Matt saw one thin, ivory wax candle winking in the rectory's kitchen window. He wondered if it was left over from last Advent or St. Blaise's February feast day, if it had been blessed or was merely an ordinary candle pulling ordinary candle duty.
Matt listened to the cab's wheels peel slowly away on the gritty pavement as he walked to the side of the rectory, then pushed the night's last button--the doorbell.
He heard the faint, hoarse ring of an elderly buzzer within, waited, then rang again.
Finally, other sounds came, like a blind man boxing his way through a maze. The door opened all at once, fully wide, filled by Father Hernandez, who looked smaller and older in civvies--a navy turtleneck and dark slacks. Matt would be willing to bet that he wouldn't touch a bottle while in uniform; even his breakdown would be regimented.
"Seraphina called you," Father Hernandez challenged. "What would we do without nuns to meddle?"
The question required no response, and Matt gave none.
He simply entered when Father Hernandez faced the inevitable and stepped aside.
"What are we supposed to do?" the pastor asked, traces of both bafflement and self-mockery in his voice.
"Talk," Matt suggested.
Father Hernandez turned and moved through the semidark kitchen, bumping into a countertop. Matt followed, avoiding comment, avoiding judgment.
The priest buffeted down the narrow, dark back hall ahead of Matt like a babe down a birth canal, caroming from wall to wall, blindly driving toward the light that poured like pale syrup from the open office door.
He lurched through that door into the room beyond, into his chair, which creaked to accept the body he threw into it. A green-glass-shaded banker's lamp lit the desktop's jumble without casting much light on Father Hernandez's face behind the desk, or on Matt's when he sat down in front of it.
Despite the hour, despite the situation, rectories had an ineffable cozy feeling, and Matt felt that trickle of warmth even now. Familiar ground, once his own. But not quite.
The desk lamp also illuminated the tall, clear bottle of tequila sitting under it, and the plain kitchen glass fogged with fingerprints beside it.
Jose Cuervo was evidently the friend of Father Hernandez that Sister Seraphina had suspected.
"Care for a glass? I almost said, 'Father.' " Father Hernandez gestured with a host's broad, sweeping hand to the solitary bottle and glass.
Matt realized he had never before confronted anyone who could be so dangerous to his own hard-won equilibrium. He nodded. He would get nowhere if he began on a holier-than-thou platform. Besides, he could use his own dose of Mexican courage.
Father Hernandez's dramatic eyebrows rose, but he pulled out a drawer and extracted a glass as plain and smudged as the one already in sight. He unscrewed the bottle cap and poured three inches of liquid into each smeary glass. No ice, no niceties.
Matt leaned out of his chair to accept it, then sipped. He'd had tequila before in a different form: the festive, saltrimmed, pale jade bubble of an oversized cocktail glass. Straight tequila burned like rubbing alcohol and had a sour, acrid aftertaste. He set the glass down on the desk, careful to place it on a clump of papers rather than on the naked wood, where it would sweat a pale ring into the finish.
Down the hall, the rectory's aged air conditioner droned like a snoring giant.
"What does she think you can do?" Father Hernandez asked after taking a long, almost loathing gulp of his drink. His voice wasn't slurred, but a bit loud and contentious. Matt didn't take offense; Father Rafe wasn't angry with him, although he might act like it.
"Sister Seraphina always had greater expectations of me than I could live up to," Matt replied.
"Don't they, though? Don't they all?" Father Hernandez leaned over his desk. "I don't blame you for leaving, you or any of the other thousands. It's not like it used to be. Everything's changed--the liturgy, the bureaucracy, the clergy, the parishioners." He eyed Matt carefully, as if he had to concentrate to see him, and maybe he did. "Was it the usual, celibacy? I can see that a young man who looks like you--"
"It wasn't celibacy," Matt said quickly. "Nothing so simple."
"Ah. You think celibacy is simple, do you? How long were you in?"
"Including seminary, sixteen years."
"It gets harder," Father Hernandez said, sitting back to drink again. "Not the celibacy, everything. Raising money, cutting corners when there are so few other priests and nuns to be found. We used to run on our clergy--our dedicated hundreds of thousands sworn to poverty, chastity and obedience.
Now we have all the worries and the expenses and none of the resources."
"I've seen the frustrations of parish life, Father."
"Yes, came, saw and left. Not like Caesar, were you? No conquering, just accounting, and accounting for yourself and your parish to the bishop, who hardly knows your name unless you become involved in some untidy abortion fracas or sleep with a teenager or disgrace your cassock by slopping a little liquor on it."
Matt winced at the corrosive tone. "Will the bishop have to hear about you?"
"Has already, I suppose. Spies everywhere. 'Father Hernandez is tippling a bit nowadays, Your Eminence. Perhaps you should send him somewhere to dry out.'"If only that were the worst of it!"
Matt sipped from his glass again, wondering whether he should probe for some indiscretion with a woman or with the abortion issue. Father Hernandez answered that himself.
"Women were never my weakness," he announced with boozy satisfaction, almost as an ordinary man would boast the opposite. "Not sex, and never the bottle, until lately. Did Sister Seraphina tell you about those odd calls to poor old Monica and the late Miss Tyler, who was so generous despite my lamentable lack of tact toward cats?"
Matt nodded. Father Hernandez leaned forward over his desk, clutching his glass in both hands.
"Do you still observe the sanctity of the confessional?" he demanded, staring into and through Matt's eyes, his gaze as piercing as laser light.
"I left officially; I didn't just walk away like some do. I . . . underwent laicization. I'm not a priest anymore. I can't observe what I can no longer practice."
"You can treat anything I tell you with the same seriousness, can swear to keep it eternally secret, as privileged information, even as a lawyer or a psychiatrist must do."
"The obligation no longer has the spiritual element," Matt objected.
"But if I asked you to . . . revert to that degree of confidentiality, would you?"
"I would have to," Matt answered unhappily.
He hated being asked to perform as a quasi-priest again, but he also understood that those were the only terms on which Father Hernandez would accept him as a confidant.
"If you were my confessor," Father Hernandez went on,
"I would have to begin my confession, 'Father, forgive me, for I have not sinned."
He laughed at Matt's partly appalled, partly puzzled expression, then sighed long and deeply. "You know about the convent getting anonymous phone calls? I have been getting letters."
"Letters?"
Father Hernandez disappeared behind the desk as he bent to wrestle open another old, and sticky, drawer. He surfaced with a large manila envelope, but before opening it, he refilled his glass and nudged the tequila bottle in Matt's direction.
"I'm fine," Matt said, indicating his almost untouched glass and registering the irony of the expression at the same moment. He was not fine, and neither was Father Hernandez.
"All right." Father Hernandez gulped more white lightning, then licked his lips. His hands came down hard on the plump manila envelop. "First, these are lies. I believe the term is 'damnable lies.' But we don't call Satan the Father of Lies for nothing. Lies can undo a life."
Matt nodded.
Father Hernandez sighed again, shakily. "I can hardly bear to show another human being such lies, but I'm sick of swallowing them by myself and saying, doing, nothing to defend myself. I think you will see why I can do nothing.