Dear Old Dead Read online

  “All right,” Rosalie said, reluctantly.

  “Take off now.”

  Rosalie hesitated a moment longer. Then she shrugged her elegant shoulders and strode out of the office, not looking back.

  “Try not to get yourself mugged,” she told him as she slammed the door behind herself. It popped open again, refusing to catch.

  Charles van Straadt took another drag on his cigar and got out of his chair. Michael’s phone was covered with Post-It notes, but it was otherwise free of debris. Charles sat down in Michael’s chair and picked up the receiver.

  “I would like to speak to Martha van Straadt,” he told the house operator. “I believe she’s on duty in post-op this evening.”

  The operator said something inane in half-Spanish, half-English and Charles chewed at the end of his cigar.

  Crises, crises, crises, he thought.

  There never seemed to be an end to crises.

  3

  UNLIKE PRACTICALLY EVERYBODY ELSE in the city of New York—or at least, practically everybody else who didn’t work at the Sojourner Truth Health Center—Father Eamon Donleavy had not been surprised to open his copy of the Daily News this morning to find Michael Pride splashed all over the front of it. He hadn’t even been surprised at the occasion for the story, which was the fact that Michael had been caught in the raid of a particularly nasty gay porno house off Times Square. Eamon Donleavy and Michael Pride had known each other all their lives. Their families had had practically identical six-room ranch houses next door to each other in Kickamer, Long Island, and they had gone straight through high school together, with Eamon two years older and more or less on track, and Michael not even old enough to drive on the day he graduated. After that, Eamon and Michael had parted. Eamon had gone on to the seminary and Michael had gone on to MIT. It had surprised neither of them when, running into each other much later, it had turned out that they had a lot in common. It had surprised Eamon not at all that Michael was “gay.” Eamon always put quotes around that word because, in Michael’s case, the situation was somewhat complicated. Eamon knew dozens of gay men. It was impossible not to, living in New York. Michael was something different, an original, a law unto himself. Michael wasn’t so much definitely gay as he was definitely crazy.

  Eamon Donleavy had the newspapers spread out across his desk: the Post, the Daily News, even The Times. The only paper that hadn’t played up the story of Michael’s arrest was the Sentinel, and that was Charles van Straadt shielding his personal saint. Eamon didn’t know how long the Sentinel’s silence could possibly last. He didn’t know what was going to happen next, either. The center couldn’t operate without Michael. The center was Michael. Eamon didn’t think Michael could operate without the center. It was getting as crazy as Michael’s personal life.

  Eamon Donleavy served as chaplain to the nuns who worked at the Sojourner Truth Health Center, and offered Mass once a day to anyone who wanted to attend, and gave classes in reading and religion to anybody who wanted to show up. He was really here to ensure that the Archdiocese of New York did not get into any serious trouble through the fact that they provided the Sojourner Truth Health Center with a good deal of money and resources. This was a tricky maneuver, because the center quite definitely did abortions (for free) and gave abortion counseling. The official position of the Archdiocese on that was that the Catholics at the center had nothing to do with abortion or birth control in any way and the money the Archdiocese sent was used for a children’s lunch program and the provision of school supplies like pencils and notebooks to children who could not afford their own. As a policy position it left a lot to be desired, as had been pointed out in everything from The National Review to The New Criterion. The Archdiocese was getting away with it because the present Archbishop had the reputation of being a conservative hard-liner. It was difficult to accuse the man of liberalism when he’d just delivered a speech on the evils of R-rated movies and nonprocreational sex. Still, it was a balancing act—and now there was this. The Archbishop had known about this long before the papers had, just as Eamon had. It didn’t make the stories any easier to take.

  Eamon’s office was right across the hall from Michael’s own. Through his open door, Eamon could see Charles van Straadt making calls on Michael’s phone. Eamon didn’t like Charles van Straadt. He thought the man was dangerous. Eamon especially didn’t like the way Charles sent his grandchildren to volunteer at the center. To Eamon, Charles van Straadt’s grandchildren looked very much like spies.

