“He’s here, you know. He is here. You do know that, don’t you?”
She gave me a puzzled look. “Who?”
“Horstmann. I know he’s here.”
“Don’t say that. Please.”
“But he is. That’s all there is to any of this. Somehow he knows. You must see that. Somehow your precious Church is harboring him. Keeping him informed. He’s not just lucky, Sister. He’s being told. Oh, he’s here, right now. Here.”
She watched my outburst, then reached across the table for my hand. I felt her touch, pulled away from her. “So who’s behind it, Ben?”
“I don’t know. The pope, for God’s sake. How should I know? D’Ambrizzi’s a liar, maybe it’s D’Ambrizzi …”
She shook her head.
“Sister, your judgment is suspect. Forgive me, but you’re a loyalist, you’re one of them.” I was flailing in the darkness and I knew it. Just beating my gums. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I never had had the slightest idea.
We sat staring at the scene, locked within our own airtight compartments, unable to intersect or connect or communicate.
“Why do you hate me? What have I done to you other than love your sister and turn heaven and earth to find out why she was killed and by whom? I can’t help wondering—just how have I pissed you off so thoroughly?”
She took me by surprise. I offered the standard coward’s response. “What are you talking about? I’ve got more important things on what’s left of my mind than hating you, Sister.”
“I may be only a nun, like Dunn said, but I am not without a certain feminine sense of—”
“Okay, okay, spare me the details of your feminine intuition.”
“Ben, what is going on? Don’t you remember how things were when we were on the same team in Princeton?”
“Of course I remember. What’s the matter with you? You’re the one who quit the goddamn team! I remember our last conversations—”
“I remember them, too. And I remember the good times—”
“I treated you like a human being, a woman. That was my mistake. I suppose I should apologize—”
“What for? I am a human being and I am a woman!”
“You’re just a nun. Nothing more. That’s all that matters to you. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“Why? Why do we have to leave it? Why can’t we clear it up? Your sister was a nun, do you recall? Did she cease being a person? What is your problem here? Did you hate her? Did she put that disgusted look in your eyes? You’re so damned transparent—”
“Val was my sister. You’re on thin ice here. Leave it.”
She sighed, staring at me. Her eyes were potent green fires. Her wide mouth was set, full of intractable tension. “I want to talk. I want to get this cleared up now so we can see this through as Ben and Elizabeth … friends, two people who like each other.…” Her two front teeth bit into her lower lip. Her eyes were so wide, pleading with me. “Whatever we are to each other.”
“All right,” I said. “The problem is your Church, the fact that you are a nun, that the Church—however wicked it may be—is all that ultimately matters to you.” I didn’t want to have this conversation. It was pointless. I wanted her gone, out of my life, erased from my memory. “It’s that simple. I can’t begin to understand any of it. I learned the lesson a long time ago but I forgot it, you made me forget it, I forgot what you’re like, all of you … it’s like a disease, it gets inside you, the Church, the Church, right or wrong. How can you serve it? How can you give yourself up to it, body and soul? It’s not noble, it’s not selfless—it has an endless appetite, it feasts on your life, consumes you like a great institutional vampire, it sucks the life out of you and leaves the husks of men and women in its wake, demanding everything and never relenting.… How could you give your life to the goddamn Church when there’s a real life out there, a place where you could be the person your instincts tell you you could be? I’ve seen that person and you’re killing her in the name of your Church.…”
I don’t know how she kept on an even keel during my tirade. For all I knew it may have been possible for her because she was a nun, one of God’s little jokes on me. Maybe her Church had given her the strength to cope with me as I was just then. She had the good sense to wait it out while the little man brought us fresh bowls of coffee and sandwiches. Maybe she thought she was waiting long enough for me to feel foolish and possibly even apologize. I could have told her, in that case, that there wasn’t enough time. Not if we waited for Gabriel’s trumpet would there ever be that much time.
