Chameleon

borderline personality.”

“Borderline? What does that mean?”

“Would you fill my cup one more time? I think that’ll do it. Thanks. Well, if I understand Rudy correctly, it means that such a personality is living right on the edge-the border-between sanity and insanity.”

Mary shuddered. “That’s frightening. I mean it sounds like some sort of science fiction-or a horror movie.”

Koesler sipped the hot coffee. It was excellent. He was convinced there was no special trick to brewing good coffee. “It is frightening. But it’s strange: When we were in that room, together, just Quent and I, I got the overwhelming impression that he had been under enormous stress for a long, long time-ever since his wife died. I think he felt he was caged in a box he couldn’t escape from.

“Rudy agreed. And added the word ‘conflict.’ It was, he said, a ‘stressful conflict.’ Quent felt he was intended to live a married life. That had been taken away when his wife died out of due time. He believed that any sexual relationship had to be restricted to marriage. According to Church rules, he could not marry again. And he felt compelled to comply with that law even though he detested it. He was not going to back away from this obligation. You could scarcely find a more clear example of stressful conflict.

“My problem was the same question you raised: How could he function so well in a normal daily life and then deliberately kill people? He would have had to be some sort of chameleon. One moment he would be a well adjusted, even dedicated man, a minister of the Church-and the next moment he would be a madman.

“But Rudy explained that this is the key to the borderline personality. They function at a high level of normalcy and then they decompose and go into a psychotic state.”

“‘Decompose’! That seems an awfully strong word.”

“I know. But that’s the word Rudy used. He also said that Quent was the right age to have been in the Korean War. Isn’t that odd: Quent and Clete Bash would have been in the same war. One emerged physically crippled, the other maybe emotionally. Anyway, Rudy said that if it were true, that Quent could already have been programmed to be violent as a result of that bloody war. As a soldier he would have to follow orders. Then as a successful businessman, he would have the power to make his own rules. So he was used to being in charge of his life.

“Then he becomes a deacon and once again he is subject to rules that he cannot bend. Another stressful situation.

“Rudy said it was completely believable that Quent could begin to see these laws that hemmed him in on every side as a kind of catch-22-a game. In his psychotic state, he would treat the situation like a game. Only it was his deal. And he was going to deal himself the unbeatable power hand-a royal flush: ten, jack, queen, king, ace of the same suit-Catholic leaders.”

They were silent for a few moments.

“I was just thinking,” Mary said, “those married ministers and priests who are becoming Catholic priests-they may have to face the same kind of problem Quentin Jeffrey did.”

Koesler nodded. “Yes, that’s possible-even probable. It will be a problem that the Catholic Church-at least the Latin Rite-hasn’t had to face for about a thousand years. That, and, I suppose, divorced priests … priests who want to remarry after a divorce. I guess that’s why the Pope is paid so well.”

They laughed.

“It certainly is a different Church from the one we grew up in,” Mary said.

“I’ll say. Some think that in the Third Vatican Council, the bishops will bring their wives along. And at Vatican IV the bishops will bring their husbands.”

Mary laughed. “That’s too much for this old head to handle.” She finished her coffee and left the kitchen, to busy herself in the office.

Koesler, alone in the room, cradled his cup and thought. In such a brief time, five, almost six, people dead. Four people he’d known quite well; one, Helen Donovan, he never knew. Four people who had no idea why they had been selected, who had no advance warning whatsoever that the end was at hand. One man the cause of it all. Yet, could a “borderline personality” be fully responsible? Was he himself a victim of a different sort, and was it one rule that was the cause of it all?

Koesler did not know. He tried to visualize the five, the victims and their killer, in heaven. In heaven-and in heaven alone-would it be possible to find the understanding and forgiveness needed to heal these wounds. Like the two soldiers, in Wilfred

Owen’s war poetry who had fought hand to hand, thrusting and parrying until they had slain one another. Now, one invites the other to come away from the field of slaughter, and rest.

He thought of the last letter St. Thomas More wrote to his daughter before he was executed. The last words of that letter, the last words that great man wrote: “Farewell, my dear child and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends that we may merrily meet in heaven.”

Only in heaven …