Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

United We Stand

Temple wasn’t unduly religious. Not when she’d been brought up as a Unitarian Universalist. It was the one area where her usually staid midwestern family had kicked over the tracks.

Slightly.

There were only about 800,000 registered UUs in the U.S. of A., including four U.S. presidents, which made them a pretty significant insignificant minority, to turn a redundancy into a contradiction in terms.

The universality and unity implicit in the name pretty much described the doctrine: inclusive. A UU didn’t even have to believe in God (as a sort of straight Leonardo da Vinci in a long beard and antiquated robes) or as anything other than an innate kindly bent in human nature.

Backsliding in the practice of Unitarian Universalism was very difficult to do. They stood for such large, all-embracing concepts and had so few narrow, excluding ones. But Temple had managed to do it. Simply by not going to church.

So making an appointment with the local UU minister for an office “consultation” felt like stealing. And operating under false pretenses.

But Sue Hathaway had been perfectly willing, even eager, to meet and talk with Temple. Temple had a good feeling about a woman with a position few other women in the country held listing herself as “Sue” instead of the more formal “Susan.”

It felt UU and even MU: Midwestern Unpretentious.

And Temple needed all the good feeling she could muster for slinking around, just when the going got tough, to a church she’d ignored for several years. But when she’d told Max that they needed to talk, Temple knew she needed to talk to an expert first. A UU minister named Sue.

“Come in.” Sue answered the door herself.

She was only three or four inches taller than Temple’s five-foot-nothing, a high point in her favor. But she was the opposite kind of woman: wiry short hair, no makeup, blue jeans, linen blazer over a sky blue silk camp shirt; Birkenstock shoes, flirting with either side of forty-five. She was plain but reassuringly savvy seeming and competent, perhaps because of her plainness.

“Temple Barr,” the woman, uh, minister, said. What should Temple call her? “An interesting name. Come sit down. Some espresso? Tea? The obligatory glass of afternoon sherry?”

“Why don’t we wait and see what’s needed,” Temple said.

Sue laughed and nodded.

“By the way, I’m not usually a bottle blonde. This is just part of my last job.”

“You’re an entertainer?”

It was a natural question in Las Vegas.

“Nothing so exciting, or lucrative. I’m a freelance public relations representative, but sometimes in Las Vegas—”

“Always in Las Vegas. Say no more. What can I help you with, Miss Barr?”

“Temple, please.”

“Miss Barr” was how Lieutenant Molina invariably addressed her. Temple did not want to think about the homicide lieutenant while on this particular, and highly personal, mission. “I was reared UU.”

“Not in Las Vegas.”

“No. In Minneapolis.”

“But you haven’t been active.”

“No. So I suppose I really shouldn’t be here.”

“To the contrary. Welcome back. At least for a meeting. What can I help you with?”

“I need a religious professional’s viewpoint on something.”

“ ‘A religious professional.’ I’d never quite thought of it that way, but it’s true.”

Temple sighed, big time. Then she plunged right in with the immediate problem. “I’ve been seeing an ex-Roman Catholic priest.”

Sue Hathaway was a pro. Her expression remained supernaturally noncommittal. And she said nothing, so Temple had to go on.

“I’ve learned a bit about that religion’s position on a lot of things, which are way more . . . definite than I grew up with.”

Sue smiled.

That forced Temple to blunder on even further. “Anyway, although he’s wonderful—smart and kind and well, hot looking—I once made this flip remark that modern girls don’t want to discover sexual compatibility or incompatibility on their wedding nights like in the olden days.”

“One does tend to get flip when nervous,” Sue said.

“And now he’s come up with the darnedest compromise between his religion, which is way anti-premarital sex, and what I sort of said I expected. Which was a”—Temple cringed—“a free sample.”

Sue laughed. Hard. Until the tears came. “How long was he in?” she asked when she could. “The church, that is.”

“About seventeen years.”

“Ouch. Why and how’d he leave?”

“It’s complicated.”

“If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be real life.”

Temple sighed again, much to her surprise. She was astonished by how hard it was to talk about her personal ambiguities even to encouraging strangers of the same gender.

“I told you he was smart. He figured out he’d entered the priesthood to be the perfect father because he was born out of wedlock. Then his mother married the most imperfect stepfather she could find.”

Sue’s encouraging expression had curdled with instant understanding. “Poor woman.”

“Girl. So there was”—Temple wouldn’t give away Matt’s name. Talking about him behind his back even with a stranger was bad enough—“my friend, dealing with all that. He says the attraction of celibacy was it was the only way in his church he could be a hero for not having children, which he’s still pretty conflicted about. He knows kids from abusive families can . . . abuse children.”

“And you?”

