I spoke with you, I realized how this book had become the…signifiant…the signifier of my father’s Abelard, as if I could still complete his work. But with you I saw that my father himself was what mattered. This book, I mean, embodied my distraction—a mistake I could not correct. It was too late.”
“It is never too late,” Kavanagh said, but immediately he understood the callowness of his remark. He placed his book on the edge of the desk, taking her misery fully in. But he was also aware that her blurted explanation was triggered by his having produced his own copy of the Abelard and Héloïse, which hit her like an “Open Sesame!” The book itself was the key to the deep mystery—the Ali Baba’s cave—of both their lives. He dared not say more.
But what he’d said was enough to display his shallowness. “Never too late”—Christ!
It was as if she felt obliged, but without malice, to rebut his glib statement. Still hovering on the edge of tears, she said with forced calm, “I spoke to you, when we sat on that bench near The Cloisters, words that began my…what to call it?…reckoning. I have continued it in these months…a drastic reckoning. But in speaking to you that day, I did not say the worst thing. I had not said it yet to myself.”
In the face of her silence, and only because he sensed her need, he found it possible to ask, “Will you say it now?”
“I denied my father. That is it. I denied my father.”
He was motionless.
“At the end, in Drancy…” she continued. She held her book to her chest as if it were a life buoy. “…they were taking him away. They would have taken me. I said I was not his daughter.” Her sobs came, finally, but she spoke through them. “I do not know why I said that. Not for life, because I was only living for him. Not for fear. I was afraid only for him. It was just…the German asked me, was I his daughter? I said no. No. I do not know why I said this. I do not understand. It was a lie with no purpose. I had always been asking, ‘Who am I now?’ And at last that was the answer. A daughter without loyalty. The German did not even believe me.” She was speaking in a rush. She rushed on. “He shot my father dead because of me, but already I myself had done the worst. The German knew that. It was his triumph. We were alike. He was happy at my betrayal, and let me live. He was right. Living was worse, after that, far worse….” She stopped.
Kavanagh knew better than to think that this fresh, visceral flood of admission had anything to do with him. She had come to the point of having to put this horror into words—that was all. That he, Michael Kavanagh, was the recipient of her expression was incidental.
She collected herself enough to go on. “I carried this book with me everywhere, as evidence of my first betrayal, how I had failed to see what threatened, encouraging him in what kept us in jeopardy. Abelard was a friend to Jews, perhaps, although to us, at the end, he was just another dangerous Catholic. But then came this, my second betrayal, and it was mortal. Literally, since, in the next moment, Papa was killed. So I carried the book as if Abelard and Héloïse would absolve me, if only I clung to them. In the camps; in Paris, where I could not possibly live again; in coming to America; in living inside the fantasy world of that museum in your parish—I could not face the truth. That there is no absolution. I said in my letter to you ‘incomplete woman.’ I almost wrote ‘unforgiven woman.’ Non pardonnée.”
“But, Miss Vedette, if I may…?” He was asking permission to say what was in his mind. She did not offer a signal, and so he did not speak.
She repeated the phrase, “Non pardonnée,” and then continued, “But here is the surprise, that I have found it possible to live, precisely, as that. Unforgiven. In these months since I met you, I have begun to accept that there is no forgetting. I am who I am. I did what I did. There is no undoing. This book had become to me what it became to my father, but for a different reason—a book of wishes I need no longer entertain. Therefore, I will leave it behind.”
Kavanagh took a breath, and realized it was his first in some moments. Rachel Vedette seemed to have finished her explanation, but he wasn’t sure he understood. He felt the burden of his own recognition, but was afraid of expressing it. Rather than speak, he took a pair of cigarettes and lit them, offering one to her. It was a gesture he had made on that park bench, when it had seemed inappropriately intimate. Now it seemed right, and she took the cigarette.
After exhaling, she said, more calmly, “Yet, because it was my father’s, the Historia et Epistolae remains a treasure. When I first took the Staten Island Ferry, I thought I would drop it into the sea, and have done with it that way. But I could not. After all, I first came to Staten Island because you mentioned it once. Having thought of you, I saw what to do. I would give my father’s book to its new friend. But, then, seeing just now that you have your own copy of the Historia completely surprises me. Undoes me. What a companion you are to Abelard and Héloïse….It made me think, for a moment, just now, that we must be alike.”
“Was your father there, nearby?”
“Yes. In the line of prisoners. But he would not look at me.”
“Did he hear you? When you said ‘No’?” Kavanagh was speaking carefully.
“Yes,” she answered.
“And still he did not look at you?”
“No. It is how I know he was hurt. Betrayed.”
“Is it possible his refusal to look was his protection of you? If he looked, they would know for sure you were his daughter? If they did not know, they would not take you? Was that his purpose?”
Rachel considered this. “Yes,” she said. “Perhaps.”
Kavanagh said quietly, cautiously, “If your father did not want them to know you were his daughter, how was it betrayal when you denied it? You were doing as he wanted. He wanted you to live.”
