True Believers(124)

“Harriet? Harriet had the emotional intelligence of a sea slug.”

Scholastica wanted to laugh, but she caught herself at the last minute. Then she left Sister Thomasetta’s office and went down the hall again, but in the other direction. When she got to the end, she opened the fire door and stepped into the cold. She looked up at the big brick building that was St. Anselm’s School—and that had been, for almost a hundred years now—and decided that she just couldn’t face playing principal at the moment. She was being very unfair to Sister Peter Rose, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she wasn’t cut out to be a nun, at least not a nun of the kind that Reverend Mother General was. By now, Reverend Mother General would have solved the crime and provided Gregor Demarkian with incontrovertible and fully admissible evidence of the same.

Scholastica went in the side door of the church, looked around at the people praying in the pews, and then went around the back to the stairs that led to the basement. She checked the boxes that had been set out for the food drive, and the other boxes, left against the wall in piles on the floor, that held the rosaries and the scapulars for the First Holy Communion   classes. Then she reminded herself that somebody else had already seen to all this, and that none of it was her job at all. She was just looking for a way to waste time that would not make her feel guilty. She felt guilty every time she thought of the way she had behaved at the sight of Sister Harriet’s body.

She came back up to the first floor and went out the front door of the church. She looked across at St. Stephen’s and wondered what they were doing in there. There was more activity than there usually was in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. She looked up the street in the direction of Roy Phipps’s place, but that was calm enough, too, this morning. Maybe they were tired of picketing. It always surprised her that nobody had ever done any damage to Roy Phipps or his church. You would think, given the nonsense he pulled, that violence would be inevitable.

Scholastica started to turn back to the church, but as she did she saw a woman coming up the street, and because the woman was familiar, she stopped. A second later, she realized who it was: that Edith Lawton person, the professional atheist, who lived with her husband in one of the single-family town houses on the block. Scholastica didn’t want to know what one of those town houses cost, or how you could afford one on the money you made by being a professional atheist—but then, Edith Lawton was supposed to be married. At the moment, she looked oddly mismatched, as if she were the living embodiment of one of those Picasso paintings from the 1920s. The parts of her didn’t go together. She was dressed like a teenager, in jeans and a down jacket, and she was almost thin enough to pull it off, but her face was the face of a fifty-year-old woman. In the harsh light of the intermittent sun, it looked even older.

“Mrs. Lawton,” Sister Scholastica said.

“Hello, Sister.”

“What are you doing this morning? You look ready to go skiing.”

Edith Lawton stopped, and hesitated, and looked at the church. “I was going to go to Mass. That’s all right, isn’t it, even if I’m not Catholic.”

“It’s more than all right. We encourage it.”

“Even if I’ve never been a Catholic?”

“Even if you’ve never been a Catholic. I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I don’t. God is just a fairy tale, like Santa Claus. People only believe in him because they’re afraid of dying. Do you mean I can’t go to Mass if I don’t believe in God?”

“No,” Scholastica said wryly. “We especially encourage you to go to Mass if you don’t believe in God.”

“Religion is a terrible thing,” Edith Lawton said piously. “Look at all the harm it causes. Look at what happened to those poor boys and right here in this very church. Don’t you think it’s a shame, that those boys were hurt and then the faithful gave their donations just so that they could be used to pay the lawyers? The Church has a lot to apologize for.” Then she turned her back and hurried down the walk into the church.

Scholastica watched her go with some amusement. Then she folded her hands under her scapular—to get them warm; in the old days they walked with their hands like this all the time, to keep them out of sight—and crossed the street to St. Stephen’s.

There was going to be a big prayer service over there for the victims of the riot, and she had volunteered the Sisters to help out with the details.

She wondered if Edith Lawton would have a vision at the Consecration and want to become a nun. She could just see the program on EWTN, with Edith in a postulant’s habit, telling the story of her conversion.