“Children? I don’t know! I’m single. I’m thirty. It’s hard enough to decide who you love, much less whether you want to add . . . cats-with-souls to the mixture.”

“So, the immediate issue is—?”

“He’s mentioned marriage.”

“Very serious.”

“Being a good ex-UU, I get that! He’s offered, actually proposed that we get a civil marriage here in Las Vegas. As a . . . test run. Then, if we’re compatible, we can remarry back wherever—my home, his home in Chicago—in a religious ceremony, probably ecumenical.”

“And your question is?”

“My question is a lot of things about marrying a devout Catholic and what it would mean to me, but I’m here to ask what this crazy idea means to him. I’ve never had to answer to a demanding religion like he has. I could get married here by Elvis and feel married. Or do a church thing and feel just as committed. But . . . I’m not sure where his plan puts him, in terms of his religion.”

Sue leaned back, tenting her fingers. “I can tell you that he’s seriously sincere.”

“I’ve always known that. It’s one of his best and most aggravating qualities.”

Sue chuckled. “You like him. You really, really like him.”

Temple nodded. “It’s my Sally Field Oscar moment.”

Sue was old enough to recognize the reference. “You could love him.”

“Yeah. Except I’m not mentioning my long-term boyfriend, who’s being pulled in directions he can’t help.”

“Which don’t include you.”

“Probably not.”

Sue inhaled deeply, lowered her head, then lifted it and asked, “Sherry?”

“Yeah.”

The glasses were tiny and exquisite. The sherry was the color of watered-down blood. Temple killed hers with one swallow.

Sue chuckled again. “At least you’re trying to figure this out. Listen. This man, the ex-priest, I don’t think he’s fooling himself. No, this civil marriage plan is not a way out for him. It is for you, if you don’t mind having a Reno divorce on your record. His church would never recognize the validity of a civil marriage. He’d have sinned. But both you and he could start over again, fresh. You’d be a Reno divorcee, not odd at your age. And he would have sinned but he wouldn’t have committed himself to a real marriage, the only kind his faith recognizes, a Catholic one.”

“All this for a free sample?”

“That was you, not him.”

“Oh, God. Oh.”

Sue shook her head and refilled Temple’s glass.

“You two. You’re like a pair of blind people trying to meet in some nonexistent middle.” She leaned forward. “You don’t have Doubt One about your sexual compatibility with this man. You have doubts about your religious compatibility.”

“It’s strange. I don’t want to think about some of these things in advance. I’m okay with sex, marriage, and what next? Who knows what I’ll want in three years? But my not wanting kids right away, or ever, would be a big religious no-no for him and his church. Yet he’s the one with a legitimate reason to worry about that.”

“There are options. Natural family planning, for instance, is accepted by his church. You know, it means abstinence on presumed ‘infertile’ days. It works a lot better these days than when it was take-your-temperature-and-hope forty years ago.”

“I don’t want to think about that. It sounds so . . . clinical. I want to think about who I love and could spend the rest of my life with.”

“What about who loves you?”

Temple smiled, shakily. “I’m lucky. I know two guys do. And I guess I . . . love them both. Is that possible?”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t work very well. I can see you’ll be conflicted no matter which way you go.”

“That sucks! Excuse me, Reverend.”

“The truth often does.”

“He said . . . my ex-priest friend, that he never wanted to confess anything that happened between us.”

“Nor should any seriously sincere person, no matter his religion. I’m afraid, Miss Temple Barr, that you also are a seriously sincere person. It doesn’t make life easy. But it will make it rewarding. Eventually. That doesn’t help, I suppose.”

“You’ve confirmed what I was afraid of. Ma—The ex-priest was thinking of me, not himself, when he came up with that civil marriage stunt. He’d still be in trouble with his faith.”

“You gotta love a guy like that.” Sue smiled.

“Yeah. But the other man has always looked out for me too, even risked his neck. It’s just that he’s been so . . . absent lately. I know he has good, even noble reasons.”

“Sounds like you can’t live with one man’s religious values and the other’s man’s job.”

“I can’t live with liking, needing, wanting, loving two men at the same time!”

“A lot of women claim they can’t find one good guy nowadays. You have two. Can you spare one? I’m single.”

Temple, on the verge of tears, found herself laughing instead.

“Yeah,” Sue said. “I’m a fine one to give advice. Love isn’t for sissies. I think something will happen to push you one way or the other. It’ll just happen, and you’ll know what’s right.”

Temple nodded and got up to leave.

She had no doubt that Max was another one of Sue Hathaway’s “seriously sincere” persons too. Maybe the answer was not what she couldn’t live with—subdivided loyalties, conflicting love and lust—but what, or who, she couldn’t live without.

And maybe she’d recognize that when she saw it.