Cross Dressing (14 page)

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. But I need help here. Father Michael showed up a couple of days ago, moved his mother in, then disappeared. I thought you might know where he is.”

“I don’t know,” Monsignor Matthews said. “But I’ll ask around.”

“Thanks, Matty.” Her voice softened. “Would you like
your reward in this life or the next?” Sister Peg could almost hear him blush over the phone.

“Now, Sister, let’s not go there,” he said. “I’m hoping you’ll honor our agreement.”

“Relax,” she said. “It’s not in my best interest to cause trouble.” Sister Peg popped a piece of macaroni into her mouth. “You sound a little tense. How’re things going at your end?”

“I’m doing what I can,” he said. “But I’m hearing rumors. Someone’s called a meeting. Word is the higher-ups are dissatisfied with the diminishing diocesan assessments that have been flowing their way the past three quarters.” Monsignor Matthews paused and swallowed hard. “If it’s true, it could mean cutbacks.”

That was the last thing Sister Peg wanted to hear. Things were hard enough as it was. Cutbacks would do her in. She knew Monsignor Matthews was on her side, but every now and then he got nervous and needed a prod. Sometimes he needed only a nudge. Occasionally he required a threat. Fortunately she knew his weak spot.

Monsignor Matthews was one of the youngest Monsignors in California history. He was Ivy League educated but surprisingly pleasant. He was also a subversive of sorts. He had an undergraduate degree in business, with a minor in accounting. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School, suffered his curacy, then began a quick rise through the ranks. He landed a parish in record time, did some good deeds, and was now working his way through the labyrinthine Catholic hierarchy. The Monsignor felt the Church was doing far less good than it was capable of and he felt working from the inside was the best way to use the Church’s resources to help those in need. Unfortunately, the resources at his end of the Catholic food chain seemed to be drying up.

“I can’t accept any cutbacks,” Sister Peg said. “If I have to, I’ll—”

“What do you want from me?” He sounded far more worried than most Monsignors when threatened by a nun. “I can’t do a loaves-and-fishes thing with money. There’s only so much.”

Sister Peg wasn’t in the mood for this. “Now, you know how much I care about you, Matty, but this is not going to be
my
problem,” she said. “You short me so much as a dime, the problem is going to be yours.”

M
r Butch Harnett saw himself as a man of faith. He didn’t attend church, but he remembered a lot of what he had learned in Sunday school when he was young. He always liked Romans the best. Although he completely misunderstood Paul’s epistle about achieving salvation through faith, he liked many of its powerful verses. It seemed to Butch irrefutable that the wages of sin was death, or at least that’s the way it ought to be.

Butch was six feet tall and thicker than average. He had a rough complexion and an oval head, shaved and shined. He looked like Mr. Clean without the earring or the wink. He wore simple dark suits and a flat expression. He didn’t care for shows of emotion. He found such things ungodly and inefficient. Butch had a job to do, and emotions simply clouded the picture.

He was on an elevator heading to the top floor of the Mutual of California Insurance Corporation headquarters. He looked displeased as he flipped through the file folder in his hands. The elevator doors opened and he walked silently down the carpeted hallway, not looking until he reached the double doors at the end of the hall. He knocked.

“Come,” came the reply. Harnett’s boss was hunched over his desk trying to ferret out a pattern of fraud from a series of claims on his desk. He looked up at his ace investigator. “Whatcha got?” he asked.

Butch sniffed at the file he was holding. “This one stinks,” he said.

“To the tune of what?”

“Three hundred forty large.”

“Anybody we know?”

Butch shook his head. “Looks like a rookie,” he said. “One Dan Steele, deceased.”

“Deceased, huh?” Harnett’s boss loved the fact that Butch didn’t believe anything until he put his hand in the wound, so to speak. “Whaddya think?”

“I think all men are sinners in God’s eyes,” Butch said.

D
AN DIDN’T WANT TO BE CHEAP ON THIS, BUT HIS SITUATION
was dictating. He was at Smyth’s Funeral Home near the interchange of the San Diego and the Simi Valley freeways. “Dignity and value where the 405 meets the 118.”

