Prince of Peace (28 page)

"I wouldn't want part of it either, if I thought that's what it required."

"But you don't."

"No, not at all. You're right that authority is the problem here. We agree about that and we agree on what to do when authority is in the wrong. Hell, you take it on the best way you can. You rant against it." Was he really saying this? It was an act of his and he knew it. And she would know it. How had he ranted on her behalf? He felt nowhere near this brave, which of course was why he pretended to. "You try to change it. But you accept in principle its fundamental structure."

"Even if that means martyrdom?"

"Martyrdom is your metaphor, not mine. That's not how I feel about my life."

"Metaphor?!"

"I—"

"You don't feel this way because you're not the one who's on the spot!"

"I know that," he said quickly, guiltily. How he wished she wouldn't say it. "I've kept my head in the trench, and I don't feel right about it at all. You've really been out there by yourself." He glanced over at her and saw tears on her cheek. It happened that just ahead there was one of those rest area/picnic groves off the parkway and he swung into it and stopped the car. He leaned toward her and touched her shoulder while she wept as quietly as she could. She seemed so vulnerable. How he wanted to protect her, but he knew how he had failed her.

As if she read that in him she raised her hand to his and pressed it against her shoulder, and her body, until then a remote abstraction, took over the field of his perception. He felt suddenly through her habit the sharply defined bone of her left clavicle. He became aware of the clean odor of her skin, that nun's soap smell he'd noticed in the teachers' room. But now it seemed intensely erotic to him. She was more woman than nun and for a moment it was possible to forget all that kept them apart. He touched a tear at her cheek with the back of his free hand, then let his finger fall to her lips. She opened them and took his finger between her teeth and bit him just sharply enough to cause him pain.

He trembled. She was waiting. Ravished? Had she said ravished?

He pulled away.

She leaned against the door and turned her face from him. All he could see was the black of her habit.

When he resumed driving, he used his old trick, reciting Scripture, but to himself. "No one hates his own flesh," Paul said. What the fuck did Paul know? "He nourishes and takes care of it as Christ cares for the church." Right. Sure he does. Oh yeah.

Later, in a disembodied voice, he asked if it would be possible to see her paintings sometime, and she said yes, that very day, for there were several at the Holy Cross convent. She was polite about it. She'd love for him to see them. By the time they arrived at the parish they had their controls in place again. But it was different. Their shared embarrassment—they had a secret now—was what made them friends.

The block party was an ethnic bash: refried beans on soda bread; Italian ice in waffle cones. Children had their faces painted. The fire hydrant at the far end of the block was open, and boys in underpants wildly dashed in and out of the geyser. On the church steps an accordionist and a fiddler rendered Irish jigs while a couple of dozen elderly men and women with bright Irish faces and slightly glassy eyes kept each other company, nodding to the music. The gents kept threatening to ask the wizened colleens to dance, but never did. In the street, in the center of the block, several nuns had organized a game of Red Rover. Ten or fifteen children were arranged on a side, and every time the line held there were great cheers.

Michael felt that after years of pacing a room alone—for compared to this the seminary seemed that isolated, that pointless—he'd been released to the world. The festivity and the sun and the city itself all seemed to applaud not only him and not only Sister Anne at his side, but the two of them together. Now that they had their distance again, and in the context of the parish celebration, he dared to think that somehow they might yet find a way to ransom one another. He didn't leave her side. Not this time.

In the schoolyard the older kids had yet another game of kickball going. A man in a white shirt with bunched sleeves was rolling the big balloonlike ball at the kicker; it was Father Mahon. Michael and Sister Anne made their way toward him. When he saw them he pulled out of the game and came over to embrace Anne warmly. He tugged her back down the block toward the church. Parishioners greeted her, though the nuns kept their distance. Michael was looking for Sister Rita because he knew that Anne would be looking for her too.

