Dr. Doolittle there, talking seriously as an attendant whisked Louie away. "Your cat should stay here all day to recover, but he'll be just fine. We won't know anything until this afternoon. Call at four."
Temple and Matt stood outside the veterinarian's office, watching the sun glint off the second-story windows across the street. He had called Sister Seraphina from the receptionist's phone. Diagnosis: still alive. Prognosis: we won't know till four o'clock.
Temple threw herself behind the wheel again and hit the bucket seat like a sack of couch potatoes.
Matt was in the passenger seat as if materialized there, as if he were the Mystifying Max and had always been there, but invisible.
"Where to?" he asked, but he sounded as if he didn't care.
Temple started the car engine, not blaming it one bit for choking.
"The emergency room," she said, "My style this time."
Chapter 15
Soul Food
Not another car was parked between the slanted parallel lines pointing to Fernando's Taqueria, which could have more accurately been called "Fernando's Hideaway," so modestly was it squeezed between a dry cleaner's and an old fashioned barbershop that didn't open until eleven o'clock.
"Breakfast," Temple said, turning off the Storm's engine with a happy sigh to know that the car would stay idle and stay put for a while, "is on me."
Matt looked dubious in a disinterested sort of way. Granted, Fernando's was not impressive from the outside. And as they entered to face garish yellow walls, mercifully softened by dim lights, and bare Formica tables and gray plastic chairs, Temple had to admit to herself that it wasn't impressive on the inside, either.
"Isn't a taqueria for takeout food?" Matt looked around, his doubtful glance pausing on a blackboard with the menu written entirely in Spanish.
"Normally," Temple plunked herself down at a table for four and set her tote bag on the empty chair beside her. "Fernando's isn't normal, but it's clean, out of the way, and the food is fiery enough to compete with a shooting star. Plus, the coffee is so strong that your spoon will stand up and do a Mexican hat dance in it."
Matt pulled out an opposite chair, looking around in a shell-shocked way that Temple just knew an order of Heuvos Rancheros Fernando would do much to overcome.
"You do like Mexican food?" she asked in an anxious afterthought.
"Normally," Matt said, "but today isn't normal." He eyed the empty little restaurant again, so bate of frills. "This place is pristine, though, for a hole-in-the-wall."
"I figured that's what we needed at the moment--a hide-out, a modest little hole-in-the-wall for two."
Matt nodded slowly, looking as if he would rather be adjusting the silverware and the place mat or turning his water glass in his hands, only there wasn't any of that.
A Hispanic man emerged from the rear and deposited a bouquet of stainless steel silverware wrapped in a doily of plain white paper napkin in front of each of them.
"I'll order," Temple said, because she knew the menu and because she didn't think that Matt would be good at small decisions right now. "I'm having the House Heavenly Hash--onions and cilantro on the side of humus-that's eggs--swimming in the house sauce, which is very green, very thick and very spicy-hot. And coffee." She repeated the order in fairly decent Spanish to the waiter, who nodded, disdaining to write anything down.
Matt shrugged. "The same, I guess."
"Okay, but I'll order your sauce on the side--they have a great tomatillo salsa that will leave your tonsils unscalded. Y agua," she told the waiter last, pointing to them both.
Now Matt would soon have plenty to fiddle with.
"This doesn't strike me as your kind of place," he said.
"It is now. But you're right." She hated mixing metaphors, mixing Max and Matt, but there was no escape, not even for a verbal magician. "Max found it," she admitted. "I'm not that adventuresome. Max always said that the best thing about Fernando's was that nobody here speaks English. It's perfect for six-cups-of-coffee mornings."
"Oh," Matt leaned back to let the waiter set a tall, olive-green, nubby plastic glass before him. "Did Max have a lot of six-cups-of-coffee mornings?"
Temple smiled, shakily. If she wanted to find out the scoop on Matt, she would have to dish up a bit of her and Max. "No, and not too many mornings, either. He usually slept until eleven. Fernando's is a little more lively then."
