The Last Suppers (29 page)

“Oh, my dear,” said one of the women, all of whom were older than me by at least three decades, “what happened to you?”

“I hurt my back.”

“We’ll add it to the list,” Lucille Boatwright declared solicitously as she settled onto the library couch like a hen adjusting to her nest. “Poor Goldy. Any word yet?” When I shook my head, she added, “Perhaps we should start with a prayer for Father Olson.”

Beginning with Lucille, the women took turns delivering halting words of supplication. This was very different from the higher-decibel, gut-spilling type of prayer I’d heard at the late Sunday service. A silence followed. I closed my eyes and conjured up an image of Father Olson. On the
screen of my brain, he appeared and said urgently, “Call me.”

“What?” I said out loud.

“What?” chorused four women, their perplexed eyes suddenly open. Lucille Boatwright rolled her lips against her gums and gave me a stern look that demanded:
Are you on drugs?

Prescribed pain pills, thank you very much. Still, I kept my mouth firmly shut as the women began a short prayer that God would lead the police to the murderer, and that Tom Schulz’s note would be deciphered and Tom found. I had intended to ask these women questions about the parish during this meeting. But the pill I had taken was making logical thought impossible. During their prayerful silence, I allowed my eyes to slip shut. This time I’d conjure up Tom Schulz. Instead, Father Olson’s face loomed again, his mouth open in supplication.

“Ca-a-a-ll me-e-e.”

No doubt about it, I was losing it. I heard serving utensils clatter loudly to the floor out in the narthex. That was all I needed—I made a slow, clumsy retreat out to where the catering action was taking place. Unfortunately, the very person I was not in the mood to chat with was Canon Montgomery. His toadlike presence filled the narthex. Or maybe it was the poetry that invaded my mind when I saw him smile approvingly at the pan of pasta:
Only a wimp/ eats shrimp.

“Ah, Goldy,” he said with a large, synthetic smile. He moved toward me. “Just the person I’ve been looking for.”

Marla gave me a helpless look as the
Mountain Journal
—in the person of Frances Markasian—breezed through the church doors. When Frances spotted me talking with Montgomery, she grabbed the wooden door behind her and eased it closed so that it would make no noise. I felt an equal amount of discouragement and unease.

Ignorant of either woman’s presence, Montgomery confided, “Goldy, I’m so very, very sorry that I was hard on you during the service yesterday.” He made a gesture of apology with his meaty hands. “I feel terrible that my grief
expressed itself in an ugly outburst against you. I called and left a message with your son. But I wanted to tell you so myself.”

I muttered, “Okay.” In her duct-taped sneakers, Frances Markasian tiptoed up behind Montgomery so she could eavesdrop on our conversation. The Stealth Reporter. I said nothing. In fact, I rather enjoyed the prospect of the canon theologian getting a painful dose of our local journalism.

“It’s just,” Montgomery went on, casting his eyes heavenward and warming to his topic, “that I’m still so terribly upset over losing Ted Olson. And this parish … I don’t know.” A cast of tragedy hung over every word. Frances Markasian was getting it all down. I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Again. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, the stress, the pill. Or maybe it was the way Montgomery took himself so seriously that brought out the hyena in me. “In any event,” he rushed on with a self-important sniff and pat of his middle-parted white hair, “we’ve decided to move up the exams by one day, since Olson’s funeral is tomorrow and the whole committee’s already here. Will this be a problem? To have dinner for fifteen at the conference center at six? Tonight? Do you have a staff that can help you? Penitential season, better have fish.” Frances scribbled madly but noiselessly; I wondered wildly if I should set an extra place for her. My mouth hung open. Dinner for fifteen a problem? Montgomery had to be kidding. “Afterwards,” he added in a rush, “we can go through the first three answers to the coffee-hour questions. If I could just figure out the fax machine in the choir room, I think I could notify the last of the candidates. I do remember we were planning on having you do the food …”

Tom Schulz’s voice in my head said,
Who’s we, white man?
At least it was Tom’s voice this time. Anything was better than having the dead rector insist that I phone him up in the Hereafter. Maybe this was what schizophrenia felt like. I waited for Frances Markasian to introduce herself, but instead she just held her fingers up to her lips in a shushing motion. I wondered if this was legal. We were, after all, in church.

