Cat in an Indigo Mood

Chapter 14

Brothers Keepers

Henderson, Nevada, was one of the fastest-growing communities in the Sunbelt.

Although it seemed only a stone's throw from the Goliath and other behemoth hotels hunkering along the Las Vegas Strip, it felt like another world.

Matt cruised the Vampire along these clean streets bracketed by upscale two-story homes, the next generation of Sunbelt building after decades of single-story ranch houses. Even the widest-open spaces focused on reducing suburban sprawl now. Imposing as these homes were, they sat on stingy lots, almost seeming to rub stucco shoulders with each other.

He didn't have a clue to what these posh-looking places would cost. More than he could imagine, he figured, and they were probably far less fancy than he thought.

The ex-priests were meeting at a major intersection on the fringe of this human ant farm, at a church, of course. Catholic, of course. Maternity of Mary.

Despite reasonably warm weather, no children played on the weedless front lawns, no garage door gaped open to display cars or clutter.

Mart reached the right address: a boxy brick and glass building whose purpose was suggested by a prow of sharply angled glass. A stained-glass cross was inlaid into the sun-repelling bronze film that overlay the window-wall like technological-age gilt.

What struck him most, though, about this new-built church with the unlived-in look was its relative smallness compared to the looming cliffs of stone and brick that still anchored the old Chicago neighborhoods. Even Our Lady of Guadalupe's desert-architecture modesty in the Hispanic neighborhood dwarfed this neat, pristine, and somehow shrunken house of worship.

Matt felt no urge to visit the church proper. It would be open, bright and soaring like the mandatory "great room" in the houses that surrounded it. He preferred a more serious interior, a sense of history, not histrionics.

He was, he realized, probably becoming an old fogey, a hide-hound conservative. So he let the Vampire swoop into the parking lot, toward a low wing attached to the church that was far too small to be a rectory or a convent or a school.

At eight o'clock at night only a few cars populated the parking lot. Saturday evening mass attendees were long gone, heading to the parties they expected to keep them up so late that Sunday morning mass would be unthinkable. All that remained on the cooling asphalt were a couple minivans, teal and forest green, an aging Volvo station wagon, a blue Cavalier, a couple of Honda Civics.

Matt eased the Vampire between the two minivans, hoping to shelter it from potential thieves. Henderson's obsessive-compulsive newness didn't rule out old failings like petty crime.

Matt glanced back as he walked away to make sure a street light would discourage lock-pickers. The Vampire's sleek silver hindquarters were just visible, making it look like a thoroughbred parked among plow horses.

Matt had left his helmet hanging from the handlebar, risking theft. If you couldn't trust a Catholic church parking lot, what could you trust? Besides, he didn't want to walk into a meeting of ex-priests looking like an escapee from The Wild Bunch.

He walked into a room like a thousand he had walked into before.

Bare vinyl tile floors. Large collapsible tables usable for anything from a conference to buffet. Metal folding chairs in that peculiar unnameable brown-gray color that were made to numb rears in record time. Serviceable beige blinds were already hanging slightly askew on the big horizontal windows. Decor by lnstitutions Anonymous.

No wonder it felt like he had crashed an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Especially when he spotted the big aluminum coffee um on a table by the wall, flanked by stacks of Styrofoam cups, plastic stir-sticks and packets of non-calorie sweetener.

The coffee would be oily and black; everything you put in it would have chemical identification chains longer than your own DNA. The fluorescent overhead lights would make everybody resemble most-wanted criminals, and the chance of something significant being said was zero to none.

Even the men in the room fell into weary stereotypes. Were priests so predictable? He hadn't thought so, but he recognized types from seminary, only aged twenty years beyond his peers.

The Really Nice Guy with glasses and acne scars. The Earnest Thinker with shock of graying hair and a mustache. The Brilliant Theologian with bald head and whiskey nose. The Progressive Cleric, he of the graying pony tail and lively expression. And where did Matt fit in? Young Father Who-Would-Have-Thought-It? More than one parishioner brave enough to watch a rerun of The Thorn Birds had looked at him with an edgy speculation.

"You must be Matt."

Progressive Cleric came over to shake his hand. Naturally, he clapped Matt's upper arm with the other hand. Progressive Cleric had been a charismatic athletic coach too. Young people had adored him. He was so cool for a priest!

"Welcome," the man went on. "I'm Nick Benedict."

