He quirked a smile. "Girls always want what they can't get."
"Boys do, too. That's high school, isn't it?"
"High school must have been a piece of cake for you," Matt said matter-of-factly, expertly, easily, turning the spotlight from him to her.
"Why?" Temple was indignant.
"You're outgoing . . . I was going to say irrepressible. You're so easy with people. I bet you were the most popular girl in your class."
"Bet again! I was the shortest. With glasses, I never could adjust to contact lenses. I was known to get good grades and to be a 'good sport,' although I couldn't play sports worth a stinky pair of sweat socks."
"I wasn't good at sports, either," he said quickly, "Except for the martial arts."
"That's hard."
"But it isn't a team sport."
"Still, I bet the girls were angling for you."
His expression grew dreamy, softened as hers had when she had thought back to the adolescent wilderness of high school days, which did great things for a face that didn't need any help. "A couple of them actually asked me to the senior prom. They didn't know yet," he said.
"They asked you? I'm impressed, but not surprised. Didn't you go?"
He looked down, away. "No."
"But you could have. What harm would it have done? Senior proms are such a rite of passage," Temple said in her dreamy turn. "Maybe you were better off not going, though. I went, and was I sorry."
"Why?"
"Why?" Temple wanted to clutch her hair, although she knew such a gesture was theatrical, "Because I was forced to go! Wouldn't you know that in front of the whole debating team, I would get asked by dweeby Curtis Dixstrom because I was the only girl shorter than he was--and the creep knew that I was too 'intellectual' to hold out for a jock or a class president. So I went."
"And you surprised yourself and had a good time?"
"You sound like my mother did then," Temple said sourly. "'Oh, go, dear, and maybe you'll meet somebody else nicer.' l didn't want anybody 'nicer,' I wanted somebody cooler. So I went, and loathed it, and Curtis got seriously drunk at the after-prom party and I ended up driving him home, and me too, in his father's dweeby Volvo station wagon."
Matt tried not to laugh. "You always end up taking responsibility, don't you?"
"You always turn personal questions back on the interrogator, don't you? You don't much like talking about you."
"No, I don't. We wouldn't be now if Sister Superfine hadn't used her nationwide nun intelligence network to track me down."
"Superfine? Oh, Seraphina/Superfine. Isn't it . . . disrespectful to call a nun that?"
"You bet it is. Catholic kids nowadays are almost as disrespectful as public-school kids. And it isn't really disrespectful. Only popular nuns get nicknames."
"I was going to ask you where these nuns get their names.
Do priests change their names?"
He shook his head. "Only nuns, I never thought about it that way, but it's probably sexist. Nuns are expected to give up their old identity, but priests aren't. Of course, brothers take new names as well."
"Brothers? Oh, brother. There's a lot about the Catholic Church that's Greek to me."
"There's even a Greek Orthodox Catholic Church." Matt mustered a teasing twinkle. "And in it, priests can marry."
"And still be Catholic? Amazing. Maybe you could . . . change churches."
Matt sobered and shook his head. "Celibacy wasn't the reason I left; it isn't the reason for a lot of ex-priests."
Temple's heart sank. Celibacy made a lot of sense in the current uncertain social climate, but she couldn't imagine any healthy prime-of-life person contemplating it forever.
"In the old days," Matt was explaining in his informative, neutral voice that so efficiently distanced him from the listener, from himself even, "boys entered the seminary from grade school. Now they enter after high school, or even after college, so there's no wav the candidates haven't had a chance to experience a normal social life."
"You mean that some priests aren't virgins
"The promise is for the duration of their priesthood."
"Forever."
"Forever."
"Except . . . in certain cases," she parroted his earlier answers about matters of ironclad dogma.
He nodded ruefully, "Except in certain cases."
"I'll never figure it out," Temple said, pushing her plate away and resolving to change the subject. "Any more than I'll figure out why anyone would harass an elderly woman like Miss Tyler."
"Kids would," Matt said promptly, "and this is gang territory."
