Good Behavior (2 page)

Also, for a second reason to be depressed,
nuns
. Born in Dead Indian, Illinois, and abandoned at three minutes of age, John Dortmunder had been raised in an orphanage run by the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery, and when you mentioned nuns to
him
no sweet images grew in his mind of kindly penguins feeding the homeless and housing the hungry. No, what Dortmunder visualized when he heard the word
nun
was a large, bad-tempered, heavy-shouldered woman with a very rough and calloused right hand, usually swinging. Or wielding a ruler: “You've been quite bad, John. Put out your hand.” Ooo; a smack across the palm with a wooden ruler can create quite an impression. Just looking down at those black-and-whites—still in the traditional uniform, he noticed, not updated with the rest of the Church—just looking at them, even after all these years, could make his palm sting.

Like his ankle. Having decided
not
to drop onto that lower roof, having started to climb back up, he'd been in the wrong posture when his hands had slipped and he'd fallen any which way, landing heavily on an angled roof, bouncing, hitting various portions of himself, and rolling at last down into a trough, his head dangling over the edge, staring down maybe thirty-five feet at extremely hard sidewalk.

Had he yelled when falling, or when he'd hit? He didn't know. He did know he had a whole lot of new aches and bruises and pains and stings all over his body, but he also knew that the sharp fiery twinges in his ankle made all the other pains pale in comparison. “Just like I figured,” he muttered, rolled over, managed not to slide off the edge of the roof, and looked back up at the dark mass of the building he'd just left. No cop yet, no flashlight yet, but there sure would be.

Scrambling up the steep slope on all threes—his left ankle hurt by now most of the way to the hip—he came to a small dormer, with a square wooden louvered shutter instead of a window on its front. This shutter was merely held in place by four small metal wings which could be turned aside, so Dortmunder turned them, crawled through into a small dusty black space and pulled the shutter closed behind himself. It kept wanting to fall away from the window, so he reached a narrow screwdriver through the louvers and put two of the little retaining wings back in place.

The space in which he found himself was absolutely black, and apparently quite small; not an attic, not a useful area, but merely a bit of waste between the outer and inner designs. Turning this way and that, trying not to hit his ankle against too many hard unyielding surfaces, Dortmunder blundered across the trapdoor, opened it, and found just below him the wide rafter far above the chapel. Having no choice, out he went.

At first, it had seemed as though he could crawl across this rafter to a pillar on the far side, then shimmy down the pillar (somehow), and thus make good his getaway, but this goddam rough-hewn timber was a little
too
rough-hewn; every time he touched it he got three more splinters. Trying to protect his hands and his ankle and everything else, he'd struggled along to just about the middle of the timber before he'd lost his grip and almost fallen. That's when his coat fell open, and tools began to drop. And now here he was, stuck, above a sea of nuns.

Silent
nuns. Even in his present difficulty, Dortmunder noticed that strangeness. The first little group of nuns, having spotted him up here, had run off to get more nuns, all of them seeming very excited, pointing at him, gesturing at one another, waving at him to remain calm, running back and forth, but never saying a word, not to one another and not to him. Robes
whiffed
down there, soft-soled shoes went
pid-pid
, beads and crucifixes
klacked
, but not a word did they speak.

Deaf mutes? Unable to use the telephone? Hope hesitantly lifted its battered head in Dortmunder's breast.

And here came yet more nuns, with a ladder. Apparently, having a man in the rafters was quite an exciting event to this crowd, so they all wanted to participate, which meant there were so many nuns helping to carry the ladder that it probably assayed out to about one nun per rung. This labor-intensive method caused a lot of delay in transferring the ladder from the horizontal to the vertical—thirty or forty of the nuns didn't want to let go—which made for a great
flurry
of hand-waving and head-shaking and finger-pointing before at last it was raised and opened to its tall aluminum A, and pushed over to where its top could poke Dortmunder's dangling knee.

“Okay,” Dortmunder called. “Okay, thanks, I got it.” Hundreds of nuns held the feet of the ladder and gazed up at him. “I got it now,” he called to them.

