True Believers(20)

“That’s all right. Do you know what? Marty Kelly’s truck is in the church parking lot this morning. Isn’t that great? He hasn’t been here for ages.”

“Have you seen him? We’ve all been so worried about Bernadette.”

“No,” Mary said. “I haven’t seen him yet. I thought I’d get this straightened away and then go look for him. I mean, they must have come in for Mass, don’t you think? Why else would they be here so early in the morning? For Mass now, and then for Scott’s funeral later.”

“Let’s just hope it’s both of them,” Peter Rose said, “and not Marty on his own because Bernadette is in the hospital again.”

Mary hadn’t thought of that. She looked behind her at the pickup truck and said a quick prayer to the Virgin, because she always prayed to the Virgin first, and because Bernadette was the kind of person the Virgin was supposed to be especially protective of. Then it hit her again, in a way, that feeling that this was not enough, that something was missing. It made her feel as if a great gaping hole had been blown through the middle of her body. It made her feel as if she didn’t have enough air.

Sister Peter Rose turned and looked back at her. “Mary? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Mary said. “I’m just a little tired. I’m coming.”

She did come, too, as quickly as she could, forcing herself not to look back at Marty’s truck or at the stream of light that came from the front of St. Stephen’s. After she was done with this, she would go find Marty and Bernadette. After she had brought the food and the homeless people out to the soup kitchen and run her shift there, she would come back here and find Chickie George and see if she could get him to talk. She had an afternoon of classes, but she thought she could skip them, this once, in order to do the right thing.

Something at the back of her mind was telling her that this was still not enough, but Mary McAllister was doing her best to ignore it.




8

Sister Harriet Garrity had received the invitation to move into the convent with the Sisters of Divine Grace with as much politeness as she had been able to muster—but it had not been much. The problem was, by now, she had the routine taped. Every time there was a new Superior at St. Anselm’s Parochial School, the invitation would come, usually proffered over coffee in one of the conference rooms in the basement of the church. Before that invitation, there would be others: to have dinner with the sisters in their refectory; to stop over for tea and cake in the convent parlor on Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, Harriet would agree to those, if only to see for herself if the Sisters had begun to offer some resistance to the patriarchy, or at least to chafe under the burden of its rule. It was a depressing sight, over there. Sister Harriet’s order had given up the habit in 1969. Sister Harriet herself wore nothing to distinguish her as a nun but a small gold Eucharistic symbol on the collar of her plain navy blue wool blazer. She wouldn’t wear a crucifix, because the crucifix was so clearly part of the problem: God, viewed as male, and only as male. She wouldn’t even wear a cross, because she had reservations about the entire concept of the crucifixion. As a mythology, it glorified violence and child abuse. It was a mythology of the Fathers, and as a mythology of the Fathers, it was a mythology of death. So much of the mythology of Christianity was a mythology of death, Harriet had a hard time contemplating it. Sometimes she sat in her pew at Mass and saw the church full of the bodies of women and people of color, hacked away at, destroyed from within. Sometimes she closed her eyes while Father Healy was saying the consecration and prayed to God the Mother the way she was allowed to do, out loud, when she went to the meetings of WomenChurch. There was a time when Harriet had thought that WomenChurch was the Church of the future. The legitimate aspirations of women and people of color would not be held back. They would overwhelm the hierarchy and shake the foundations of Rome. Now she wasn’t so sure. There were too many women out there like the Sisters of Divine Grace—too many women willing to aid and abet their own oppression. That was what made the situation of women like Harriet so very tenuous, and so very dangerous. They were in the belly of the beast, but they could be found out and destroyed at any time.

At the moment, if Harriet was going to be destroyed, she was going to freeze to death. She had opened her bathroom window to look out on the parking lot behind the church. The glass was caked over with ice, so that she couldn’t see anything very clearly. Now she could see what she wanted to see—Mary McAllister talking to Sister Peter Rose in the courtyard near the convent—but the cold was going straight through the terry cloth of her bathrobe and making the joints in her fingers ache. She leaned a little farther out to see if there was anything else going on that she ought to know about and caught sight of Marty Kelly’s truck. She made a face and retreated back inside. She didn’t know what was worse, really, women like Sister Scholastica or women like Bernadette Kelly. Scholastica had the brains, but Bernadette was both a witness and a disgrace. Harriet could just imagine that girl on one of those inspirational shows on EWTN, gushing to Mother Angelica about how the only thing that kept her going in her troubles was her faith in Christ and the comfort of the Blessed Mother.