Prince of Peace (24 page)

Michael held the pastor's eyes for an instant longer than he should have, and that "insolence"—its implicit "No, that is not what you said, nor obviously what the cardinal said"—released the old man's fury. "Goddamnit! I will not have this at my own table! I will not have it! Do you understand?"

Michael thought it wasn't necessary to answer, but he was wrong.

"Well, do you?!" the priest shouted.

"Yes, Monsignor."

Nothing more was said.

Within five minutes the dreary meal was over and each of them had retired to his room.

Michael was shaken by the pastor's anger. He considered rolling the blueprints up and stashing the tube of them in the trash in the alley, but only for a moment.

"In for a penny," he said to himself, feeling something he hadn't allowed himself to feel in years. He picked up the phone and called the convent.

To his own surprise, when the phone was answered, he did not ask for Sister Rita, but for her assistant, Sister Anne Edward.

T
HE
next morning he found her in the schoolyard, a drab paved quadrangle that could have served as the exterior set for a prison film. She was supervising the ten o'clock recess, and the children were swarming like bees. Unlike the other nuns who had taken up their positions in the schoolyard and stood watching like sentries, Sister Anne Edward had joined in the games.

The game was kickball, and it was her turn to kick just as Michael arrived. She didn't see him. Otherwise she'd have been selfconscious when she hiked her skirts and charged the rolling ball, inadvertently displaying her old-fashioned ankle shoes, granny shoes, and a black-stockinged calf. She made contact with the ball—
thunk!
—and it sailed over the heads of the nearest children. But an eighth-grader in left field caught it in the air just as the nun rounded first base, and there was a resounding groan from her side.

Michael recognized her, of course, as the
Life
magazine cliche of the high-spirited young nun—"Good kick, Sister!" But her liveliness charmed him nonetheless and he was still applauding when she saw him. She laughed as she approached. "Were you watching?"

"Yes. You're good. The kid was lucky. That should have been a double."

"A double! That was a home run! I was robbed!" She grinned.

"Well..." Michael made a swatting gesture with the cardboard tube he was holding. "Try taking a crack with this."

"Are those the plans?" she asked, sobering.

"Yes."

"May I see them?"

"Out here?"

"I suppose not, but..." She looked around. "Wait a minute. I'll just tell Sister Laurice to cover for me." She ran across the schoolyard to another nun. She had to clutch the rosary beads hanging from her cincture. Returning to Michael she slowed to a walk because he was watching her, he realized, and so he looked away. Clothed in that particular habit—a black bonnet instead of a veil and wimple, a modestly waisted gown with flowing skirts instead of a scapular and multifolded robes—she looked more like a nineteenth-century New York Society widow than a medieval abbess, more like the Victorian Mrs. Seton, whose dress the habit memorialized, in fact, than like Eloise. Still, the effect of her clothing was the same. It made her another creature entirely, a mysterious otherworldly person who was unlike lay people or even priests. It made her a nun.

"We can go to the teachers' lunchroom off the cafeteria. Nobody will be there now. We can get some coffee."

"That would be great," he said, and they walked to the school side by side. Children waved and called her name, and some ran after her to clutch her hand for a moment before running back to their games. Each child she greeted or touched seemed special to her, and Michael sensed that each was.

