by Jane Haddam
Today, Father Stephen Monaghan had taken the noon Mass at St. Bridget’s in Eddingsberg. Eddingsberg was farther than he usually traveled to say Mass and out of his particular orbit. He’d gone there because the Bishop had asked him to and he always did what the Bishop wanted. He’d had high hopes for the afternoon. After all, Eddingsberg was rust-belt territory. He wouldn’t be caught in a clutch of yuppies up there. But he’d underestimated the reach of what he was beginning to think of as the “pernicious doctrine.” It must be something they were advocating on television. All he had said—in memory of the fact that his own mother had died on Mother’s Day—was that remembering the finitude of life was a good way to keep perspective on the things of this world. That was it. You want a pair of sixty-dollar Reeboks. You have forty-nine, ninety-five. You can walk around convinced your life is terrible, or remember that your life is finite and realize that Reeboks aren’t that important after all. That was a little muddled, but not so muddled it was difficult to understand. A four-year-old could have understood it. He’d looked out over the densely packed pews, at the blue ribbons tied into bows on each of the pews’ ends, over the heads of the women in their best. Sunday hats and the children wiggling and straining against the starch in their clothes. He’d delivered a sermon that was in no way substantially different from the second one he’d ever preached. He’d caused what amounted to a brush fire of indignation. Maybe he’d been a little off in his timing. Maybe this wasn’t the kind of sermon good hardworking people wanted to hear on Mother’s Day. Maybe he should have said some warm fuzzy things about the Motherhood of Mary and let it go at that. He didn’t know. What he did know was that when he was done and standing on the church steps, shaking hands with the people on their way out, a ferociously well-maintained woman in her early thirties had marched up to him, put her hands on her hips and announced: “If you learned to take better care of yourself, you wouldn’t have to think about death all the time. You could save your own life!”
Father Stephen Monaghan was himself waiting for the Rapture. He wanted to see the Heavens open up and Christ descending on a cloud. Or however it was done. The Rapture was mostly an evangelical Protestant concept, now seeping into North American Catholicism through various forms of folk religion. He wasn’t sure he had it straight.
He was sure he wasn’t ready for an afternoon of five thousand nuns, either, but he figured he didn’t have a choice. He had told Reverend Mother General at the Sisters’ Mass this morning that he, would drop in as soon as he got back from Eddingsberg, and he would have to drop in. In the old days, people didn’t question priests who turned down invitations or took them up when they hadn’t actually been offered. Priests could come and go as they pleased as long as they didn’t do anything to offend the Bishop. Now there were a dozen committees to decide every question and at least one person in every group—usually female, usually in her forties, usually with a degree in pastoral counseling or contemporary liturgies from one of the lesser Catholic colleges—ready to jump to her feet at the slightest provocation and start delivering lectures on the necessity of “accountability.” “I am accountable only to God,” St. Thomas More had said. Father Stephen Monaghan often wished he had the courage to say the same. Out loud.
It was quarter to two in the afternoon, and there were nuns everywhere, on the walks, in the parking lots, on the steps of buildings. Pulling onto campus from the narrow town road that passed it, Stephen was reminded of the plagues of locusts that showed up at least once in every 1930s picture about agriculture in China or farmers in the frontier Midwest. Of course, nuns were nothing at all like locusts, of course not, but there they were, in those black veils, covering the ground like a living blanket. It wasn’t that bad, but it was close. It was very close. And parties being what they were, Father Stephen was sure that they were spreading.
He drove away from the main hub of the party to St. Patrick’s Hall, which housed the religion department where he had an office. He parked in the back and let himself in through the basement door. He didn’t think it would do any harm for him to sit in his office for a moment or two, just to catch his breath. He would go over and shake a few million hands in a moment or two.
