Virgin (16 page)

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
neverending 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 than 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 took him a while, but now he was just as
comfortable.

And 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 co-worker 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 only two or three years
old."

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," she said.

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,"
he said.

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 reentering 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 if 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.

"And
here," she said, tapping one of the pages, "this part where he refers
to 'his brother.' Who else can that be but St. James the Apostle, the brother
of Jesus."

"His
brother or his cousin," Dan said, "depending on which authority you
believe."

But he sat up
straighter in the bed and took the page from her. As he scanned the passage
Carrie had mentioned it occurred to him that she had a point. The recent
publication of some obscure Dead Sea scroll fragments suggested a link between
the Essenes of Qumran and the Jerusalem wing of the early Christian church, or
"Nazarean movement," as it was called. The Jerusalem Church had been
led by St. James. King Herod Agrippa martyred his share of early

Christians, and even the High Priest Ananus was after them. So
they were periodically fleeing into the desert.

"You know," he said softly, "I never saw it
before. I mean, the writing was so disjointed and cryptic, but the timing fits.
If we assume that 'his death' refers to the crucifixion, and that 'his brother'
arrived 'two decades and a half later, that would date the Glass scroll
somewhere around fifty-eight
a.d."
Dan
felt a tingle of excitement in his gut. "James was still alive in
fifty-eight. Ananus didn't have him killed until sixty-two
a.d."

Carrie clutched
his arm. "And tradition says Mary died twenty-two years after Jesus's
death, which is pretty darn close to two decades and a half."

Dan could tell
Carrie was getting pumped again. It seemed to be contagious. His own heart had
picked up its tempo.

"But who
wrote this? If we can trust the little he says about himself, I would guess he
was a scribe or a Pharisee, or both."

"How can
you tell that?"

"Well,
he's educated. Hal told me the scroll was written in the Aramaic of the time
with Greek and Latin words and expressions thrown in. The striped blue sleeve
he mentions, and his former free access to the Temple--he's got to be a
Pharisee."

"He talks
about the inheritance he left behind."

"Right. A
rich Pharisee."

"But
weren't the Pharisees proud? This guy's wearing rags and he says even the lice
won't bite him. And he tried to drown himself."

"In the
Dead Sea, apparently--it was called the Sea of Lot back in those days. Okay. So
he's a severely depressed Pharisee who's fallen on hard times and suffers from
a heavy-duty lack of self-esteem."

Carrie smiled.
God, he loved that smile. "Sounds like he'd fit right in at Loaves and
Fishes," she said. "But what's this about Hellenists?"

Dan reread the
passage. The pieces began falling into place. "You know . . . he could be
referring to St. Paul's
wing of the early
church. The two groups had a falling out."

"I knew
there were disagreements, but--"

"More than
disagreements. A complete split. James and his followers remained in Jerusalem
as observant Jews, sticking to all the dietary laws and customs while they
awaited the Second Coming of the Messiah, which they assumed would happen any
day. St. Paul, on the other hand, was out in the hinterlands, working the
crowds, converting Jews and Gentiles alike to his own brand of Christianity.
His father was a Roman and so Paul had a different slant on Jesus's teachings,
one that sacked the dietary laws and most Jewish traditions. It mentions here
'the brother's fear of the Hellenists using the mother's remains for their own
purposes'--the scroll has
got
to be referring to St. James's rivalry with
St. Paul's movement."

Dan stared at
Carrie, his heart pounding, his spirits soaring. Good God, it all fit! The
scroll described an encounter with St. James and the remnant of the Jerusalem
church shortly before James was martyred.

"Carrie,
this is incredible! Why hasn't anybody else--?" Then he slammed on the
brakes as he remembered. "Wait. Just wait." He shook his head to
clear away the adrenalin buzz. "What am I doing?"

"What's
wrong?"

"Everything's
wrong. The scroll is a fake, Carrie. The
ink is two or three years old. We've got to remember that. A damn skillful job,
but a proven forgery. Almost had me going there, wondering why nobody else had
put these pieces together. Then I realized why: nobody bothered to try. Why
waste time interpreting a fake?"