Hardscrabble Road(105)

This was not an accident, but a mistake. He should have turned away and left the store, immediately. He should not have stood still where he was, with his left hand resting on the big magazine rack, as if he was seriously considering finding something to buy.

“Excuse me,” the nun said. “I’m sorry to bother you. It’s Dr. Richard Tyler, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Jig said. Then he thought that that, too, was another mistake. He would never make a spy. People recognized him from television, or from magazines. He was used to admitting who he was.

“I’m sorry,” the nun said again. “I really don’t mean to bother you. It’s just—I have such a strong feeling I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

“You’ve seen me on television, probably,” Jig said. “I’m not really on all that often, but people remember.”

“We don’t watch television,” the nun said. “And it’s not that, it’s that I could swear I’ve seen you somewhere in person, face-to-face. Very closely face-to-face. Do you come out to the monastery?”

“The monastery?”

“Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Hardscrabble Road.”

“Is that in Philadelphia?”

The nun bit her lip. She was, Jig thought, a remarkably beautiful young woman, more like an actress playing a nun than most of the nuns he’d met. She was also very intelligent. It showed in her face. For once, it did not make him very comfortable.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’m being ridiculous, and I’m intruding. It’s just—never mind. I don’t know. I’m not making any sense. Please excuse me, Dr. Tyler. I shouldn’t have intruded on your privacy.”

“Not at all,” Jig said.

The nun gave him one last searching, worried look. Then she turned away and went back to the other nun, who had bought something she was now carrying in a white plastic bag. Jig realized that he couldn’t remember nuns like this, with full habits to the floor, carrying anything in their hands. He couldn’t remember them wearing coats, either, and now he knew why. They had heavy wool capes to wear instead.

The two nuns went out together, to the front of the store, to the street. Jig watched them go until he couldn’t see them any longer. His mouth was as dry as paper. He looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was barely quarter past eight.

There were things he was good at, and things he was not good at. When he was good at something, he was so good at it that he could not be compared to other people who did it. In mathematics, in physics, in research medicine, he was so far out ahead of the pack that he might as well have been in the field alone. When he was not good at something, he was incapacitated. There were not a lot of things he was not good at, but they were there, and one of them was lying to other people face-to-face.

No, he thought, that wasn’t true. Sometimes he did that very well. It was more complicated than that. It was just that he had been so very bad at lying to that nun, just a moment ago, and it was one of the few times in his life when he had wanted his lies to be effective.





3


Beata was on the bus and reaching for her breviary before it struck her, and then she found herself torn by the sort of procedural guilt she had always thought was the least attractive thing about religious life. It was quarter after eight. They were absent from prayers because they had errands to do, and they were later than they should have been because Immaculata had had three coughing fits in half an hour and wanted to pick up lozenges so that she didn’t cough and hack her way home. They were supposed to take the first opportunity to “make up” prayers, and that first opportunity was now, a half hour ride on this bus with nothing to worry about in the way of missing their stop, since it was the last one before the bus turned around. The Office sat in her hand, thick and red. They had separate volumes now for Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, and Ordinary Time. In The Nun’s Story, Audrey Hepburn had carried a prayer book so small it almost fit into the palm of her hand, but that was the Little Office, and nobody said the Little Office anymore. Beata couldn’t even fault the rule, really. The idea was to have the whole Church praying the same words at the same times every day, to lift up praise and supplication in one voice, ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

Next to her on the seat, Immaculata was already hard at prayer, her finger moving carefully from line to line, her lips moving. The Office was in Latin, and the rule had made much more sense when all the Offices were in Latin. These days, though, there were religious orders and churches saying the Office in every possible vernacular. Somebody had told her once that the Office had been translated into Klingon and posted on the Internet.