They all gathered around then--Really Nice Guy, whose name was Jerry. Earnest Thinker, aka Paul, squinting through his trifocals, pumping Matt's hand. Brilliant Theologian, saddled with the overtly Catholic name of Damien, abstracted and just cool enough to make the sheen on his bald head look like glare ice from a Chicago winter. The man closest to Matt's age, around forty, was tall, slightly overstuffed and had a mustache. Norbert.

Matt let some coffee drip into a Styrofoam cup while he gathered his wits. Except for Norbert, these guys were all at least twenty years older than Matt was. He didn't belong here.

This was a mistake, but he was stuck with it.

Folding chairs shrilled protest as they were dragged into a circle on the empty floor.

"We start with a group therapy go-round," Nick said, grinning.

"No props but java and honesty. We're used to it, but it might be off-putting for a newbie."

"I'm not a 'newbie.' I'm . . . an ex-oldie."

"Ohol Matt's seen the therapy square dance." Paul expertly balanced the flimsy coffee container on his knee. "A veteran."

"I hadn't expected to be the youngest," Matt said.

"We hadn't expected it either," Jerry put in gently. Jerry would always be the peacemaker.

"Yeah," Nick said, laughing. "You must have just been coming in when we were going out.

Kinda like me and smoking; l started just when the Surgeon General's report saying we shouldn't smoke came out in the sixties. Are you as contrary a jackass as l am, Matt?"

"Swimming against the tide. The best always do," Damien put in. With authority.

Matt dragged his own tortured chair into the circle, wishing he dared leave.

But it was his turn to talk. "Yeah. There were almost more women in seminary than men when I went in. Just . . . getting the theological education, of course. Not expecting to be priests."

"Women priests!" Brilliant Theologian Damien looked pained. "God help us; that may he all we have left."

"I suppose gays are still one step below women in the church hierarchy," Norbert noted.

Matt knew that many gay men had entered the priesthood after the first wave of priests had left in the sixties, but the unspoken policy had always been "don't ask, don't tell," long before the military thought of it. He supposed one way of coming "out" was leaving the priesthood.

Nick shook his trendy head. "Don't scare Matt. We're really a pushover group. Being an ex-priest makes it hard to look down on anybody for any position--political, personal, or sexual.

For a start, why don't you tell us why you left."

"I can't."

They gazed at him, unconvinced and waiting.

"Not without saying why I entered. It's not a concrete process, like going in a door and out a door, is it?"

Paul nodded. "We talk about it in terms of either in or out, but it's never that simple."

"It's a revolving door, Matt." Nick grinned. "Not a door that just opens and shuts, but one in eternal motion. Believe it or not, sometimes you can feel more a part of the church after you've left."

"Politics," Damien grumbled.

"Lots of politics," Nick agreed. "Everywhere."

Matt was shocked to find himself in the company of men who enjoyed discussing theories and verities again. Why had they all made the wrong life choice, then, if they were so smart?

"How did you leave?" Norbert asked, nursing his coffee cup.

"The hard way." Matt laughed softly. "I was laicized."

"Good for you!" Nick looked ready to clap his arm again. Luckily, he was three chairs away.

What a relief to talk to people who know what that word means, or even how to spell it.

Being laicized was an achievement. Most priests just left, but Matt had gone through the official process of asking to leave, and had been granted permission. The difference was like getting certified as a conscientious objector in the Vietnam War, rather than just fleeing to Canada to escape the draft.

"I don't know how 'good' it was," Matt added. "That was just how it worked out. I came to see that my vocation, sincere enough when I was young, was really an escape from an abusive family situation. I was looking for a heavenly father. I was afraid of being a father. I was hiding in the Lord."

"Isn't that what He's there for?" asked Brilliant Theologian.

Matt felt momentarily trapped into giving the catechism answer, but didn't. "Then why wasn't that enough?" he said instead.

"For any of us?"

Silence. He was the raw recruit, freshly AWOL. They were veterans of leaving without leave.

Father figures, except none of them appealed to him in that way anymore. Maybe he didn't need the roles of Father, or even Son, in his life anymore, in himself.

"I'm . . . embarrassed." Matt admitted. "I came to the priesthood after everybody else was losing faith. I feel like a throwback. Like a fool."

"There's no fool like a holy fool," Brilliant Theologian joked.

Matt shrugged. "If only I could be that blessedly idiotic."

They sat silent in their circle, on metal chairs, cosseting ersatz coffee cups.

"Maybe I shouldn't have come," Matt said.

