Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

"I won't have it from you!" Blandina Tyler said with a trace of her earlier sharpness. "You go too far, with your short skirts and bare heads. Sacrilege, Profanity, and so cruel--" Her face contorted as if seeing a nightmarish vision.

"Not Father Hernandez," Seraphina said firmly, stepping aside to reveal Matt, looking like an angel of the Lord, all golden-haired and as handsome as a prince in a fairy tale.

The sight of him struck Blandina silent for a moment.

Then she looked him up and down with the old suspicion that Temple recognized; she had been its recipient only hours before. "He's not wearing-"

"I called him in the dead of night," Seraphina reminded her.

"Isn't it . . . dawn yet?" the old woman asked in a sudden pathetic, trembling tone. "The nights have been so long lately."

Matt drew a side chair to the bed and sat on it. Sister Seraphina lifted the black bag onto the bedside table she had emptied of clutter. She opened the bag and drew out a shining length of pale satin as long as an albino snake, wider than a ribbon but not as broad as a scarf.

Matt took it and put it around his neck. Temple had a momentary vision of a World War I pilot with his silk scarf . . . but that was off-key. She kept trying to place this scene into some context she could recognize, and failed utterly.

Matt glanced at her briefly, the first time he had acknowledged her presence since introducing her to Seraphina, then lifted one end of the satin length to his face and kissed it.

Seraphina handed him a small glass bottle holding clear liquid, leaning near to whisper something in his ear.

"We are gathered," Matt said, "at the side of our friend Blandina to bring health and healing to her spirit and body." He stood, and with several ceremonial shakes, sprinkled the bottle's contents on the bed and around the room. When a strong sprinkle came in Temple's direction, she started as if it was acid, but Matt no longer noticed her, not anyone in the room but the sick woman.

"She attended daily Mass," Seraphina murmured to Matt, adding with a smile, "despite Father Hernandez, and made her confession every Saturday."

He nodded, then leaned forward with great concentration and almost visible compassion, to place his palms on the old woman's head. She sighed deeply, and then the tortured tossing of her head subsided.

Seraphina took another small glass bottle and some cotton balls from the bag. Curiouser and curiouser, thought Temple.

"Should I leave?" a voice asked. Temple was startled to find it had been hers.

Matt did not look up, but Seraphina smiled and shook her head. Temple backed up until a piece of furniture stopped her, and set her heavy tote bag on the floor as slowly and quietly as she could.

Matt pressed his thumb to the bottle, then tilted it. His thumb-tip glistened as it reached toward the sick woman, touched her forehead and made a mark there. He repeated the ritual, anointing the palm of each hand.

Temple squelched a wild wondering if that gesture tickled. Clearly, it did not. Blandina Tyler calmed even more as Matt intoned: "Through this holy anointing may the Lord in His love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Amen. May the Lord who freed you from sin save and raise you up. Amen."

Matt then leaned forward and spoke intently, in a low tone, wishing Blandina peace of mind and body, true serenity of soul and spirit. Temple couldn't absorb all the words, just as she could barely absorb the meaning of this scene, but she absorbed the same calm that visibly quieted Blandina moment by moment.

"Our Father," Matt began, "Who art in Heaven . . ."

Seraphina joined in, and Temple was surprised that she still knew the words as well as she did--okay, an Our Father was like the Pledge of Allegiance or riding a bicycle; once you learned to do it, you never forgot--except that she alone charged ahead at the end with her favorite, thundering, dramatic line, "For thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory--" The others stopped, even Rose, who had returned to the room and stood in the doorway watching and nodding with a solemn look on her round, woebegone face.

Temple sat down on what was behind hers-an old-fashioned trunk, she saw as she turned--and caught Blandina's cane, which had been propped against the trunk, before it fell to the floor. When she reinstated it, she noticed that the

rubber tip was damp and dotted with curds of fresh dirt.

Blandina had been out in the garden, Temple realized. Maybe that's where the ravings about a garden, the Garden of Gethsemane, had risen to haunt her mind; and that comment about Peter and betrayal and cocks crowing . . . obviously, the woman was very religious. Obviously, Temple was attending a religious rite. Obviously, Matt had presided here at Seraphina's behest.

Except that nothing was obvious to Temple beyond the incomprehensible obvious. Who was who and what was what--and did she really want to know?

She heard Matt's voice murmuring again, and this time she didn't listen. She was beginning to feel like an eavesdropper, after all.

Then she heard the thin, pale wail of a nearing emergency vehicle and felt relieved that something, something she understood, was coming to take charge of this situation that was so perplexing and even, in its way, frightening and disturbing.

When the heavyset man and woman pounded up the stairs--the siren had apparently banished all cats--with their equipment and their gurney and when Blandina Tyler was checked fore and aft and was being noisily bounced down the stairs. Temple finally looked up from her front-row- center seat on the trunk.

The black bag was shut. Matt was silent and scarf less. Seraphina was looking much relieved and toward Temple, then to the person referred to as "Rose."

"Forgive me for forgetting introductions," Seraphina said. "I am Sister Seraphina O'Donnell and this is Sister Saint Rose of Lima. This is Matt's friend. Temple--"

"Barr," Temple was proud to find herself reporting. Sister Seraphina O'Donnell. Sister Saint Rose of Lima. The words made no sense. "Rose" did. She smiled at the woman, who beamed back.

Temple decided that only good Girl Scout behavior would save her. "I . . . urn, was supposed to come in the morning and help Miss Tyler feed her cats. I suppose if I stopped at your house--" she carefully included both women in her glance "--you could let me in. There are . . . an awful lot of cats."

"We know." Rose chuckled a little. "You're a darling girl to suggest it," she added with a tinge of Irish brogue, "but we can do it. We're used to Miss Tyler's fascinating felines. In fact, we adopted a couple of them."

Temple didn't try to argue. A person lost in space, time and sense does not argue. as Alice in Wonderland had proved long ago.

"I'll ride with her to the hospital," Sister St. Rose of Lima told Sister Seraphina, who nodded and retrieved the black bag from the bedside table.

Mart did not offer to help her with it, Temple noticed, and Matt was always polite beyond belief.

"What about her cane?" Temple asked with belated concern, hefting the colorful stick.

"She won't need it until she comes home," Sister Seraphina assured her, following Rose out into the hall.

Temple nudged Matt, who had not yet moved, then went out in turn.

Downstairs, the rooms glowed with the silent red strobe of the ambulance light outside the open front door. Cats' eyes gleamed in the dark, as green as Christmas foil.

"Apparently she has a lot of cats," Matt said when he came downstairs, still sounding dazed.

Temple was able at last to have something in common with the odd old women named "Sister"--wry laughter.

"That's an understatement," Temple said. "Do you know how many there are?"

Sister Seraphina answered while Sister St. Rose of Lima---what a long name; no wonder it was shortened to "Rose"---went out to the ambulance.