“I didn’t set out to become a nun, of course. It just sort of happened. No, that makes it sound like an accident and it certainly wasn’t that. On the contrary, it was almost inevitable given the circumstances of my life and my particular personality. When the time came I made a conscientious, conscious decision to devote myself to the work of the Church. I’m going to spare you some of the sappier details … just give you an outline of sorts.
“I grew up in the Eisenhower years—that’s a code word, are you with me? And my parents were very devout Catholics, well off, a Buick Roadmaster and an old Ford Woodie station wagon, my father was a doctor and my mother gave every spare moment to the Church. My grandparents and all my cousins and friends and, well, everyone I knew—all Catholics. My brother Francis Terhune Cochrane, that’s our family name, Cochrane, by the way—he talked about becoming a priest. All the boys did, naturally, and all the girls went through their nun phase. But it was usually just a phase. Naturally.
“When I was ten John Kennedy, a Catholic, was elected president. My God, what rejoicing! We lived in Kenilworth, near Chicago, and Mayor Daley had won—or stolen, they said—the election for Kennedy, and that made it all the better. It was as if we had won our civil rights battle. A Catholic in the White House—you and your family must have felt much the same way, though your father would have had a pipeline into the White House, I suppose, and mine was still just a doctor—but, you know, what a brave new world it was! But in what seemed like no time at all everything began to go to pieces. Everything changed … I was thirteen when Kennedy was murdered. The Beatles came along and turned all the music upside down—pretty amazing stuff for a thirteen-year-old girl. The Rolling Stones, rebellion and smoking dope and people dropping acid and Hair and Vietnam and having a boy spreading your legs and touching you when you were all wet for God’s sake and the Catholic guilt! I’m telling you—particularly when you liked what the boy was doing and you liked to do things to him—my God, we are talking mass confusion! And then there was Bobby Kennedy staring up into the bright lights with blood seeping out of his head and Martin Luther King on the motel balcony and Kent State and Woodstock and Bob Dylan and the police riot in Chicago in ’68 and I got a busted lip in the melee.…
“Maybe I was a dope or too sensitive or an adolescent at just the right, or the wrong, time. But the point is I looked back on my own life and it hit me hard that I liked security and faith and—forgive me for sounding like a nerd—I liked doing what can only be called good works. I loved the Church—I was a kid, guilt-ridden and disappointed in my pathetic little attempts at sexuality and I was confused by dope and the long hair and the fuck-the-world attitude I kept seeing all around me.… I look back now and what I see is a girl who watched in the sixties while everything she’d grown up counting on in the fifties got blown to bits without an apparent care. Some kids loved the change, the chance for rebellion, and some didn’t. I just couldn’t get into it … rebellion has never much appealed to me. Working for change is something else and I made little moves toward getting involved in the civil rights movement but Kenilworth wasn’t exactly a hotspot on that score. So rebellion wasn’t my thing, it was Val’s thing, by her very nature.
“Me, I realized I loved the security of the first ten years of my life … what happened from 1963 on scared me. Oh, I’d never have admitted it then, but nothing could get in the way of my belief in the goodness of my
parents, the goodness of the Church, the rightness of the way things were supposed to be. So many of my friends fell away from the Church, lots of them wound up in the drug culture, they ran away, decided all they wanted to do was raise hell and fling it all back in their parents’ faces … but not me. It just wasn’t me.
