"Good to see you here."
He breathed easily once past the gantlet of nuns at the gate, but Temple suddenly pressed his forearm, her longish nails biting into his skin.
"Oh, God. I mean, excuse me. Molina!" she whispered in throaty despair. "Does she always go to this mass?"
"I don't know." The homicide lieutenant was entering by a side door with her daughter, who was wearing jeans, t-shirt and a defiant expression.
Matt paused by the Holy Water font to touch his fingertips to the cool sponge and make the sign of the cross.
Temple waited, but eyed the yellow sponge stranded in its grandiose stainless-steel-lined white marble bowl as if it were something dead washed up on a beach.
He leaned down to her, automatically whispering in church. "These old Holy Water fonts were once filled with blessed water, but since the trick with the red dye, I think Father Hernandez capitulated to modern times and converted to a Holy-Water soaked sponge. It's less messy and more economical."
"And it discourages pranksters," she added, nervously eyeing the impressive width and length of the central aisle.
For a split second he saw the familiar sight of a church interior through a stranger's eyes.
The ranked pews gleaming with golden oak polish, the elaborately carved and plastered altarpiece, the altar, the hanging vigil light beaming its red greeting. He had always found this scene awesome, inspiring and calming, especially when the deep-throated chords of an organ swelled to fill every crevice and linger among each bit of holy bric-a-brac.
Temple teetered on her modest heels and bit her lip. Matt took her elbow and steered her behind the last row of pews, to a side aisle. Halfway down, he gestured her into one of the pews.
She slid in and sat quickly, looking around. "I'd have felt like a Miss America candidate or something worse--maybe a bride--going down that big aisle, "she confided in the accepted whisper."
''Nobody's looking at anybody," he whispered back.
''Oh, yeah? Molina is giving us the Big Eye, or didn't you notice?"
Matt glanced around until he spotted the lieutenant and her daughter across the aisle. If she had been watching them, she wasn't now.
Matt pulled two paperback missalettes from the rack on the pew-back before them and handed Temple one. The corners were curled from previous use. They seemed so disposable, compared to the black leatherette-bound missals of his mother's day.
"Is there a lot of kneeling?" she asked anxiously. "I'm not good at kneeling--bony knees."
"You can always sit instead, and you should have seen the old days, at the Latin mass they held at St. Stan's. But the kneelers are padded, see."
She dubiously eyed the folded kneelers.
Then a small bell rang and the altar boys were entering-- Matt winced, knowing few Catholics would be able to regard them with as innocent an eye now that several scandals had surfaced.
Everyone stood at Father Hernandez's entrance--why did he keep couching every action in the terms of a play? Matt wondered--and Temple followed suit, playing her part like a diligent bit player.
Matt was suddenly glad for his instincts and her presence. She was the cautious stranger in his world now, as he had been in hers last night. Each had their uncertainties and strengths.
And then the ritual began, the words and actions that were as automatic as breathing, and Matt was watching, listening, thinking, partaking, released from being any more than what he was now, what he might become later.
Beside him, Temple read along and recited where the missal called for it; she sat and stood and--when called for--watched him flip down the kneeler and then settled upon it so gingerly that he almost laughed out loud.
Before Matt knew it, the central sacred part was unfolding as Father Hernandez held up the chalice and the Host. And he was able to watch, to participate in a passive sense where once it had been active. And, thanks to Frank Bucek, he felt his heart lighten and pride for Father Hernandez suffice this moment, a pride for himself that he had answered the ugly question without creating any more unnecessary ugliness. Like Christ, Father Hernandez had been falsely accused. Unlike the Savior, he had been privately found innocent and spared the public trial and crucifixion. Innocence is often hard to prove in life. Matt thought, and one's own innocence is the most ambiguous of all, but this case was closed. And, Matt knew, he would never have been able to act, to ask, had he not seen Temple refuse to leave unanswered questions lie like sleeping dogs.
So he saw it as a serendipitous circle: himself and his new life, the anguish of his old life.
Temple a key opening locked doors in both. By Communion time to hesitate seemed craven, even insulting to everything and everyone he cared about.
Matt edged past a sitting Temple to the central aisle, where he jointed the two parallel lines shuffling over the rough tiles to Father Hernandez.
When his turn came and the priest placed the bland white circle of faith in his palm, saying,
'The body of Christ," Matt looked into his raven-dark eyes without guilt or reserve.
He saw joy teetering on the brink of tears. Father Hernandez had never stood on the sacristy steps to judge Matt, but indeed had felt judged himself all during the terrible time at Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Seeing Matt before him, taking Communion, told the priest that Matt did not judge him and find him wanting. Matt did not see him as a priest who had buckled in the face of enormous pressure, nor as one possibly guilty of unspeakable sin, as charged by the bitter Peter Burns.
Matt knew all of Father Hernandez's secrets and could keep them in good conscience.
He returned to his place beside Temple in a daze, blessed with relief. He knelt, his face in his hands, in prayer.
Then this part was over. When Father Hernandez faced the congregation and instructed them to exchange the Kiss of Peace, Matt found himself shaking hands with people behind and forward. Temple did likewise, handling this assignment like the crack PR lady she was.
Finally there was no one to greet but the one in the same pew. Matt turned to her last, taking her hand, then bending to kiss her mouth.
He could feel her hand tense at the kiss, a quick, caring gesture. As he drew away, he saw she was terribly pleased.
Suddenly self-conscious, he glanced around for Sister Seraphina. Instead, he found himself exchanging glances with an unknown woman--well-groomed, her hair both silver by age and gilded by frosting, perhaps fifty-something. She was watching him with the look he had always surprised on women's faces, one of speculation, distance and unsettling ache.
Matt, feeling naked, wanted to look away. He had always looked away. Then, caught up in the moment, the mass, he smiled at her instead. For a moment her face was blank, confused.
Then she returned his smile, sheepishly, shyly, as if to mouth that catch phrase of women in department stores, "just looking." The unspoken admission liberated him. Perhaps he had misinterpreted the women's eyes and smiles all the time. Perhaps it wasn't his looks they admired, making him feel phony and unworthy, but his instincts, his warmth. Perhaps they saw unlived life in him, and wanted to call it forth.
He glanced at Temple, who was pretending to concentrate on her paper prayerbook, but smothering a smile. She had seen the byplay and she wasn't threatened. In fact, she approved.
Matt realized such looks might not be invasive and judgmental, but wistful expressions of an other person's warmth or joy, or seeming self-possession.
Now that he had experienced this Kiss of Peace in the congregation, he pitied the priest in his lonely role at the forefront, the instructor who urged acknowledgement on others, but always held himself apart.
Matt felt the shards of his guarded, stainless-steel inner self drawing together as by a magnet. He felt a cooling inner bath, as if immersed in an immaterial font.