“Goldy?” Canon Montgomery raised his voice a shade. The last thing I needed was to have him holler at me again. Marla was shaking her head wildly and mouthing the words
No food.
But I knew I had to keep busy, even if the pain pills were playing tricks with my mind. The worst aspect of missing Schulz was the terrifying notion of having nothing to do, of being motionless at home waiting for the phone to ring. Not that I had done that much sitting around in the last forty-eight hours. But still …

“Yes, dinner will be fine. Will the place be open?”

He lifted his peaked eyebrows. “I’ve told Mitchell Hartley to leave the doors unlocked around the clock. That Bob Preston fellow protested—a little late for the person responsible for security to be upset, wouldn’t you say? I’m having a broken window fixed right now. Can you imagine?”

“Actually, I can. That’s our fault—”

He waved my protest away. “I’m assigning you and Doug Ramsey to examine Mitchell Hartley tonight, just for an hour. Go ahead and open your letter matching numbers with candidates, and concentrate on his written work. We hope Hartley’ll do better this time …”

There was that
we
again. “How’s Father Doug doing?”

“Oh, well,” said Montgomery with a sniff. “You know he was upset with Olson over the miracle claims, and I do believe he was a trifle jealous, perhaps. Olson was so handsome and charismatic in
every
sense, a lady’s man, you know.” Frances Markasian wrote furiously.

“He was never a lady’s man with me,” I said, my voice as stiff as my aching back. I didn’t wish to see any undocumented insinuations about Father Olson in the
Mountain Journal.

“I’m just saying,” Montgomery replied, testy and oblivious, “that I’ve been working with the clergy in this deanery to change suspicious, jealous attitudes. There have already been some meaningful changes. However, I do admit to frustration over priests’ feelings that the pie is only so big—”

“Pie!” cried Marla. “I just knew there was something I
needed to talk to Goldy about. Sorry that you’re feeling frustrated, Canon Montgomery. Actually, I’ve been meaning to tell you about this other canon I knew. His name was Canon Glasscock. I said, ‘Glasscock? Is that your real name? Do you have crystal balls, too?’” Montgomery gagged; I bit my lip; Frances Markasian wrote. But Marla was unyielding. “You know what the clergy should do?” she said, wagging a bejeweled finger at him. “Give
you
a jingle when they feel blue. Here, tell the
Mountain Journal
all about it. Frances here can write, ‘When you want/to feel all summery/you can call/Canon Montgomery!’” With that she grabbed my arm, whirled us both around, and marched in the direction of the kitchen.

Behind us, I heard Frances say with potently false humility: “Hi, I’m from the paper, and I’d like to talk to you about your relationship with the murder victim. Father Olson? Could you talk a little bit more about those jealous attitudes?”

“Brr-auugh!” howled Canon Montgomery.

I didn’t dare look back to see how the canon theologian looked. I felt like a Filipino racing away from an erupting Mount Pinatubo. A Filipino with a bad back, no less.

Marla took the hotel pan from the church’s oven. She set it in the chafer with a minimal amount of overflow splashing, from which she deftly leapt away. “Hey, Montgomery deserves it after the way he treated you on Sunday, so don’t give me a lecture,” she said defensively. She scooped up the salad bowl, swayed her body from side to side, and chanted, “I truly don’t know/which is worse/Listening to his sermons/Or listening to his verse!” The woman was on a roll. I saw Montgomery storm out of the church with Frances Markasian in hot pursuit. My bet was on the journalist.

The bakery-fresh smell of breadsticks heating filled the kitchen. I watched Marla toss the salad with the balsamic vinaigrette and wrap the warmed breadsticks in a linen napkin inside a wicker basket. When the ladies emerged from the prayer meeting, they
oohed
and
ahed
over the sumptuous array. In a fuzzy part of my brain, I registered
that Agatha Preston hadn’t shown up; maybe Frances Markasian had nabbed her, too. Between refilling the salad bowl and breadstick basket, Marla remarked that she hadn’t seen Agatha either. But when I went outside to get a breath of fresh air and stretch my back, I saw Agatha on her knees, digging around in the columbarium construction area. With its deep mud and frozen puddles, steep-sided ditches and erratic surface, perhaps Agatha was working in the mud and thinking about her favorite topic: hell.