His office was an eight-by-ten cubicle on the first floor, facing a wall of tree trunks that made viewing any part of the campus impossible. He let himself in, looked over the books he had left on his desk—Hymns for the Modern Catholic Congregation; Harrigan’s Homily Notes for the Liturgical Year—and sat down in his desk chair. He took his pipe out of the center drawer of his desk and lit up carefully. He always had trouble with his pipe. It wouldn’t light. It wouldn’t stay lit. The base of the stem got all clogged up and wouldn’t let any air through. He’d been smoking this pipe since his ordination, and he still hadn’t got the hang of it.
He took a couple of deep drags, decided he was getting a decent stream of smoke with minimal aggravation for once, and wondered if he should wander down the hall to see if anyone had left yesterday’s paper out. Father Stephen Monaghan almost never got to the newspaper on the day it was printed, and sometimes didn’t get to the paper at all. The Berlin Wall had been lying in pieces on the ground for two weeks before he’d heard of it.
He had just about decided he ought to go over to St. Teresa’s House and make his manners and get something to eat—Father Stephen was thin mostly because he was always forgetting to eat; when he remembered to eat he ate like a horse—when he heard a noise out in the hall. It was an unself-conscious, blundering m noise, nothing to be worried about, but it was strange. Although St. Elizabeth’s was like any other college these days, in that it employed more workaholics than a sane person could stand to be in the same place with for longer than fifteen minutes, on a Sunday like this at the start of a vacation week, those workaholics were likely to be straining themselves to death in the Marabar Caves or the British Museum. Father Stephen wasn’t sure what professors of religion did except lose their faith and talk forever about the “symbolic significance of the crucifixion.” In fact, Father Stephen admitted to himself, he wasn’t sure about much of anything at all. He wasn’t a sure kind of man. The only thing he’d ever been willing to bet his life on was the one thing he had bet his life on. And that was that Christ had risen on the third day.
He went out in the hall, looked around, heard more blundering, and headed for the stairwell. This was a beautiful building outside, made of stone and gracefully proportioned. Inside, it had been constructed like those ancient parochial schools where Father Stephen had spent his childhood. High ceilings. Heavy doors. Wide tall windows that could only be opened with the help of a long thin pole. Standing in the doorway to his office, Father Stephen could see that the fire door to the stairs at the far end of this hall had been left propped open with a rubber door stopper. Father Stephen assumed that a nun had done it before the weekend sometime, because only the nuns used rubber door stoppers. Everybody else used whatever was handy, like wads of paper and stray books. The sound he was hearing was somebody thrashing around in the stairwell on the basement level, probably with no idea of where he was supposed to go. Or she, Father Stephen told himself. With all the nuns around, it was probably she. He went to the fire door and called down, “Who is it? Can I help you?”
“Oh, thank Christ,” a man’s voice said. “Yes, you can help me. You can get me out of here.”
“Just come up the stairs,” Father Stephen said, ashamed to be feeling so relieved that the person he was talking to was a man. “How did you get in?”
“There was a door down here that was open, you know, with a book keeping it open, but when I came in I kicked the book out and locked myself in. I mean, for Christ’s sake. Haven’t you people ever heard of safety locks?”
Father Stephen didn’t even know if safety locks had been invented when this building was built. He did know it took a key to get in or out of the building once the locks were set. That was true of every building on this campus. He stepped back and held the door he was standi
ng next to wide open, just to seem welcoming.
“You just come on up,” he said, “I can let you out the front door with my key. I hope you haven’t been put to too much trouble. Was there something you needed I could get for you?”
“Not exactly.” The man emerged in the stairwell, a big young man in overalls creased with what Father Stephen’s mother would have called “clean dirt.” He’s been gardening, Father Stephen thought to himself, and in a moment the truth of that observation was confirmed. The young man was carrying a mud-caked trowel in his left hand, swinging it along as if he didn’t even know it was there.
“Hi,” he said, looking Father Stephen over with less curiosity than relief. “You don’t know how glad I was to hear a guy’s voice. I mean, you don’t know. I’ve been up to my neck in them all week.”
“Nuns,” Father Stephen said solemnly.
“You got it. I’m Frank Moretti. I do groundswork. You know. With the grass. And the gardens.”
“You’re the groundskeeper?”