“Even so.” She shook her head brusquely, dismissively. “What I said was unforgivable. It does not matter what my father thought. Unforgivable! I knew that as soon as I said ‘No.’ So did the German. The German condemned me to live with that knowledge. He was right.”
Kavanagh had spent more than a decade as a facile dispenser of forgiveness, and he realized that that was what he had just attempted to do now. Better, he realized, to utter the separate truth he’d come to, even at the risk of being misunderstood. “But…” About to say “miss” again, he stopped. Instead, he said, “Rachel.” He waited. She did not indicate that his use of her name was wrong. He continued, “There is something else besides your experience of that situation, perhaps something larger.”
“What?”
“The situation itself—who created that? Not you. Not your father. The German certainly did, but not even he was acting out of a vacuum. You said before that Abelard, even despite himself, was a ‘dangerous Catholic’—just another one. There’s the point. None of what you went through, including the loss of your father, would have happened but for Catholic teaching about Jews. Twenty centuries of it. I myself, in that sense, am a ‘dangerous Catholic.’ The crime you described, what requires pardoning, was not yours. In a way, it was mine.”
She stared at him. An amazed expression had come over her face.
“Don’t misunderstand,” he added quickly. “I know the crime was Hitler’s, and the crime was that German officer’s, with his gun. He—they—were the murderers. But someone handed them the loaded gun. What I’ve understood is…we did that. We followers of Jesus…we have been, what to call it? The gun loaders. The arms suppliers, maybe. The Germans could not have done what they did without what went before. You referred to this with me—the French Catholic support for Vichy. Where did that come from? And among the things I learned from you, and I guess that means from your father, is that, with Abelard, the story could have g
one another way. You told me this, and now I get it. Abelard marked a fork in the road—the Church’s wrong turn. Wasn’t that what your father saw? The dangers in our theology?”
“Yes.”
Kavanagh picked up his copy of the Historia. “Peter Abelard gave the great warning, and thank God for him. But, as I read them, it was Héloïse who made the difference to me,” he said. “Not just because she pushed him to become the hero he was, but because she herself so heroically refused to live with illusions. All her railing against convention, and against the Church even—I see it now as being about the underlying truth she saw. I have come to my small version of that. Until I met you, I was terrified of facing up to the unreality of my situation, because, as a Catholic, I knew that ordination to the priesthood is forever, an ‘indelible mark on the soul.’ My solemn vow—broken. Quitting the priesthood is an unforgivable sin…for us…truly unforgivable.” He paused, aware of having not said this to anyone before, acknowledging the breadth and depth of his offense. But then it hit him—how trivial his problem was, how pathetic.
He said again, “Don’t misunderstand. I am not comparing my situation to yours. I know they are incomparable. I am only trying to explain why I came to treasure this book you brought me to, why—once, finally, I did leave the priesthood—I then haunted used-book stores looking for my own copy. These people”—he held the volume up, eyeing it with more feeling than he knew he had—“that woman, actually. Her. She exposed the lie that I’d built my life on. Yet Héloïse could denounce it—not against the Church, but within and for the Church.”
He stopped. He said quietly, “Because I believe in God, the God I have from the Catholic tradition, I am still a part of it. But perhaps I am a Catholic now in the way Héloïse was. I haven’t left the Church. I have only moved to the edge, as she did. She is the gift you gave me.”
He waited for Rachel Vedette to speak. She said nothing, but her gaze, fast on his eyes, did not shift. She knew, before he did, that his thought was not complete. Her silence was an invitation to go on, even if his thought would now extend to her. He said, “And one more thing, speaking of non pardonné…I am only now seeing this, but…wasn’t Héloïse defined by her status as unforgiven? And how she accepted it? Her unforgivable offense, of course—as she saw it—was not against the Church or God, but against the one she loved, for whose, yes, calamitous fate she accepted responsibility. Is it that you, in the acceptance you describe, have become like Héloïse—not as a Catholic, of course, but exactly in being the Jewish daughter of your Jewish father?” Seeing the gleam of recognition in her pooling eyes, a further permission, he continued: “Being like Héloïse, ironically, requires you to let go of what she wrote. Is that it? You are still instructing me, Rachel. You want to give me your father’s book not to be rid of it, but because you are finished with the task it came to represent. Forgive me if I presume, but…hurts need nursing, you said. Until they are gone.”
“No,” she said, “Not ‘gone.’ Until they are different.” She brought the back of one wrist to her face, to wipe it dry of tears. Her sleeve was no longer bound with an elastic band. He saw her scar.
She said softly, “Your Héloïse, perhaps, is like my father’s Abelard—a screen on which to flash images of the world as we would have it.”
Kavanagh laughed. “Whoa! Speaking of the rejection of illusions.”
Rachel smiled faintly. “So you are like my father. And because you are…le voilà!” She reached her book out to Kavanagh, who took it and paired it with his own.
He said, “I will accept your book, but only as its safekeeper. One day, it will no longer be what you called it, a ‘signifier.’ It will be only what it is. And then, perhaps, if you will have it back, I will return it to you.”