“What I saw was a world that looked like it was coming apart at the seams. All the values I’d been raised with seemed to be falling into some kind of disrepute, the ‘normal’ paths one traveled were all being closed off.… And then my brother Francis, the idealist in the family who’d gone off to war determined to serve his country, was killed in the Tet offensive and I had a hell of a tough time coping with that. Here again, another kid might have said such a pointless death proved there was no God and would have turned against the Church. But not me. I had to face it and explain it to myself, I couldn’t, wouldn’t, just shriek and scream and blame it on anybody handy or on Lyndon Johnson, I wouldn’t say that Francis’s death was evidence of existence without any purpose or meaning. Life does have meaning, there is right and wrong and there is punishment at the end for those who deserve it.… God gave meaning to life—and I went to the Church for the answers I needed. The Church just seemed to mean more than the available alternatives. And the timelessness of the Church—it just sort of overtook me, everything else seemed so trivial. Does this make me sound like a Jesus freak? I hope not. Because I’m not. But I could take the Church seriously and I just couldn’t take acid rock or tie-dyed jeans seriously. I was against the war in Vietnam, I was for the sense of responsibility and the willingness to accept the consequences of your acts. Oh, my God, I listened to the music and bought the records and wore the clothing and my peace badge, but it all seemed to be passing … do you see what I mean? The Church had been there a long time, it mattered.
“I knew a couple of very decent priests, one extraordinary old nun, an elderly woman with a mind so inquisitive and bright that I was just in awe … my God, she was an Elvis freak, and she was a truly happy woman, her life made so much sense, she enjoyed her life. She was a teacher, a school administrator, she wasn’t afraid of being politically active and she was always telling the Vatican where to get off.… She was just great, she inspired me, made me realize that if everything else worked, then maybe I could go on and live without the pleasures of the sexual life and keep from going nuts—can you understand that? It wasn’t going to be perfect, but it would be good.…
“Well, either you understand it or you don’t. The convent was a haven, too, I don’t deny that. What they say about nuns and priests looking for a place to hide, sure, why not? Everybody wants a place to hide, Ben, everybody—and most of us find one place or another. I hid out in the convent for a while. And sure, my parents were proud … you know that mixture of pride and sorrow you see all over the faces of Catholic parents when their daughter chooses the Church rather than husband and kids and mortgage … but they were proud of me, proud, curious, doubtful. Our little girl, O Mother o’ Mercy, does this mean our little Liz will never get laid? Or words to that general effect. My God, it’s funny when I look back on it.…
“I wanted to serve God. To serve mankind. And have a life I would enjoy.
“It looked as if the Church was moving toward a new definition of women and their role in the Church, moving toward a more liberal interpretation of things.…
“Well, you can’t have everything can you, Ben?
“You know that, don’t you, Ben?”
“The truth is you’re something like aliens. Creatures from Jupiter or thereabouts. You look like the rest of us now, and you move around in the real world, you seem to be one of us.… But it’s all an illusion, it’s a lie, and you play it for all it’s worth. You’re like an odorless, colorless gas that numbs the brain and dulls the senses of the rest of us.
“It’s an illusion because as soon as life comes close to you, you jump back and start putting the seven veils back on, you hide behind your sanctimonious bullshit, you use it to excuse anything, any kind of betrayal.… I’m a nun, you say, had you forgotten I’m a nun? The Church is my savior and I’ll be goddamned if I’ll think for myself, that’s what you say.… I’m a nun, I’m made of purer and finer stuff, and I also know which side my bread is buttered on … and lucky me, you say, I don’t have to deal with men! What a relief that is!
“Sister, you’re afraid, you’re a liar and a fake and a bullshitter—”
“And Val? Was she a fake and a liar and a bullshitter?”
“No, she wasn’t. She was up to her ears in life, soaking it up, making her own judgments, risking her life—”
“If I’d died, if he’d pushed me off the bloody terrace, would that make me as wonderful as Val? Is that the problem? You hate me because I didn’t die? How incredibly petty—”
“I don’t hate you—”
“You’ve got some real problems, Ben. It sounds to me like you hate me because you hate the Church and you hate the Church because you hate yourself and you hate yourself because you think you failed the Church, failed your father, failed and failed and failed.… Well, you’re nuts, far nuttier than I am.… You didn’t fail yourself or the Church! It just wasn’t for you.… But you’ve let it drive you crazy. And you take it out on me—why? Val was a nun, I was her best friend. Our styles were different, but we were on the same side.… What is it with you? Why can’t you just give me a break? I’ve admitted I was wrong—so forget the last conversation in Princeton, for God’s sake! Val … me … what’s the difference? What’s the big deal here? Grow up, it’s not a black and white world!”
