OCR Text |
Show Anting Alone Page 286 psychiatric institution. The fact that Bopp didn't realize that Polycarpana and Simone were cellmates and best friends and that, therefore, Polycarpana could be expected to know all the secrets of Simone's life - and Simone Polycarpana's - was proof of how unseriously Bopp took his duties as chaplain and "counselor" at Saint Paphnutius. Though usually not one to put much stock in rumors, Polycarpana did recall Simone's claim that Bopp, fresh out of seminary, had run his first parish into debt in record time, and that the Ordinary of the Archdiocese of Denver, having determined that Bopp was too sickly and irresponsible and self-centered to be a competent parish priest, had assigned him to the pampered life of convent chaplain, as if by default, with no consideration of his qualifications., or lack thereof, for the job. Pretending to warn Polycarpana of the fleshly pitfalls that awaited her outside the community in the real world, Father Bopp had hissed into her ear as if it were fresh news the vicious, if not entirely unfounded rumor that Simone had not been sneaking out of her cell after Grand Silence was rung to get an early start in the peagarden (which is what she'd claimed, almost bursting out in belly laughs) , but rather to hold secret nighttime trysts with her lover, her fleshly lover, let there be no doubt, Polycarpana; and her fleshly lover was not exactly, shall we say, of the more masculine gender. Polycarpana had sat down in the chaplain's presence, had flung herself down in the fake-antique pettypoint wingback chair in front of his desk; she'd gotten right down there, eye-to-eye with the tiny priest. She thumped on his leather-bound Dante that he used as a paperweight and told him in |