  “We’ve got to start working on some kind of contingency plan,” the Archbishop was saying in Eamon’s ear. “We’ve got to think of a rationale. That is, unless you want us to pull all the nuns out of there, which I don’t.”

  “No, Your Eminence. Of course I don’t.”

  This Archbishop was also a Cardinal. The Archbishop of New York was always a Cardinal. In Eamon’s experience, there was something about making a man a Cardinal that rendered him incapable of making a short phone call. This call had lasted half an hour so far, and it was beginning to look like a real marathon.

  “How’s Michael?” the Archbishop said. “Is he keeping his mind on his work?”

  “I don’t think Michael’s noticed the fuss at all, Your Eminence.”

  “How could he avoid it?”

  “By working.”

  “Well, yes, Eamon, of course, by working, but—it’s all over the place. He couldn’t go to the corner for a cup of coffee without finding a newspaper staring him in the face.”

  “You don’t go to the corner for a cup of coffee in this neighborhood, Your Eminence. At least, you don’t if you’re Anglo. Michael might be able to get away with it just because he’s Michael, but I don’t think he’d count on it.”

  “People must have said things to him. There must have been phone calls.”

  “The phone’s been ringing off the hook all day, Your Eminence. Augie—Sister Augustine has one of those Benedictines that came in from Connecticut answering the calls. She’s very polite and very noncommittal and she doesn’t let anything get through to Michael. There have been a few reporters hanging around, too, of course, but fewer than you’d think. This isn’t a neighborhood up here, Your Eminence. This is a war zone. It’s not safe.”

  “No. No, Eamon, of course, it’s not safe. But what about Michael himself? What about the arraignment? Is there going to be a trial?”

  “Well,” Eamon said drily, “it seems that the New York City Police Department has neglected to file charges—”

  “What?”

  “Michael hasn’t been charged, Your Eminence, and he’s not going to be. Not for something like this.”

  “I see. Yes, Eamon, I see. What about his health? Not just his psychological health. His physical health.”

  “I don’t know,” Eamon Donleavy said.

  There was a lengthy pause on the other end of the line. Eamon Donleavy could just imagine what the Archbishop was thinking. It was what Eamon himself thought, when he let himself think, about the medical indications of Michael’s periodic bizarre behavior. A glory hole was a hole in the wall of a stall in a gay porno theater. A client entered the stall, paid his quarters for the movie, and then, if the whim took him, either stuck his own private parts into the hole for the man in the next stall to service, or serviced whatever was sticking through the hole in his own stall. The very idea made Eamon Donleavy physically ill. For Michael, in this age of AIDS, it was a death wish. For the Archbishop, it was undoubtedly more incomprehensible than genocide.

  There was a cough on the other end of the phone. “Eamon? Are you as worried by all this as I am?”

  “I’m worried about Michael, Your Eminence.”

  “I’m worried about Michael, too. Will he be able to withstand all this publicity?”

  “It depends on what the van Straadt papers do. If they pull out all the stops, he could be in trouble. Maybe not, but he could be.”

  “Will they pull out all the stops? Don’t they fu
nd most of the center’s operations?”

  “Yes, they do. And the old man professes to like Michael.”

  “Only professes?”

  “I don’t know, Your Eminence. I don’t seem to know much of anything today.”

  “You know as much as you need to know. All right, Eamon. I’d better let you off the phone. We’re getting reports of a full-scale gang war going on up there.”

  “Yes, Your Eminence. There’s something like that going on. We have one or two of these every summer.”

  “It’s not summer, Eamon. It’s barely spring.”

  “Excuse me, Your Eminence.”

  “Take care of Michael, Eamon. As much as he’ll let you. God bless.”

  The Archbishop hung up. Eamon Donleavy hung up, too, and stared through his still-open door at Charles van Straadt sitting across the hall. Charles van Straadt was still on the phone, talking to God knows who, doing only God knows what. No, Eamon thought, I don’t like him. I don’t trust him. I don’t want him slithering around on the edges of our lives.

