Prince of Peace (29 page)

"My God, it's Syr!" her father cried. "It's Syr!" He was up and running to meet her, a grinning, vigorous man in his fifties, tanned and muscular. When they embraced, I felt something of a jolt, as if the shock of their bodies colliding registered in me, but I think it was more the sight of that large, quite physical man clad only in his bathing suit taking that sternly garbed nun in his arms and whirling her around and around so that her black habit flew.

Her mother, knotting a terry robe, quickly joined them. When they hugged the two women burst into tears.

Michael and I stood oafishly by until her father noticed us. He approached Michael with his hand extended. "Hello, Father! Welcome! I'm Ed Campbell."

"I'm Michael Maguire, Ed. And this is Frank Durkin."

As Campbell shook hands with us he eyed his daughter. It was obvious something was wrong. She was sobbing against her mother's shoulder. When she realized we were watching she pulled herself together and brought her mother over to meet us.

Mrs. Campbell was a slim, tanned woman whose hair was partly blond and partly gray. She had the posture of a tower and her face, though lined, seemed young. When I took her hand I felt drawn in by her, and my unease left me. Her name was Anne.

Anne and Edward, I realized. Anne Edward. My first lesson in the naming of nuns.

Ed Campbell offered us beers, but then a better idea hit him. "How about a swim, fellows?" Before we could respond he led the way back to the house, saying that between him and his two sons they had suits galore. As we followed, Michael looked back at Anne who watched us smiling, as if the pleasure for her in seeing her strong-willed generous father override us was enough. I glanced back at her once more as we went in the house and was struck by—I could say
moved
by—the mammoth sacrifice nuns make. She had forsaken herself, and even there in the embrace of her home the stigma of her clothing, of her choice, set her apart. No swimming for Sister.

But I saw too, amazingly, why she'd done it. Only in that setting, heightening as it did the extremity of her situation, could I grasp its meaning. In her vowed life, in her hyperchaste body, in her loss of free will, she contradicted the world itself, its bondage to time and its steady quest for comfort. On that day in her merciless garments she contradicted the weather itself, and that act alone seemed transcendent. She was Crane's "wink of eternity," a spot of black in the glare on which it was possible for an instant to rest an eye. The great oppression is that things are what they seem and no more. Nuns deny it. How simple once one understands. And what fools they are unless the rest of us are wrong. Nuns teach us, if we let them, that we want to be wrong. If we don't let them, they're no bother unless your best friend gets involved with one.

In her presence so far that day I had been uncomfortable, and I hadn't fathomed Michael's apparent attraction to her, but now I saw her as an image less of rejection than invitation. In her radical straining against the flow of things was there some meaning for me? For my sense-ridden but senseless life as an aging boy-wonder whose zeal for literature had been swamped in the backwash of classroom drudge-work, and whose once cherished, oh-so-modern belief in "the dearest freshness deep down things," in the "shining shook foil" of "experience" had grown stale, like bread left out on the table overnight? What began in the Village as a permanent "liberty" in the sailor's sense had become for my generation, or my crowd at least, even as we drifted from the great promise of school into rather ordinary jobs, the lockstep, nose-to-tail of canine heat. Even as I gave my stirring early lectures on "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (which Hopkins dedicated by the way to five Franciscan nuns), I was always half thinking of the weekend and of getting laid. This nun made me uncomfortable, I realized, because her chastity-on-display seemed addressed to the likes of me, and I could admit it only when I'd met her parents whose lively bond with each other seemed not Manichean, as one like me would expect in the progenitors of the celibate, but downright voluptuous.

So Sister Anne Edward was straining against the flow of herself, as if her point wasn't at all that the world is evil, but that, even though it is good, it is far from enough. Life even in a loving family, even in a beautiful house, even as a promising artist, is not enough. How much less is it enough if life is among lonely Village girls who dream of Edna St. Vincent Millay and so believe us when we tell them that we part with our despair by parting our legs and whispering to each other like literary whores—give me "Baby, oh baby!" any day—"Death devours all lovely things," or "Love is not all; it is not meat or drink." After we have cheapened not only talk but good writing, no wonder the woman of silence reminds us that there is more, far more, not only than the worst, but than the best. That was why the radical denial implicit in Anne Edward's vocation had taken the form of a radical embrace. Had she been raised by lovers? Then she had to have for herself the Greatest Lover of them all. To my own surprise, I understood. In my last glimpse of her across the lawn I marked how she bent her head toward her mother and they laughed, and a rare affection fluttered above them.