Funeral homes had always given Dan the willies. Despite efforts to decorate with warm dark woods and heavy soothing drapes, Dan never felt warm or soothed when he attended funerals or visitations. Smyth’s Funeral Home was an exception only to the extent that they had made no obvious attempt to offer consolation through interior decorating. The place was cinder block painted baby-shit brown. The thing Dan noticed the most was the smell. Dan fanned the air with the brochure he was holding. There was no getting around the fact that the place smelled funny, not ha-ha funny, but are-you-sure-that-body-was-embalmed-properly funny.

Dan flipped through the brochure until he saw the “Alternative Container Price Range.” Looking at the cheap end of the spectrum, Dan wondered what you got sent home in for $84.06. Given what Smyth’s was charging for a pine box, Dan figured eighty-four bucks might get you a mayonnaise jar with the label peeled. The small print at the bottom of the page caught his eye. “There is no scientific or other evidence that a casket with a sealing device will preserve human remains.” Dan wondered what sort of false promises had prompted the government
to require that disclaimer. “Let’s say you spring for the Deluxe Dust-to-Dust III with the advanced hydroseal, okay? Ten years from now, if medical science finds a cure for whatever killed your beloved husband, we can exhume him and …” Dan put the brochure down and wiped his hands. Even after his years in advertising, Dan was put off by the lies these people were willing to tell in order to make a sale. It was one thing, he thought, to make bogus claims about laundry detergent—“now with ultrabrightening enzymes!”—it was something else altogether to take advantage of the grief-stricken. Dan paused. He wondered where this sudden bout of moralizing had come from. He used to be a strict caveat emptor kind of guy.

A few moments later a salesman materialized. Dan had been expecting someone out of a Charles Addams cartoon, but the guy turned out to look more or less normal. His name was Walter. He had interesting eyebrows but little else that Dan noticed. Walter hated his job, but he tried not to let it show. He had bills to pay and no ambition to find other work. So he pushed the high-end stuff at everybody who came in.

This month, the biggest commission was with the Promethean Bronze caskets with the Pomp and Circumstance Services. So, after feigning compassion for Dan’s loss, Walter put his hand on the small of Dan’s back. “Father,” he said. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll show you a casket that says you really care.” Walter steered Dan over to a garish, three-tone coffin shrouded with gaudy filigree. “This is the top of the line,” he said. “We’re talking a forty-eight-ounce, solid bronze full couch with decorative marquetry finish, powder blue ultravelvet interior, and twenty-four-karat gold-plated hand staffs.” It looked like a small, rectangular Graceland with handles. Walter pointed to a thick strip of soft rubber that ran the circumference of the coffin. “This is what I call the casket gasket. It’s an advanced hydroseal feature that prevents the body from decomposing.”

“How much?” Dan asked.

Walter stroked the powder blue ultravelvet interior and tilted his head slightly upward. He appeared to do some mental calculation. “With the Pomp and Circumstance Service, funeral coach, flower car, facilities for visitation, organist, filing of death certificate, transportation of grave monument to cemetery, imported Italian prayer cards with gold trim, I’d say in the range of thirty-eight thousand. A terrific price, really. I’m sure your brother deserves nothing less.”

Startled at the terrific price, Dan glanced around the showroom for something in pine.

“You know,” Walter said. “There’s no better way to say good-bye than with the Promethean Bronze.”

Dan stared at the casket for a moment. He’d gladly spend forty thousand to put his brother to rest in a quality casket, but he just didn’t have the money. Besides, he thought, Michael was dead. He wouldn’t know if he was laid to rest in a powder blue ultravelvet interior or burlap. Finally Dan shook his head. “No,” he said. “My brother’s tastes were, uh … simpler.”

“I understand,” Walter said, “something less—”

“Elvis,” Dan said.

Walter smiled sadly as he thought of what to say next. The words “cheap bastard” came to mind, but instead he said, “Let me show you a little something we call the Oro Del Divino, brushed and shaded thirty-two-ounce bronze half couch with champagne velvet interior.”

Dan wasn’t listening anymore. The budget just wasn’t there for champagne velvet interior. He looked around the room. “Got anything on sale?”

