Precious Blood(24)

“What are you thinking of?” Declan Boyd said. “Where’s your cape?”

“I left it in my office. I’ve had a long day.” She held out her hand to Gregor and said, “Mr. Demarkian. I’m very glad to meet you. I’m Sister Mary Scholastica.”

“How do you do,” Gregor said.

“Sister Martha is waiting for you at Rosary House.” Scholastica turned and pointed through the trees at the third of the brick buildings. “I think she’ll make you very comfortable. She’ll try, anyway.”

“I’m sure everything will be fine.”

“Are you? I wouldn’t be. Stereotypes notwithstanding, nuns can be very disorganized people.” She unlatched the gate and pulled it open. “Come along now. All we’d need is to have you die of pneumonia on our doorstep. That would give the Cardinal a case of terminal apoplexy.”

“I don’t think Mr. Demarkian has had his dinner yet,” Declan Boyd said, as he and Gregor hurried to catch up. Sister Scholastica was already halfway to their destination and in no mood to slow down. Gregor didn’t blame her.

“He probably hasn’t even had lunch,” Father Boyd said plaintively. “The train takes I don’t know how long from Philadelphia.”

“The train takes forever from Philadelphia,” Sister Scholastica said, “and Martha has dinner all ready and waiting. I’m afraid, Mr. Demarkian, she won’t have breakfast. It’s Holy Thursday tomorrow. There’s a great deal we have to do. If you want breakfast you’ll have to come over to the convent for it.”

“That will be fine,” Gregor said.

Scholastica reached the door of Rosary House, punched the bell, and turned to wait for them. “Under ordinary circumstances,” she said, “you would have taken your meals at the rectory and stayed there, too. Unfortunately, there haven’t been any ordinary circumstances in St. Agnes Parish in quite some time.”

“Now, Sister,” Declan Boyd started.

But Sister had her back to them again. The door of Rosary House had opened and a little nun had come out onto the porch, much younger and smaller than her superior and much less able to look comfortable in the cold. This, Gregor thought, had to be Sister Martha. And he was right.

He was right about something else, too. His first impression of Sister Scholastica was that she was a very smart woman and that she knew she was smart. She had that air of automatic authority that can only be developed over many long years of trial virtually unmixed with error. She didn’t look old enough to have developed that in the convent.

Gregor wondered momentarily who had said what to Scholastica to make her this suspicious of him, then allowed himself be let into Rosary House and down a long narrow hallway to the kitchen. Sister Martha had laid out his dinner there, at a broad oak table meant to seat eight. One whiff of the smell coming out of the bowl at the one set place, and Gregor had no doubt about what he was being served. “Lentils and olive oil,” Sister Martha told him happily. “I consulted with Father Marcovian at Christ the Lord Armenian Church. You won’t have to break your Lent while I’m around!”





THREE


[1]


FATHER ANDREW WALSH KNEW exactly what his Cardinal Archbishop thought of him. A flake, a jerk, a goof-off—the words that rolled down from on high through one parishioner or the other were all epithets for an airhead. The Cardinal Archbishop did not call Andy Walsh a heretic, because the Cardinal Archbishop did not think Andy Walsh was smart enough—or serious enough—to be one. The Cardinal Archbishop did think Andy Walsh was dangerous, because the Cardinal Archbishop thought all stupid people were dangerous. The Cardinal Archbishop was a man whose intelligence had been discovered early and sheltered rigorously. In some secret part of him, he didn’t believe there were any stupid people. When a man was dense or slow or illogical or oblivious, the Cardinal Archbishop thought he was doing it on purpose.

Andy Walsh stopped at the mirror that hung on the wall at the bottom of the rectory’s back stairs, checked out the fall of his Sassoon cut, and wondered why he persisted in thinking of O’Bannion as the “Cardinal Archbishop” instead of just the “Cardinal.” Maybe it was just an instinctive reaction. Andy had never had much patience with authority or pomposity or high seriousness. He believed in God, but the God he believed in made much more sense than the one people like O’Bannion kept trying to foist on their gullible parishioners. Andy Walsh’s God didn’t deal in absurdities, like transubstantiation. The idea of Jesus Christ, still in human form, rushing around heaven turning bread and wine into His Body and Blood was just silly. He didn’t deal in impossibilities either, like holiness and sanctity. Andy Walsh’s God was much too good a God to punish people for their sins, or even to believe in sin in the first place. He was a great formless mass of uncritical Love, waiting to dissolve each and every human soul into the undifferentiated ocean of His perfect peace at the moment of death.