"Look," Nick said, "there aren't that many of us in this area.

Las Vegas is one of those oasis cities: one bright dot in the middle of nothing. Literally nothing. Norbert drove in from Arizona. Jerry's from Booma, California. I'm from Tonopah and Damien's from way up by Reno. We may seem a rather paltry group, but We're all we have.

Everybody's case is individual. Like, you're the only one among us from an abusive family."

"Thanks. And it wasn't that abusive a situation. it was one guy. My stepfather. And he was a piker. I'm talking yelling, a little hitting, nothing demonically sadistic, just--"

"Just enough to make every living thing around him cringe constantly," Damien said, nodding. "I had an uncle like that. It's not good, Matt, even if it doesn't set a record."

Matt nodded. "I've been working on that. That's why I'm here in Nevada, actually. He, my stepfather, just loved Las Vegas. I . . . found him. And that's when I found out that he wasn't the main problem, not really."

"You're not blaming yourself?" Nick's wrinkled brow showed concern made incarnate.

"God, no!" Here, such expletives didn't sound like swearing, just emphasis. "And it wasn't my mother's fault or mine. It was the times, or, rather, the behind-the-times. A man was head of the family, right or wrong. A woman had to have a man in her life, right or wrong. A kid had to feel responsible, rightly or wrongly. I understand that I fled to the vocation. I accept that maybe that's why that option was there, that maybe it was always a temporary sanctuary instead of the lifelong commitment I thought I was capable of making. I thank God for giving me an out when I so desperately needed one, but . . . I grew enough to know that I was hiding, not committing. So I made my case and left, with the blessings of the church, who could ask for anything more?"

"An ex-priest could," Nick said, laughing again. "Why are you here?"

"My spiritual director from seminary--my ex-priest spiritual director--told me about this group. And, I'm at loose ends now that I've left the priesthood. There's so much I don't know how to do."

"Like?"

"Earn a living. Set up a place to live."

"We all have to adapt to that," Damien said impatiently.

"And. uh, to women."

"Yeah, I bet," Jerry said. "But what's new? I bet they've always flocked all over you."

"Maybe. But that's the very thing I was running from. Women meant marriage and kids, at least those were the only two options a Polish Catholic boy could come up with. . . ."

They laughed, with him.

"But I don't see how----" Matt went on.

"How? How's simple."

"I don't see how to do it right. How to do what we asked every Catholic teenager in our congregations to do: stay pure, meet a nice girl, marry her, go to bed with her, have children. I mean, how does anyone do it in that order? Nowadays."

The laughter lasted longer this time, but so did the silence afterward.

"Specifics." Damien pulled out a pipe and sucked on it, but never lit it.

A phallic substitute? Matt wondered.

But the observation distracted him from his own situation.

Why should he give specifics? Why should he name names, including those for his conflicting feelings? Why should he expose himself?

"Okay. There's this woman." Another laugh. "She and l were . . . meshing. Not. . . literally,"

he said into the face of more laughter, will be boys, even ex-priests.

"And then, her . . . old boyfriend comes back into the picture.

And . . . she joins him. I don't understand--"

"What's not to understand, Matt? An old boyfriend?"

"An ex-lover. I'm not that naive. She had been living with him when he vanished. I think she expected that they would get married."

"Women always do."

"She is not a rote 'always' kind of woman. She had made a commitment. She meant it."

"And him?"

"He looked like a total rat. Walking out on her without a word, only she never believed he had. She thought something had happened to make him go. And she was right. When he came back, there were extenuating circumstances."

"Then it's a happy ending. Go with it."

"He's not . . . good for her, no matter the sincerity of his intentions."

"And the sincerity of your intentions?"

"I . . . I really care about her. But I was working out this thing with my stepfather and--"

"When did the old boyfriend come back?"

"Around Halloween."

A bark of appreciative laughter from Damien. "Appropriate."

"So . . . why didn't she rake up with him right away," Nick wanted to know, or did she?"

"No. That's what's so maddening. She didn't go running hack to him. We were still . . . well, friendly. And then I went home to Chicago for Christmas, and events with my stepfather and my mother came to a head. I was finally working free of the past, ready to, I don't know, to meet her on her own ground. And--"

"And?"

"He showed up in New York. She was visiting her aunt there for Christmas. He threw a ring at her. Not a diamond. He. . .took her to bed."

"The romance was back on."

