“Drive carefully.”
“I’m not driving. I took the bus.”
Out in the courtyard, the day seemed to have gotten darker, and colder, and to have begun to verge on wet. Mary cut diagonally across the quadrangle and went out the side gate. Then she went around the front of the church and crossed the street so that she could go into St. Anselm’s. At this time of day, there was no Mass. The next Mass would be at twelve o’clock. She had already been to Mass, and to Communion , at seven. Now it occurred to her that she might not have been right to go to Communion at all. She was feeling so—dead—inside these days. Her praying wasn’t doing her any good. She spent a lot of time at Mass just daydreaming, and then when she came to she couldn’t remember what she had been daydreaming about. Surely there was something about all that that rendered her—unfit—for Communion ?
She dipped her fingers with holy water from the font and crossed herself. She came up the middle aisle and genuflected in front of the altar. She slid into a pew halfway down the line of them and knelt carefully on the padded kneeler. She had been in dozens of Catholic churches in half a dozen states, and every one of them had been close to identical: the pews, the kneelers, the fonts. It had startled her, the one time she was in France, when she realized that very old churches did not have kneelers, or even pews that were set in place like the ones she was used to at home. She had tried to imagine herself a medieval woman, going to church to stand and kneel, unsupported, on a stone floor, but the picture had not fit. She could no longer imagine herself anywhere, because the picture did not fit anywhere. At some point when she wasn’t paying attention, she had been set adrift in space. Now she was no one and nothing, weightless and loose, tossing in the wind without an anchor.
Mary sat back in her seat and turned her attention to the statue of the Virgin that stood watch over the huge bank of candles in the niche they called the Mary Chapel.
“All right,” she said, in her head, although she could hear the words as clearly as if she had spoken them. “You’re supposed to have all the answers. What do I do now?”
3
For Sister Harriet Garrity, the issues surrounding the execution of Anne Marie Hannaford were problematic. On the one hand, she was a woman, oppressed by definition, and, due to the fact that she was anything but conventionally attractive, one of the victims of the vicious lookism that pervaded every segment of American society. On the other hand, she was the daughter of one of the great hegemonic capitalist oppressors of the Reagan period, and from all the evidence she was not a rebel trapped in the patriarchal fold. Harriet didn’t think she had ever seen such a thorough case of false consciousness. Anne Marie hadn’t given a lot of interviews over the past ten years, but the ones she had given were monuments to hierarchical thinking. It was just so obvious that the woman thought herself better than just about everybody she met, and that she was convinced that the only reason she had been convicted in the first place was that the jury was full of lower-class Blacks and Latinos acting out a fantasy of revenge on their “betters.” She had actually used the word “betters” at one point in one interview, and the very sight of the word had made Harriet flinch. Still, there was principle involved here. Harriet knew the death penalty for what it was, judicial murder, the legal construct that allowed the ruling class to murder the troublesome members of the classes beneath them before those troublesome members could gain disciples and become agents of change. She didn’t think it would be possible for her to pretend that this particular judicial murder was not happening. No matter how much she might dislike Anne Marie Hannaford personally—from a distance, of course, since she had never met the woman face-to-face—Harriet couldn’t imagine herself staying home while the state of Pennsylvania pumped poison into the woman’s veins. Besides, it might all be a trick. Journalists had been gotten to before, and most of them didn’t even need to be gotten to. They bought the patriarchal line without ever thinking to question it. In real life, Anne Marie Hannaford might be nothing at all like the woman she seemed to be in interviews. She might be a sister under the skin, or someone who had struck a blow against repression and now just didn’t know how she was supposed to behave. Harriet knew from experience how hard it was for women to own their anger, or excuse themselves for acting in their own interests, and without permission.
The Action Alert from the Seamless Garment Network was lying across the green felt blotter in the middle of her desk, along with the Urgent Memo from the Gay and Lesbian Support Advisory, which had to do with the priest-pedophilia case, and especially with the men who had once been victims and in many ways were victims still. There wasn’t much she could do about the execution of Anne Marie Hannaford, but six of the men who had been victims of the priest pedophiles worshiped right across the street, and she had already talked to Father Burdock about what she might be able to do to help them out.