Murder Superior(47)
What he did do was to make his way through the crowd, deliberately and insistently, in Bennis Hannaford’s direction, weaving his way through clots of nuns who sometimes seemed to have been welded together. It was astonishing. None of the nuns was drinking, but all of them were behaving just the way men did at professional conventions, when the liquor flowed like water.
“Listen,” one of the older nuns was saying as she jabbed a fingertip in the air in front of a younger nun’s face, “I’ve read everything that’s come out in these last few years about school discipline, and I still say nothing is going to get a five-year-old boy to sit in his seat better than putting the fear of God into him.”
“But Sister,” the younger nun protested, “the problem is that these days you can’t put the fear of God into him. And when you try, his parents sue!”
“We put up four AIDS hospices in Cleveland last winter,” a cheerfully roly-poly little Sister was saying to another group, “and of course it was a mess with the zoning board, but let me tell you how we got around it—”
“We sent two of our Sisters to the Jesuit seminary to take courses in theology,” a Sister with a heavy Australian accent was saying, “and they came back talking about Joseph Campbell and the idea of the numinous. What in the name of all that’s holy is the idea of the numinous?”
“I know who Joseph Campbell is,” one of the other Sisters said.
“Maybe the idea of the numinous is God,” a third Sister said.
The Australian Sister looked skeptical. “Maybe the Jesuits are just as crazy as I always thought they were. Honestly. Such intelligent men and always going to extremes. Do you suppose it’s hormonal?”
“Did you hear the one about the Franciscan and the Dominican who were arguing about who was holier, Francis or Dominic?” This was the second nun, the one who had heard of Joseph Campbell. “They argued and argued and argued, and finally they decided to leave it in the hands of God. So they went to the church and they got down on their knees in front of the altar and they prayed and they prayed and they asked God, ‘Who was holier, Francis or Dominic?’ Suddenly there’s a puff of smoke that smacks into the altar cloth right at the front, and the fathers jump to their feet and run up to see what’s happened, and sure enough there’s a note there where there wasn’t any note before. So they pick it up and read it and it says, ‘All my saints are equally close to my heart. Stop bickering. Signed, God, S.J.’ ”
Wonderful, Gregor thought. They even had in-jokes. He pushed by two Sisters who were talking away in French (about Quebec, he could pick up that much) and finally found himself within speaking distance of Bennis Hannaford. He gently removed a tiny nun from his path and went to Bennis’s side. The tiny nun—who had to have been ninety—went on lecturing her audience about the proper way to form a First Communion line without a break in her voice of any kind to mark the fact that she’d been lifted into the air and deposited on a different square of rug. There was a poster on a rickety tripod still in his path and Gregor moved that too, in the opposite direction of the tiny nun, so he didn’t hit her in the head with it. The poster showed the Virgin Mary on a cloud floating above the entire world in miniature and then the words:
MOTHER OF GOD. MOTHER OF THE CHURCH. MOTHER OF US ALL.
Gregor squinted at the miniature and found the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He thought he might have found the Coliseum, but he wasn’t sure.
“Well,” Bennis said in his ear, “did you come over to talk or to look at posters?”
“I came to talk. This is a fascinating poster. I think that’s supposed to be the Great Wall of China.”
“This person says she’s somebody you know. Sister Mary Angelus. She says her name used to be Neila Connelly.”
“Neila Connelly,” Gregor said.
He hadn’t been aware that Bennis was talking to somebody. Now he looked at the small girl in the white veil standing by Bennis’s side and thought that, yes, she might actually be Neila Connelly, but only a Neila Connelly significantly more grown up than the one he had met in Maryville so many months ago.
“Sister Mary Angelus,” he said, feeling a little stupid. What was he supposed to say?
“It’s just Sister Angelus,” Neila Connelly told him. “Everybody has ‘Mary’ in their name so almost nobody uses it, except of course old traditionalists like Mother Mary Bellarmine, except it isn’t all that traditional because even in the old days almost nobody used it. And I don’t think it’s fair to call Mother Mary Bellarmine a traditionalist. I don’t think she is a traditionalist.”