"And I'm off, sitting here, wondering what happened. It doesn't seem fair. I mean, I was within hours of being ready to consider a serious relationship with her--"

"How wonderful for you," Nick said.

Matt, reliving the trauma of his own story, could still read the sarcasm despite his anguish.

And he was expressing anguish. The Cagey acolyte had become an eager convert, bleeding all over their group therapy circle like a hereditary hemophiliac. And now, seasoned sharks scenting fresh blood, they were turning on him.

"No! Not wonderful. I'll live with it if l have to, but I don't understand." Laughter.

He was spilling his guts, and they were amused.

The anger came in a tidal wave; luckily, rage tongue-tied him, so the others went on talking, unaware. Or maybe they weren't so unaware.

"You are a classic case, you know that?"

"Classic?"

"Do you have any idea what you put that poor woman through?"

"Put her through?"

Sage nods from several of the circled chairs.

"We all do it, Matt," Jerry said. "We get so wrapped up in the angst of leaving our vocation.

We weigh each hair, struggle through faith and fury. Examine our consciences until they are shredded wheat. And women, whew, that's a big one."

"Speak for yourself," Norbert said.

"All right. The big one is sex, gender aside. Maybe we've been pure as the driven communion wafer. Maybe we've stumbled and felt like hell. Still, we're not priests anymore. We can do anything we want. Anything we think we can do.

"And we can't do squat," Jerry admitted. "We're conscience-bound. You don't throw off maybe decades of holy celibacy just because you can."

"So we meet a nice woman," Nick said, "and we tell her, eventually, our little problem."

"Which is that she's the devil we've been avoiding all these year's." Jerry shook his head.

"Speak for yourself." Nolbert's chorus made Damien shoot him a poisonous glance.

"Anyway," Nick went on, "we explain so carefully that we have to go through a lot of soul searching to decide if we can make the transition. Are you getting this, Matt? Are you hearing the underlying message we're still sending?"

"But we can't change overnight," Matt protested. "We took the celibacy seriously, most of us. We have to take the . . . non-celibacy just as seriously."

"What do you believe in?" Damien snapped. "Premarital sex?"

"No! Well, I can see it's not as cut and dried as that--"

"You'll get married first, then, and then you'll find out if you can hack marital relations at all?" Jerry suggested. "Fun for your bride, all right. Might as well play Russian roulette."

"What about children?" Norbert wanted to know. "You said you had a fear of having them.

How can you be sexually active and remain in a church that forbids birth control?"

"I don't know . . . things hadn't gotten that far."

"They'd gotten far enough. How far? Anything confessable?"

"No, not really."

"Not even in intention, if not in act?"

"It's . . . hard to say. She's an honorable woman--"

"And you respected her previous relationship, even if it was unsanctioned by marriage?"

"Yes! She loved the man. She expected permanency, or hoped for it, or she wouldn't have consummated the relationship. I know that."

"So . . . you didn't interfere, did you? You let him walk back in and resume his old role of lover. Let him take the risk, not you"'

"No! He'd been back for a while and she still hadn't ... taken up with him again. I thought--"

"You thought you could string her along forever, with no promise of anything concrete until you had worked through your problems."

"Well, yes. But my problems--"

"--were so much more delicate, so much more serious, so much more spiritual, and more important than hers."

"I didn't think of it that way."

"You didn't think, Matt. You didn't think of the woman you say you love."

"Would you have married her?" jerry.

"Of. . . course."

"In the Catholic Church?" Damien.

"Well--"

"Is she Catholic?'" Nick.

"No. But . . . a fallen away Unitarian could be anything."

"A mother? Does she want to be one? How many kids?"

"I don't know."

"Do you want to be a father?" Norbert.

"I told you that I don't know if I should be," he said between clenched teeth.

"Well, then. . . ." Nick.

"Well then, what?"

"What were you really prepared to do with her?" Nick was obviously head teacher around here. Head interrogator. Head devil's advocate. "You don't know. Do you know you could get married in a renegade Catholic ceremony? Birth control would be A-okay. But you wouldn't be really in the church. Or why not try the Unitarians; they are a very accepting sort. They'd overlook your orthodoxy. Or a true Catholic ceremony? You're eligible, you played by all the rules, but could you promise to accept all the children God sent you after what you've said here about your upbringing.' Could you live with that? Could she live with your uncertainty on every matter relating to sex and family that there is? You are separated by a chasm from most people, my son, and from most women by the Grand Canyon.

"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?