A few moments later all the activity was suspended as the throng gathered at the foot of the church stairs. When Father Mahon had their attention he thanked the ladies who had prepared the food and the men who'd hung the decorations, and he said he hoped everyone would play games and dance in the street until dark. After that he hoped they wouldn't keep the fathers awake since everyone knew that priests in their rectories wept to bed early and often. They all laughed, the more so because he was poking fun at himself. Then he introduced Mrs. Heaney, the president of the Mothers' Club. She could hardly be heard, but that didn't matter because everyone knew what she was saying. It was her job to present Sister Anne Edward with the felt banner the mothers had made. The young nun was quite moved, but she managed to unfold the gift and hold it up so that everyone could see it. "Sister Anne Edward," it read, "you S'd our S. Thank you. With Love from the Parents and Children of H.C." The people applauded loudly and Sister, for the barest moment, buried her face in the banner.

I was there. I stood on the edge of the crowd, utterly ignorant of the meaning of what had just happened, but nevertheless affected by it. That was the first time I'd laid eyes on Sister Anne Edward and I remember straining to see her because of the notoriety she'd received, and also because Michael had described the impression she'd made on him. As was arranged, I'd come uptown to pick up my car. Sister Anne was to return to Tarrytown with one of her fellow nuns that evening.

While I made my way through the crowd toward Michael, I was thinking what happy people those parishioners seemed to be, so unlike the sullen freshmen for whom I was endlessly diagraming compound, complex and simple sentences on blackboards in those days. I hadn't expected to find myself envying Michael, but as I saw the open fondness with which the people of that neighborhood engulfed him, I did.

I hooked up with him and his nun friend just as another nun did, the principal, Sister Rita. And so it was that I witnessed the awkward encounter between those two women, once so dear to each other. I could, of course, have had no idea how decisive that meeting would be not only for Sister Anne Edward, but for each of us.

"Oh Anne, it's so good to see you," Sister Rita said, but she made no move to embrace her or to shake her hand.

"Mother was kind to let me come," Anne Edward said stiffly, but even I sensed the power of her emotion. Was she afraid? Angry? Hurt? Was she going to cry?

"We managed to get Monsignor Ellis to call her." The principal smiled awkwardly. "What old nun can refuse the pastor?" She paused, then added, "I wanted to write you."

"I wish you had."

Rita lowered her eyes. "I was advised against it," she said miserably.

Then Michael noticed me, and he made the introductions. I knew I'd interrupted something, but it was clear even to me that the women needed more privacy than was available there for the talk they wanted to have. Michael described me as his oldest friend, and he draped his arm around my shoulder, but the tension between the nuns continued to dominate. They moved, as if to go off together. Sister Anne Edward said to Michael, "Thank you for coming for me. I enjoyed our talk."

God, they're formal with each other, I thought. Like Mennonites. What did I know?

Michael said, "Don't forget, before you go back, you're going to let me see your paintings."

"That's right," Anne said, with a relief that first displayed to me her desire to be with him, and that flash of warmth unaccountably filled me with relief too.

But the other nun interrupted. "I'm sorry, Sister, that's one of the things we have to talk about."

"What do you mean?"

"Your paintings are gone."

"Gone?"

"I had to send them to the Mother House. I sent all your things over a month ago."

"But they never gave them to me. Not my paintings! What did they do with them?"

"I don't know." Sister Rita lowered her eyes in exactly the way she had before. I realized it was a form of hers, an act of piety. There was even a name for it, I would learn: "custody of the eyes." Not even I believed that she didn't know.

"You
do
know!" Sister Anne said, furious.

"I'll tell you later."

"Tell me now please, Sister."

"All right." The nun spoke as I imagined nuns spoke to their confessors, with more whine than penitence. "Mother told me at first to destroy your paintings. She said she should never have allowed you to pursue it. I pleaded with her. She relented and told me to send them to her instead."

"So that
she
could destroy them! Why didn't you call me? Oh Rita!"

Sister Rita looked up sharply. "You know why I didn't call you!"

"No I don't. I truly don't."