“Hell no,” Frank said. “The groundskeeper is Ally MacBurn—Aloyishus, I think. He’s sixty-two and about six hundred pounds and he’s been here forever. No, I just do work. I plant things.”
“Flowers,” Father Stephen said helpfully.
“Flowers and grass and bushes. They’ve got this topiary out in front of the church. Gumdrop hedges. No big deal. I trim that.” Frank had reached the top of the stairs. He walked onto the first-floor hall and looked around, no more curious than he had been about Father Stephen. Father Stephen got the impression that Frank Moretti had seen his share of schools and was glad to be quit of them.
“So,” Father Stephen said. “What can I help you with? Maybe I can at least direct you to the proper person to be helped by.”
“Who’ll probably be a nun.” Frank Moretti sighed.
“Probably.” Father Stephen sighed back.
“Well, I suppose it can’t be helped,” Frank Moretti said. “It’s Sunday, which you probably know, being a priest and all.”
“Oh, I know,” Father Stephen said.
“Right,” Frank Moretti said. “So what I do on Sundays, usually, is I work on the grass. Now the nuns don’t like that much, what with Sunday supposed to be a day of rest and whatnot, but the grass is my responsibility and Sunday’s really the only day it makes any sense to do it I mean, it’s the only day there aren’t six million people walking on it, because you know what these college girls are like. They go anywhere. Forget the signs.”
“Mmm,” Father Stephen said.
“So I come in and I do the grass, I fertilize, I mix plant food. I do all of it from the back garden beyond the walled garden behind St. Teresa’s House to over here and then out again up to the lawns behind the Administration Building. Big area. Of course, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get into that space behind St. Teresa’s House today.”
“Of course,” Father Stephen agreed.
“If you ask me, a nuns’ convention is a damn silly idea. Excuse my language. But you know what I mean. Somebody said there were more than five thousand nuns over there.”
“Five thousand two hundred and change.”
“Yeah. And they’re multiplying. It’s a miracle. Forget I said that. The thing is, I knew I was going to have trouble this week, so I packed up my things in a big knapsack last Friday, see, and I put the knapsack on the bench in the gardening shed—”
“Where’s the gardening shed?”
“Well, there are six or seven gardening sheds, Father, but the one we use for this part of the campus is right there next to St. Teresa’s House on the side like where there’s this little alley. So I put all my things in this knapsack and I left the knapsack on the bench and then when I came in today I got the knapsack off the bench and I came over here to work. You follow so far?”
“Perfectly,” Father Stephen said.
“Good,” Frank Moretti said, “because so do I, because what comes next is first-rate stupid, and I tell you it’s because we’ve got all those nuns around. It’s not a good idea. All those nuns. It’s enough to give a man the creeps.”
“Shades of second grade,” Father Stephen said.
“Right,” Frank Moretti said, “except in second grade we didn’t steal plant food, because there’s no damn reason for anyone to steal plant food, I mean if you want plant food all you have to do is go over to the main gardening shed and get some, which is a walk of all of about a quarter of a mile, over to the Physical Sciences Building. Or you could go to the store and get it for practically no money at all. And why would you steal it? Because your plant was dying?”
“Somebody stole your plant food,” Father Stephen said thoughtfully.
“I didn’t discover it until I got over here,” Frank Moretti said. “In fact, I didn’t discover it until about half an hour ago, which was when I came in here looking for someone to help out, although what anybody’s supposed to do about this is beyond me. I mean it. I didn’t look in the knapsack before I brought it over here, you see. And I didn’t notice about the plant food until half an hour ago because I didn’t need the plant food until about half an hour ago. You see what I mean.”
“Are you sure somebody stole it? Maybe you forgot to put it in on Friday.”
“They didn’t steal all of it,” Frank said patiently. “They ripped the bag open and took a bunch out I mean, I figure they took a bunch out I can’t really tell. But you see what I’m saying here. I got a new bag Friday. I remember doing it And I know I didn’t open it myself and none of the other gardeners did either because of the way it was torn. It was ripped right down the side. We’d have used our jack knives and opened it along the top. Where the ‘Open Here’ sign is.”
