True Believers Read online

  “I was thinking about Chickie George,” Daniel said.

  “Chickie’s behaving like a saint.” Aaron leaned over the archway rail. Chickie was kneeling in the second pew from the front on the right of the center aisle, his hands folded on the back of the pew in front of him, his eyes closed, his body still. “We’re all incredibly proud of Chickie at the moment. He’s been here since midnight.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder what it would be like, to be like Chickie? We all get frustrated with him, I know. He’s such a flaming stereotype in some ways—”

  “Well,” Aaron said, “flaming would be the word.”

  “Yes, exactly. But maybe that’s better than what we are. You and me. Maybe it’s more honest. Or maybe it just—precludes prevarication.”

  “I don’t think it’s a choice, Daniel. I don’t think people decide to be flaming queens, not to put too fine a point on it. Any more than they decide to be gay.”

  “I don’t think they decide, either.” Daniel had put his coffee cup down on the floor next to his feet. Now he reached into the pocket of his trousers and brought out his open roll of soft mints. He offered them to Aaron and was refused. He took one himself. Somehow, at seven o’clock, he was supposed to go downstairs and lead a Matins sung prayer. At the moment, he didn’t think he could remember the words.

  Aaron sat down on the edge of the archway lip with his back against the rail. “So,” he said. “What’s all this about? Scott? It’s odd about Scott, isn’t it? You’d think it would be easier. He didn’t die from AIDS. He didn’t get beaten to a pulp in some back alley somewhere just because a couple of good old boys got liquored up and let loose.”

  “He fried his system on cocaine and died of a convulsion at the age of thirty-two.”

  “People do that, Daniel. People do it who aren’t gay men.”

  “Scott did it because he could never accept who and what he was. And I’m at least partially responsible for that. St. Stephen’s is at least partially responsible for that.”

  Aaron turned around to look over the rail. Scott’s mother looked like she might have been asleep, she was that still. “He was molested at the age of eight by his own priest,” he said. “You know that. We handle the settlements the archdiocese made, and not just for Scott. All the men who were victims over there are screwed up now. And on top of that, Scott’s father was a son of a bitch. Is a son of a bitch. You know all this as well as I do.”

  “In two weeks,” Daniel said, “it’s Valentine’s Day Sunday. And they’ll be back. Roy Phipps and our friends from down the road.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ll go stand out there while they’re having their demonstration. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I didn’t go alone?”

  “We’d go if we thought we could. It’s not safe.”

  “Is it safe for me?”

  “You’ve got the collar to protect you.” Aaron stood up. “Look, I don’t understand what you’re so upset about here. It’s not like we’re all in the closet. It’s not like St. Stephen’s is in the closet. Everybody knows—”

  “Everybody knows, but they never say it out loud.”

  “Maybe that’s the best we can do at the moment. Look, what’s going to happen to us if you decide to make an issue of this and get kicked out of the clergy? Even Spong couldn’t make them budge on this, and he’s got a lot more clout than you do. What happens if St. Stephen’s gets shut down? Or if they put a conservative in here, or some asshole who thinks his mission in life is to convert gay men to heterosexuality? This is an incredible place, Daniel. This is the first place I’ve ever found where I can hear God. I don’t want to lose it.”

  Daniel got up. The adrenaline was back. Over the course of this night, he had sometimes felt as if he had ingested methamphetamine in a time-release capsule. Every hour or so, it surged back at him. He looked down at the altar, at the plain gold cross that hung above it. Some of the men in the pews were in pairs, pressed up close to each other or holding hands. Others were solitary, like Chickie George, mostly because they were always solitary. They were the ones who knew where all the back-street bars were, and which of the leather shops would run a private account.

  “Do you believe in it?” Daniel asked Aaron. “What it is we say we believe every Sunday. The virgin birth. The Resurrection. Do you believe in it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

  “I’m getting at the fact that I do believe in it. I’m not John Shelby Spong. I don’t think it was all a myth. I don’t think it was all a metaphor. I think it really happened. The Annunciation. The miracle of the loaves and the fishes. The walking on water. But most of all, the Resurrection. And that’s the point.”

  “I think I’d feel a hell of a lot better if you’d start making sense,” Aaron said.

  “I am making sense.” Daniel leaned over the rail and looked one more time at Chickie George, and then at Scott’s mother, a pale woman in a worn brown coat who looked exhausted beyond belief. He wondered what she made of it, what she made of them. He wondered if she realized that all the men in this church were gay, and not only the ones like Chickie.

  “I’m going to go take a shower,” Daniel said. “I feel like I’m covered in crud. Are we going to have picketers at this funeral?”

  “I don’t think so. It wasn’t AIDS.”

  “And he wasn’t famous. Thank heaven for small favors. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Right,” Aaron said.

