Murder Superior(11)
It was nine thirty on the morning of Monday, May 5, and Father Stephen and Sister Domenica Anne had been out here in the rose garden for over half an hour. The rose garden always reminded Father Stephen of the little patch of flowers his mother had grown every spring in the fifteen-by-fifteen patch of green behind the triple-decker house in New Haven where they had rented the middle floor for all the years of his growing up. Sister Domenica Anne’s confession reminded him of the three other confessions he had heard since just after dinner last night. There are priests who belong to religious orders or who are assigned to orders of nuns on a regular basis. Father Stephen had only begun shepherding religious women when he was sent to St. Elizabeth’s two years ago. He knew very little about religious orders or how they were run. He knew less about the interior lives of nuns. He was, however, a man of great common sense, and he had a hunch. There was about to be a great deal of trouble on the campus of St. Elizabeth’s College.
Sister Domenica Anne had stopped her pacing momentarily. She had her back to the wind, so that her veil was blowing up behind one shoulder and the long skirt of her modified habit pressed against the backs of her legs. Father Stephen rubbed the side of his bulbous nose and wished he wouldn’t think of her as a harbinger of the return of the Amazons. The Amazons would probably look like wimps next to Sister Domenica Anne.
“So the thing is,” she was saying, “it’s not the effect on the Cardinal I mind, because I think the Cardinal could use a little shaking up, I think they all could. But we’re in the middle of an enormous project here, costing millions of dollars, and in spite of the fact that we’re not a diocesan institution, we’ve had a lot of help from the Chancery. And I know I’m supposed to have patience, and charity—”
“You keep talking about how it’s you who’re supposed to have patience and charity,” Father Stephen said. “You never mention Mother Mary Bellarmine. Isn’t she also supposed to have patience and charity?”
“She isn’t my problem.”
“What?”
“Her patience and charity aren’t my problem,” Sister Domenica Anne said helplessly. Then she went back to pacing again. “Father, I know what you’re trying to tell me. I know the woman is impossible. Everybody says the woman is impossible. But it’s maddening. You think you have control of yourself—”
“Do any of us really have control of ourselves?”
“—you think you can at least be polite to people, and then, there it is, and you can’t even figure out what happened. I mean that. There I am, standing in a hallway in full view of I don’t know how many students, shouting at this woman, and I don’t even know why. I don’t know why. I don’t know what she did. I’m beginning to think I’m losing my mind.”
“How long has Mother Mary Bellarmine been here?”
“For about two days.”
“How long is she expected to stay?”
“To the end of the convention, I think. I don’t believe Reverend Mother General will need her beyond that.”
“What does Reverend Mother General need her for?”
“Oh, to go over the budget for the new field house. Mary Bellarmine is good at that. She’s good at running the whole operation, really, the fund-raising and all the rest of it. She’s done it a dozen times. Maybe that’s why Reverend Mother General had her come in early. So that she could give me some advice on what I’m supposed to do.”
“You don’t think you need advice on what you’re supposed to do?”
“I think I need it desperately. I just categorically refuse to take it from that bitch.”
There was a robin sitting on the perch of the bird-house hanging in the tree branches above his head. Father Stephen Monaghan sighed a little and stretched his legs. He couldn’t tell Domenica Anne anything about the other confessions he’d heard, of course, but he couldn’t get them out of his mind. Bitch was actually one of the milder words the Sisters had been handing him to describe Mother Mary Bellarmine. Last night, a fluffy little old nun—physically ancient, fanatically conservative and almost pathologically repressed—had called the Mother Superior of the Southwestern Province “a world-class cunt.” God only knew what kind of well-buried memory bank that had come out of.
Domenica Anne had stopped. She was looking at him expectantly, as if he held the secrets of the universe in the palm of his hand, or in the notes he wrote in the margins of thick books on theology he read when nobody wanted him for anything else. This was what Father Stephen didn’t like about hearing confessions, this expectation that he knew what to do better than she did herself.