Murder Superior(7)
“The thing about Alaska,” she said slowly, is that everybody I meet up there knows what he’s doing. Nobody is wandering around looking confused and trying to figure out what she’s doing in a habit. And I like the bishop.”
Mother Mary Bellarmine sniffed. “You did it to get away from me. You told Reverend Mother General you did it to get away from me. Moving away in the middle of the term like that. Giving me less than three days’ notice.”
“Of course I wanted to get away from you,” Joan Esther said. “You were driving me crazy.”
“I was trying to turn you into a nun. A nun, Sister. Not—whatever it is you girls are these days.”
“I’m forty-two years old, Bellarmine. I’m hardly a girl.”
“You’re hardly a nun, either. You’re soft, just like all the rest of them. You have no stamina.”
“I had the stamina to put up with you for six years. Trust me, that was enough.”
The Canadians had all been polite enough to mark their suitcases clearly. Now all Joan Esther had to do was get them upstairs to the hall where these women had been assigned, parcel the suitcases out to the correct rooms, and unpack. She had to get the suitcases upstairs and parceled out fairly quickly, but she had more than a week to get them unpacked. That was good. She’d leave them where she dumped them for today. Then she’d go find herself a little food.
Somewhere up above, what sounded like a heavy iron bell rang five times.
“That’s the call to Mass,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “In the old days, you’d have dropped whatever you were doing and gone immediately to church.”
“These aren’t the old days,” Joan Esther said. “I can go to the twelve o’clock Mass.”
“I wonder you go to any Mass. I wonder you bother to wear the habit. You don’t believe in religious obedience anymore. I don’t even think you believe in God.”
“If you stand that close to the stairway, I’ll knock you over going upstairs.”
“You’ll probably find some way to blame it on me, too. Going to Alaska. Leaving my house—my house—with less notice than I’d have a right to expect from a cleaning lady. Telling Reverend Mother General—”
“I told Reverend Mother General the truth,” Joan Esther said. “I told her you were an evil old woman who was impossible to work for. Does that make you happy? It was three years ago, Mary Bellarmine. God didn’t strike me dead and Reverend Mother General didn’t relieve you from your post It’s over and done with. Let me by.”
“If you really wanted to get by, you could go around me.”
“So I could.”
“You don’t really want to get by me. You want to assassinate me. That’s been your plan from the beginning.”
The Gingerbread Lady’s suitcase was heavier than the one in Joan Esther’s other hand. Maybe the Gingerbread Lady had had the good grace to pack something interesting. Joan Esther backed up a little, the only way to get around Mother Mary Bellarmine without doing a complete circle of the suitcase pile. Assassination, for heaven’s sake. Mother Mary Bellarmine had always been fond of self-dramatization.
From the bottom, the stairs looked endless, steep, and unforgiving. Joan Esther got a better grip on the suitcases she was carrying and started up.
“You’d better go to Mass,” she said to Mother Mary Bellarmine. “It’s halfway across campus, from what I saw on the map. You’re going to be late.”
“Maybe I ought to offer to help you with the bags.”
Mother Mary Bellarmine had never offered to help anyone with anything, as far as Joan Esther knew. She didn’t think there was any danger that Mother Mary Bellarmine would take up philanthropy now. Carrying the suitcases, she walked steadily up the steps to the landing, turned the corner and walked up some more. When she got to the second floor and out of sight of anyone in the foyer, she put the suitcases down and leaned against the wall.
It had been such a small incident, really, such a nothing, over before it had really begun—and three years ago on top of that. She had taken her stand and won. What more could she possibly want?
It was just that it seemed like a bad omen really, that the second person she should see at this convention would be Mother Mary Bellarmine.
She picked up the suitcases again and headed for the east-wing hall.
4
SARABESS COLTRANE HAD COME to that point in her life where she no longer trusted anyone who didn’t snap to attention at the mere mention of the name of John Beresford Tipton. It was a very good point to come to, with advantages she would not have dreamed of at twenty, because it limited the number of men she had to talk to for longer than twenty minutes. Sarabess Coltrane didn’t hate men. In Sarabess’s metaphysically reconstructed universe, hatred was the inevitable waste product of late capitalism run amok. Sex was the perversion of love, what the market did to the deeply felt human need for a socialist reality. Love was the outpouring of the cosmic unconscious. Greed was a neurosis that would disappear with the abolition of property. It went on and on. Sarabess had gone to visit the revolution in Cuba just after Castro had come to power. She had been visiting revolutions ever since, from Chile to Nicaragua to Angola to El Salvador and back again. She had evolved—she was always evolving—from an unthinking species chauvinist in cow leather sandals to a friend of the earth in cotton espadrilles that always seemed to be unraveling into threads and leaving red dye stains on the bony tops of her feet. She had had a vision in the reeking communal kitchen of a Franciscan mission in San Luis Alazar that showed her the face and the magnificence of God. She had had the good luck to find this job in the Registrar’s Office of St. Elizabeth’s College. Her life was working out perfectly, really, in spite of the fact that the world didn’t seem to make sense anymore. That was her Catholicism. Sarabess Coltrane believed that God was the engine of history that was driving the world inexorably in the direction of an international communitarian Utopia. She was sure the gates of Hell would not prevail against it.