Evangeline’s father had not wished to discuss Angela after her death. If Evangeline inquired about her, he would often simply turn away, as if he had not heard her speak. Other times, if he had opened a bottle of wine with their dinner, he might relate a tantalizing piece of information about her-the way Angela would spend all night at her laboratory and return to the apartment at sunrise. How she would become so engrossed in her work that she would leave books and papers wherever they fell; how she wished to live near the ocean, away from Paris; the happiness Evangeline had brought her. In all the years they lived together, he had discouraged any substantial discussion of her. And yet when Evangeline asked about her mother, something in his demeanor opened, as if welcoming a spirit that brought pain and comfort in equal measure. Hating and loving the past, her father seemed both to welcome Angela’s ghost and to persuade himself that it did not exist at all. Evangeline was certain that he had never stopped loving her. He had never remarried and had few friends in the United States. For many years he made a weekly call to Paris, talking for hours in a language that Evangeline found so gorgeous and musical that she would sit in the kitchen and simply listen to his voice.
Her father had brought her to St. Rose when she was twelve, entrusting her to the women who would become her mentors, encouraging her to believe in their world when, if she were honest with herself, faith seemed like a precious but unattainable substance, one possessed by many but denied to her. Over time Evangeline came to understand that her father valued obedience above faith, training above creativity, and restraint above emotion. Over time she had fallen into routine and duty. Over time she had lost sight of her mother, her grandmother, herself.
Her father visited her often at St. Rose. He sat with her in the community room, frozen upon the couch, watching her with great interest, as if she were an experiment whose outcome he wished to observe. Her father would stare intently into her face as if it were a telescope through which, if he strained his vision, he might view the features of his beloved wife. But, in truth, Evangeline looked nothing at all like her mother. Instead her features had captured the likeness of her grandmother, Gabriella. It was a likeness her father chose to ignore. He had died three years before, but while he had lived, he held steadfastly to the conviction that his only child resembled a ghost.
Evangeline squeezed the necklace in her hand until the sharp point of the lyre drove deep into the skin of her palm. She knew she must hurry-she was needed in the library, and the sisters might wonder where she had gone-and so she let thoughts of her parents recede and focused upon the task at hand.
Bending to the floor, she slid her fingers over the rough brickwork of the turret wall until she felt the slightest movement in the third row from the floor. Inserting the flat of a fingernail into a groove, she levered the loose brick and pulled it from the wall. From the space Evangeline removed a narrow steel box. The very act of touching the cold metal relieved her mind, as if its solidity contradicted the insubstantial quality of memory.
Evangeline set the box before her and lifted the top. Inside was a small diary bound with a leather strap and fastened with a golden clasp molded in the shape of an angel, its body long and thin. A blue sapphire marked the angel’s eye, and the wings, when pressed, released the latch so that the pages fell open upon her lap. The leather was worn and scuffed and the binding flexible. On the first page, the word ANGELOLOGY had been stamped in gold. As she flipped through the pages, Evangeline’s eye skimmed over hand-drawn maps, notes scribbled in colored inks, sketches of angels and musical instruments drawn in the margins. A musical score filled a page at the center of the notebook. Historical analysis and biblical lore filled many pages, and in the last quarter of the notebook there grew a mass of numbers and calculations that Evangeline did not understand. The diary had belonged to her grandmother. Now it belonged to Evangeline. She ran her hand over the leather cover, wishing she could understand the secrets inside.
Evangeline withdrew a photograph tucked in the back of the diary, a snapshot of her mother and grandmother, arms wrapped around each other. The picture had been taken the year of Evangeline’s birth-she had compared the date stamped upon the border of the photograph with her own birthday and had come to the conclusion that her mother had been three months pregnant at the time, although her condition wasn’t at all apparent. Evangeline gazed upon it, her heart aching. Angela and Gabriella were happy in the photo. She would give anything, trade everything she had, to be with them again.
Evangeline took care to return to the library with a cheerful expression, hiding her thoughts as best she could. The fire had gone out, and a draft of cold air swept from the stone fireplace at the center of the room and tickled the edges of her skirt. She retrieved a black cardigan from her worktable and wrapped it about her shoulders before going to the center of the rectangular library to investigate. The fireplace was well used in the long, cold winter months, and one of the sisters must have left the flue open. Rather than close the flue, Evangeline opened it fully. She took a piece of the knotty pine stacked in the log rack, placed it in the middle of an iron grating, and lit kindling paper around it. Clasping the brass handles of the bellows, she blew a few subtle gusts of air until the fire, encouraged, caught.
Evangeline had spent very little time studying the angelic texts that had brought St. Rose Convent such renown in theological circles. Some of these texts, such as histories of angelic representation in art and works of serious angelology, including modern copies of medieval angelological schema and studies of Thomas Aquinas’s and St. Augustine’s views on the role of the angels in the universe, had been in the collection from the 1809 founding. A number of studies on angelmorphism could also be found among the stacks, although these were quite academic and did not catch the interest of many of the sisters, especially the younger generation, who (truth be told) did not spend much time on angels at all. The softer side of angelology was also represented, despite the cold eye the community cast upon the New Agers: There were books on the various cults of angel veneration in the ancient and modern world as well as the phenomenon of guardian angels. There were also a number of art books filled with plates, including an exceptional volume of Edward Burne-Jones’s angels that Evangeline loved in particular.
On the opposite wall from the fireplace there stood a rostrum for the library ledger. Here the sisters wrote the titles of books they removed from the stacks, taking as many as they wished to their cells and returning them at will. It was a haphazard system that somehow worked perfectly well, with the same intuitive matriarchal organization that marked the convent. It was not always thus. In the nineteenth century-before the ledger-books had come and gone without systemization, piling up on whatever shelf space was available. The mundane task of finding a work of nonfiction was as much a matter of luck as an impromptu miracle. The library was given over to such chaos until Sister Lucrezia (1851-1923) imposed alphabetization at the turn of the twentieth century. When a later librarian, Sister Drusilla (1890-1985), suggested the Dewey decimal system, there was a general outcry. Rather than succumb to gross systemization, the sisters agreed to the ledger, writing each book’s title in blue ink on the thick paper.