Dead Wrong Read Online Free PDF Page B

rest of her fertile life. Ted said he would discuss the matter with Father Art and see what the official Church position was on a hysterectomy when the organs in question were perfectly healthy.
    Melissa, when she recovered from astonishment at Ted’s imperious presumption, declared she didn’t really give a damn what current Church teaching was, but if he was going to check out anything, let it be the present stance on vasectomy, again when the operation involved not only healthy but robust plumbing.
    Ted very definitely was having none of that, no matter what the Church taught.
    They argued for quite a while until both came to realize that neither “ectomy” was going to take place.
    They debated noninvasive methods of birth control … until they came to the conclusion that while Melissa, on the one hand, had no intention of depending on unreliable methods, Ted, on the other hand (citing the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” as definitively condemning any form of artificial birth control), had no intention of utilizing any such thing.
    By this time, neither thought it productive to mention the rhythm method. In the end, both could have sung “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.”
    All things considered, Melissa figured she could do without sex at least until such time as it would be worthwhile to divorce Ted—certainly not until the children were grown—or until she chanced on a safe affair of the heart.
    Ted was not nearly as tranquil with the arrangement. It was perfectly acceptable for women to be continent; abstinence came naturally to them. And of course priests freely chose to be celibate and chaste. But he felt no call whatsoever to lead a temperate existence.
    And then, like a miracle, Brenda came into his life. God was good.
    T HEY MET AT A Marygrove College Christmas celebration, at which he was the guest of honor. She was a graduate of what had been a Catholic college for women. It was now coed, and Ted Nash was one of its benefactors.
    The timing was perfect. He’d been barred from Melissa’s bed just long enough to build up a smoldering hunger. He certainly could not bring himself to seek relief either with a prostitute or by himself.
    Had Ted not been the honoree, he would never have considered attending the party. It was neither his kind of party nor his sort of group.
    It was held in a huge room with a vaulted ceiling. In the center of the room were tables holding trays of finger sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres. Other tables against the walls held liquor and generic wine. A student choral group was singing carols.
    Bored, Ted was eager to leave, when he spotted her, as the song had it, across a crowded room.
    She was tall—easily his height, slender, and dressed in what for some reason was his favorite color scheme—black and white. He caught her looking at him. But when he returned the gaze, she quickly turned her head.
    He approved such modesty.
    Who can say why one person is attracted to another? There can be countless reasons, many of them intangible. But something ignited between them.
    He crossed to her and introduced himself. She blushed and acknowledged that she as well as everyone else in the room knew who, he was. She introduced herself. Brenda Monahan.
    Irish. He liked that too.
    When he discovered where she worked—the chancery of the archdiocese of Detroit—their conversation would not suffer an awkward silence for the rest of that evening, nor for all the evenings to come. With his abiding interest in Catholicism—on his terms—he was fascinated with the inner workings of what was in effect headquarters.
    Ted did not particularly cotton to Detroit’s Catholic hierarchy. Far too liberal. He felt that was a just charge to make against Detroit’s archbishop, Cardinal Mark Boyle. And of course the archbishop set the tone for the entire archdiocese.
    Not that every priest marched in lockstep to the official drummer. There was Father Art for one, and many who agreed with him.
    But