by Jane Haddam
“Oh, Lord.” Scholastica winced. Sister Jerome had been Mistress of Novices for the order for as long as anybody could remember. It wasn’t a position that normally made a nun beloved, but Jerome was a brick. Even the girls she sent home never had a bad word to say about her. “Is she all right, Reverend Mother? She isn’t—”
“Dead? No. Unfortunately, she isn’t functional, either. Her right side is paralyzed. The doctor says it will be months before she’s able to speak. After that—” Reverend Mother General shrugged. “Jerome is seventy-nine. I suppose we should have let her retire years ago.”
“Jerome is the best Mistress of Novices in the United States. She loses fewer vocations than anybody I’ve ever heard of.”
“I know,” Reverend Mother General said. “And we need those vocations. How are you getting along here, with five nuns?”
“It’s six, Reverend Mother. Counting me. It’s a mess. Tuition is five hundred dollars a year now. It’s going to be six fifty come fell. In another five years, we’re going to be too expensive for the parishioners to afford.”
“Exactly, Sister. And think of it. Most of the schools we run have only four nuns. Some of them have only two. It’s all well and good to talk about lay participation in the Church, but a lay teacher has to be paid like a human being.”
“We don’t get paid much of anything here, Reverend Mother.”
“I know. I know. You’ve been very dedicated. But let’s face it, Sister. If the parochial school system is going to survive, we need nuns. And that means we need girls who want to come into the convent and girls who want to stay in the convent once they get there.”
“Mary Jerome was very good at making us want to stay.”
“I know.” Reverend Mother General brushed snow off her shoulders. Then she looked Scholastica in the eye and said, “So are you.”
“Me?” What this reminded her of, Sister Scholastica thought, was the day she’d realized she had a vocation. First, things were impossibly confusing, all jumbled up and aimless. Then light dawned, and with it came an almost physical excitement. Happiness always made her feel pumped full of a mood-altering drug. “Me,” she repeated.
“You may not realize it, Sister, but your Sisters give you the best reports in the order. They love working under you.”
“That’s very—flattering, Reverend Mother.”
“It’s also very unusual. I’d been thinking about this even before Jerome had her stroke, Sister. I’d intended—well, I’d intended to do a lot of things, but I always do. Now, of course, it’s too late. We’re going to need a new Mistress of Novices this fall.”
“I’ve never even been on a formation team, Reverend Mother. I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“We can put Sister Alice Marie in for the next year. You can work under her as Mistress of Postulants. Then, the year after that, Alice Marie can go back to being Mistress of Postulants and you can go on to the novices.”
“Wouldn’t Alice Marie resent that?”
“Alice Marie and I understand each other,” Reverend Mother said. “I know the Church is supposed to be changed, Sister, but I’m an old woman. I’m almost as old as Jerome. And Alice Marie ran off with that boy.”
“But Reverend Mother,” Scholastica said, “she wasn’t even in the convent then. And the way I understood it, she only ran away for a day. That was—that had to be twenty-five years ago.”
“I know, Sister. But even isolated incidents are indications of character. Of the way a Sister will react under stress.”
“I think you’re being very hard, Reverend Mother.”
“I’m simply being practical,” Reverend Mother General said. “The Mistress of Novices is the most important nun in any order, more important than the Mother General. She forms the character of the community. I need to be—assured of the future of that character, Sister.”
“I think Alice Marie would assure it for you.”
“I think you’d assure it better. Do you want to be Mistress of Novices, Sister?”
The snow seemed to be getting heavier. It was piling up all around them, and on top of them, too. Reverend Mother General’s veil had acquired a little conical peak. Scholastica didn’t even want to think of what her own veil looked like. She hadn’t been brushing it off.
“Of course I want to be Mistress of Novices,” she said. “Everybody wants to.”
“That’s not true, Sister. But I’ll admit it. A lot of people do.”
“Won’t there have to be some kind of an election?”
Reverend Mother General smiled. “There’ll have to be a vote among the governing board, of course, but the governing board is my council. We discussed this before I came down. You can have it if you want it, Sister.”
“I think we ought to go inside,” Scholastica said.
This time, Reverend Mother General went, her heavy old-fashioned shoes shuffling through the snow like tiny motorboats in an ocean of polluted water. Scholastica watched her for a few moments and then hurried forward, so she would be at the door to open it when Reverend Mother General got there. Of course she wanted to be Mistress of Novices, she thought. Now that it had been offered to her, she wanted it desperately. It was just that she felt a little—guilty.
Alice Marie had been honest enough to tell Reverend Mother about her past, and it had put her out of the running. Scholastica, on the other hand…
Reverend Mother General reached the door. She patted Scholastica on the hand.
“You’ll do very well, Sister. Just wait and see. I know my nuns.”
Reverend Mother General disappeared into the vestibule. Scholastica stared after her, until a gust of wind lifted her skirt and wrapped it around her knees. Then she headed for the vestibule door herself.
Ass, she told herself. Nobody knows and nobody is ever going to know.
