Mrs. Hobart did not cry. She put her hands together as if she were praying. She stood very, very still. A breeze came in through an open window somewhere and ruffled the jaunty little bow on her jaunty little lavender blouse. Mother Mary Bellarmine finally remembered what Mrs. Hobart reminded her of: the models in Seventeen magazine, circa 1964, who always came with everything matched.
Mother Mary Bellarmine cleared her throat “Excuse me,” she said. “I came for some records.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Hobart said.
“I really have to have them right away. I’ve got work to do.”
“Of course,” Mrs. Hobart said.
“Can you get them for me now.”
Mrs. Hobart turned around and looked at the other women in the room. The moment had passed. They were all bent over their work, concentrating too hard, to make up for their recent un-Christian curiosity about somebody else’s pain. Mrs. Hobart winced at the sight of them.
“Debbie,” she said after a while. “Debbie Gross. She can get you what you need.”
A very young woman stood up from a Workstation in the front row, looking frightened. Mrs. Hobart motioned her forward and she came.
“Debbie Gross,” Mrs. Hobart said again. “This is Sister—”
“Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said.
“Mother Mary Bellarmine,” Mrs. Hobart repeated. “Yes. Well. I think I’ll go back to my desk. I do have the midterm reports to coordinate. Mother Mary Bellarmine. Give Mother the information she needs, Debbie.”
“Of course,” Debbie said.
“Yes,” Mrs. Hobart said again.
Mrs. Hobart drifted back to her desk. Mother Mary Bellarmine watched her go. Then she turned her attention to Debbie Gross, who had gone from looking frightened to looking terrified. Mother Mary Bellarmine took an inventory: skirt too short, hair too long, makeup too thick. Back in the days when Mother Mary Bellarmine was teaching parish school, she’d had a hundred girls just like Debbie Gross. She knew what to do with them.
“Miss Gross,” she said. “I need the records on a woman named Elizabeth Johns, who was a student here about twenty years ago. She might be listed under Sister Joan Esther, since she later joined the Sisters of Divine Grace. I told all that to Mrs. Hobart. Did you hear me?”
“I heard some of it,” Debbie said faintly.
“Now you’ve heard all of it,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “Get me what I need, please. At that point we can discuss your views on artificial birth control.”
“What?” Debbie Gross said.
“Artificial birth control,” Mother Mary Bellarmine repeated.
Debbie Gross stood up a little straighter and announced, “I am a Jew.”
A moment later, Debbie was walking away between the rows of computer stations and Mother Mary Bellarmine was contemplating her second attack, which wasn’t obvious but which she knew would come to her soon. It always did. There had been only one woman in her entire life who had been immune from her methods, and that had been Joan Esther. Which was why she was looking for Joan Esther’s records now.
Exactly what she would do with Joan Esther’s records once she had them, she didn’t know, but she was sure that would come to her, too.
There were Sisters in the Order who had a talent for art and others who had a talent for music. Mother Mary Bellarmine had a talent for the clandestine.
She tried to keep it oiled and well.
8
FOR NORMAN KEVIC, THE only thing on earth that needed to be kept oiled and well was himself, and he worked at that, assiduously, until he sometimes thought he didn’t do anything else. It was now quarter after ten on the morning of Monday, May 5, and he was exhausted. The show was over and so was his mind, as far as he could tell, drifting out to Venus somewhere and communing with space aliens. Norm had some cocaine in his pocket—usually he was careful not to bring that stuff into the studio; carrying cocaine was a felony in Pennsylvania and he was part-owner of this station; nobody who had been convicted of a felony could own any part at all of a broadcast station—but he had been so bombed out when he came in today he had forgotten all about it. Now he wondered if he ought to find out how much he had and use it, for medicinal purposes only, just to get himself moving in the direction of home. One of the nicer things about being the hottest talk show radio host in the Philadelphia ADI and part-owner of one of the most lucrative radio stations and the man most wanted for supermarket promotions and local people profiles was that he could afford a very nice place, a big house out in Radnor with a swimming pool and three tennis courts and a maid’s room that almost never had a maid in it, because Norm couldn’t keep help. Actually, Norm didn’t blame the help for leaving. His houseboys were offended by his ethnic jokes. Even Norm himself was sometimes offended by his ethnic jokes. His maids had all been intensely Catholic and afraid for their virginity in the onslaught of propositions he unleashed whenever he’d been snorting and drinking at the same time. Norm always wanted to tell them they had nothing to worry about—when he was all hyped up he couldn’t get stiff if his life depended on it—but it was too embarrassing to mention and he preferred the reputation he had for being a lecher and a prick and a devotee of sexual harassment. That was how he had approached the Thomas/Hill hearings on the show—as an opportunity to treat sexual harassment as an art form. It had been one of his better brainstorms. By the second day of the hearings, so many people had been trying to call the show to tell him off, the phone lines were jammed and nobody could get through at all. He’d ended up doing it stream-of-consciousness and getting his third warning from the FCC about “borderline language.”