The women were suddenly at a standoff. Each had unfurled what she thought of as the truth. I glanced at Michael who hinted at his own frustration with a quick upturn of his eyes. I mistook his attitude at that point for clerical or at least masculine condescension.

Sister Rita abruptly turned away and cut through the crowd. Sister Anne Edward faced Michael. "Do you still want to see my work?" Her voice trembled with emotion. I recognized her defiance even without understanding it. And I sensed how large this moment was for her, without knowing why.

"Yes, of course."

"Can you drive me?"

Michael looked at me. I'd been counting on my car, but I said, "No problem, go ahead, I'll see you later."

Michael shook his head. "Come with us." He looked at her. "That would be okay, wouldn't it?"

I sensed her disappointment; how could Michael want me along? But she said, "Sure. The more the merrier."

And that is how it happened that I drove them that afternoon to her parents' house in Dobbs Ferry.

 

That town struck me as a place brimming with happiness, or is that how those of us raised and still living in the grim corners of the crowded city always felt in our rare forays out to the posh suburbs? Her family's house was large, set on a carefully landscaped knoll and surrounded by elm trees, which made it seem more private than it probably was. It certainly seemed less hot than Manhattan had, though we arrived in the middle of the afternoon and the temperature must have been near a hundred. The trees cast a benign pattern of moving shadow over the house, but that was no relief. I could not imagine how Michael managed in that collar and suit of his, much less his nun friend in her habit. The relevant heat had seemed, of course, to be in her, that plugged volcano, and I sensed her fury and her hurt despite the inconsequential chatter my presence imposed on them. Our ride up the Saw Mill River would have been less awkward if they had sat together in the back seat of my car. That arrangement at least would have reflected the reality of our relationships and allowed them perhaps a snatch or two of real talk about the inflamed decisions they were coming to. As it was, Michael had insisted on her riding in the front with me. I didn't understand yet how desperate he was to get his distance from her. I only knew that I felt entangled between them at once and I didn't like it.

The house, when we entered it, was cool. Sister Anne Edward ran ahead, calling for her parents. We followed as far as the entrance hallway which was dominated by an elaborately curving staircase with a gleaming mahogany banister. Michael grimaced at me and shrugged. We mirrored each other, slouching with our hands in our pockets, trying to seem casual, though obviously we felt like interlopers.

"I'm sorry to drag you out here," he whispered.

"No sweat." I pointedly ran a finger through the slick of perspiration on my forehead.

"Look at this." He crossed behind me to a large painting of a barn wall in winter. In it snow was falling in a keen wind; icicles hung from a wrecked gutter and the gleam of frost defined the grain of the unpainted wood. The painting captured perfectly the sparkle of winter. "Just looking at it cools me off."

"Is it signed?"

The name
C.P. Campbell
was carefully printed in the corner, and the year, 1956.

I stood back and said, "It's stunning."

"Thank you," Sister Anne said, from behind me.

We faced her. "It's yours?"

She nodded and looked at it wistfully, as if remembering flakes of snow whirling around her canvas. She grinned. "That's the north wall of our barn at our farm in Vermont. I painted it in each of the seasons. My father says he keeps this one out here because he can't afford to heat it." She approached the painting, resting her fingers on its frame for a moment, as if to reassure herself that it, at least, existed. Then she brightened. "I'll show you others, but first come meet my parents. They're outside."

We followed her through the narrow corridor that ran behind the staircase. The walls there were hung with several dozen family photographs, and I saw, displayed like treasures, the faces of children, a girl in a hammock, two boys clutching a dog, a man at the helm of a boat, a beautiful woman posed in a satin gown on the very staircase we had just left behind. They seemed creatures from a brighter world, and the flash of their smiles filled me with envy.

The corridor led to a solarium, and its french doors opened on a broad stone terrace. A lawn sloped gradually down over a distance of about fifty yards to a blue and white island in the green, a swimming pool. A man and woman were reclining on chaises longues and they remained oblivious to our approach until Sister Anne clutched her rosary and her hem and broke for them, crying out, "Mommy! Dad!"