“Right,” Father Stephen said. Then he looked away and frowned. It was so hard to know what this man wanted of him. Father Stephen thought it might be something on the order of “male affirmation” or whatever you called it these days when two men got together and commiserated with each other about women. Then he had an uncomfortable thought. “Frank,” he said, “is this stuff that’s missing dangerous?”
“What do you mean, dangerous?”
“Well, could someone die from it? Or get very sick? Is it poison?”
Frank looked confused. “I don’t think so, Father. We have it all over ourselves all the time and never think anything of it, so it couldn’t be too toxic. It’s this new organic stuff. Sister Wilhelmina in the biology department switched us to it last year. Said it didn’t make any sense to poison the environment just to get greener grass. Saw her point. The old stuff used to be poisonous, though. Bunch of chemicals in it.”
“Hmm,” Father Stephen said.
“What this stuff would do anybody got ahold of it not paying attention,” Frank said, “is it would turn them green. I mean green the color. It’s got some kind of natural stain in it and it comes right off on everything. Skin. Clothing. Mix it with water and it’s worse. It’s like instant dye. Gross.”
“Ah,” Father Stephen said.
“So the thing is,” Frank Moretti said, “I don’t want to make a big fuss about it or anything, cause I know how crazy things are all over this place, you know, but what I want to do is, I want to tell whoever I’m supposed to that if any of those nuns want plant food they should come ask us. Instead of ripping open bags and getting it on their own, if you see what I mean. I mean, that kind of thing only causes a lot of trouble.”
“Right,” Father Stephen said.
“Only now I’ve told you,” Frank Moretti said, “and you can tell whichever nun it is that’s supposed to know.”
Finally, Father Stephen Monaghan knew what Frank Moretti wanted of him.
He wanted to be protected from the nuns.
2
SISTER DOMENICA ANNE HAD entered the Order of the Sisters of Divine Grace at the age of seventeen, right out of high school, and she fully expected to be there until the day she died. She liked being a nun and she liked most of the nuns she met. She hadn’t minded the routine prior to Vatican II and she didn’t mind the relaxation of that routine now. Stuck on Amtrak or an airplane or some other long trip among strangers, she almost always sought out the other religious women—and there were a surprising number of them on the move these days; since most of them didn’t wear habits you simply had to know what to look for—and had a good time discussing the differences in customs among the many orders old, new, flourishing, and otherwise. Domenica Anne would not have believed that she could ever get tired of nuns. She would have been wrong. For almost a week now, the campus of St. Elizabeth’s College had been filling with nuns. They had been trickling in like water filling a tide pool. They had become so numerous they had begun to appear as if they were cloning themselves. They were in kitchens and dining rooms, classrooms and living rooms, rectories and convents. They covered lawns and pews. They occupied library carrels and booths at the Bright Day Fountain Shoppe. Some of them even drank beer and ate pizza with tapeplayers blasting out vintage Beach Boys right on the convent’s front steps. It was lunacy.
That Domenica Anne was herself going loony had become thoroughly clear immediately after Mass this morning, when she had filed out into the air of the seven o’clock spring morning along with seven hundred other nuns and watched seven hundred more file in. At that point the weather had been considered iffy, so they had had stacked Masses instead of one big Mass on the field behind St. Teresa’s House. The weather had been considered iffy all week. Domenica Anne had been filing in and out and out and in with seven or eight hundred other nuns for everything she could think of, sometimes—this was an exaggeration, but not much of an exaggeration—even for a chance at the bathroom. Add to that the fact that she was really not ready to make nice-nice to Mother Mary Bellarmine, and by eight o’clock she’d known that she really couldn’t go to this party. Maybe she could come down later, when the receiving line had broken up and everybody was a little addled by too much food. In fact, she probably would, because the food at the party was going to be the only food available for most of the day. In the meantime, however, she thought she would be much more comfortable surrounded by her papers in her own workroom. She might even be able to get something done.