“I love you, that’s what’s wrong … I saw enough to fall in love with you.… You’re right, Sister. I am crazy. And you’re just not worth it.… You heard what I said that other time. You and Sandanato—there’s the love interest. You sort of deserve each other, don’t you?”
Furiously she stood up, knocked over the chair, glared down at me, her lips drawn back, whitened. “Fine! You’re making a mistake and you’re going to have to live with it for the rest of your life! You’ve earned your mistake about me, you’ve been a real bastard. And you’re welcome to it—you can dry up and die with your mistakes and your hatred … but you will have been wrong! Wrong about the Church, wrong about me, and saddest of all, wrong about yourself.…”
She whirled away from me, pushed her way blindly through the crowd which was applauding the commedia troupe. I could still see the back of her head when she stopped abruptly and screamed, trying to turn away from something or someone. I was helpless. The throng had closed between us.
Then Arlecchino, the harlequin from the commedia troupe, leapt out in front of her, posed wildly, grotesquely, his pelvis jerking, grinning lasciviously from beneath his masque. She turned away again, trying to push past him as he thrust at her. Finally, realizing she wasn’t interested in playing, he made an obscene noise into her face. While the crowd laughed, taunting her, she pushed past into the darkness and was quickly gone.
Things were going fast, speeding up all around me, but I sat there like a statue, wondering if what she’d said about me was right. For all I knew she was dead on the money. Maybe I owed myself a damned hard looking-over, but psychological introspection can take you only so far. I could worry about what was going on in my head later, if I survived. As she’d said, I’d have the rest of my life to tighten my chain.
The commedia characters were working their way back toward the stage, where a brightly painted wagon of a sort used by such troupes centuries before had been drawn into place. Some of the lights illuminating the crowds were dimming and the clatter of conversation from the tourists, scholars, kids, townsfolk, and drunks began lessening. I looked out over the sea of berets and caps and clapping hands and popping flashbulbs. Spotlights were coming up softly on the wagon, and music came from somewhere. The next performance was about to begin.
I stood up and moved away from the little table, skirting the crowd, paying as much attention to my interior mo
nologue as I was to finding Elizabeth. What an imbecile, blurting out my feelings, I love you … what idiotic blithering! And what a remarkably gallant fellow I’d been! There she was, taking me into her confidence in a remarkably intimate and unexpected way, telling me about how she’d chosen to become a nun, and I decided it was the perfect moment of vulnerability to blast my way forward, overrun her positions, score a point or two.… She was right. I was crazy. I had to find her and apologize and get her out of my mind. Give it up, old Ben, she’s a nun, for Christ’s sake.…
Such were my reflections as I circled the crowd, heard its braying and the yakety-yak of the actors, heard the breeze off the Rhône whistling damply in the naked trees. Somewhere, up above me in the palace another play was being performed, and the faint punctuations of laughter drifted down upon us. Where the devil had she gone?
At first I didn’t realize what I was seeing, maybe because it was so utterly unexpected. I was looking for Elizabeth but …
Across the glut of people I saw Drew Summerhays!
It made no sense. What was he doing in Avignon? Summerhays should have been dividing his winter between that elegant house off lower Fifth Avenue, with his cats and his clutch of Catholic friends and the splashing fountains and the trays of perfect drinks, and his place in the Bahamas which over the years had earned its spot in the history books. Presidents had come on yachts to call on Summerhays.
But here he was, ramrod straight, in Avignon.
He turned his noble head and spoke to another man, shorter, wearing one of those Tyrolean green felt hats with a feather on the side, which was all I could see of him, that and a trench-coat collar turned up.
Drew Summerhays …
I was sorting out the possibilities of this being only a coincidence, and the odds were ridiculous. Summerhays didn’t just happen to be in Avignon with Dunn and Erich Kessler and me. Coincidence was for the birds. So what was the point?
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