As was her wont, Sneja appeared to be reading her son’s mind. “Despite your best efforts to sabotage your own cure, I believe that your art historian has pointed us in the right direction.”
“You’ve found Verlaine?” Percival asked, closing The Book of Generations and turning to his mother. He felt like a child again, wishing to win Sneja’s approval. “Did he have the drawings?”
“As soon as we hear from Otterley, we will know for certain,” Sneja said, taking The Book of Generations from Percival and paging through it. “Clearly we overlooked something during our raids. But make no mistake, we will find the object of our search. And you, my angel, will be the first to benefit from its properties. After you are cured, we will be the saviors of our kind.”
“Magnificent,” Percival said, imagining his wings and how lush they would be once they had returned. “I will go to the convent myself. If it is there, I want to be the one to find it.”
“You are too feeble.” Sneja glanced at the glass of scotch. “And drunk. Let Otterley and your father handle this. You and I will stay here.”
Sneja tucked The Book of Generations under her arm and, kissing Percival on the cheek, left the billiard room.
The thought of being trapped in New York City during one of the most important moments of his life enraged him. Taking his cane, he walked to the telephone and dialed Otterley’s number once more. As he waited for her to answer, he assured himself that his strength would soon return. He would be beautiful and powerful once more. With the restoration of his wings, all the suffering and humiliation he had endured would be transformed to glory.
St. Rose Convent, Milton, New York
Making her way past the crowd-sisters on their way to work and sisters on their way to prayer-Evangeline tried to maintain equilibrium under the scrutinizing eyes of her superiors. There was little tolerance for public displays of emotion at St. Rose-not pleasure, fear, pain, or remorse. Yet hiding anything at all in the convent proved virtually impossible. Day after day the sisters ate, prayed, cleaned, and rested together, so that even the smallest change in the happiness or anxiety of one sister transmitted itself throughout the group, as if conducted by an invisible wire. Evangeline knew, for example, when Sister Carla was annoyed-three tension lines appeared about her mouth. She knew when Sister Wilhelmina had slept through her morning walk along the river-a restrained glassiness weighed upon her gaze during Mass. Privacy did not exist. One could only wear a mask and hope that the others were too busy to notice.
The enormous oak door that connected the convent to the church stood open night and day, big as a mouth waiting to be fed. Sisters traveled between the two buildings at will, transposing themselves from the gloomy convent to the glorious luminescence of the chapel. To Evangeline, returning to Maria Angelorum throughout the day always felt like going home, as if the spirit were released just slightly from the constraints of the body.
Trying to ease her panic at what had occurred in the library, Evangeline paused at the bulletin board that hung beside the church door. One of her responsibilities in addition to her library duties was the preparation of the Adoration Prayer Schedule, or APS for short. Each week she wrote down the sisters’ regular time slots, careful to mark variations or substitutions, and posted the APS on the large corkboard listing the roster of alternate Prayer Partners in case of illness. Sister Philomena always said, “Never underestimate our reliance upon the APS!”-a statement Evangeline found to be quite correct. Often the sisters scheduled for adoration at night would walk the hallway between the convent and the church in pajamas and slippers, white hair tied up in plain cotton scarves. They would check the APS, glance at their wristwatches, and hurry on to prayer, assured in the soundness of the schedule that had kept perpetual prayer alive for two hundred years.
Taking solace in the exactitude of her work, Evangeline left the APS, dipped a finger in holy water, and genuflected. Walking through the church, she felt calmed by the regularity of her actions, and by the time she approached the chapel, she felt a sense of renewed serenity. Inside, Sisters Divinia and Davida knelt at the altar, prayer partners from three to four. Sitting at the back, careful not to disturb Divinia and Davida, Evangeline took her rosary from her pocket and began to count the beads. Soon her prayer took rhythm.
For Evangeline-who had always endeavored to assess her thoughts with a clinical, incisive eye-prayer was an opportunity for self-examination. In her childhood years at St. Rose, long before she had taken vows and with them the responsibility of her five o’clock prayer shift, she would visit the Adoration Chapel many times a day for the sole purpose of trying to understand the anatomy of her memories-stark, frightening recollections she often wished to leave behind. For many years the ritual had helped her to forget.
But this afternoon’s encounter with Verlaine had shaken her profoundly. His inquiries had brought Evangeline’s thoughts, for the second time that day, back to an event she wished to forget.
After her mother’s death, Evangeline and her father had moved to the United States from France, renting a narrow railroad apartment in Brooklyn. Some weekends they would take the train to Manhattan for the day, arriving early in the morning. Pushing through turnstiles, they followed the crowded tunnel walkways and emerged into the bright street aboveground. Once in the city, they never took taxis or the subway. Instead they walked. For blocks and blocks across the avenues they went, Evangeline’s eyes falling upon chewing gum wedged in the cracks of the sidewalk, briefcases and shopping bags and the endlessly shifting movement of people rushing to lunch dates, meetings, and appointments-the frantic existence so different from the quiet life she and her father shared.
They had come to America when Evangeline was seven years old. Unlike her father, who struggled to express himself in English, she learned their new language quickly, drinking in the sounds of English, acquiring an American accent with little difficulty. Her first-grade teacher had helped her with the dreaded th, a sound that congealed upon Evangeline’s tongue like a drop of oil, impeding her ability to communicate her thoughts. She repeated the words “this,” “the,” “that,” and “them” over and over until she said them properly. Once this difficulty had disappeared, her pronunciation rang as clear and perfect as that of children born in America. When they were alone, she and her father spoke in Italian, her father’s native language, or French, her mother’s, as if they were still living in Europe. Soon, however, Evangeline began to crave English as one craves food or love. In public she returned her father’s melodic Italian words with new, flawlessly articulated English.
As a child, Evangeline had not realized that their trips to Manhattan, taken many times a month, were more than pleasurable excursions. Her father said nothing of their purpose, only promising to take her to the carousel in Central Park, or to their favorite diner, or to the Museum of Natural History, where she would marvel at the enormous whale suspended from the ceiling, catching her breath as she examined the exposed underbelly. Although these day trips were adventures to Evangeline, she realized as she got older that the real purpose for their journeys to the city revolved around meetings between her father and his contacts-an exchange of documents in Central Park, or a whispered conversation in a bar near Wall Street, or lunch with a table of foreign diplomats, all of them speaking in rapid, unintelligible languages as they poured wine and traded information. As a child, she had not understood her father’s work or his growing dependence upon it after her mother died. Evangeline simply believed that he brought her to Manhattan as a gift.