  If I were a man of courage, Eamon thought, I’d do something about him.

  4

  SISTER AUGUSTINE HAD BEEN seventeen years old on the day she entered her order, stubborn and exhilarated and panicked all at once. Those were the days when nuns wore tight white wimples fastened around their throats and so many skirts it felt like wading in water just to walk down a hall. Those were the days when Sisters barely spoke except to ask Sister Anne to pass the salt to Sister Josepha at breakfast. Those were also the days when nuns were never allowed to ask for anything for themselves. Sister Augustine remembered it all without regret. She was not a radical. She didn’t care if women were ever ordained into the priesthood or not. She felt no urge to think of God as a goddess or to call her Heavenly Father “She.” Sister Augustine simply preferred to spend her days in sweatsuits and sneakers rather than habits and nun shoes. She also preferred to be called “Augie.” Sister Augustine had been born Edith Marie Corcoran, which she hated. She had been named “Mary Augustine” by the Mother Superior of her order on the day she received its habit. She had first been called “Augie” here, about ten years ago, by one of the girl junkies in the refuge program. The street kids all thought she was cute. It annoyed her sometimes. She tried not to show it.

  Sister Augustine regretted nothing of the passing of the old order after Vatican II, except this: Before the changes, there always seemed to be hundreds of people milling around, willing to do everything and anything and willing to do it for free. That wasn’t true, of course, not really. Augie knew her own selective memory when she caught it in the act. Even so. Her order used to run two dozen elementary schools, paid for by their parishes and provided to parishioners for free. These days, with no nuns to speak of and lay teachers having to be paid just like public school teachers and provided with benefits besides, it was a miracle if a parish school’s tuition wasn’t just as high as the tuition of the fancy private school down the road. And then there were the hospitals…

  Sister Augustine looked out the window of the emergency-room nurses’ station at the man with his cardboard sign walking back and forth on the sidewalk outside and shook her head. In a minute she would have to go out there again, where all hell was breaking loose. In a minute she would have to pretend she was competent and wise and no more prone to hysteria than anybody else. For just this second she could contemplate the center’s most faithful protester and wonder to herself what had happened to all the nuns. Even if the habits had disappeared and church discipline had been relaxed—why should that make a difference? Doing good was doing good, no matter how you justified it to yourself. Doing good didn’t become less important than climbing the corporate ladder to vice president in charge of operations for IBM just because the Mass was being said in English.

  The door to the nurses’ station opened. Augie turned around to see Sister Kenna Franks coming in with a large tray of cafeteria food. Sister Kenna Franks was a Franciscan from an order in Boston, an order that, like Augie’s own, had almost no nuns left in it. Back in the old days, Augie might have been assigned to a place like the Sojourner Truth Health Center, but the Sisters under her direction would all have been Sisters in her own habit. These days, they took any nun whose order was willing to sponsor her for a year or two, they took nuns the way they took acts of charity from rich old men whose anti-Papism was only just beneath the surface. Augie had quite a lot of nuns on her staff. She had many more nuns than any other Catholic medical facility in the city. Only one of them was a nun of her own order.

  Sister Kenna Franks wore a loose black cowl-necked robe tied at the waist with a rope. It fell to her feet and covered up the fact that she was wearing socks and sandals. Sister Kenna Franks was very young and very thin and never ate much of anything at all. She put the cafeteria tray down on the desk and cocked her head.

  “We figured you were hiding out,” she said. “Is there something interesting going on out there on the sidewalk?”

  “What’s his name with the sign,” Augie told her.

  Sister Kenna Franks went to the window and looked. “Oh, him. The others are gone, you know. The ones from that group that wants civil rights for homosexuals. Sister Victoria said this morning at breakfast that that was because of all the stories in the newspapers.”

  “They’ll be back,” Augie told her.