When, suited, we went back out and across the lawn to the pool, they were gone.

Michael and I plunged into the water while Ed went back into the house for the beers. We rejoiced in the sheer release from the heat and I, for myself, felt momentarily freed of my Young Werther melancholy. The thrill of the wet cold enlivened me and I had, as it were, a brief foretaste of what was soon to come. Michael and I swam independently at first, then splashed one another boyishly, like a couple of Cooper Street kids away at camp for the first time.

Michael noticed before I did. He stood up in the pool abruptly, the water at his waist, his strong chest dripping, and his jaw suddenly slack. I turned to see what caused this shock in him.

She had just stepped off the terrace onto the lawn and was coming toward us in an unornamented, unskirted dark bathing suit of the sort competitors wore, but it registered as nudity, the simplified lines of her limbs, her long, elegant legs, her bare arms undulating sexually, as if to walk was an erotic act. Her cropped blond hair was short as a boy's, which made her long neck seem flaunted. Watching a lewd stranger coyly raise her nightgown at a window would not have been more electrifying than watching this virgin place one bare foot after the other in the grass. Her naked ankles! Her undraped thighs! She came not self-consciously but solemnly, as if taking possession of territory or enacting a rite of primitive religion. Drops of water clung to her. Had she just showered? To shave herself perhaps? Her skin was white as porcelain, cool, the Victorian ideal, but she seemed otherwise like a figment of the avant-garde, something out of Existentialist Paris, lacking only a cigarette and a hurt expression.

A faint smile and the barest color in her cheeks were the only hint of the bashfulness she surely felt. How long had it been since she'd so exposed herself? I pictured her before her childhood mirror, removing her anachronous garments, the black yardage, the linen at her throat, the constricting starched bodice, the layered underwear. And when she saw her parts whole, her breasts with nipples rising and her hips, her broad pelvis, the delta between her legs, her body in its prime come back to her, did her juice flow? Certainly she knew what an apparition of desire she would be to us.

In fact, I heard from Michael's lips a quick short cry, an "Oh!" that made me look at him.

His face was the face of a man who'd taken a severe blow. Without the water to float in I think he'd have been reeling. His disorientation was apparent, and his questions flashed in his eyes. Who was she? And what did anything he'd learned or vowed or prayed over have to do with the agony of this wanting? What were all those memorized verses of Writ to him now? He wanted her and his wanting trapped him. By then the choice was not between her and God or between her and the Church or between her and the priesthood, but between her and himself.

Because I cared for him as a friend my thought for an instant was how to help him. I knew right then of course that his pain would not be soothed until he took possession of her, and I think I knew also that eventually, no matter what promises to whom were broken, he would.

When I looked back at her I forgot him. As she approached the tile apron of the pool her step quickened, and she raised her arms together over her head, flaring her breasts, and then springing into the air, feet together, carving an arc through the heat with her flawless dive.

She swam underwater half the length of the pool, right at Michael, like a predator, and she surfaced two feet in front of him. "Hello," she said. But her meaning was, Here I am. What are you going to do?

"Venus Rising," Michael answered, but the rakish greeting had nothing to do with what he felt. I read his agony, though I didn't understand it yet. He was naked to himself for the first time. What was he going to do? Precisely nothing. Why? Because he
was
nothing. He would never know humiliation like that again.

She began to blush. Clearly she had planned her moves to this point, but no farther. She folded her arms across her breasts and let her face fall. Neither Michael nor I looked away from her. It would have been the merciful thing to do, for her counterfeit boldness had failed her utterly and she felt terribly exposed. But it was impossible to take one's eyes away. She was simply the most beautiful woman either of us had ever seen.

To my astonishment I was the one to steer us past that moment by saying simply, "Your father calls you 'Syr.'"

She nodded and laughed. "For 'Syrup.' Karo syrup." She laughed again. "My name is Carolyn."

Michael said sadly, quietly, "It's a lovely name, Carolyn."

