“And it will center on me, because I’ll still be delivering the news. Which means I won’t be delivering the news. I refuse to.”
“You’re just going to ignore the note?”
“I’m going to write her one back saying I can’t possibly make such an announcement unless I’ve been told to make it by Father Healy, and that she should talk to Father Healy about it instead of me. And I’m not going to budge. Not at all. I think that’s the only thing I can possibly do.”
Peter Rose got up. “I think I’m going to make myself some tea. Or some coffee. Do we have coffee I don’t have to use the percolator for?”
“We have those coffee-bag things, in the pantry cupboard.”
“Oh, right. I wish you didn’t sound so—I don’t know. Angry, I suppose. But it’s more than angry.”
Scholastica drummed her fingers on the table. Then she picked up Harriet’s note again and turned it over in her hand. “I hate these things,” she said finally. “I hate the petty infighting, and the manipulations and the rhetoric that gets thrown around like garbage as soon as the situation heats up. Liberal Church. Conservative Church. Whatever happened to the Church speaking in one voice?”
“The birth-control encyclical.”
“Marvelous. I entered the convent at the age of eighteen, and I still have to think about birth control.”
Scholastica got up and wandered across the room, to the big windows at the back that looked out over the courtyard toward the church. It was already lit up in there, but then it would be. Father Healy believed in keeping the church open twenty-four hours a day, in case somebody suddenly felt a need for conversion while walking down the street at two o‘clock in the morning. What they really got, this time of year, was homeless people looking to get in out of the cold. Some of them genuflected when they first came in. Some of them just found an empty pew at the back and stretched out to sleep right away. Most of them were either so mentally ill or so alcoholic that they couldn’t really follow a coherent line of thought. When seven o’clock Mass came around, some of them got up and tried to follow it, and some of them came to the front for Communion . When Mass was over, all of them came downstairs to the coffee hour that Father Healy adamantly refused to alter or cancel. There were six or seven different kinds of muffins, and coffee cake, and orange juice, and coffee and tea. None of the regular parishioners came, except for the three older women who set up the buffet. There were things Scholastica did not like about Father Robert Healy. He was young and stiff and far too rigid in his theology, and he tended to see things as issues that she thought ought to be decided on the basis of emotion. Still, in this one thing, she could not have imagined him any better than he was.
Over in the church, somebody seemed to be moving back and forth in front of the Stations of the Cross—not praying them, just moving back and forth in front of them. Scholastica went back to the kitchen table and sat down.
“Well,” she said.
“It will be all right,” Peter Rose said. “It’s just Harriet. Everybody knows Harriet. Even the archbishop is fed up with Harriet.”
“Maybe I just can’t understand why a woman like that wants to be a nun. Oh, never mind. I think I’ll go get some work done before we pray the Office. I still think of it as Matins, can you believe that? I still think of all the hours by their old names, but it doesn’t work, because they got rid of one of them.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,” Peter Rose said.
Scholastica drained the last of her tea—she couldn’t remember drinking it at all, but she must have—and brought her mug to the sink to rinse it out. When she was in the novitiate, her postulant mistress had been relentless in stressing the importance of doing “small work” for oneself whenever it was possible: washing out a cup instead of leaving it in the sink; wiping off the base of a statue when you noticed it was dusty; putting away your cloak as soon as you came in from outside.
“If everybody all over the world did that kind of thing all the time,” Sister Carmelita had said, “the world would be a much better place, and hundreds of people who slave away at menial tasks would be free to get an education and better themselves.”
Had she ever really been young enough for that to have made perfect sense?
“Sister?” Peter Rose said.
“Don’t mind me,” Scholastica said. “I’m just drifting off. Thinking of my postulant mistress. Who did you have for a postulant mistress?”