Act of Darkness(11)

“No.” Mary Alyse frowned furiously and struggled to her feet. “I talk to the Blessed Mother now.” She looked appealingly at Sister Mary James, and broke into a smile when sister nodded. “I talk to the Blessed Mother now,” Mary Alyse said again. “I say thank-you.”

“Say thank-you for me, too,” Janet said.

Mary Alyse gave Janet a very dubious look. She had been taught that everyone talked to the Blessed Mother, everyone talked to God, everyone went to Mass and tried to be good—or, at least, that everyone nice did. Janet could see her trying to work it out—surely Janet could say thank-you to the Blessed Mother herself?—and then abandoning the effort. Mary Alyse’s face was taken over by an infinitely wise look that said Here is another of those things people say but don’t really mean. She leaned over, gave Janet a tremendous hug, and scampered out of the room.

Up at the front, Sister Mary James put her chalk back on the chalk shelf, dusted her hands against the coarse brown cloth of her habit skirt, and said, “I told you she would do it. It was only a matter of time.”

“I wish all of them could do it,” Janet said. She swiveled a little in her chair, toward the tall window that looked out on the asphalted playground. There were children out there, running and jumping in the heat, teasing and petting Sister Mary Vianney, who had playground watch. In a little while they would be called in for prayers and supper, then read to in the convent’s big living room before being sent off to bed. If the nuns insisted, the children would hear a new story, rewritten and illustrated by one of the sisters from a narrative in the Bible. If the nuns were being indulgent, though, the children would get what they wanted, a story they’d already heard a hundred times and wanted to hear again. According to Sister Mary James, Down syndrome children, like all children everywhere, wanted their favorites read to them “just one more time” into infinity.

In fact, Janet thought, the first thing you learned by spending time at Emiliani was that Down syndrome children were like children everywhere, exactly like, except for an intellectual slowness that made them take longer to learn some things than they would have if they hadn’t had the syndrome. Janet was beginning to think this slowness was less “stupidity,” as dear old Dan would put it, than most people thought. Patchen Rawls was stupid. The woman couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag and didn’t have the brains to realize she ought to try. Mary Alyse tried very hard, all the time, and practice was beginning to make perfect. Unlike Patchen, Mary Alyse would have no trouble at all knowing what was wrong with trying to use a copper bracelet to cure arthritis.

Unlike Patchen Rawls, Mary Alyse would have no trouble at all knowing what was wrong with trying to steal another woman’s husband, either.

Janet’s handbag was on the floor next to her seat. She picked it up, rummaged around inside, and came out with a comb.

“I saw an article about your husband in the paper this morning,” Sister Mary James said. “He’s sponsoring a bill to get a program going for children with Down syndrome. Did you talk him into that?”

“No,” Janet said. Then, realizing how rude she must have sounded, she added, “I didn’t know anything about it until four days ago. He and his chief of staff worked it out between them.”

“It’s a good idea,” Sister Mary James said. “We’re in a very unusual situation here. And vocations are down, all across the country, in every Catholic parish. The Church can’t take up the burden everywhere, the way things are.”

“Is it a burden?”

“Working here?” Sister Mary James smiled. “I had to fight three other sisters to get it. I love working here. But laypeople have to be paid, Mrs. Fox. And paying costs money.”

“Mmm,” Janet said. She had been a political wife long enough to know all about political money. What she didn’t say—and what Sister Mary James didn’t say either, although she knew it just as well—was that the Emiliani School wouldn’t get any, even if the bill passed unanimously in both houses of Congress. Its pro-life stance was too uncompromising and too well known, its links with Rome were too public, its determination to be not just a school but a Catholic school was too frequently and too insistently proclaimed. There was also the simple fact that the sisters did not have the money to hire a lobbyist or to attend seminars on Long Island at $100,000 a pop. When the dealing got started, the Emiliani School wasn’t even going to make the bottom of the subsidizing list. The fact that it was the country’s best facility for the education of retarded children wouldn’t matter at all.