She gave no indication that she heard in what he said the implication of a future. She stood, and fastened the belt of her trench coat. “So now I will go. You have been kind—” She cut herself off, and he realized that she’d almost called him “Father.” She said, “From the start, you have been kind. I am grateful.”
He stood. “Hoboken, you said.”
“Yes.”
“I told you, we go there twice a week. Let me take you.”
She did not understand.
“If you go by ferry, then the subway, then the bus,” he said, “what’s that, two hours? On a Sunday, three? I can have you at the Hoboken dock in half an hour.” He reached for his jacket.
“By boat?” she asked.
“The Catherine Marie. Named for my mother. It’s right outside. I can use the log time.” He gestured at his Mariner’s exam prep. “I still need another thirty hours at the helm for my Mate’s License. You’d be helping me. We’d document the trip as vessel inspection.” He laughed, and led the way.
At the midpoint between Staten Island and Hoboken was Liberty Island, and as they drew abreast of it, Kavanagh pulled the throttle back. The engine noise eased off. Rachel was sitting on the jump seat beside him. “There she is”—he pointed through the glass of the wheelhouse—“in all her glory.” Seen up close, the enormity of the green statue was what registered.
“The day of my arrival,” Rachel said, “she was lost in fog. But when we finally saw her from the rail, people around me wept.”
“Not you?”
“No. I never weep.” When she looked at Kavanagh, she was blushing: her face still showed the slight smear of tears. She smiled. She teased herself by adding, “Never.”
“Me, neither,” he said, laughing. But he thought of that day they’d seen the SS America off, when a departing girl had cried down to Rachel, “I love you!” And he’d mistaken snowflakes on her face for tears.
He gestured at the water around them. “This marks the actual mouth of the Hudson. Some days, when I’m logging time, I go upriver a ways, past the bridge. Have you ever seen The Cloisters from the water?”
“No.”
“Would you like to?”
She did not reply at first. Then she said, “No. I’ve left that behind, too. No, thank you…Michael.” She fell silent.
EPILOGUE
If there is any thing which may properly be called happiness here below, I am persuaded it is in the union of two persons who love each other with perfect liberty, who are united by a secret inclination, and satisfied with each other’s merit; their hearts are full and leave no vacancy for any other passion; they enjoy perpetual tranquillity.
Mother Héloïse looked up from the page—script in her own hand. These were words she’d written to him three decades ago, but what struck her now was the one word—“happiness.” Peter was long dead, and, as she well knew, she was soon to follow, at last.
She was propped up on the pallet she’d had brought into the Chapter House two days before. The stolid room was serving as her vestibule of darkness. Because it opened on her beloved Cloister garden, she would spend her last hours within sight of the earth’s most precious corner. Amid the paving stones just inside the arched ambulatory was the marble disc carved with the letter “A,” the marker of his grave. Twenty years before, she had chosen that spot on the path from garden to sanctuary so that the nuns, with heads bowed on the way to choir, would see his place and then carry him with chanted Psalms to God. While her good sisters had prayed “for” Peter Abelard all these years, she had been praying “to.”
Mother Héloïse realized that someone was standing in the Gothic archway, waiting. The cranelike form was familiar: Sister Célestine, the Novice Mistress. She had been acting as provisional Superior since Mother herself was stricken. It was certain, such was the esteem in which the sisters held her, that Célestine would be the successor Abbess. Célestine was Héloïse’s intimate friend.
“Dear sister,” Héloïse said, and she let the vellum page fall into its folds. The Novice Mistress came forward. At the edge of the pallet, she bowed. “Bless me, Mother.”
“You are blessed beyond any blessing I could bestow.”
The nun was carrying
a flagon and a cup. “This is lemon water, Mother. You should drink.” She helped Héloïse to sit forward, and put the cup to her lips. Sister Célestine then placed the flagon and cup on the nearby table, beside a bowl that was alive with steam. She adjusted the white draperies of the bed, even as Mother Héloïse tugged her veil back into place, saying, “There is vanity, still, in a wizened old nun.”
“Your vanity, Mother, is justified. You are ever beautiful.”
“Still vain.” She held the page up to Célestine. “Put this back with the compendium, sister. You have tended to the compilation, as I asked? The codices, scrolls, manuscript leaves, all of it?”
“Yes, Mother. When I have replaced this missive, the lot will be sealed in the iron-bound chest and secured in the groin of the tower vaulting.”
“And registered in the scriptorium?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“And the Dialogue with the Jew, in particular, noted in the ‘Index Reserved’?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“I depend on you, sister. And I will depend on your successor, when the time comes. See to the fast-keeping of Master Peter’s writing, one Abbess instructing the next, in perpetuum. I depend on you,” she repeated, but now breathlessly. She had kept his writings intact across the most dangerous decades, through the frenzied destructions that followed King Louis’s mad Crusade, the requisitions imposed upon Cluny after the ascent of Bernard, the savage assaults against Jews wherever they clustered, and the heresy hunts launched throughout France by the ever-threatened Italian Popes. Again and again, the white-robed zealot monks had stormed the gate of the Paraclete, but Héloïse had kept it barred. If Peter Abelard’s writings could be held safe through these bloody years, why not forever?
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