"What isn't nowadays?" Temple asked with a shudder. "And making obscene phone-calls to a convent." She contributed another, deeper shudder to the conversation.
"Were you serious about Satanists?
The waiter retrieved their empty plates. Matt braced his elbows on the table and scrubbed his face with the palms of his hands. "There's not as much of it out there as the alarmists think, but it is a possibility. Satanists are known to be cruel to cats."
"And the attack on Miss Tyler's niece's cat at the show is strange. That seemed more of a prank, or the work of a malicious competitor."
"Could people get that worked up over a cat competition?"
"There's status and money in it," Temple said promptly, "and where there are status and money, there also is a motive for mischief."
"Sounds like another beatitude, only I'd call it a maleficitude."
"It's the oddest coincidence," Temple said, reaching for the small green chit the waiter slapped to the table before Matt.
"You drove, and then some," Matt said, sliding it off the table and pulling out his wallet.
New, Temple observed, like a lot of his clothes looked. Why hadn't she noticed that and come to correct conclusions before? Because nothing about Matt was particularly noticeable, until you knew his history, and then everything was more fascinating than ever . . . Oh, dear Lord, Could a congenitally curious woman ever have had a more perfect subject of interest?
"What are you doing the rest of the day if you're not resting?" she asked.
"If you don't mind dropping me off at the convent, I'll see how Sister Seraphina and Miss Tyler are doing. I can get home all right during the day."
"I'll stop by the vet's and check on Louie and poor Peter."
"How free are you today?"
"As free as a rock-concert ticket at a radio station, why?"
"Want to practice your self-defense techniques at four?"
"Not really, and you'll be dead tired--"
"That's why I'll need to do something like that."
"You must think I need intense help."
"No, but not many weeks ago you were confronted by thugs looking for Kinsella; now you're driving me around bad neighborhoods in dark nights. You need it. By the way, have you gone to group yet?"
"I will, I will, when I get a minute!"
"Four o'clock okay?" he asked, eyeing her hopefully.
"Okay." She thought he was crazy to push himself this hard after a night's lost sleep, but maybe that was exactly the way he kept himself sane.
Chapter 17
Cross Not the Cat
"You looked tired. Matthias," Sister Seraphina said in the cool visitors' room of the convent, the elderly air conditioner's hum as domestic and comforting as a refrigerators.
"You lost as much sleep as I did," he countered, "and it's just Matt now."
Her eyes shut in brief, placid admission of the correction.
"I do not work a night shift like you do, and the old don't need much sleep---luckily so, for we seldom get it. Nor do we change old habits easily. Matt, I think that you should meet Father Hernandez now."
Matt maintained silence. He had no desire to meet this Father Hernandez who was reduced to feuding with parishioners about the afterlives of cats, with managing fund drives to keep the parish alive, and with retreating to the bottle when the maddening daily wear and tear had become t
oo much. Mostly, he didn't want to meet Father Hernandez because no matter how badly the man had failed, he had not deserted his post, he had not yet left the priesthood. Father Hernandez's mere existence, with all its cracks and fissures, would seem a rebuke. Matt realized that he was still raw from his severance with his vocation and only imagining that a man whom he was not willing to judge would be a harsh judge of Matt Devine. Father Hernandez would not even know Matt's history, unless Sister Seraphina had told him. Had she?
Matt finally rose without comment and let Sister Seraphina lead him out into the hot, post-meridian sun, which already fell less scaldingly on his fair skin. Autumn was coming.
He was given the grand tour on the way to the rectory. Our Lady of Guadalupe Church had a cool, old and ornate interior, laced with white plasterwork and pastel statues of the saints that most other Catholic churches downplayed now, confining even the Virgin Mary to a discreet side altar.
The blinding, blue-collar magnificence reminded him of his home church of St. Stanislaus in Chicago, the architectural opposite but spiritual cousin to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Working-class people were inspired by churches of blatant beauty, perhaps because their daily lives held so little of it.
