“Well,” Father Stephen said, “I can see how you wouldn’t want to lose control in front of your students. We could work on that.”
“You don’t think anger of this magnitude is a mortal sin?”
“Auschwitz was a mortal sin, Sister. The murder of Lisa Steinberg was a mortal sin. This is more in the line of justifiable homicide—and that does not mean I would condone—oh, never mind. I don’t know what I’m talking about. How much longer do you personally have to work with Mother Mary Bellarmine?”
“Oh, I don’t really have to work with her. She’ll just be around on and off, if you know what I mean. And she’s supposed to sit in on meetings.”
“On many meetings?”
Domenica Anne considered this. “There’s VTZ next week—”
“VTZ?”
“VTZ Corporation gave us most of the money to build the field house, Father. The wife of the founder is one of our alumnae. Actually, I shouldn’t say they gave us the money, exactly. They gave us their services. They run a construction company, among other things.”
“Among other things?”
“It’s a kind of local conglomerate, if you see what I mean. They own a whole lot of different businesses. They’ll build a lot of the field house for us and then write it off their income taxes.”
“Ah, I see. So no VTZ, no field house.”
“Exactly.”
“So it would be a good thing for you to keep your temper in any meeting with VTZ executives in attendance.”
“Exactly,” Domenica Anne said again.
“Then let’s work on that.”
Domenica Anne blinked. It was so obviously not what she’d expected to hear. Father Stephen understood how she felt. In the old days, he’d never have said anything of the sort. He’d simply have told her to try to keep her temper and then given her an Our Father and five Hail Marys to say as penance. He would have done it in spite of the fact that she hadn’t committed any sin that needed to be forgiven. Now he was supposed to provide some real help with her problem, and he was trying.
Actually, the person he’d really like to provide help for was Mother Mary Bellarmine herself, but she hadn’t come to see him, and he didn’t think she would. It was one of the sad truths of religion that the people who needed it most never came looking for it. It was one of the hallmarks of sin that the world’s greatest sinners often thought of themselves as the world’s greatest saints.
Saints or sinners, all these confessions about Mother Mary Bellarmine were beginning to make him nervous, and Father Stephen Monaghan didn’t like to be nervous.
They’re all closed up in here, he thought, looking around the rose garden as Sister Domenica Anne went on pacing. They’re all shut up in here together. It can’t be a good way to live.
“I keep trying to think of some way to ship her out of here and back to California,” Sister Domenica Anne said, stopping at the side of an overgrown bush that seemed to be growing thorns for Sleeping Beauty’s castle. “If I could just find some way to get rid of her, I could finally relax.”
And that, Father Stephen Monaghan thought was precisely the sort of thing that made him jumpy.
6
NANCY CALLAHAN HARE LIKED to tell people that all the girls she’d ever known who’d gone to convent schools had turned out wild, and although that wasn’t true—most of the girls Nancy had been with at Sacred Heart and St. Elizabeth’s had degenerated into bright-eyed country club wives with three children each in private schools and a seat on the parish advisory board—most of the people she knew weren’t Catholic, and it worked out anyway. It at least made a stab at explaining Nancy herself, who was thoroughly inexplicable otherwise in the circles in which she moved. The circles in which Nancy Hare moved had a lot of money, a lot of cosmetic surgery and a fair number of lifetime subscriptions to Paris Vogue. They did not have much of anything else, which made their situation a little ambiguous in Philadelphia, which was a city that believed in old money. The age of money was not something Nancy worried about herself. She’d always been an outsider in Philadelphia. When she was growing up, it was enough to be Catholic and Irish to be beyond the pale. She was perfectly happy to have no social cachet at all, as long as she had money to spend and younger men to go to bed with.
The young man Nancy had gone to bed with the night before—that would have been May 4—was a tennis pro at the club her husband had founded with four other men, when all five of them had been turned down at every established club on the Main line. The new club was shinier and larger and better equipped than the old ones could ever hope to be, and in no time at all it had become almost as difficult to get into. The tennis pro was named Barry Something and on “sabbatical” from Yale, from which Nancy inferred that he’d been asked to take a year off and get his act together. Whether this had been caused by too many drugs or too little studying she neither knew nor cared. The young man she was going to go to bed with right this minute—at quarter to ten on the morning of May 5—was of much more interest to her at the moment. His name was Mark Something and he worked in a bookstore in downtown Philadelphia. He was supposed to be a novelist, but Nancy had met twenty-two-year-old novelists before. She had met painters and poets and composers and musicians before, too. If they were serious they took off for New York or California. If they stayed in Philadelphia they were going nowhere fast. Nancy preferred the ones who were going nowhere. Her husband was going somewhere, and what that meant was perpetual impotence and a head full of calculations and the instructions for hiring a taxi in Riyadh.