She stood at the hot plate while the water heated, fussing with napkins and spooning Nescafe into cups. He listened to the faint swishing of her clothing, the rattling beads. Those subtle sounds were familiar to him from his boyhood, but at Good Shepherd School he had never watched nuns in the way he was watching her. Her body was lost in her habit and from behind not an inch of her skin was visible, not a wisp of hair. The vague outline of her slim figure, her efficient posture and carriage, suggested an unsensuous womanliness, but even that abstractly. Why then should her image have been the one to gnaw at the strange but necessary detachment he had cultivated over six years? But he knew why. She had given herself to God. She was a Bride of Christ. She was safe. He would never have allowed himself so blatantly to watch a real woman or think in this way about her. Sister Anne Edward was vivacious and pretty and smart, but what drew him to her finally—with a shock he realized that this was the first time he was in a room alone with a woman his own age since entering the seminary—was that she, like him, was, in one of the all-time fabulous phrases, a dedicated virgin. That meant not only that she too was trying to build a life around an inexplicable but compelling attraction to God, but also—and more importantly—that she was no threat. She was not automatically suspicious of him or condescending. He didn't have to prove to her that this choice was a worthy one. Outsiders would regard them as life's losers—who else became nuns and priests?—but they knew differently. Their vocation was a courageous rejection of the superficial and the sordid, a generous embrace of a life of service, the most ennobling calling there was. With anyone else of their own generation they'd have felt foolish and defensive. With each other, already, they felt better about themselves.

"Cream?"

"No, thanks. Nothing."

"No sugar?"

"No, thanks, Sister."

She served the coffee, then took a chair across the table from him. "You should call me Anne. I call you Michael."

"Okay." He smiled. "I never called a nun by her first name before."

"You still haven't."

"Anne."

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" She laughed and sipped her coffee. The sleeves of her habit fell back each time she raised the cup to her mouth, and he saw her forearms. She wore a man's watch. Her wrists were pale and he could see the faint blue lines of her veins. Other girls her age put perfume there.

"Like I said on the phone, it's bad news." Michael pushed his coffee aside and unrolled the Triborough plans. Anne Edward leaned forward. "Right there. See?" Michael planted his forefinger firmly. "The whole school is marked for demolition."

For a moment she said nothing. Then, exhaling dramatically, she leaned back in her chair. "And the monsignor says, 'Don't worry!'"

"Monsignor Ellis has his head in the trench, but that's because Moses is shooting live ammo. Obviously these plans are going through."

"No, they're not."

Michael shook his head. "Anne, if the cardinal has given the green light, and I'd say there's reason to think he has—"

"The cardinal doesn't understand the needs of this parish. If he did, he'd never permit the destruction of the school: The school is all there is at Holy Cross."

He said nothing.

"Don't you agree?"

Loyalty to his fellow clerics, whom she was criticizing—what did it require? He could say, No, there's also the hospital ministry, there are the daily Masses, there's the bingo. But those were rote exercises, and he already knew it. Only the school had life. He nodded, a small concession, but for him important. A break with clericalism. "Why else would I be here with you? I haven't shown these plans to the priests."

"They would say what you said, that it's all over. But do you know why they'd say that? Because the priests don't care about the school. They don't care about the children. Why should they fight for them? But if Robert Moses was coming through here taking away their liquor cabinet or their three days off a week or their free passes to fancy restaurants,
then
you'd hear a howl!
Then
they'd be on the cardinal's doorstep! And
then
Moses would think twice. But the priests are fatalistic now because all Moses wants to take away from the parish are its children."

When she sipped her coffee now her hands were trembling, and Michael saw that she herself wasn't nearly as bold as her speech was. When she looked at him across the rim of her cup, he saw that her eyes were full.

"I don't blame you for being angry," he said. She was right. It was an outrage. These nuns were right and the priests were not supporting them. Well, by God, he thought, I'll support them. Even if they're bound to lose. Now clerical loyalty
required
that Michael throw in with Anne Edward. Should he have let these nuns defend the parish alone? Should he have ignored what he saw in her eyes, what her speech revealed, what she was telling him? They needed the priests! They needed him! He said, "You love the children, that's obvious."

She put her cup down. "Of course we do. What sense does our life make if we don't love the children?"

Michael nodded. What a simple statement of the nun's vocation. Priests fall back on clerical privilege or on the transcendent function of administering sacraments or on the exercise of ecclesiastical power or on the superior social status they occupy in an immigrant community. Nuns fall back only on the people they serve, or on God. Michael was surprised by a wave of admiration he felt for her, and he wanted to express it. "Holy Cross is lucky it has you."

"Our order has been in this school for seventy years."

"And you?" Michael smiled.

