Angelology (17 page)

After reading for some time, Evangeline found that she had unwittingly pushed the pages of the book flat against the oak table. Her gaze drifted from the book to the doorway of the library, where, only a few hours before, she had looked upon Verlaine for the first time. It had been such a profoundly odd day, the progression from her morning ablutions to her present state of anxiety more dream than reality. Verlaine had burst into her life with such force that he seemed to be—like the memories of her family—a creation of her mind, both real and unreal at the same time.

Taking his letter from her pocket and straightening it upon the table, she read it once again. There had been something in his manner—his directness, his familiarity, his intelligence—that had cracked through the shell in which she’d lived these past years. His appearance had reminded her that another world existed outside, beyond the convent grounds. He had given her his telephone number on a scrap of paper. Evangeline knew that despite her duty to her sisters and the danger of being discovered, she must speak with him again.

A sense of urgency overtook her as she walked through the busy hallways of the first floor. She hurried past a Prayer Partner informational meeting under way in the Perpetual Peace Lounge and a crafts class in the St. Rose of Viterbo Art Center. She did not pause in the communal cloakroom to find her jacket, and she did not stop by the Mission and Recruitment Office to see about the day’s mail. She did not even pause to be sure the Adoration Prayer Schedule was in order. She simply marched out of the main entrance to the great brick garage on the south side of the grounds, where she lifted a ring of keys from a gray metal box on the wall and started the convent car. Evangeline knew from experience that the only truly secluded place for a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration at St. Rose Convent was to be found inside the brown four-door sedan.

She was certain that no one would object to her taking the convent car. The task of driving to the post office was a chore she usually looked forward to performing. Every afternoon she packed the St. Rose correspondence into a cotton bag and turned onto Route 9W, a two-lane highway snaking along the Hudson River. Only a handful of the sisters had a driver’s license, and so Evangeline volunteered to do most errands above and beyond her mail duties: retrieving prescription medicines, restocking office supplies, and picking up gifts for sisters’ birthday celebrations.

Some afternoons Evangeline drove across the river, taking the metalwork Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge into Dutchess County. Slowing as she crossed the bridge, she would roll down the window and gaze at the estates scattered like overgrown mushrooms along both sides of the water—the monastic grounds of various religious communities, including the towers of St. Rose Convent and, somewhere around a bend, the Vanderbilt Mansion, protected by acres of land. From that height she could see for miles. She felt the car veer slightly in the wind, sending a shiver of panic through her. How very high above the water she had driven, so high that, looking down, she understood for a second how it might feel to fly. Evangeline had always loved the feeling of freedom she felt going over water, a fondness she had developed on her many walks across the Brooklyn Bridge with her father. When she reached the end of the bridge, she would make a U-turn and drive back to the other side again, letting her eye drift to the purple-blue spine of the Catskills rising in the western sky. Snow had begun to fall, rising and scattering in the wind. Once more, as the bridge carried her higher and higher above the earth, the pilings bearing her up, she felt a pleasant sense of disembodiment, a sensation of vertigo similar to what she felt some mornings in the Adoration Chapel—a pure reverence for the immensity of creation.

Evangeline relied upon her afternoon drives to clear her mind. Before that day her thoughts had invariably turned to the future, which seemed to stretch before her like an endless, dimmed corridor through which she might walk forever without finding a destination. Now, as she turned onto 9W she thought of little else but Celestine’s bizarre tale and Verlaine’s unsolicited entry into her life. She wished her father were alive so she might ask him what he, in all his experience and all his wisdom, would have her do in such a situation.

Rolling the window down, she let the car fill with icy air. Despite the fact that it was the dead of winter and she had left the convent without a jacket, her skin burned. Sweat soaked her clothing, making her feel clammy. She caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror and saw that her neck had broken out into splotches of red hives, amoeba-shaped blotches staining her pale flesh crimson. The last time this had occurred had been the year her mother died, when she had developed a list of inexplicable allergies, all of which had disappeared after her arrival at St. Rose. The years of contemplative life may have created a bubble of ease and comfort around her, but they had done little to prepare her to face her past.

