Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”
I would like to believe, Father, that those were my thoughts as I waited at the Gare d’Auxerre for someone to recognize me, but they could not have been. They are my thoughts now, thoughts I would dispatch if I could to that young American doctor marooned on his bench—a warning, an antidote, a last-minute reprieve—the pay phone before him jolting awake with a jangle of bells.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Monsieur? he said for the second time and, again, Monsieur? The speaker was a young man, weedily bearded, long hair restrained by a cyclist’s cap. Vous êtes le Docteur Abend?
I was.
“Très bien! Me, I’m called Jean-Marie,” he said, lifting my bag. “I will bring you to the community.”
—
The community seemed not to have a name. Jean-Marie, as his Renault camionnette coughed its way out of Auxerre, referred to it only as the community—la communauté—as did (I would shortly learn) anyone who worked there or lived nearby. I have often wondered what name they settled on, though, of course, it may never have had a name. Maybe nothing came of it. Maybe it folded. Maybe it didn’t even last the year. Though the monastery at Leuvray was one of its primary sponsors, the monastery newsletters make no mention of it. I have never tried to find out more.
In any event, Father, it was from this place that Miriam had called me, not from the monastery at Leuvray, where she had first said she would be spending the week. When I asked her where she had gone, she said only, “You will see, mon ami. It will just be for a few days.”
—
The community (Jean-Marie explained) had been conceived as an extension of the monastery. A local aristocrat, a count, had deeded the order an old mill on a tributary of the Yonne. The mill had fallen into disuse in recent decades but had been in operation as late as the 1930s. Private donations and government funds had been secured to repair and restore as much of the original machinery as could be salvaged. A small co-op was established. Other buildings from the former mill had been leased at favorable rates to a stonecutter, a cabinetmaker, and a sawyer. A potter, a Scotsman named McGarvy or MacGarry, had occupied another of the agglomerated buildings, where he manufactured floor and roof tiles using traditional techniques. The cooperative hoped eventually to rely more on the income from beekeeping, the cultivation of vegetables, and a small herd of Charolais cattle, along with some sheep. The plan, in short, had been to reproduce in microcosm the industries that constituted the local economy of small rural communities before the Third Republic, a period when moderate industrialization had lifted such communities from misery but before rural populations had collapsed in the wake of unchecked urbanization and the devastation of the great wars.
Jean-Marie explained how the order envisioned an expansion of its ministry to include the small farmers of the region and to offer a retreat site less imposing and “hyper-catholique” than the monastery and basilica at Leuvray. The plan was to staff the operation with a small group of lay brothers and sisters, either single or married, affiliated with the order but governed autonomously, on the model of earlier Christian collectives. As the Leuvray church was several kilometers away, the order had built a small chapel alongside the river.
So Jean-Marie had instructed me as we clattered along. He had asked me if I minded leaning just “un petit peu” to the left during our drive, so that a bundle of copper and PVC pipe might be permitted to extend from the bed of the camionnette, over my shoulder and out the side window. This arrangement required that I incline my head and upper body toward Jean-Marie as if I were straining to listen, a posture, I feared, that only egged him on.
“T’es le copain de Miriam?” he asked.
Was Jean-Marie asking if I was Miriam’s friend or her boyfriend? “Yes,” I said.
“Donc, t’as de la chance, alors.”
He had declared me lucky. Not knowing what to say in reply, I said nothing.
—
Fields of oats. Fields of rapeseed. We had passed through a region of smaller, newer houses, into a rolling countryside pieced from expanses of greenish grain spreading on either side. In time these swelling distances contracted and the terrain, paned now by hedgerows into small and irregular pastures, disclosed here a troop of whitish cows and calves, there a bull, immense and solitary, an alp of brawn. In other pastures tidy cylinders of hay dotted the stubble, each pinning to the ground a lozenge of eastward-tending shadow. As the inclines grew more pronounced and frequent, the hedgerows expanded at intervals to small patches of woodland. Soon long kilometers of road passed canopied beneath roofs of vaulted branches. On either side the forest appeared to have been stripped of all underbrush. Filled with blue-green shadow and columned by tree trunks or intermittent shafts of sunlight, the woods seemed an undersea garden of