Oh, yeah? Here he was on a rafter, and there next to him was the ladder, and the physical impossibility of transferring himself from the former rafter to the latter ladder gradually made itself manifest. There was absolutely no way to let go of anything over here, and equally no way to attach himself to anything over there. Dortmunder dithered, unmoving, and time went by.

Vibration in the ladder. Dortmunder looked down, and here came a nun, lickety-split, zipping up to his level. She was small and scrawny, ageless inside that habit, her sharp-nosed ferretlike face peering out of the oval opening of the wimple like somebody looking out of the porthole of a passing ship.

And not much liking what she saw, either. With one brief unsympathetic look at Dortmunder, she pointed briskly at his left leg and then at the first step of the ladder below the top. Nothing goody-goody about
this
one; she'd fit right in back at the orphanage. Feeling almost at home, Dortmunder said, “I'm sorry, Sister, I can't do that. I think I broke my ankle, or sprained it, or something. Or something.”

She raised her eyes heavenward, and shook her head:
Men; they're all babies
. It was as efficient as speech.

“No, honest, Sister, I did.” Old habits die hard; seeing the old habit of the nunnery, Dortmunder immediately started making excuses. “It's all swole already,” he said, and shifted around precariously to give her a better look. “See?”

She frowned at him. Braced on the fourth step of the ladder, she raised the dangling end of her wooden-beaded sash and pointed at the crucifix on the end of it while raising her eyebrows in his direction:
Are you Catholic?

“Well, uh, Sister,” he said, “I'm kind of, uh, fallen away.” He lowered his gaze, abashed, and looked at that stone floor way down there. “In a manner of speaking,” he said.

Again she shook her head, and let the crucifix drop. Coming up two rungs, she reached out and grabbed his right wrist—
God
, her hand was bony!—and gave it a yank. “Holy shit!” Dortmunder said, and she stared at him in wide-eyed disapproval. “I mean,” he said, “I mean, uh, what I meant—”

An eyes-closed brisk headshake:
Oh, forget that
. Another tug on his wrist:
Let's move it, fella
.

“Well, okay,” Dortmunder said. “I hope you know what we're doing.”

She did. She treated him like a collie bringing home a particularly stupid sheep at the end of the day, as limb by limb she transferred him off the beam and onto the ladder, where he clung a moment, half-relieved and half-terrified, covered with sweat. More vibration meant that his short-tempered benefactress was hurrying back down the ladder, so it was time to follow, which he did.

Awkwardly. His left ankle absolutely refused to support any weight at all, so Dortmunder hopped his way to the ground, holding on to the sides of the aluminum ladder with fingers so tense they left creases. Left leg stuck out and back at an awkward angle that made him look as though he were imitating some obscure wading bird from the Everglades, he went bounce-bounce-bounce all the way down on his right foot, and when he finally got to the bottom a whole lot of nuns reached over one another's shoulders to push him backwards into a wheelchair they'd just brought in for the purpose.

Dortmunder's fierce friend from the top of the ladder stood in front of him, gazing severely down at him, while all the other nuns hovered around, watching with a great deal of interest. This one must be the Chief Sister or Mother Superior or whatever they called it. She pointed at Dortmunder, then pointed at herself, then pointed to her mouth. Dortmunder nodded: “I get it. You're all of you, uh, whatever. You can't talk.”

Headshake. Hand waggled negatively back and forth. Disapproving scowl. Dortmunder said, “You can talk?”

Nods, lots of nods, all around. Dortmunder nodded back, but he didn't get it. “You
can
talk, but you
won't
talk. If you say so.”

The wiry little boss nun clutched her earlobe, then suddenly did a vicious right-hand punch in midair, a really solid right hook. She looked at Dortmunder, who looked back. She sighed in exasperation, shook her head, and went through it all over again: tug on right earlobe and punch the air, this punch even stronger than the first; Dortmunder believed he could feel its breeze on his face. As he sat there in the metal-armed wheelchair, frowning, wondering what in
hell
this old vulture was up to, she glowered at him and tugged her earlobe so hard it looked as though she'd pull it right off.

Parties. Dortmunder's head lifted as a memory came to him. Party games, he'd seen people do—He said, “Cha
-rades?
”

A great heaving relieved nod flooded the room; the nuns all smiled at him. The head nun did one last earlobe tug and punched the air one more time, and then stood there with her hands on her hips, staring at him, waiting.