Turning off the main highway, Evangeline drove onto the narrow, winding road that led into Milton. Soon the dense trees diminished, the forest cutting sharply away to reveal an expanse of vaulted sky awash with snow. On Main Street the sidewalks were empty, as if the snow and cold had driven everyone indoors. Evangeline pulled into a gas station, filled the car with unleaded, and headed inside to use the pay phone. Her fingers trembling, she deposited a quarter, dialed the number Verlaine had given her, and waited, her heart beating loud in her chest. The phone rang five, seven, nine times before the answering machine picked up. She listened to Verlaine’s voice on the message, but replaced the receiver without speaking, losing her quarter. Verlaine wasn’t there.

Starting the car, she glanced at the clock embedded next to the speedometer. It was nearly seven. She had missed afternoon chores and dinner. Sister Philomena would surely be waiting for her to return, expecting an explanation for her absence. Chagrined, she wondered what was wrong with her, driving to town to call a man she didn’t know to discuss a subject that he would surely find absurd, if not completely insane. Evangeline was about to turn around and return to St. Rose when she saw him. Across the street, framed by a large, frosty picture window, was Verlaine.

H
OW Evangeline had known that he needed her—that he was bloodied and stranded and, by now, significantly drunk on Mexican beer—was an act Verlaine considered both miraculous and intuitive, perhaps even a trick she’d learned in her years in the cloister, something altogether beyond his powers of understanding. Nevertheless, there she was, walking slowly toward the tavern door, her posture too perfect, her bobbed hair tucked behind her ears, her black clothes resembling, if he stretched his imagination, the moody attire of the girls he’d dated in college, those dark, artistic, mysterious girls he made laugh but could never convince to sleep with him. In a matter of seconds, she’d walked through the barroom and taken a seat across from him, an elfin woman with large green eyes who had clearly never been in a place like the Milton Bar and Grill before.

He watched as she gazed over his shoulder, taking in the scene, glancing at the pool table and jukebox and dartboard. Evangeline didn’t appear to notice or to care that she appeared significantly out of place among the crowd. Looking him over in the way one examines an injured bird, she furrowed her eyebrows and waited for Verlaine to tell her what had happened to him in the hours since their meeting.

“There was a problem with my car,” Verlaine said, avoiding the more complicated version of his plight. “I walked here.”

Genuinely astonished, Evangeline said, “In this storm?”

“I followed the highway for the most part but got a little lost.”

“That is a long way to walk,” she said, a hint of skepticism in her voice. “I’m surprised you didn’t get frostbitten.”

“I got a lift about halfway here. It’s a good thing, too, or I’d still be out there, freezing my ass off.”

Evangeline scrutinized him a bit too long, and he wondered if she objected to his language. She was a nun, after all, and he should try to behave with a certain restraint, but he found it impossible to read her. She was too different from his—admittedly stereotypical—vision of what a nun should be. She was young and wry and too pretty to fit into the profile he had drawn in his mind of the severe and humorless Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. He didn’t know how she did it, but there was something about Evangeline that made him feel as if he could say anything at all.

“And why are you here?” he asked her, hoping his humor would come off the right way. “Aren’t you supposed to be praying or doing good works or something?”

Smiling at his joke, she said, “As a matter of fact, I came to Milton to call you.”

It was his turn to be astonished. He wouldn’t have guessed that she would want to see him again. “You’re kidding.”

“Not at all,” Evangeline replied, brushing a strand of dark hair from her eyes. Her manner had turned serious. “There is no privacy at St. Rose. I couldn’t risk calling you from there. And I knew I needed to ask you something that must remain between us. It is a very delicate matter, a matter upon which I hope you can give me guidance. It is about the correspondence you’ve found.”

Verlaine took a drink of his Corona, struck by how vulnerable she looked, perched at the edge of her bar chair, her eyes reddening from the thick cigarette smoke, her long, thin, ringless fingers chapped from the winter cold. “There’s nothing I’d like to talk about more,” he said.