[5]
Peg Morrissey Monaghan kept all four of her high-school yearbooks on the shelf next to the television set in her family room. She kept her collection of newspapers there, too, bound in lime green cardboard. Sometimes, when she was alone in the house, she took the yearbooks down and looked at them. She never went near the newspapers. Her junior prom was an occasion she wanted to remember: her election as queen; how well she had looked in powder blue chiffon; how much better Kath had looked in ivory taffeta, even though by then Kath knew she was becoming a nun. An assassination was an event that was best left forgotten, and there were a lot of assassinations in those old copies of the Colchester Tribune. John Kennedy. Robert Kennedy. Martin Luther King. Thinking back on what it had been like growing up in the sixties, Peg always found herself envisioning the landscape of war-torn Beirut.
Now it was quarter to one on Ash Wednesday, God only knew how many years after all that had happened, and Peg was stuck in one of her mid-pregnancy funks. Her five older children were safely tucked away in St. Agnes Parochial School. Her four younger ones were in the kitchen, where her husband was making tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. Joe was very good like that. He always came home to make lunch when she was pregnant, and he always took the children off her hands for half an hour and cleaned up when he was done. Except for Friday afternoons, when her sister came over to take the children “out,” it was the only quiet time Peg had.
Peg caught herself staring at the yearbooks and the newspapers and shook her head. It hadn’t been the assassinations she’d been thinking of, of course, it never was, but what had brought all that up again she didn’t know. Maybe she was just having one of her very drifty days. Pregnancy was like that. Peg had once described it to her Bible study group as “just like drowning—all the worst moments of your life pass in front of your eyes, and they make you absolutely euphoric.”
She left the family room and made her way down the hall to the kitchen, listening to Joe belting out a monotonal but very vigorous version of “Lord of the Dance.” At least it was a Catholic song. Sometimes he got started on the music he’d learned growing up in the South, and she could barely believ
e it. There was one song—“Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life”—that she still refused to believe was not a joke.
She stopped at the kitchen door, dipped her fingers into the Holy Water she kept in a tiny wall font, and crossed herself. Then she slipped in and surveyed the scene. Susan, Charlie, Maria, and Agnes were seated with their backs to her along one of the benches that flanked the refectory table. Joe was standing at the counter next to the sink, chopping onions on a small square cutting board. His hair had started to thin on top. From the back, he looked like he had a tonsure.
“Don’t forget,” Peg said, “if you put too much onion in it, they have gas all afternoon.”
“Do they cry or do they just smell terrible?” Joe said.
“They do both.”
Peg sat down at the table, in the chair they had dragged in from the dining room to accommodate her pregnancy. She was already seven months along and big as a baby whale. Her back ached and her waist had departed for Kathmandu. She leaned over and brushed a crumb of toast from the corner of Charlie’s mouth. Charlie had been raiding the lunch preparations behind his father’s back. Again.
“I think I’m going to call Linda and cancel out of prayer meeting,” she said.
Joe cranked his head around to get a good look at her. “What’s the matter? You tired?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what’s the matter? You love prayer meeting. It gets you out of the house. You go over to the convent later and spend half the night talking to your friend the nun.”
“Kath,” Peg said.
“Sister Mary Scholastica,” Joe said.
“Andy Walsh took the ten o’clock Mass this morning,” Peg said.
“Ah.” Joe put down the jar of mayonnaise he was holding and turned full around to look at her. “Now I see. I take it he’s also taking prayer meeting tonight.”
“Yes, he is.”
“You know, Peg, not everybody keeps all the friends they had in high school. I don’t think it would be such a terrible thing if you stopped speaking to the man.”
“The man is our parish priest.”
“The man shouldn’t be any kind of priest. I don’t know why the Cardinal puts up with him, but maybe he has to. You don’t have to.”
Peg shrugged. “It’s not that I put up with him so much. I mean, I hardly ever see him. He’s such a—such a creature of habit. This has to be the first time he’s taken a ten o’clock since he was assigned here. Father Boyd must be deathly ill.”
“He takes at least one prayer meeting a month.”
“I know. Usually he doesn’t bother me. Today he was just—I don’t know.”
“Insulting?”
“Andy never insults anybody directly. He just makes your whole life sound ridiculous.”
Joe took the bowl of tuna fish and the plate of toast off the counter and came to the table. “You’ve got a right not to be made to feel ridiculous,” he said. “You’re a good woman and a good Catholic. You’re a better Catholic than a lot of them, if you ask me. And I don’t think the Pope would be pleased to hear Father Walsh talking about how the rosary was old-fashioned.”
“Or how we should all be more like the Protestants?” Peg laughed.
Joe was frowning. “It’s not funny, Peg, really. We are good Catholics. We do follow the teaching of the Church magisterium. We’re not the ones who ought to be feeling uncomfortable in this parish.”
“Mmm,” Peg said.
“What’s ‘mmm’ supposed to mean? Or are you just being pregnant again?”
“Not everything I do is because I’m pregnant,” Peg said. Then she thought: liar. “You’ve got to remember, I’ve known Andy all my life. Back around, oh, sophomore year in high school, we were practically engaged to be engaged.”
“That excuses him for altar girls?” Joe was incredulous.