"I keep the same hours," Matt noted after a slow sip of water.
"You going to be able to get off of work tonight?"
"Maybe, if they can call someone else in. But there's no point. I won't get any sleep anyway. I'm not used to normal work hours now."
Temple nodded. "Then the best thing to do is to start mainlining caffeine and keep going until . . . what time do you usually get home? Three-thirty A.M.?"
He nodded.
"And Sister Seraphina called you at--?"
"Four-thirty. ' '
"Then the cat was attacked before four."
He nodded again, clearly not as interested in the night's exact chronology as she was. "Temple, you must be wondering--"
"I am beyond wonder," she said quickly. Nothing was worse than an ex-reporter's need-to-know, and right now she was so very needy. "I'm too tired. But I am congenitally nosy-"
"You've got a right to know." he began, leaning back again as a heavy, white-porcelain cup filled to the brim with molasses-dark--and thick----coffee was placed before him.
"Leche, por favor," Temple asked the waiter before unfurling her paper napkin and drawing out the spoon. How long could she put it off?
A small blue pitcher of milk arrived, and then the waiter left. Temple poured a pale stream into her coffee, stirring until the black color softened. The cup was too full. She'd have to drink it down a little before she could mix the just-right shade of tan.
"I don't have a right to know anything," she said after another moment. "Of course . . ." She sighed. "Given my wild imagination, it might be in your best interests to head me off at the pass."
He sipped the steaming coffee as if to gather Columbian courage. "I was a priest."
Four little words. Hearing them put Temple in the kind of daze Matt had visibly occupied ever since Sister Seraphina's call. She was getting hooked on a priest--after the debacle of Max? Oh, puhleeze. No. . . .
"You'll have to bear with me," she made herself say. "I'm a fallen-away Unitarian. We know a little about everything and not much about anything. You were a priest?"
He nodded.
"An . . . Episcopal priest?"
He shook his head, but couldn't help smiling at her hopeful tone. "No."
"No." Temple contemplated her coffee cup, and then added enough milk to bring the contents lapping at the brim. She concentrated on spilling not a drop as she lifted it to her lips and sipped, saying a little prayer so she wouldn't spill, so she wouldn't spill her overflowing uncertainties. "I didn't really think that Our Lady of Guadalupe was big in the Episcopal Church, but they do have nuns, I think, and they do call them 'sister'?"
Matt nodded. "You know more than you think you do."
"But you were a Catholic priest?"
"Yes."
"The kind with the usual vows--um, poverty, chastity and obedience?"
"Yes."
"The celibate kind?"
He tried hard not to hesitate. "Yes."
"And now you're not a priest, officially."
"Yes."
"But if you were a priest, why did Sister Seraphina call you? Why didn't she ask this invisible Father Hernandez everybody talks about but nobody sees? And why would an . . . ex-priest perform some kind of rite?" Temple knew her spate of questions was a form of denial, yet she denied on, like poor befuddled Peter in the Garden. I know you didn't want to do it. Aren't you . . . disqualified from doing that now? Isn't it a . . . sin?"
Matt leaned forward, his arms and hands curved around his coffee cup as if defending it, or seeking warmth.
"It's a judgm
ent call and a delicate situation. In an emergency, if the person is dying, Sister Seraphina could administer the sacrament herself, even a lay person could. But if the person's condition is more uncertain, and a priest is available . . . Father Hernandez was not. Miss Tyler had been having a fierce feud with him and would have been even more distressed to see him."
"I know about that," Temple put in. "Father Hernandez had this perfectly silly notion that God doesn't allow cats in heaven. If poor Miss Tyler had seen Midnight Louie, I'm sure she would have seen the point in that."
"The theological point," Matt said, "is that animals don't have souls, and only those with souls can get to heaven."
"Only those with souls in apple-pie order," Temple added solemnly, wondering about Matt's.
