"It's no mystery why the other man reclaimed her. You weren't ready to commit to any woman.
And, in her heart of hearts, she knew it. Better to cast her fortune with an invisible man than an uncertain one."
"You think it was that calculated?" Matt said. "I don't. I think the other guy did what he did before: swept her off her feet. He's a pretty charismatic guy, a performer by profession."
"It's him. Or it's her. But it isn't you, is it, Matt? You're just the innocent bystander." Nick again.
Matt had long since set the Styrofoam cup with its silt of black on the bottom on the floor.
He understood the dynamics of group therapy; he understood they were giving him a probably needed crash course in tough love. But it hurt, and it wouldn't have unless a good part of it was the truth.
"I've always avoided close relationships with women." he realized. "My mother and I grew distant because we shared a secret we couldn't admit to anyone else, and then we finally couldn't admit it to each other. Girls at school . . . well, I had my vocation to keep me warm--
and aloof. I really didn't know how to be a good Catholic and not have children who would then have to endure what was done to me. Kids pick up the patterns they most hate, they most suffer from, because that's what growing up wrong does to you. So . . . the priesthood was the only option. I know that now. So did the diocese that gave me my laicization. It certainly wasn't for my being a priest who couldn't live without women. That was the last thing I wanted to confront."
"With your looks--" Jerry sounded puzzled.
"With my looks, they were always coming around. Still are. Only now I don't see that as quite the threat."
"Now it's a perk?" Norbert asked archly.
Matt laughed. "Not quite that, either. Now it's a recognizable risk."
"And you were ready to take a bigger risk with one particular woman, only you were too late." Jerry sounded sorry for him.
Matt nodded. "That's why I'm here, I think. Realizing that I did something to ruin my own chances. Except, it was not doing something. And you say we're all like that? It's not just me."
"No way, brother! We are so arrogant about women," Nick said genially. "We'd have to be to choose to live without them in any significant way, except for of course, our sainted mothers and the Virgin Mary." His arms lifted to indicate the cradling arms of the church around them: Maternity of Mary, after all.
"Think about it from a different perspective, Matt. If it's such a big decision to decide to consort with one, what does that make her?"
"A . . . temptress. A demoness." Matt spoke slowly, thinking not of Temple, but of Kitty O'Connor. Something he was saying gave him a glimmer into the demon that drove her hostility, but he couldn't quite name it. "And the relationship has to be all my way.
"If you need to play it by strict Catholic theology." Jerry.
Matt looked up. "How many of you abide by church teachings still?"
They looked at each other.
Damien closed his eyes. "I don't know why l come here. I can answer that question 'yes,' but l can't answer for my brother priests. The priesthood has fallen so far."
The silence was long, like at a family dinner table where there are deep political divisions and everyone finally learns to hold his tongue so that it doesn't slash into someone else.
Finally, Nick spoke. "Even the ex-priesthood, Damien, or especially the ex-priesthood?" He smiled at Matt as if to apologize for the tension in the bare little room. "You see, Matt, except for our father confessor, Damien, who has no trouble with the rules, we'd have to guess that you are the one-most-likely-to. You and Jerry, there, who lucked out by marrying an ex-nun.
They' could explore all their angst, and the mutual insult never seemed un- natural."
"It is not insulting to demand moral standards in another person!" Damien dug into his suit coat pocket until he pulled out the pacifying pipe again.
"Demand?" Jerry asked.
"If you don't demand, what do you get? A situation ethics cafeteria."
"I don't know why you come," Norbert said suddenly, his genial air of mock dissent turning suddenly serious and weary. "We're here precisely because we discovered that spiritual values are not tidily painted in black and white, or in bad and good, or in male or female, for that matter."
"You should never have been ordained," Damien said.
"But l was. And who's to say l was not a better priest than any one of you, my sexual orientation notwithstanding?"
"It's not a contest," Nick said, as wearily.
"It is to close-minded people like Damien," Norbert shot back before to challenge the older man again. "I don't get why you come to these meetings. To go away and look down upon us stumbling human beings?"
"Am l close-minded, or are you simply trying to justify your own perversity?"
Matt stirred restlessly, wondering if he'd have to act as literal referee. The two men seemed ready to hurl themselves into physical as well as philosophical combat.
"Don't scare our newbie," Nick put in softly. "This group wouldn't be useful if we didn't differ. And why do you come, Damien? We're a disgraceful bunch of failed sinners, by your lights."
"And why didn't you stay in?" Norbert jabbed. "Or wasn't everything so perfect for you, either?"
Damien clutched the pipe in his hand, his thumb tamping down on the unlit tobacco as if to crush it.
"Let's get a last cup of java," Nick suggested, rising, and then stretching as disingenuously as a kid.
The homely gesture disarmed the rising tensions. Everybody else stood, bent the kinks out of their backs.
Everyone else but Damien and Norbert, who sat still and sullen in their chairs, like kids robbed of a neighborhood brawl.
Matt joined the dispersing majority that was acting so unconcerned about the ugly fissure of antagonism in their midst. He was struck by the thought that each of the two men represented the most liberal and conservative faction, the literal past and possible future, of the church. But which was which? And which man's values could he better coexist with?
Maybe the answer was both, or neither.
Correct moral values. They didn't advertise, did they?
Chapter 15
Break-in
A simultaneous scratching at one of the French doors leading to the patio and at the front door opposite found Temple clutching her TV remote control like a weapon. Eight o'clock on a Saturday evening. Who would come calling so stealthily?
She'd just muted the sound during a commercial, or she wouldn't have heard either modest noise. Was this a concerted social call, or what?
While she debated which unknown to confront first, the scratchers, again acting in eerie concert, decided to bypass her entirely.
The locked front dour cracked open like a Christmas walnut, while, simultaneously, the patio door split to admit a slim-jim shadow of night.
Home invasion! Temple thought, wondering what Asian gang she had antagonized lately.
But through both her invaders wore ninja-black and moved on soundless feet, neither was remotely Asian, or gang-like, since they came forward alone.
Temple stood, torn between two primal urges: the succulently steaming take-out pizza box advancing from the front door in Max Kinsella's custody . . . or the disturbingly limp object dangling from Midnight Louie's mouth.
Apparently both her beaux had resolved to treat her to a surprise snack.
"Smells terrific," she told Max. "Put in on the kitchen counter.
I'll be right there. And Louie--" She turned to the cat. "Put that down tight where you stand, it does not smell delicious."