“Sounds,” Dortmunder said, the rules of the game vaguely floating in his head. “Sounds like. Sounds like punch? Like lunch, you mean.”

They all shook their heads.

“Not lunch? Munch, maybe.” (The lost caviar was influencing him.)

Everybody
vehemently
shook their heads. The boss did the charade all over again, more irritably and violently than ever, this time punching her right fist smack into her left palm with all her might. Then she stood there, shaking her left hand, and waited.

“Not punch at all,” Dortmunder decided. “Sock?” No. Well, that was just as well. “Hit? Bang? Crash? Pow? Thud?”

No, no
, they all semaphored, waving their arms.
Go back one
.

“Pow?”

Many many nods. Several of the nuns did quick charades with one another and silently laughed; talking about him.

“Sounds like pow.” Dortmunder thought it over, and saw only one way to handle the situation. He said, “Bow? Cow? Dow? Fow?” The look they gave him when he said
fow
made him skip
gow
. “How?”

Several of the nuns were pointing at the floor or stooping down. Dortmunder said, “Start at the other end of the alphabet?” and they smiled in agreement and relief, and he said, “Zow? Yow? Wow? Vow?”

That was it! Thousands of fingers pointed at him in triumph. “Vow,” Dortmunder repeated.

The head nun smiled, and spread her hands:
There. That's the story
.

“I don't get it,” Dortmunder said.

A collective sigh went up, the first sound he'd heard from this crowd. While the rest of the nuns all raised their eyebrows at one another, the boss put her finger to her lips, then cupped her hand around her ear and leaned forward to make a big dumb-show of listening.

“Sure,” Dortmunder agreed. “It's real quiet. When you've got nobody talking, that's how it gets.”

The nun shook her head, did the dumb-show again, and spread her hands:
Get it, idiot?

“Oh, it's a clue.” Dortmunder leaned forward, holding the wheelchair arms. “What is it, like, sounds like quiet? Riot. Diet. No? Oh, you mean
quiet
. Something
like
quiet. A different word like quiet. Well, I mean, when it's real quiet, it's like, you know, it's quiet, you can't hear anything, you like it when it's quiet at night, things get very quiet, you want some other word like quiet, when it's quiet, when there's no horns or anything, it's real quiet and—I'm
thinking!
I'm doing my
best!
”

Still they glowered at him, hands on hips. “Gee whiz,” Dortmunder said, “I'm new to this, you people do it all the time. And I just had a bad fall, and—All right, all right, I'm thinking.”

Hunched in the wheelchair, not speaking, he thought and thought and
thought
. “Well, there's always silence,” he said, “but beyond that I can't—Oh! It's
silence!
”

Yes!
They all pretended to applaud, nearly clapping their hands together. Then more and more of them switched over to a pointing thing. Point
here
, then point
there
. Point
here
, then point
there
.

Dortmunder was getting into the swing of it now, gaining confidence from his successes. “I get it,” he said. “Put the two things together. Vow. Silence. Vow. Silence.” He nodded, and then he
did
get it, and loudly he said, “A vow of silence! You got a—One of those religious things, a vow of silence!”

Yes! They were delighted with his accomplishment, if he'd been a Maypole they'd have danced around him. A vow of silence!

Dortmunder spread his hands. “Why didn't you just write that, on a piece of paper?”

They all stopped their silent congratulations, and looked briefly puzzled. A few of them plucked at their skirts or sleeves to call attention to their habits, suggesting it was just habit, but the chief nun stared at Dortmunder, then reached into her garments and came out with a three-by-five notepad and a ballpoint pen. She wrote briskly, tore off the note, and handed it to Dortmunder.

Can you read?

“Oh, now,” Dortmunder said. “No need to insult me.”

4

Mother Mary Forcible and Sister Mary Serene wrote notes back and forth with the speed of long practice. Here in the tiny cluttered office of the convent, with its barred window viewing Vestry Street, they sat on opposite sides of Mother Mary Forcible's large desk, shoving their notes at each other with increasing vehemence.