The school was a pair of dull, one-story adobe wings enfolding a sandy-surfaced, scruffy playground. The once bright painted-metal monkey bars and swing sets had paled and peeled to a dull burnt-sienna undercoat in the dry desert sun. Now the playground was empty and not even the dust stirred. Behind the schoolrooms' glinting glass windows, shut to keep out the heat, lay teachers tried to inspire the restless students for another nine-month school year, that everlasting pregnant pause between the blessed deliverance of too-short summer holidays.
Matt was remembering everything he wanted to forget, but he could regard this unexpected odyssey into another priest's parish as a form of penance. The church was too successful at converting confrontation into endurance. He had not yet found a new place in the church, or outside of it.
At least the rectory was foreign. St. Stan's had been red-brick-grand, with tidy white trim, and peopled by three priests and the eternal housekeeper: that prototypical elderly, devout and devoted (if sometimes waspish) cook and cleaner and dorm mother--always female and always above any kind of depraved suspicion--who committed herself to serving a houseful of religious men.
Here a large, lumpy Mexican woman whose charcoal-dark hair glinted with silver strands as shiny as fresh paint opened the door, not one of those forbidding Northern gatekeepers whose severe gaze would make any caller feel properly guilty for being there and disturbing Father.
Spanish coos urged them into the artificially cooled dimness. The tile floors were hard and so was the heavy, dark Spanish furniture, as plain and somber as a cross. Colorful cloths draping the backs of wooden chairs provided welcome warmth and softened the austerity.
"Is Father Hernandez in, Pilar?" Sister Seraphina asked.
"Si, si. But he is now with Mr. Bums, the lawyer." Pilar sounded most impressed with this visitor.
"We will wait," said Seraphina, who did not sound impressed. A successful teacher never sounds impressed by anything, Matt reflected, and she had certainly been that.
She claimed a hard bench in the hallway. Mart, after strolling down the
passage to examine the wall decorations--a citation from the Knights of Columbus, a modern chrome cross with a gilded figure of Christ on it--joined her. He was reminded of benches placed outside of the principal's office for misbehaving students to warm until a higher authority was good and ready to deal with them.
"You'll like Father Hernandez," Seraphina said suddenly, in a warmer tone, "although lately he seems lost in some labyrinth of his own. Before--"
Before, he had been a good priest, as Matt had been. Matt leaned his elbows on his thighs and clasped his hands; the fingers dovetailed, and then realized the position could be construed as an informal one of prayer. He had so many reflexes to disconnect.
At last the closed door down the hall cracked open. Voices bled from the room beyond, intense voices.
"You must concentrate on the developmental fund-raising program, Father, or there will be no OLG! I can't understand your distraction at such a critical time. And you must make up with Blandina Tyler. What is this nonsense about cats in heaven? You mustn't allow an old woman's silly fantasies to affect your fiscal judgment. She's recently been threatening to leave her estate to her cats--so the Ladies' Flower Guild says--and not to Our Lady of Guadalupe. That would be disaster."
"She may do as she wishes," a testy voice answered. "The church does not tailor its theology to fit the notions of its wealthier members."
"Yes, yes, Father---"
The men were moving into the hall now, ending their meeting.
"But--" continued the first voice, soothing, reasoning, warning, "this is such a minor matter. Cats! Sneaky, selfish creatures, but people who fancy them can be fanatics. It's bad for the peace of Miss Tyler's body and soul to work herself into a state over such a triviality."
The attorney was fully in the hall now, an earnest man in his worried mid-thirties, wearing a blue-striped seersucker suit that would look at home in a barbershop quartet. Horn-rimmed glasses perched on his rather prominent nose, giving him the prissy look of an accountant, oddly contradicted by a smile exposing a thin silver line of braces.
Such was the lot of a parish priest nowadays, Matt ruminated unhappily: keeping well-meaning parish volunteers happy while facing the realities of a waning congregation, sisterhood and priesthood, and a youth population that was eroding into the camaraderie of the gangs instead of attending Mass, and regularly receiving stolen goods instead of Holy Communion. Not to mention the unwed-pregnancy problem.