Peg sighed. “It doesn’t excuse him for anything. I understand Andy, that’s all. He’s not Father Charles Curran. He’s not trying to subvert the Church—”
“Good. I’d hate to see what he could do if he did try.”
“—he’s just making his own excitement. He was always like that. One year at the DeMolay banquet, he brought his own dinner in a bag. He said the hotel served the worst food in Colchester and he wasn’t going to eat it.”
“Wonderful,” Joe said.
“Andy means well. It’s just that, right now, he’s on this kick about the Spirit of Vatican Two or whatever, and he practically comes out and accuses me of single-handedly overpopulating the earth. And then he fawns around Judy so much and blithers on and on about how wonderful she is for making a success of her own business. I end up feeling like a college dropout, and I’m the one who graduated.”
Joe passed her a tuna fish sandwich. “How long did you go out with him?” he asked, curious. “I thought priests knew they were going to be priests practically from the day they were born.”
“If Andy knew, he wasn’t telling. We went out all sophomore year, and then a little into the summer. Then he went out with Judy junior year while I was going out with Tom, and we doubled.” Black Rock Park, she thought. “I guess it was the year after he decided to go into the seminary.”
“Maybe he did it out of disappointment. You know, because you dumped him.”
“I didn’t dump him. We dumped each other. And I don’t think he cared one way or another. Even when he was going out with Judy, he was running around school nights with a girl named Cheryl Cass.”
“I’ve never heard you mention Cheryl Cass.”
“Of course you haven’t. She was the school tramp. She dropped out of school at the end of junior year and sort of disappeared.”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “That kind usually do. I don’t care what the feminists say. A guy can screw around all he wants and he always has a chance to come back. With a girl, one bad move and it’s downhill all the way.”
“Mmm,” Peg said again. She looked around the table and was happy to see that all the children had sandwiches, although not so happy that they were staring at her wide-eyed, taking in everything she said and a few of the things she didn’t. She always forgot how careful you had to be about children—and that meant she would never remember, because anything she didn’t know about children now she was just not capable of learning. She took a bite of her sandwich and willed herself not to be sick.
“Maybe it’s just as well if I don’t go to prayer meeting anyway,” she said. “I’m dead on my feet.”
“No, you’re not,” Joe said happily. “Look at your middle. The twins are doing the frug.”
[6]
It was two-thirty by the time the two robotic little men from Mark Candor’s All Christian Good News Gospel Network left Barry Field’s main studio, and by then Barry was close to a nervous breakdown. Or what he thought was a nervous breakdown. That was one of the few things that had not changed in his life when he accepted Christ as his personal savior: the way he responded to pressure. Some people, like Judy Eagan, did better when they were under the wire. Barry Field did nothing at all. As soon as he got nervous, he began to feel stiff in mind and body. As soon as he got scared, he shut down altogether. He was a bad person to have around in an emergency, because he was just like that hoary old rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. When the going got tough, he turned into a statue and let the tough turn him into a road kill.
Still, he thought, coming back upstairs after seeing the two space aliens out, his conversion had been a good thing. His life as a Catholic had been a trauma of epic proportions, a Ring cycle of guilt and confusion. There were so many rules. As soon as you thought you were keeping one, you realized you were breaking another. You certainly never had any assurance that you were doing the right thing, even though that was what the Catholic Church was supposed to be for. And if you confessed your fumbling, as the nuns had taught you to do, you found you had committed yet another sin, called scrupulosity. Barry had never understood scrupulosity. It seemed
to him it was just a fancy name for an honest conscience.
Now, of course, he understood that it was all a racket. The God who had always been so important to him was not an ogre bent on driving men to despair. His rules were clear and simple and very few in number, and He had sent Christ to make their interpretation plain. Finding Christ had released Barry from a lifetime of fear and self-loathing. He could barely stand to think of the way he had been before he’d got his soul free of the Catholic Church. He didn’t feel any better thinking of all the people still trapped within Her. That was why he did what he did, and that—no matter what anybody said—was why getting a spot on Mark Candor’s All Christian Good News Gospel Network was so important to him.
Barry let himself into his office and found Andy Walsh where he had left him, slouched into the club chair near the window, his hands folded together on his chest, his eyes closed. Andy had been his guest on the Witness Hour this afternoon, something Barry had arranged precisely because the robots were coming. Andy Walsh’s disquisitions on the perfidies of the Catholic Church were a big hit with the Reverend Mark, maybe even the reason why he was interested in Barry Field. Barry believed absolutely that God did all things in His own way on His own time, but there was still enough of the Catholic left in him so that he also believed he had to cooperate with grace. Cooperation in this case meant giving the public what it wanted.
Barry closed the door with a little click. Andy looked up.
“The cast of Dawn of the Dead is gone, I take it,” he said.
“I put them into their car myself.”
“Are you sure you want to work for these people, Barry? They remind me of those guys who end up blowing away everybody in the local mall with a Uzi.”
“I wouldn’t be working for them. I’d be working for Reverend Mark Candor. I’ve met Candor. He’s a nice man.”
“He’s also a rich man. He could make you rich, too.”