“Right,” Father Stephen said. Then he looked away and frowned. It was so hard to know what this man wanted of him. Father Stephen thought it might be something on the order of “male affirmation” or whatever you called it these days when two men got together and commiserated with each other about women. Then he had an uncomfortable thought. “Frank,” he said, “is this stuff that’s missing dangerous?”
“What do you mean, dangerous?”
“Well, could someone die from it? Or get very sick? Is it poison?”
Frank looked confused. “I don’t think so, Father. We have it all over ourselves all the time and never think anything of it, so it couldn’t be too toxic. It’s this new organic stuff. Sister Wilhelmina in the biology department switched us to it last year. Said it didn’t make any sense to poison the environment just to get greener grass. Saw her point. The old stuff used to be poisonous, though. Bunch of chemicals in it.”
“Hmm,” Father Stephen said.
“What this stuff would do anybody got ahold of it not paying attention,” Frank said, “is it would turn them green. I mean green the color. It’s got some kind of natural stain in it and it comes right off on everything. Skin. Clothing. Mix it with water and it’s worse. It’s like instant dye. Gross.”
“Ah,” Father Stephen said.
“So the thing is,” Frank Moretti said, “I don’t want to make a big fuss about it or anything, cause I know how crazy things are all over this place, you know, but what I want to do is, I want to tell whoever I’m supposed to that if any of those nuns want plant food they should come ask us. Instead of ripping open bags and getting it on their own, if you see what I mean. I mean, that kind of thing only causes a lot of trouble.”
“Right,” Father Stephen said.
“Only now I’ve told you,” Frank Moretti said, “and you can tell whichever nun it is that’s supposed to know.”
Finally, Father Stephen Monaghan knew what Frank Moretti wanted of him.
He wanted to be protected from the nuns.
2
SISTER DOMENICA ANNE HAD entered the Order of the Sisters of Divine Grace at the age of seventeen, right out of high school, and she fully expected to be there until the day she died. She liked being a nun and she liked most of the nuns she me
t. She hadn’t minded the routine prior to Vatican II and she didn’t mind the relaxation of that routine now. Stuck on Amtrak or an airplane or some other long trip among strangers, she almost always sought out the other religious women—and there were a surprising number of them on the move these days; since most of them didn’t wear habits you simply had to know what to look for—and had a good time discussing the differences in customs among the many orders old, new, flourishing, and otherwise. Domenica Anne would not have believed that she could ever get tired of nuns. She would have been wrong. For almost a week now, the campus of St. Elizabeth’s College had been filling with nuns. They had been trickling in like water filling a tide pool. They had become so numerous they had begun to appear as if they were cloning themselves. They were in kitchens and dining rooms, classrooms and living rooms, rectories and convents. They covered lawns and pews. They occupied library carrels and booths at the Bright Day Fountain Shoppe. Some of them even drank beer and ate pizza with tapeplayers blasting out vintage Beach Boys right on the convent’s front steps. It was lunacy.
That Domenica Anne was herself going loony had become thoroughly clear immediately after Mass this morning, when she had filed out into the air of the seven o’clock spring morning along with seven hundred other nuns and watched seven hundred more file in. At that point the weather had been considered iffy, so they had had stacked Masses instead of one big Mass on the field behind St. Teresa’s House. The weather had been considered iffy all week. Domenica Anne had been filing in and out and out and in with seven or eight hundred other nuns for everything she could think of, sometimes—this was an exaggeration, but not much of an exaggeration—even for a chance at the bathroom. Add to that the fact that she was really not ready to make nice-nice to Mother Mary Bellarmine, and by eight o’clock she’d known that she really couldn’t go to this party. Maybe she could come down later, when the receiving line had broken up and everybody was a little addled by too much food. In fact, she probably would, because the food at the party was going to be the only food available for most of the day. In the meantime, however, she thought she would be much more comfortable surrounded by her papers in her own workroom. She might even be able to get something done.