The women raved about the Canterbury Jumbles more than any other dish. This bore out the truth of the caterers’ maxim that you must serve a rich and sweet dessert after a fish course. This was true even if the fish is shrimp in a wine-and-cheese sauce. After virtuous behavior, even if it is not truly virtuous, people feel they have earned their right to calories.

“Tata, dear!” one woman called gaily to me as she tied her Hermes scarf under her chin. “I hope they find your fiancé!” Her tone was along the lines of, “I hope you buy a new car!”

I glanced at my watch as Marla cleared the plates.
1:00.
Tom Schulz had been gone for fifty hours.

“You cannot cater tonight,” Marla insisted once we were back at my house, sitting in the kitchen with our feet up. “I won’t let you.
I’m
too tired. Besides, we don’t have any food left.”

I shook my head. The only message on my machine had been from Alicia, my supplier. That afternoon, she was bringing up the Chilean sea bass and vegetables I had been planning to prepare for the first meeting of the Board of Theological Examiners. This was fortunate, as I was indeed out of shrimp. I said, “This committee is counting on me. I can’t just show up with no food.”

“They were counting on you for
tomorrow.
Not tonight.”

I got up slowly and took unsweetened chocolate, vanilla,
and Amaretto from my pantry. “Look, Julian will be home soon, and he won’t mind helping. Dinner will be very simple,” I said as convincingly as possible.

Marla scowled. “What kind of medication did Stodgy Hodge put you on, anyway, hallucinogenic Darvon? Was lunch your idea of
simple?”

Actually, the pain pills were helping. I melted butter and whirled chocolate cookies in the blender to make a crust. If we were going to have bass, especially steamed bass, then the caterers’ postfish maxim made chocolate cheesecake a dessert necessity. Besides, I wanted to use another of Tom Schulz’s recipes. It made me feel close to him.

“I don’t believe I’m watching you do this,” Marla muttered. “At least it’s chocolate. Then we can both have some. Not to mention that your back will feel a lot better after a dose.”

Nudging me aside gently, she beat cream cheese with eggs, sugar, and melted chocolate, then doused the smooth, dark mixture with cream, vanilla, and Amaretto while I patted the crumbly crust into a springform pan. When the cheesecake was safely in the oven, Marla poured herself a generous glassful of Amaretto. She announced she was going out to rest on the living room sofa.

“If you leave this house, I’ll never speak to you again,” she mumbled once she’d downed the liqueur and slipped off her shoes. “And another thing I’ll never do again is think catering is this easy, fun, glamorous profession.”

I shook out the heart-in-the-center and cross-in-the-center afghans and gently placed them over her. “It’s nice to be appreciated,” I told her. But immediately I felt a wave of sorrow: Here I was catering a fancy meal to a bunch of examiners and examinees, when I should have been on my honeymoon.

I dutifully hobbled back out to the kitchen and pulled out the pile of exams. I leafed through to Mitchell Hartley’s first set of questions. This section of the exam was constituted to replicate that most pastorally challenging part of Sunday morning, the coffee hour. Many parishioners saw the priest’s presence at coffee hour as an opportunity to get
free advice. Think
Ann Landers meets Dial-a-theologian.
This year’s written questions reflected the kind of bizarre interrogatories that were common. At our last meeting, Father Olson had told the board that a long paragraph was acceptable as an answer to a coffee-hour question. We examiners were always to remember that the candidate was supposed to be pastoral first and theologically correct second. The Episcopal church didn’t want to make anyone feel unwelcome, no matter what. At least, that was their official line.

The first question went, “My neighbor asked me if I’d been born again. I said once was enough, thank you. She said I needed it, and I said I didn’t. Who’s right?”

Mitchell Hartley had written: “Your neighbor is right! You have to be born again, even Jesus says so. You need to get with the program.”

“Uh-oh,” I groaned. On the living room couch, Marla stirred in her sleep. Nor
exactly pastoral,
I wrote in pencil,
and what happened to the long paragraph?

The second question was, “Our teenager babysat for some neighbor kids whose bedtime prayer began, ‘Our Mother and Father in Heaven …’ I thought God was a man! What do you think, Father?”

Mitchell Hartley’s tall, loopy handwriting replied: “God
is a
man! Don’t let your teenager babysit there again.”

Candidate Hartley was beginning to tick me off. Again.

The third question. “I don’t understand, Father. Is AIDS God’s judgment against homosexuals?”