And she raised her face to him exactly as she might have had he hooked a finger under her chin. I saw the worship in her eyes. For years I would try to forget that moment and its meaning. They beheld each other so steadily, so exclusively and for so long that I became embarrassed and dove under the water.

When I surfaced she had swum away. Her parents were approaching with refreshments. Michael called me, drew close and whispered, "As soon as we can you have to get me out of here."

 

Carolyn never returned to the convent. As Michael and I left that day, he took her aside for a moment. I saw them kiss, like a pair of figurines. Tears ran freely down her face when she followed him to the car, then stood waving as we drove away. Michael didn't speak.

Finally, as we crossed into Manhattan, I had to ask him. "What did you say to her?"

"I said 'Goodbye.' I can't see her again."

"Why not?" I asked, though I knew the answer. I asked it calmly, though my heart soared with happiness. I cared not a whit for his agony then, and though I was in its debt, I did not for once admire his ruthless will.

"Because I love her," he said simply.

I nodded, as if my only meaning was that I understood.

O
UR
TWA flight from Tel Aviv arrived at Kennedy at 1:45 in the afternoon. My daughter and I took an hour to clear customs. Molly was carrying only a shoulder bag and I had nothing, save my toothbrush and passport, but that heightened the official's suspicion. When he asked me my occupation I wanted to say smuggler.

Then we were in a taxi sailing up the ramp of the Triborough Bridge. Ah, Moses! The cabbie cut dangerously in front of a truck. Molly and I exchanged a glance, then smiled; this was more dangerous than the terrorist-ridden road from Jerusalem.

New York was golden in the afternoon sun and my eyes feasted on the skyline, the most familiar sight there was. Only then, beholding the jagged frieze, did I realize how I had hungered for this city. I was nearly overwhelmed by a longing for the life I had denied myself.

The taxi took us directly to the cathedral.

Not Saint Patrick's; the funeral was to be held that night at the Anglican Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue near Columbia University, and that had loosed a flood of feelings that surprised me and disturbed me. At first I thought Carolyn had preferred the Episcopal Church and I was shocked. Had they converted? I asked Molly, and she said no. They had quietly continued to worship as Catholics all those years, mainly at the Jesuit parish not far from their apartment on West Seventieth Street. Since it was a church staffed by Order priests who had never known him personally—though perhaps some of them had played basketball against him—Michael had been able to go there with a certain, essential feeling of anonymity. Molly said that he and her mother had come to love the place.

But it hadn't mattered.

When, after Michael's death, Carolyn had called the Jesuit pastor, he had regretfully referred her to the chancery of the archdiocese. The chancellor had told her that Michael would not be allowed to be buried from a Catholic church. As an unlaicized but married priest he was an excommunicant, the archbishop had said. Canon law forbade him both a Church funeral and burial in sacred ground. The archbishop regretted it too, and he was sorry it came as a surprise. But, he'd said, he was sure Michael Maguire himself had understood the consequences of the decisions he'd made.

I was too stunned, when Molly told me, to realize how furious I was and how hurt, for myself as well as for Michael. What an obscenity such a last rejection was, even if, by Church standards, it was somehow defensible. I was confused by the fact that Molly seemed to have no particular reaction to the profound insult her mother had suffered. Was that because she expected no better from the Church? She didn't believe in God, she'd said. Wasn't it to her advantage to be free of those petty distinctions, as if, on any rational scale, it mattered, now that Michael was dead, which church he was buried from? Hell, from Molly's point of view Saint John the Divine
would
have been preferable. It at least was an authentic Gothic masterpiece, far more beautiful and, even unfinished, more imposing than the Fifth Avenue bauble, Saint Patrick's. And no mere museum like the Cloisters, Saint John the Divine had at least been the scene of vital human events of broad significance: huge ecumenical gatherings on the crisis of the city, on the meaning of the Holocaust, on ending racial conflict. Duke Ellington conducted his concerts of sacred music in that cathedral and was buried from it. Great festivals with jugglers and aerialists and minstrels, and countless productions of plays and chorales and symphonies reaffirmed the ancient connection of religion to art. And once, while FBI agents waited nervously to arrest him, Michael preached against the war from the cathedral's great pulpit.