  When Daniel went out the gallery door, it squeaked one more time, so he didn’t bother to shut it behind him. The stairwell was steep and winding. Everything had been done that it was possible to do to make this church look as if it had been built by the same people who had built the Houses of Parliament. Back in the nineteenth century, when Philadelphia had been a rich city and the Episcopal Church had been the richest denomination in it, that had probably seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do.

  Daniel got to the bottom of the stairs and headed across the foyer to the side hall that led to the rectory at the back. The doors to the church had been propped open, but he didn’t even bother to look inside. He felt light-headed beyond belief, and annoyed with himself for more reasons than he was able to enumerate, or even define. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep. Maybe it was just that he had always thought that Scott would make it through, when he was good and ready—and instead, all he had been ready to do was die. He knew all the good arguments against making decisions on the basis of emotion, but at the moment none of them seemed to apply. Hell, he thought. Sometimes, if you didn’t make a decision on the basis of emotion, you didn’t make a decision at all.

  The back hall ended at an arched doorway. The doorway led into another hall. Daniel hurried through and came out in the rectory mudroom. There was a wooden bench against one of the walls. Under it, there were boots and shoes, the kinds of things Daniel wore when he was not wearing his collar. On another of the walls there was a rack with hooks. The hooks held snow parkas and barn jackets and a long yellow rubber slicker he’d bought once to keep out the rain, but never worn. Looking in this room, you could imagine yourself in the house of any upper-middle-class WASP in America: the sort of person who bought his suits from Brooks Brothers and his outdoor things from L. L Bean; the sort of person who had been to a decent prep school before going on to Princeton; the sort of person who had tickets to the symphony every season. It was a very good description, Daniel thought, of the sort of person who belonged to the Episcopal Church.

  He went through the mudroom into the kitchen and looked around. It didn’t look like anyplace he had ever been before. It didn’t even look like his coffeepot, sitting there at the edge of the stove.

  He thought his head was about to explode into a million and one different pieces, and when it had finished doing that it was going to reconstruct itself—as something other than a head.

  3

  Sister Mary Scholastica had never met a parish coordinator before she cam
e to St. Anselm’s Roman Catholic Church, but now—two weeks into her tenure—she was sure that the title was nothing but a polite term for bitch.

  Well, not “bitch” exactly. Scholastica’s order, the Sisters of Divine Grace, wore recognizable habits. They weren’t elaborate habits, like the ones Mother Angelica and her sisters wore on EWTN, but they were impossible to miss. A black dress that went to just below the calf line, black stockings, a black veil with a white brim that showed only the smallest amount of hair at the very front of the head: there was no way to mistake the fact that Scholastica was a nun, even before you saw the large metal crucifix that hung around her neck. Habits were more than a witness to the world. They were also a constraint. Considering what it was they constrained, Scholastica was willing to admit that that might not be a bad thing. If she was ever going to call Sister Harriet Garrity a bitch, she was going to have to wait to do it in her bathrobe—and that wouldn’t work either, because she would never be in her bathrobe in any place where anybody outside her order would have a chance to see her. She went over and over the rules in her mind. It was barely past four in the morning. She was tired beyond belief, and she was not thinking well. All she came up with was a mishmash of emergency scenes: the convent was on fire and she was out in the parking lot in her bathrobe because of that; she was confined to a hospital bed for something like a broken leg or a bad case of sciatica; Sister Harriet burst in through the convent door in a mad attempt to free them all from patriarchal oppression. Patriarchal oppression made Sister Scholastica’s head ache, but not nearly as much as Sister Harriet Garrity did. She should have taken a Tylenol when she’d still had a chance.

  What she did instead was to put the big mug she’d brought from the motherhouse on the table, and to put a tea bag into it. Sister Harriet’s note was sitting right there at the edge of the place mat, written in thick black letters that must have been made with a felt-tip pen. She caught the kitchen crucifix out of the corner of her eye and nodded to it, automatically, the way she’d been taught to nod to churches when she was young. The memory surprised her. When she was in grade school and all nuns wore habits even more obvious than her own, Catholic men used to tip their hats when they passed a Catholic church. They used to do it on the bus and on the sidewalks, all the time, so that even non-Catholics never thought anything of it. The kettle began to screech, and she took it off to pour water over her Red Rose. What a very odd thing to remember—and to pine for, which was really what she was doing. Men tipping their hats when they passed a church. Parishes with three priests in the rectory to see to all the parish business. Nuns who knew when to shut up. Sister Harriet Garrity. Scholastica put the kettle back on the stove.

  Please inform the parents of the girls in the First Communion class, Sister Harriet’s note said, that it is no longer considered religiously appropriate for girls to dress like brides for their First Communion.

  Scholastica picked up the note, folded it in half, then unfolded it again. She put it down. She picked it up again. She put it down again. The kitchen door snicked open, then shut. Scholastica looked up to see Sister Peter Rose coming across the floor to her, dressed in one of those infamous bathrobes and with nothing at all on her head. Some of the older nuns wore their veils or their old white linen nightcaps just to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, but Peter Rose was barely twenty-six. She had a good head of hair, which now seemed to be held back by a rubber band.