A
t the end of another eighteen-hour day, Sister Peg retired to her small room, physically and mentally exhausted. She and Ruben had spent the last two hours scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom floors, interrupted only by her calls to Father
Michael’s apartment, which went unanswered. The muscles in her back were thick cords of gristle. She was dismayed by the hopelessness in the eyes of the Care Center’s elderly residents and the mistrust in those of Alissa. Late in the day, Larry Sturholm had called to gently remind Sister Peg that foreclosure was as certain as Judgment Day, and much closer.

Sister Peg walked to the foot of her bed, where she lowered herself slowly onto her knees. She looked up at the wall where Jesus hung on the cross, then she closed her eyes and bowed her head. “Dear Heavenly Father,” she said. “Please look down on us and show us the way to fulfill Your will. These people have come to me for help and in Your name I have promised to help them, but I seem to be falling short and I need Your guidance to help me understand …”

There are those who speak of a virtuous life as an uninterrupted prayer, appealing to the Latin adage
laborare est orare
—“to toil is to pray.” If there was any truth to that, no one prayed more or harder than Sister Peg.

Most people are under the impression that prayer is a simple act wherein a supplicant asks God for help in some temporal or moral matter. Most people, of course, are wrong. There’s nothing simple about it. There are strict rules and regulations to follow if you want your prayers to get through. In fact, a thumbnail outline of the official doctrine on praying takes up eight full pages in
The Catholic Encyclopedia.

The complexity of Catholic theology makes the Federal Tax Code look like a first-grade primer. This results from Pope Pius IX’s notion that the doctrines, edicts, and other papal bulls that Popes hand down are infallible. The problem comes when one Pope makes a decree that contradicts a doctrine handed down by some previous Pope. Since infallibility can’t be questioned, and because the Church can’t admit to moral relativism, this sets Church theologians scurrying to obscure the inconsistency, usually in Latin. The result is a system of beliefs that, if studied
sufficiently, is found to be less than wholly defensible. Fortunately, the faith was built on such solid ground that no amount of theological tinkering seems able to screw it up. In fact, as long as you don’t wander too far from the Ten Commandments and the old chestnuts from the Sermon on the Mount, you’re not likely to find yourself facing off with the College of Cardinals at an excommunication hearing.

Now, Sister Peg was no Thomas Aquinas, theologically speaking, but she had faith. Faith in God and His goodness. That wasn’t to say she never suffered doubt; she was human, after all.

Sometimes, in fact, Sister Peg found while praying that she was simply expressing gratitude for the bad things that
hadn’t
happened rather than being thankful for all the good things that had. Still, she prayed every day through her labors and every night on her knees. She hoped that someday her prayers would be answered in the affirmative.

According to the authorities, prayers must be for the right things, be they temporal or moral. The rules strictly limit to whom you may pray—you can pray to God the Father, or the Son, or even Christ the man because he is a Divine Person. However, the rules do not allow praying to Christ’s human nature as such, since prayers are never to be addressed to something so abstract. You can pray to saints, asking that they intercede on your behalf, but not because you expect them to actually deliver. For all the good they did on earth, in heaven saints are simply message-delivery systems. God is the One Who delivers. Or not, depending on circumstances and His will.

“Merciful Father,” Sister Peg continued, “I pray that in Your wisdom You deliver Alissa from the torments she suffers and that You open her heart to the love and the hope that You have bestowed upon all of us …”

The just can pray, as can sinners (though there was some controversy about sinners until Pope Clement XI cleared up what he decreed was Pasquier Quesnel’s heretical position on
the matter). They say prayer is impossible in hell, and besides, at that point, it’s too damn late.

“Show me the way to meet the earthly obligations I have assumed so that I might better serve You …”

There are several further conditions of prayer. The object of prayer must be worthy of God. Faith and humility are required. Sincerity is a must. Earnestness and fervor are important; lukewarm beseeching won’t cut the cheese. You must be resigned to God’s will,
resigned
being used in the positive sense of the word. And you have to pay attention while praying. In fact, attention is said to be the very essence of prayer. As soon as your attention ceases, so does the prayer. There’s vocal prayer and there’s mental prayer, the difference being self-explanatory. And—hard as it is to imagine God passing judgment on such a thing—posture is a consideration. A proper display of reverence and outward manner is essential. In other words, appearances are important. Image is almost everything, even in prayer.