“Then you won’t mind,” she said, leaning forward against the table, “telling me where you found these letters?”

“In an archive of Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller’s personal papers,” Verlaine said. “The letters were not cataloged. They had been overlooked entirely.”

“You stole them?” Evangeline asked.

Verlaine felt his cheeks flush at Evangeline’s reprimand. “Borrowed. I will return them once I understand their meaning.”

“And how many do you have?”

“Five. They were written over a period of five weeks in 1943.”

“All of them from Innocenta?”

“Not a Rockefeller in the bunch.”

Evangeline held Verlaine’s eyes, waiting for him to say more. The intensity of her gaze startled him. Perhaps it was the interest she showed in his work—his research had been underappreciated, even by Grigon—or maybe it was the sincerity of her manner, but he found himself anxious to please her. All his fear, his frustration, the sense of futility he’d been carrying with him washed away.

“I need to know if there is anything at all in the letters about the sisters at St. Rose,” Evangeline said, disturbing his thoughts.

“I can’t be sure,” Verlaine said, sitting back in his chair. “But I don’t think so.”

“Was there anything at all about a collaborator in Abigail Rockefeller’s work? Anything about the convent or the church or the nuns?”

Verlaine was perplexed by the direction in which Evangeline was going. “I don’t have the letters memorized, but from what I recall, there isn’t anything about the nuns at St. Rose.”

“But in Abigail Rockefeller’s letter to Innocenta,” Evangeline said, raising her voice over the jukebox, her composure slipping, “she specifically mentioned Sister Celestine—‘Celestine Clochette will be arriving in New York early February.’”

“Celestine Clochette was a nun? I’ve been trying all afternoon to figure out who Celestine was.”

“Is
,
”
Evangeline said, lowering her voice so that it was barely audible over the music. “Celestine is a nun. She is very much alive. I went to see her after you left. She is elderly, and not very well, but she knew about the correspondence between Innocenta and Abigail Rockefeller. She knew about the expedition mentioned in the letter. She said a number of rather frightening things about—”

“About what?” Verlaine asked, growing more concerned by the second. “What did she say?”

“I don’t understand it exactly,” Evangeline said. “It was as though she were speaking in riddles. When I tried to puzzle out their meaning, it made even less sense.”

Verlaine was torn between an impulse to embrace Evangeline, whose complexion had gone completely pale, and wanting to shake her. Instead he ordered two more Coronas and slid his handwritten copy of the Rocke-feller letter across the table. “Read this again. Maybe Celestine Clochette was carrying an artifact from the Rhodope Mountains to St. Rose Convent? Did she tell you anything about this expedition?” Forgetting that he hardly knew Evangeline, he reached across the table and touched her hand. “I want to help you.”

Evangeline pulled her hand away from his, glanced at him suspiciously, and looked at her watch. “I can’t stay. I’ve been gone too long already. You obviously don’t know much more about these letters than I do.”

As the waitress set two beers before them, Verlaine said, “There must be more letters—at least four more. Innocenta was clearly responding to Abigail Rockefeller. You could look for them. Or perhaps Celestine Clochette knows where we can find them.”

“Mr. Verlaine,” Evangeline said in an imperious tone that struck Verlaine as forced, “I am sympathetic to your search and to your desire to fulfill the wishes of your client, but I cannot participate in something like that.”

“This has nothing to do with my client,” Verlaine said, taking a long drink of his beer. “His name is Percival Grigori. He’s unbelievably awful; I should have never agreed to work for him. In fact, he just had some thugs break into my car and take all my research papers. Clearly, he’s after something, and if this something is the correspondence we’ve found—which I haven’t told him about, by the way—then we should find the other half before he does.”

“Broke into your car?” Evangeline said, incredulous. “Is that why you’re stranded here?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Verlaine said, hoping to appear unconcerned. “Well, actually, yes, it does matter. I need to ask you for a ride to a train station. And I need to know what Celestine Clochette brought with her to America. St. Rose Convent is the only possible place it could be. If you could find it—or at least look for the letters—we would be on our way to understanding what this is all about”