He took a couple of deep drags, decided he was getting a decent stream of smoke with minimal aggravation for once, and wondered if he should wander down the hall to see if anyone had left yesterday’s paper out. Father Stephen Monaghan almost never got to the newspaper on the day it was printed, and sometimes didn’t get to the paper at all. The Berlin Wall had been lying in pieces on the ground for two weeks before he’d heard of it.
He had just about decided he ought to go over to St. Teresa’s House and make his manners and get something to eat—Father Stephen was thin mostly because he was always forgetting to eat; when he remembered to eat he ate like a horse—when he heard a noise out in the hall. It was an unself-conscious, blundering m noise, nothing to be worried about, but it was strange. Although St. Elizabeth’s was like any other college these days, in that it employed more workaholics than a sane person could stand to be in the same place with for longer than fifteen minutes, on a Sunday like this at the start of a vacation week, those workaholics were likely to be straining themselves to death in the Marabar Caves or the British Museum. Father Stephen wasn’t sure what professors of religion did except lose their faith and talk forever about the “symbolic significance of the crucifixion.” In fact, Father Stephen admitted to himself, he wasn’t sure about much of anything at all. He wasn’t a sure kind of man. The only thing he’d ever been willing to bet his life on was the one thing he had bet his life on. And that was that Christ had risen on the third day.
He went out in the hall, looked around, heard more blundering, and headed for the stairwell. This was a beautiful building outside, made of stone and gracefully proportioned. Inside, it had been constructed like those ancient parochial schools where Father Stephen had spent his childhood. High ceilings. Heavy doors. Wide tall windows that could only be opened with the help of a long thin pole. Standing in the doorway to his office, Father Stephen could see that the fire door to the stairs at the far end of this hall had been left propped open with a rubber door stopper. Father Stephen assumed that a nun had done it before the weekend sometime, because only the nuns used rubber door stoppers. Everybody else used whatever was handy, like wads of paper and stray books. The sound he was hearing was somebody thrashing around in the stairwell on the basement level, probably with no idea of where he was supposed to go. Or she, Father Stephen told himself. With all the nuns around, it was probably she. He went to the fire door and called down, “Who is it? Can I help you?”
“Oh, thank Christ,” a man’s voice said. “Yes, you can help me. You can get me out of here.”
“Just come up the stairs,” Father Stephen said, ashamed to be feeling so relieved that the person he was talking to was a man. “How did you get in?”
“There was a door down here that was open, you know, with a book keeping it open, but when I came in I kicked the book out and locked myself in. I mean, for Christ’s sake. Haven’t you people ever heard of safety locks?”
Father Stephen didn’t even know if safety locks had been invented when this building was built. He did know it took a key to get in or out of the building once the locks were set. That was true of every building on this campus. He stepped back and held the door he was standing next to wide open, just to seem welcoming.
“You just come on up,” he said, “I can let you out the front door with my key. I hope you haven’t been put to too much trouble. Was there something you needed I could get for you?”
“Not exactly.” The man emerged in the stairwell, a big young man in overalls creased with what Father Stephen’s mother would have called “clean dirt.” He’s been gardening, Father Stephen thought to himself, and in a moment the truth of that observation was confirmed. The young man was carrying a mud-caked trowel in his left hand, swinging it along as if he didn’t even know it was there.
“Hi,” he said, looking Father Stephen over with less curiosity than relief. “You don’t know how glad I was to hear a guy’s voice. I mean, you don’t know. I’ve been up to my neck in them all week.”
“Nuns,” Father Stephen said solemnly.
“You got it. I’m Frank Moretti. I do groundswork. You know. With the grass. And the gardens.”
“You’re the groundskeeper?”
“Hell no,” Frank said. “The groundskeeper is Ally MacBurn—Aloyishus, I think. He’s sixty-two and about six hundred pounds and he’s been here forever. No, I just do work. I plant things.”
“Flowers,” Father Stephen said helpfully.