"This is my second." She laughed and touched the corner of her eye. To purge a tear? "But I care about it as if I've always been here."

"Where were you before?"

"In the juniorate. In training. I came here right after I took vows. I felt so lucky to be assigned here. It's considered a privilege in our order because the people of this parish are so good."

"How'd you wind up in the convent, Anne?"

With a quick look she conveyed both that she did not take his right to ask such a question for granted, but also that she welcomed his interest. "The sisters in my high school; I thought, what fantastic women! They were so happy, their lives were full of meaning. I fell in love with them." She blushed but did not drop her eyes. "I fell in love with Christ." She laughed and added, self-mockingly, "Isn't that what girls in high school are supposed to do? Fall in love?" Despite her irony, however, Michael sensed the strength of her vocation. There was no equivalent for priests to the religious woman's fiercely romantic attraction to the mystical life. It was at root, of course, an attraction to the great dream figure of all time. Jesus was the ultimate Mister Goodbar.

"It's a great system, isn't it?" he said. "Now you're in a school impressing young girls with
your
happiness, with the meaning in
your
life."

"Yes," she said, but there was a hint of darkness in her that made him wonder, How happy?

She went on, "Maybe that's why the school is important to me. Schools are where we sisters do our work. Schools are where we sisters come from. We take care of our schools because they take care of us."

Michael nodded. He looked around at the corners of the room and suddenly realized that teaching nuns had been eating lunches in there for decades. Robert Moses was assaulting the ghosts of all those nuns too. A long line of fantastic women! Yes, Michael looked at her and thought that.

Perhaps she sensed these feelings in him because she continued to blush. When she didn't speak, the silence loomed between them. She picked her cup and saucer up and stood, but because her hand shook the cup rattled and she had to quiet it with her other hand. This was not like her, he sensed. She was ordinarily more selfpossessed. Was he the cause of this tension? he wondered. Or was it only Robert Moses? She came to his side of the table and took his cup. She smelled of soap.

"Thanks," he said.

While she rinsed the cups and left them to drain, he rolled up the blueprints and put them into the tube.

She dried her hands while crossing to him, then dropped the towel on the table and reached for the cardboard tube just as he did. They picked it up together, each with a hand. The tube joined them. Their eyes met.

"I was going to take it," she said. "I have to show Rita."

"I have to get it back to the commissioner's office." Surely she understood that. "We can't keep it."

"But we need these plans, Michael. They prove our point. If we're going to rally the parish, they have to know what we're up against. They think it's just a widened street."

Michael felt sick suddenly. What was she asking him to do? What would the commissioner say if he didn't return the plans? What would the monsignor say if he found out? Or, good God, the cardinal!

He felt the pressure from her hand on the tube. She was pulling it toward herself. It was as if she was pulling him. They were physically close and no doubt since they were young and ripe, there was an erotic aspect to the charged field between them—they held each other's gaze after all for a long time—but it was not only that or even primarily. They were making a compact with each other, an alliance. And Michael didn't realize that that was what they'd done until, despite his inhibition, he let go of the tube, to let her take it.

 

Monsignor Ellis had assumed it would be the usual May procession from the schoolyard to the church front where the pale statue of Mary in its small grotto would be garlanded with roses as it had been every year since he put it there in memory of his mother. He hadn't presided himself in some years, but that hadn't mattered. Now it made him seem like a fool that he wasn't there, as if he didn't know what was what in his own parish. The first phone call was from a
New York Times
reporter, and the second was from the chancery.

An hour and a half after the end of the regular school day and well after such devotions were usually held, all seven hundred and fifty Holy Cross children filed down Forty-third Street, nuns herding them like collies. That block was little traveled for Manhattan, and as they always did when the pastor or the principal requested it, the police had closed the street. The girls were wearing their Communion and Confirmation dresses, and certain of them were carrying bouquets. The boys were wearing white shirts and blue ties, and their shoes were polished. As they marched along they sang, "O Mary, we crown thee with flowers today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May."