"The . . . sacrament used to be called 'Extreme Unction' and was associated with the dying. Nowadays the church recognizes the healing nature of the ritual and it's given under much less rigorous circumstances. It's called the anointing of the sick, and the reason you were so puzzled by it--besides being such a fierce Unitarian--is that a lot of Catholics haven't witnessed it, even today. It was the most private of the sacraments, and to some, the most frightening. To a devout Catholic like Miss Tyler, the sacrament could have a strong healing and calming effect, as you saw. Sister Seraphina was right that she should have it, was right to decide that Father Hernandez would upset her, was even right to call on me. A woman of Miss Tyler's generation would not have accepted a nun administering a sacrament; priests and doctors are like gods to such women."
He laughed wearily at their delusions, and then said with the intensity of someone convincing himself: "I was part of the necessary psychological efficacy of the sacrament, as well as its spiritual aspect."
"But Miss Tyler is feuding with Father Hernandez! How can she do that if she's such a devout Catholic?"
Matt smiled his first full-wattage smile of the morning. "Devout Catholics, more than anyone else, consider themselves privileged--no, obliged---to point out personal failings to their parish priests."
"Oh. It must not be fun to be a parish priest."
"No."
Were you!"
"For a while."
"Oh."
Out from the kitchen came the waiter bearing two large oval plates heaped with mounds of food. Mexican food had an earthy, yet limited color range--yellow to red to brown and was not highly textured; everything was chopped into such tidy, digestible piles. Yet it was . . . Temple searched for the proper mental tribute: it was Yummy on the Tum-tum-tummy. Especially when that tummy was dancing a solo of uncertainty.
She and Matt studied their plates with awe after the waiter left.
"That's a lot of food," Matt said finally. "I don't know if I've got the stomach for it."
"One taste and you'll know you don't. That's what makes Mexican food so much fun; it's an endurance contest."
He offered a pale smile and spooned some of the milder salsa on his eggs. Temple made sure her eggs were basted in green sauce and took a big bite.
Umm, who would believe minced vegetables could have such zip? Those scrambled eggs, no matter how fluffy, could taste so substantial?
"This isn't bad," Matt admitted, forking up another bite.
The warm food and hot coffee, the combination of bitter and fiery tastes--the very alienness of eating Mexican food at eight O'clock in the morning--revitalized them both, as Temple had hoped it would. It was hard to stay down in the mouth when your taste buds were on fire. Temple doused her eggs with a speedy helping of onion-potato hash with cilantro.
For a few blessed moments, they just ate. When they had to take a respite from the culinary fireworks, they sat back by mutual agreement. Temple broke the silence first. Again, she always was doing that sort of thing, rushing in where fools would keep their lips zipped.
"You still didn't explain why an ex--priest can administer a sacrament in an emergency."
Matt dabbed his lips with the flimsy napkin, as if to brush away the meal's heat as well as its traces. "Once a priest, always a priest." He used the rueful, solemn tone that announced a truism said long before he had repeated it. "In any emergency, I'm called upon to perform priestly duties if no other priest is available. If I came upon a dying accident victim, for instance."
"Why did l get the feeling that Sister Seraphina was . . . I can't say glad, but why did I feel that she was challenging you to do this?"
"She was a grade-school teacher of mine. She knew when I went into the seminary, although I entered from college.
She knew when I left, although I was years and miles away by then. Talk gets back. Every parish is a news bureau; nuns have some kind of nationwide intelligence system . . . or the Holy Spirit whispers deportment reports on former students during prayers, or my Guardian Angel rattles on me--I don't know. But she knew, and she knew where to find me now, when she needed me. And she needed . . . she's disappointed in me, in my leaving, on some level that maybe she doesn't even admit to herself. She didn't mind forcing me to face my ambivalent position. I've left the priesthood, but the priesthood will never leave me."
"That's . . . cruel," Temple said.
"No, just harsh, a religious life does not fear harshness."
