He’d never been in love before. Grade school and high school puppy loves, sure. But this went beyond physical attraction, beyond infatuation. If Carrie were a lay person he’d leave the Church for her—if she’d have him. But Carrie had no intention of leaving her order. Ever. So he’d have to settle for things the way they were.
Of course, if she’d been laity, the relationship never would have begun. He wouldn’t have let her within arm’s reach. His guard would have been up, his defenses primed at all times when he was around her. But Carrie, being a nun, being a member of the club, so to speak, had slipped past his guard without even trying.
That first afternoon in her brother’s condo had awakened a long-dormant hunger in him. Along the course of his years as a priest he’d learned to structure his life without regard to sex. Excruciatingly difficult at first. He’d found it went beyond avoiding thoughts of sex. It meant avoiding thinking about avoiding thoughts of sex. You did that by cramming your days full of activity, by hurling yourself headlong into the never-ending hustle and bustle of a downtown urban parish, by sublimating your own needs to those of your parishioners. After all, that was what it was all about, wasn’t it? That was why you joined the priesthood. And if you did your job right, at the end of the day you collapsed into bed and slept like the dead until dawn when it was up and out for early Mass and back again into the parish whirl.
After a while you got pretty good at it. After a while, the lusty parts of the brain atrophied and became too weak to bother you with much more that an occasional, feeble nudge.
Unless something kick-started them with a steroid charge and pumped them up to strength again.
Something like making love to Sister Carrie.
Now he was like a randy teenager. He wondered where the guilt had gone. Overwhelmingly awful at first, especially when she’d told him about her father and what he’d done to her. Dan had almost despaired then, wondering if he might be aiding and abetting some dark, self-sabotaging compulsion within Carrie. She’d run to the convent to escape a sexually molesting father; she’d become a model nun, a paradigm of virtue and saintliness except for the fact that she was having a sexual relationship with her parish priest...a man everyone called “father.”
Dan had always been skeptical of facile parlor psychoanalysis, but the doubts nagged at him when he was apart from Carrie. When he was with her, however, they melted in the warmth of her smile, the glow of her presence. Carrie seemed perfectly comfortable with their relationship; it had taken him a while, but now he was just as comfortable.
Dan loved her as he had never loved another human being, and that love let him see the world in a whole new light, brought him closer to the rest of humanity. How could that be wrong?
He loved Carrie completely, and he wanted her—all the time. Every moment they were together at Loaves and Fishes was a struggle, a biting agony to keep his hands off her. He’d learned to freeze his emotions at those times, confine his thoughts to the instant, force his brain to regard her as no more than a pleasant coworker and to leave her clothes on whenever he looked at her.
But God, it was hard.
But more than wanting Carrie physically, he wanted her emotionally. Just being near her was a thrill. But being near her in bed was Heaven. Like now...
He noticed her bathrobe hanging open, exposing the rose-tipped globe of her left breast. He reached for it but she brushed his hand away with a sheaf of papers.
“What is this?” she said, shaking them in his face.
“Wha—?” Dan propped himself up on his elbows and stared at the papers in her hand.
“Where did you get this, Dan?”
He couldn’t remember ever seeing Carrie this excited.
“Oh, that. Harold’s back from Jerusalem. It’s the translation of a scroll that somebody turned in to the Rockefeller Museum over there. He gave it to me as part of a little gift.”
She laughed. “A gift? He gave this to you as a gift? But this is fabulous! Why hasn’t the world been told?”
“There’s nothing to tell, Carrie. The scroll is a fake.”
She stared at him in silence, the glow of excitement slowly fading from her eyes. She shook her head.
“No.” Her voice was a whisper. “That can’t be.”
“It’s true. Hal said the carbon dating showed the ink is twelve years old tops.”
Carrie was still shaking her head. “No. There’s got to be a mistake.”
Dan leaned forward and kissed her throat. “What’s so important about it? It’s paranoid, jumbled, and seems deliberately obscure. The forger was probably some nut who—”
“It’s about Mary.”
Now it was Dan’s turn to stare. “Mary? Mary who?”
“The Blessed Virgin Mary.”
Dan knew from Carrie’s expression that he’d better not laugh, but he couldn’t repress a smile.
“Where on earth did you get an idea like that?”
“From this.” She held up the translation. “The dead woman he’s talking about, the body he’s supposed to guard—it’s Mary’s.”
“I guess that means we’re tossing out the Glorious Mystery of the Assumption.”
“Don’t be flip, Dan.”
“Sorry.”
And he meant it. He knew of Carrie’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin and didn’t want to tread on any of her vital beliefs. But even though he was a priest, Dan had never been able to buy the Assumption. The thought of Mary’s soul re-entering her body after her funeral, then reviving and being carried aloft to heaven by a host of angels was pretty hokey.
That sort of fairy tale stuff was all through the Bible, Old Testament and New, and had nothing to do with Dan’s idea of what the Church was all about. Nifty little stories to wow the kids and get their attention, but sometimes fairy tales only served to distract from the real message in the Gospels: the brotherhood of man.
“But you’ve got to admit,” he said cautiously, “that the Assumption is a bit hard to buy.” Carrie didn’t react; she simply stared down at the papers in her hands. So he pressed on. “I mean, we can agree, can’t we, that Heaven isn’t a place. It’s a state of being. So how could Mary be ‘assumed’ into Heaven body and soul when Heaven is a spiritual state? Her body was a physical object. It couldn’t go to Heaven. It had to go somewhere else. And I doubt it’s in orbit.”
A vision of the space shuttle passing the floating body of the Virgin Mary popped into his head. He shook it off.
Carrie looked up at him, her eyes bright again.
“Exactly! And that’s what this is all about. This tells us where she really is!”
Uh-oh. He’d backed himself into that one. “Now wait just a minute, Carrie. Don’t get—”
“Listen to me, Dan! Whoever wrote this was assigned the task of guarding the body of a woman, a very important woman. ‘Twenty years and five after his death they found me.’ Tradition holds that Mary died twenty-two years after her son’s crucifixion. The timing is almost perfect.”
“But Carrie, the guy never says whose death. In all the Gospels and letters and other texts, Jesus was called by name or referred to as the Master, the Lord, the Son of Man, or the like, and the Dead Sea scrolls referred to the Messiah as the ‘Branch of David’ or a ‘shoot from the stump of Jesse’ or as the ‘Prince of the Congregation.’ I’d expect the writer to use one of those terms at least once if he was referring to Jesus.”
“Maybe he wrote the scrolls for himself. Maybe he feared mentioning Jesus by name—there were all sorts of persecutions back then.”
“That’s possible, of course, but—”
“But I get the feeling from this that he didn’t feel worthy to speak Jesus’s name.”
A rather melodramatic interpretation, Dan thought, but he said nothing. Carrie’s intensity impressed him. The translation had really got to her. She was inspired, afire with curiosity and...something else...something he couldn’t put his finger on.