True Believers(8)
“Mary Alice.”
“Oh, all right then. The soul of common sense. Oh, you’re on the house phone today, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Good. I’m expecting a phone call from a woman named Bennis Hannaford. If it comes in, could you hunt me down at school instead of just taking a message? I’ve been in Philadelphia for two weeks, and we haven’t caught up with each other yet. I’m rather anxious to see her.”
“All right. As long as you’re all right yourself, right now. You’re sure you’re not still, I don’t know, ready to breathe fire?”
“I’m fine.”
She was, too. She put the mug and the spoon in the dish rack. She wiped her hands on the dish towel that was kept on a little rack next to the sink. Then she went back to the table and got Sister Harriet’s note.
“Idiot,” she said, folding it up and putting it into her pocket. She was suddenly very glad that they had these ready-made habits now, instead of the old ones. In the old ones, there had been a slit in the robe where the pocket was supposed to be, and then there had been a separate pocket that they’d had to pin on with straight pins. The pockets were always coming loose and falling down. The pins were always digging into the tops of everyone’s legs.
I’m too tired to be let loose without a leash, Scholastica thought, then gave a little nod to Peter Rose and went out of the kitchen into the back hall. She had a lot of work to do today, Sister Harriet or no Sister Harriet. She had a school to run, and a CCD program to coordinate, and on top of everything else, it was Lent. She rubbed the palm of her hand against the fifteen-decade rosary that hung from her belt.
When she got to the vestibule, she could see out the windows by the side of the door, across the street to St. Stephen’s. It was lit up, which it wasn’t very often at night, and for a moment Scholastica felt confused. Then she remembered: there was going to be a funeral there today. That young man, Scott Boardman, whom she had seen a hundred times hanging around the wrought-iron gates, zoned out of his mind—Scott Boardman had finally taken a dose of cocaine strong enough to kill him. Scholastica made the sign of the cross and a quick prayer for the repose of a soul, then found herself hoping that those nuts from down the street wouldn’t be here today with their signs.
“Idiots,” she said, out loud. When she was in the novitiate, it would have been called “speaking without necessity during the grand silence,” and she would have had to proclaim herself for it when it became her turn to speak in Chapter of Faults. There were some things Scholastica didn’t miss from the old days at all.
She looked back at St. Stephen’s, said another prayer for Scott Boardman, and hurried out across the convent’s front parlor toward the side door that led to the side door of the school. If she really put her mind to it, she could get the entire seating plan for the First Confession breakfast worked out and down on paper before she had to come back to the convent at six and pray the Office.
4
The Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia had started his religious life in the Order of Discalced Carmelites, and now, fifty years later, he found he was a Carmelite still. It wasn’t the asceticism that convinced him that he hadn’t changed, much, from the days when he had walked the grounds of the monastery at Avery Point, with its low brownstone buildings and its chapel built as a perfect replica of the one St. Teresa had had for her nuns in Avila. The Cardinal Archbishop had always been something of an ascetic, even as a child. He liked order. He like quiet, too. It had seemed to him better to have a life that was cleared of inessentials, because in such a life it would be so much harder to be confused. Maybe the problem was that, as a small child, he had been confused too often. As far as he could tell, the only thing his father had done that he was supposed to do was to marry his mother. It hadn’t lasted long. His mother had been highly religious and, he thought now, highly insane. She was one of those women who went to Mass daily, and whose life at home was a vortex of competing superstitions. They had had to kiss bread before they threw it out, to offer up the most minor bruises and cuts, to bless themselves from the fonts of holy water screwed into the frames of every door in the house, even the door in the bathroom. People called his mother a good Catholic woman, but the Cardinal Archbishop had known better, even at the age of five. He had known that there was something deeply evil about her, and that this evil was dangerous not only to him, but to the very idea of the Christian Church. By the time he was fourteen, he could see how most people brought up the way he was would turn against religion. It was almost wrong not to turn against something that crushed your life the way his mother’s version of religion was crushing his, hemming in every move, stifling every thought, turning his nights into restless struggles with demons who refused to name themselves. He had known, then, that his only way out was to find a Catholic boarding school to take him. He had found one in the school connected to Avery Point. It had been a perfect match. There was nothing at all insane about the Carmelites. They lived with little and asked for less. Their schedules were as streamlined as monoliths. In the chapel in the mornings, chanting the Office in the cadenced Latin that had been in use everywhere then, with the light coming in through the east-wall windows in straight undecorated slants, the world had finally straightened itself out, and made itself right, and been clear. There were people who said of him that he had no emotions at all, and that his faith was a sham he put on to justify the power he had accrued to himself by the careful application of his ambition to the hierarchy of the Church. This was so far from true, he often found it funny. The only thing that bothered him was that so many people assumed he had no faith. Why was it that so many people were so very sure that only stupid people could believe? His faith had come in on the light from the east window in the chapel at Avery Point. That was God, pure and simple, offered up to anyone who would have Him. Maybe the truth was that he believed in God but not in the elaborate rituals of the Church, even though he went to great pains to ensure that those rituals were observed. Maybe it wasn’t so odd that his mother had gone mad, when life outside a monastery was such a tangled heap of mess.