Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

The school was a pair of dull, one-story adobe wings enfolding a sandy-surfaced, scruffy playground. The once bright painted-metal monkey bars and swing sets had paled and peeled to a dull burnt-sienna undercoat in the dry desert sun. Now the playground was empty and not even the dust stirred. Behind the schoolrooms' glinting glass windows, shut to keep out the heat, lay teachers tried to inspire the restless students for another nine-month school year, that everlasting pregnant pause between the blessed deliverance of too-short summer holidays.

Matt was remembering everything he wanted to forget, but he could regard this unexpected odyssey into another priest's parish as a form of penance. The church was too successful at converting confrontation into endurance. He had not yet found a new place in the church, or outside of it.

At least the rectory was foreign. St. Stan's had been red-brick-grand, with tidy white trim, and peopled by three priests and the eternal housekeeper: that prototypical elderly, devout and devoted (if sometimes waspish) cook and cleaner and dorm mother--always female and always above any kind of depraved suspicion--who committed herself to serving a houseful of religious men.

Here a large, lumpy Mexican woman whose charcoal-dark hair glinted with silver strands as shiny as fresh paint opened the door, not one of those forbidding Northern gatekeepers whose severe gaze would make any caller feel properly guilty for being there and disturbing Father.

Spanish coos urged them into the artificially cooled dimness. The tile floors were hard and so was the heavy, dark Spanish furniture, as plain and somber as a cross. Colorful cloths draping the backs of wooden chairs provided welcome warmth and softened the austerity.

"Is Father Hernandez in, Pilar?" Sister Seraphina asked.

" Si, si. But he is now with Mr. Bums, the lawyer." Pilar sounded most impressed with this visitor.

"We will wait," said Seraphina, who did not sound impressed. A successful teacher never sounds impressed by anything, Matt reflected, and she had certainly been that.

She claimed a hard bench in the hallway. Mart, after strolling down the

passage to examine the wall decorations--a citation from the Knights of Columbus, a modern chrome cross with a gilded figure of Christ on it--joined her. He was reminded of benches placed outside of the principal's office for misbehaving students to warm until a higher authority was good and ready to deal with them.

"You'll like Father Hernandez," Seraphina said suddenly, in a warmer tone, "although lately he seems lost in some labyrinth of his own. Before--"

Before, he had been a good priest, as Matt had been. Matt leaned his elbows on his thighs and clasped his hands; the fingers dovetailed, and then realized the position could be construed as an informal one of prayer. He had so many reflexes to disconnect.

At last the closed door down the hall cracked open. Voices bled from the room beyond, intense voices.

"You must concentrate on the developmental fund-raising program, Father, or there will be no OLG! I can't understand your distraction at such a critical time. And you must make up with Blandina Tyler. What is this nonsense about cats in heaven? You mustn't allow an old woman's silly fantasies to affect your fiscal judgment. She's recently been threatening to leave her estate to her cats--so the Ladies' Flower Guild says--and not to Our Lady of Guadalupe. That would be disaster."

"She may do as she wishes," a testy voice answered. "The church does not tailor its theology to fit the notions of its wealthier members."

"Yes, yes, Father---"

The men were moving into the hall now, ending their meeting.

"But--" continued the first voice, soothing, reasoning, warning, "this is such a minor matter. Cats! Sneaky, selfish creatures, but people who fancy them can be fanatics. It's bad for the peace of Miss Tyler's body and soul to work herself into a state over such a triviality."

The attorney was fully in the hall now, an earnest man in his worried mid-thirties, wearing a blue-striped seersucker suit that would look at home in a barbershop quartet. Horn-rimmed glasses perched on his rather prominent nose, giving him the prissy look of an accountant, oddly contradicted by a smile exposing a thin silver line of braces.

Such was the lot of a parish priest nowadays, Matt ruminated unhappily: keeping well-meaning parish volunteers happy while facing the realities of a waning congregation, sisterhood and priesthood, and a youth population that was eroding into the camaraderie of the gangs instead of attending Mass, and regularly receiving stolen goods instead of Holy Communion. Not to mention the unwed-pregnancy problem.

Matt stood, Sister Seraphina rising beside him, as the parish priest came out into the hall, wearing black slacks and a short-sleeved black shirt with the usual pastoral notch of white clerical collar showing.

Traditional garb for today's more modern priests and hot in a desert clime, Matt couldn't help noting. His neck broke out in a sympathetic rash as he remembered the imprisoning circle of starched linen. Father Hernandez's appearance surprised Matt even more. He had expected someone roly-poly, like the housekeeper, someone warm and cheerful and now obviously incompetent and harassed. Instead, Father Hernandez reminded Matt of the late Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Catholicism's only televangelist in the late, unlamented fifties. Father Hernandez was tall and thin, his skin the color of rich Corinthian leather. His attractive, rather ascetic face was framed by a handsome halo of silver hair.

"Visitors," Father Hernandez announced with an air of relief. "Sister Seraphina. Is this your . . . friend from Chicago?"

"Matt Devine," she said quickly. "Father Rafael Hernandez. And Peter Burns here is the parish attorney and also a dedicated parishioner who donates much time to Our Lady of Guadalupe."

Matt shook hands with both men, surprised by the priest's anemic grip, but not by the lawyer's businesslike, Toastmaster knuckle-cruncher. Matt gripped right back, but got no reaction, just a curt acknowledgment and farewell.

Odd, but Matt would have picked the lawyer as the tormented man who had recently hit the bottle that Sister Seraphina had described, not the priest.

"Come in." Father Hernandez gestured them into a study equipped with the mandatory four or five comfortably upholstered chairs, useful for receiving prominent community members offering money, or bereaved families making

funeral arrangements, and fellow religious.

Matt sank onto old leather with relief; it was cooler than cloth, and the rectory air conditioner was old, audibly cranky and patently ineffective. No wonder a sheen of sweat had polished both the priest's and the lawyer's faces--or maybe the discussion of parish fiscal matters had produced the moisture.

Father Hernandez threw his long frame into an old-fashioned leather swivel chair behind a massive glass-topped desk. Pen-holders, papers, a calculator, the large glass ashtray for guests or the occasional parishioner bearing a rare

Cigar, a missal and breviary--the flotsam of a religious and administrative life--met and mingled on the parish priest's desk. Matt had used one like it once, and knew its makeup as a geologist knows the strata of the various geological ages of the earth. Here and there amid the scattered papers, loose paperclips glinted like veins of silver.

Father Hernandez leaned his weight on one leather-upholstered arm and swung the chair into a familiar and favorite position. "Before you say anything, Sister Seraphina, I'll tell you that I called the hospital. Miss Tyler would have nothing to do with a visit from me, as I told you; besides, the emergency-room doctors' diagnosed hysteria, gave her a prescription of Valium, and are sending her home with her niece. Now that we know the cause of her episode, it's clear that her condition was due to mental shock rather than a physical breakdown."