Temple shook her head. "I never would have guessed it." She thought for a moment. "Say, that's how you dredged up that black suit you wore when you played the organ for Chester Royal's memorial service! That's why you can play the organ at all!"
Matt held up his hands in surrender and laughed, out loud this time, and long. "You always have to put two and two together, did you know that? You're insatiable."
"Yeah, but what do I do when two and two add up to three?"
He sobered immediately.
Temple took another stab at her eggs, then rolled the corner of her napkin. "Matt. I have to tell you. we ex-Unitarians are pretty tolerant, but I have severe problems with religions that can't let others live and let live according to their honest lights."
"So do I," he said promptly.
"I mean, fundamentalists basically concentrate on judging other people and finding them guilty on all counts, whether they're Christian or Muslim."
"That's why there are so few Catholic fundamentalists, although there are a goodly number of conservatives."
"But, I mean, a church that in this age of AIDS won't condone safe sex with condoms because it's also birth control! Well, that's more than a harsh position; that's insanity."
He stirred in the hard plastic chair. "I don't want to argue theology or logic with you. A lot of these issues have liberal and conservative positions within the church, especially in America."
"Now l may be wrong," she said. "I don't pay a lot of attention to religious matters, to tell the truth. But, Isn't the church against premarital sex?"
"Yes."
"Against all forms of birth control?"
"Well . . . there are natural methods--"
"Against divorce?"
"Yes . . . but again, there are instances--"
"Against . . . masturbation?"
"All sexual acts must be open to the conception of children--"
"Matt!" Temple leaned forward, over her decimated plate of cooling food. "What are you going to do?"
"I don't have to take positions on any of these things anymore, now that I'm not a practicing priest. I don't have to tell anyone else what to do anymore." He seemed relieved, but he still didn't get it.
"Matt!" Temple knew that she sounded even more exasperated, but she couldn't help it. Conundrums demanded solving and she was sitting across from a walking, talking human conundrum who wasn't facing the facts of his new-how new?--existence. "What are you going to do? What can you do, now that you're not a priest? You move in any direction that's middle-class comfortable, reasonably independent and sexually active other words, normal--and you sin, right? Well?"
Chapter 16
Catechism
"Most of us marry ex-nuns, fast."
"Isn't that a li
ttle . . . limiting?" Temple asked.
"The blind leading the blind? Yes, but who else has anything in common with us? Why do you think I'm here-- doing my nightline job, living at the Circle Ritz? There were many good reasons l went into the priesthood, and some wrong ones. The church agrees that the wrong ones outweigh the right ones. Now it's up to me to figure out how to live postpartum, if you will; to decide what kind of ex-priest I'm going to be, what kind of Catholic, what kind of man."
Matt drank his cooling coffee, down to the dregs--and dregs did inhabit this bitter, strengthening brew; Temple could taste the grit of fresh grounds when she was halfway through her cup.
"I'm sorry you had to find out." Matt went on, almost to himself. "Sorry that Sister Seraphina had to find out, sorry that what I am is still less than what I was. I've got a lot to work out, more questions that I can't answer than even you could ask."
"I'm sorry. I'm nosy. I'm pushy--"
"You're right," he interrupted, without denying her unflattering self-description. "I'm facing a lot of contradictions."
He spun the oily black dregs of his coffee in the white cup as if looking for tea leaves to read--nope, too superstitious, Temple thought; an ex-priest couldn't even do that.
Temple studied the contradiction sitting across from her. She was attracted to Matt. had been from the first, even though---fresh from Max's inexplicable desertion--she knew better.
She found Matt handsome, but then, that was obvious. She had always squirrned at her attraction to the obvious, but she also understood that the very things that were not obvious about Matt attracted her even more. Now she was getting down to that nitty-gritty--with escalating interest! If she didn't know why he had left the priesthood, she could wonder why he had entered it.
"The girls in high school must have gone crazy when you went into the seminary," she mused, knowing she was dangling for history, for answers, for rivals.
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