Matt stood, Sister Seraphina rising beside him, as the parish priest came out into the hall, wearing black slacks and a short-sleeved black shirt with the usual pastoral notch of white clerical collar showing.
Traditional garb for today's more modern priests and hot in a desert clime, Matt couldn't help noting. His neck broke out in a sympathetic rash as he remembered the imprisoning circle of starched linen. Father Hernandez's appearance surprised Matt even more. He had expected someone roly-poly, like the housekeeper, someone warm and cheerful and now obviously incompetent and harassed. Instead, Father Hernandez reminded Matt of the late Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Catholicism's only televangelist in the late, unlamented fifties. Father Hernandez was tall and thin, his skin the color of rich Corinthian leather. His attractive, rather ascetic face was framed by a handsome halo of silver hair.
"Visitors," Father Hernandez announced with an air of relief. "Sister Seraphina. Is this your . . . friend from Chicago?"
"Matt Devine," she said quickly. "Father Rafael Hernandez. And Peter Burns here is the parish attorney and also a dedicated parishioner who donates much time to Our Lady of Guadalupe."
Matt shook hands with both men, surprised by the priest's anemic grip, but not by the lawyer's businesslike, Toastmaster knuckle-cruncher. Matt gripped right back, but got no reaction, just a curt acknowledgment and farewell.
Odd, but Matt would have picked the lawyer as the tormented man who had recently hit the bottle that Sister Seraphina had described, not the priest.
"Come in." Father Hernandez gestured them into a study equipped with the mandatory four or five comfortably upholstered chairs, useful for receiving prominent community members offering money, or bereaved families making
funeral arrangements, and fellow religious.
Matt sank onto old leather with relief; it was cooler than cloth, and the rectory air conditioner was old, audibly cranky and patently ineffective. No wonder a sheen of sweat had polished both the priest's and the lawyer's faces--or maybe the discussion of parish fiscal matters had produced the moisture.
Father Hernandez threw his long frame into an old-fashioned leather swivel chair behind a massive glass-topped desk. Pen-holders, papers, a calculator, the large glass ashtray for guests or the occasio
nal parishioner bearing a rare
Cigar, a missal and breviary--the flotsam of a religious and administrative life--met and mingled on the parish priest's desk. Matt had used one like it once, and knew its makeup as a geologist knows the strata of the various geological ages of the earth. Here and there amid the scattered papers, loose paperclips glinted like veins of silver.
Father Hernandez leaned his weight on one leather-upholstered arm and swung the chair into a familiar and favorite position. "Before you say anything, Sister Seraphina, I'll tell you that I called the hospital. Miss Tyler would have nothing to do with a visit from me, as I told you; besides, the emergency-room doctors' diagnosed hysteria, gave her a prescription of Valium, and are sending her home with her niece. Now that we know the cause of her episode, it's clear that her condition was due to mental shock rather than a physical breakdown."
Seraphina nodded. "You're quite right, but we didn't discover . . . the animal until Blandina had left in the ambulance."
Father Hernandez tented his long fingers and shook his solid sterling head, bishop material if looking the role had anything to do with it. Matt envied the man's air of churchly charisma, of an attractiveness untainted by movie-star good looks. Why should such a man--and Matt had seen the type before, the kind who could charm money out of a cuckoo clock and make it seem a privilege to the donor worry so much about a fund drive that he risked everything: Career, parish, fund drive, and even his priesthood, which was quite a different matter than a mere career, by diving into a bottle? Perhaps Seraphina had jumped to conclusions there.
"The cat," the pastor was musing with impressive melancholy. "Poor . . . Peter, did you say? I could never tell him and Paul apart, but then, I'm not much of a cat person. It must," he added with a mahogany glance at Matt from under bristling pewter eyebrows, "have been traumatic to take him down, given your situation, Mr. Devine."
Cat on a Blue Monday Page 14
