Angelology(124)

comforted Evangeline—it was as reliable as the workings of St. Rose Convent. The train passed, the

sisters walked to prayer, the heat seeped from steam radiators, the wind rattled the windowpanes.

The universe moved in regular cycles. The sun would rise in a few hours, and when it did,

Evangeline would begin another day, following the rigid schedule she had followed every other day:

prayer, breakfast, Mass, library work, lunch, prayer, chores, library work, Mass, dinner. Her life

moved in spheres as regular as the beads on a rosary.

Sometimes Evangeline would watch the train and imagine the shadowy outline of a traveler making

his precarious way through the aisle. The train and the man would flash by and then, in a clatter of

metal and neon light, move off to some unknown destination. Gazing into the darkness, she longed for

the train carrying Verlaine to pass while she watched.

Evangeline’s room was the size of a linen closet and, appropriately, smelled of freshly laundered

linens. She had recently waxed the pine floor, cleaned the corners of spiderwebs, and dusted the

room from floor to ceiling and wainscoting to sill. The stiff white sheets on her bed seemed to call

out to her to take her shoes off and lie down to sleep. Instead she poured water from a pitcher into a

glass on the bureau and drank. Then she opened the window and took a deep breath. The air was cold

and thick in her lungs, soothing as ice on a wound. She was so tired she could hardly think. The

clock’s electric digits gave the hour. It was just after midnight. A new day was beginning.

Sitting upon her bed, Evangeline closed her eyes and let all thoughts of the previous day’s

encounter settle. She took the pack of letters Sister Celestine had given her and counted. There were

eleven envelopes, one sent each year, the return address—a New York City address she did not

recognize—the same on each one. Her grandmother had posted letters with remarkable consistency,

the cancellation on the stamp dating the twenty-first of December. A card had arrived annually, from

1988 until 1998. Only the present year’s card was not among them.

Careful, so as not to rip the faces of the envelopes, Evangeline removed the cards and examined

them, arranging them in chronological order across the surface of the bed, from the first card to arrive

to the last. The cards were covered in pen-and-ink sketches, bold blue lines that did not appear to

form any specific image. The designs had been executed by hand, although Evangeline could not

understand the purpose or meaning of the images. One of the cards contained a sketch of an angel

climbing a ladder, an elegant, modern depiction that had none of the excesses of the angelic images in

Maria Angelorum.

Although many sisters did not agree with her, Evangeline much preferred artistic depictions of

angels to the biblical descriptions, which she found frightening to imagine. Ezekiel’s wheels, for

example, were described in the Bible as beryl-plated and circular, with hundreds of eyes lining their

outer rims. The cherubim were said to have four faces—a man, an ox, a lion, and an eagle. This

ancient vision of God’s messengers was unnerving, almost grotesque, when compared with the

Renaissance painters’ work, which forever changed the visual representation of angels. Angels

blowing trumpets, carrying harps, and hiding behind delicate wings—these were the angels

Evangeline cherished, no matter how removed from biblical reality they were.

Evangeline examined the cards one by one. On the first card, dated December 1988, there was the

image of an angel blowing a golden trumpet, its white robes traced in gold. When she opened it, she

found a piece of creamy paper fastened inside. A message, written with crimson ink in her

grandmother’s elegant hand, read:

Be forewarned, dear Evangeline: Understanding the significance of Orpheus’s lyre has proved to be a

trial. Legend surrounds Orpheus so heavily that we cannot discern the precise outline of his mortal

life. We do not know the year of his birth, his true lineage, or the real measure of his talents with the

lyre. He was reputed to have been born of the muse Calliope and the river god Oeagrus, but this, of

course, is mythology, and it is our work to separate the mythological from the historical, disentangle

legend from fact, magic from truth. Did he give humanity poetry? Did he discover the lyre on his

legendary journey to the underworld? Was he as influential in his own lifetime as history claims? By

the sixth century B.C., he was known through the Greek world as the master of songs and music, but

how he came upon the instrument of the angels has been widely debated among historians. Your

mother’s work only gave confirmation to long-held theories of the lyre’s importance.