  “Really?” Sister Kenna sat down at the desk and looked over the tray of food. “You really ought to sit down here and get something to eat. Mrs. Angelini sent up all the things you like best. And you need your strength. Dr. Pride is down in OR bellowing for you right this minute.”

  “OR being kept busy?”

  “Oh, yes. All three theaters. We’ve got those back-up doctors Dr. Pride set up last summer, you know, those men he used to know in medical school who said they’d come down if there was ever a real emergency. Two of them who said they would wouldn’t, but the other three are here. It’s a good thing, too, because it’s all very bad out there.”

  “Any news as to how soon it might get better?”

  Sister Kenna shook her head. “I haven’t had time to watch the news, but the television set is turned to Channel two down in the cafeteria and people report when they have a chance. There seems to be some kind of impasse, but there hasn’t been an end to the shooting. Three police officers are already dead.”

  “Wonderful. It’s drugs, I take it.”

  “I think so.”

  Augie went over to the desk and looked at the cafeteria tray. A hot turkey sandwich, piled very high with turkey and gravy on white bread. An enormous slice of Mrs. Angelini’s killer chocolate pie, with whipped cream and a cherry. A cup of coffee. Augie got a chair from near the window and sat down to eat. It was embarrassing how accurately Mrs. Angelini had her pegged. It was embarrassing how much of a rut she’d let herself get into. Back on the day she had entered the convent she’d told herself, secretly, that it would be good for her figure. She would become an ascetic and a saint and live on Holy Communion wafers and air, like Saint Catherine of Siena. Instead, she’d become thoroughly addicted to chocolate and even rounder than when she’d started out.

  Mrs. Angelini had included four little cups of cranberry sauce. Augie picked up the closest one and began eating that.

  “Tell me,” she asked Sister Kenna. “How are the Sisters taking all the newspaper stories? What are they saying about Dr. Pride?”

  “Saying?” Sister Kenna looked confused. “They’re not saying much of anything, Sister. Just that it’s a shame.”

  “A shame that he did it or a shame that he got caught?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think of it myself, Sister. I mean, Dr. Pride is a kind of saint, isn’t he? Starting this place and working here. He could have been a doctor in private practice and made a lot of money. He wasn’t just stuck with a situation like this.”

  “True.”

  “And then there are these—these glory holes. Do you k
now what a glory hole is, Sister?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, I don’t, and most of the other Sisters don’t either, but some of the girls in the refuge program—they know. And they laugh.”

  Augie winced. “I’m sure they do. Are they upset about all this?”

  “No,” Sister Kenna said. “No, they’re not. One of them, Julie Enderson—do you know Julie Enderson, Sister?”

  Augie knew Julie Enderson. Julie was a prostitute who claimed to be eighteen years old. Augie was fairly sure she was no more than fourteen. Julie was the great good hope of the refuge program at the moment. She was bright and energetic and good at schoolwork when she put her mind to it. She had a chance to make it out of this place if she really wanted to. Everybody at the center knew Julie Enderson.

  “I hope Julie isn’t off her stride,” Augie said carefully. “That would be unfortunate.”

  “Julie says it’s just like Dr. Pride, that he’d pick a vice where there was no question whatsoever that he wasn’t forcing anybody else into anything. And the other girls agreed with her.”

  “Well, that’s one way of thinking about it,” Augie conceded. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me, but that’s one way of thinking about it. Anything else going on over there?”

  “Not really.” Sister Kenna stood up. “But I do think you ought to talk to the girls about Mr. van Straadt, Sister. I mean, I don’t like him either, but the things they say about him—and he does give us so much of our money, and we need the money, don’t we?”

  “Yes,” Augie said. “We need the money.”

  “I’ll leave you here with your dinner,” Sister Kenna said. “You eat up and then come down to OR and calm Dr. Pride. There’s talk that the police are going to send in a whole set of SWAT teams this time. The last time they sent in one and it didn’t work. But you know what that means. It’s going to get even worse around here than it already is.”