Murder Superior(41)

Today, Father Stephen Monaghan had taken the noon Mass at St. Bridget’s in Eddingsberg. Eddingsberg was farther than he usually traveled to say Mass and out of his particular orbit. He’d gone there because the Bishop had asked him to and he always did what the Bishop wanted. He’d had high hopes for the afternoon. After all, Eddingsberg was rust-belt territory. He wouldn’t be caught in a clutch of yuppies up there. But he’d underestimated the reach of what he was beginning to think of as the “pernicious doctrine.” It must be something they were advocating on television. All he had said—in memory of the fact that his own mother had died on Mother’s Day—was that remembering the finitude of life was a good way to keep perspective on the things of this world. That was it. You want a pair of sixty-dollar Reeboks. You have forty-nine, ninety-five. You can walk around convinced your life is terrible, or remember that your life is finite and realize that Reeboks aren’t that important after all. That was a little muddled, but not so muddled it was difficult to understand. A four-year-old could have understood it. He’d looked out over the densely packed pews, at the blue ribbons tied into bows on each of the pews’ ends, over the heads of the women in their best. Sunday hats and the children wiggling and straining against the starch in their clothes. He’d delivered a sermon that was in no way substantially different from the second one he’d ever preached. He’d caused what amounted to a brush fire of indignation. Maybe he’d been a little off in his timing. Maybe this wasn’t the kind of sermon good hardworking people wanted to hear on Mother’s Day. Maybe he should have said some warm fuzzy things about the Motherhood of Mary and let it go at that. He didn’t know. What he did know was that when he was done and standing on the church steps, shaking hands with the people on their way out, a ferociously well-maintained woman in her early thirties had marched up to him, put her hands on her hips and announced: “If you learned to take better care of yourself, you wouldn’t have to think about death all the time. You could save your own life!”

Father Stephen Monaghan was himself waiting for the Rapture. He wanted to see the Heavens open up and Christ descending on a cloud. Or however it was done. The Rapture was mostly an evangelical Protestant concept, now seeping into North American Catholicism through various forms of folk religion. He wasn’t sure he had it straight.

He was sure he wasn’t ready for an afternoon of five thousand nuns, either, but he figured he didn’t have a choice. He had told Reverend Mother General at the Sisters’ Mass this morning that he, would drop in as soon as he got back from Eddingsberg, and he would have to drop in. In the old days, people didn’t question priests who turned down invitations or took them up when they hadn’t actually been offered. Priests could come and go as they pleased as long as they didn’t do anything to offend the Bishop. Now there were a dozen committees to decide every question and at least one person in every group—usually female, usually in her forties, usually with a degree in pastoral counseling or contemporary liturgies from one of the lesser Catholic colleges—ready to jump to her feet at the slightest provocation and start delivering lectures on the necessity of “accountability.” “I am accountable only to God,” St. Thomas More had said. Father Stephen Monaghan often wished he had the courage to say the same. Out loud.

It was quarter to two in the afternoon, and there were nuns everywhere, on the walks, in the parking lots, on the steps of buildings. Pulling onto campus from the narrow town road that passed it, Stephen was reminded of the plagues of locusts that showed up at least once in every 1930s picture about agriculture in China or farmers in the frontier Midwest. Of course, nuns were nothing at all like locusts, of course not, but there they were, in those black veils, covering the ground like a living blanket. It wasn’t that bad, but it was close. It was very close. And parties being what they were, Father Stephen was sure that they were spreading.

He drove away from the main hub of the party to St. Patrick’s Hall, which housed the religion department where he had an office. He parked in the back and let himself in through the basement door. He didn’t think it would do any harm for him to sit in his office for a moment or two, just to catch his breath. He would go over and shake a few million hands in a moment or two.

His office was an eight-by-ten cubicle on the first floor, facing a wall of tree trunks that made viewing any part of the campus impossible. He let himself in, looked over the books he had left on his desk—Hymns for the Modern Catholic Congregation; Harrigan’s Homily Notes for the Liturgical Year—and sat down in his desk chair. He took his pipe out of the center drawer of his desk and lit up carefully. He always had trouble with his pipe. It wouldn’t light. It wouldn’t stay lit. The base of the stem got all clogged up and wouldn’t let any air through. He’d been smoking this pipe since his ordination, and he still hadn’t got the hang of it.