  Peter Rose stopped in front of Scholastica and bowed slightly, the way they’d all been taught to do in the novitiate.

  Scholastica said, “Well, since I make the rules for this house, and I’m talking, I suppose we’re not observing the grand silence this morning.”

  Peter Rose pulled out a chair and sat down. “You’ve been pacing for hours. Are you all right?”

  Scholastica passed the note across the table. Peter Rose picked it up and read it.

  “Ah,” she said. “Harriet, up to her usual. I think she already suspects that you’re not going to be as much of a pushover as Marie Bernadette.”

  “Was she a pushover?”

  “She was sick, that was the problem,” Peter Rose said. “Cancer makes you weak, and chemotherapy makes you weaker. She didn’t have a lot of fight in her, at the end. She shouldn’t have been kept on here so long.”

  “She wanted to stay. It seemed like the best thing to do, as long as she was able.”

  “I suppose. I’m glad you’re here, though. Things have been insane around this place far too often lately. And the school needs—more energy than it’s been getting.”

  Scholastica took the tea bag out of the mug and put it on a small square paper napkin. She dumped a heaping teaspoon of sugar into the mug and stirred. The clock on the wall seemed to be moving incredibly slowly, far more slowly than it ever had before. It was as if the world had decided to stay dark and asleep forever.

  Scholastica put the teaspoon on the napkin. “Tell me something,” she said. “Does Father Healy know about this?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?

  “Because he isn’t having a fit about it.”

  “Exactly,” Scholastica said. “He’s going to have a fit about it. You know that, and I know it. It’s just the kind of thing he can’t stand. And after he’s had a fit about it, the parents are going to have a fit about it, because they’ve probably already bought those First Communion dresses. White dresses. Little veils. Crown things for the tops of the heads.”

  “I had a really gorgeous one when I made my First Communion,” Peter Rose said. “The crown had pearls all around it, and the veil had pearls in it. I kept it for years, just to look at.”

  “Well, I used to close the door of my room and put mine on and pretend I was getting married. My point, I think, is that this is going to be a very unpopular decision. It won’t stand, because I don’t think Father Healy will allow it to stand, but between the time it’s made and the time it’s countermanded, there’s going to be a very big fuss. I resent this woman attempting to make that fuss center on me.”

  “But it won’t center on you,” Peter Rose said, startled. “You’ll tell Father Healy it was Harriet’s decision and—”

  “And it will center on me, because I’ll still be delivering the news. Which means I won’t be delivering the news. I refuse to.”

  “You’re just going to ignore the note?”

  “I’m going to write her one back saying I can’t possibly make such an announcement unless I’ve been told to make it by Father Healy, and that she should talk to Father Healy about it instead of me. And I’m not going to budge. Not at all. I think that’s the only thing I can possibly do.”

  Peter Rose got up. “I think I’m going to make myself some tea. Or some coffee. Do we have coffee I don’t have to use the percolator for?”

  “We have those coffee-bag things, in the pantry cupboard.”

  “Oh, right. I wish you didn’t sound so—I don’t know. Angry, I suppose. But it’s more than angry.”

  Scholastica drummed her fingers on the table. Then she picked up Harriet’s note again and turned it over in her hand. “I hate these things,” she said finally. “I hate the petty infighting, and the manipulations and the rhetoric that gets thrown around like garbage as soon as the situation heats up. Liberal Church. Conservative Church. Whatever happened to the Church speaking in one voice?”

  “The birth-control encyclical.”

  “Marvelous. I entered the convent at the age of eighteen, and I still have to think about birth control.”

  Scholastica got up and wandered across the room, to the big windows at the back that looked out over the courtyard toward the church. It was already lit up in there, but then it would be. Father Healy believed in keeping the church open twenty-four hours a day, in case somebody suddenly felt a need for conversion while walking down the street at two o‘clock in the morning. What they really got, this time of year, was homeless people looking to get in out of the cold. Some of
them genuflected when they first came in. Some of them just found an empty pew at the back and stretched out to sleep right away. Most of them were either so mentally ill or so alcoholic that they couldn’t really follow a coherent line of thought. When seven o’clock Mass came around, some of them got up and tried to follow it, and some of them came to the front for Communion. When Mass was over, all of them came downstairs to the coffee hour that Father Healy adamantly refused to alter or cancel. There were six or seven different kinds of muffins, and coffee cake, and orange juice, and coffee and tea. None of the regular parishioners came, except for the three older women who set up the buffet. There were things Scholastica did not like about Father Robert Healy. He was young and stiff and far too rigid in his theology, and he tended to see things as issues that she thought ought to be decided on the basis of emotion. Still, in this one thing, she could not have imagined him any better than he was.

  Over in the church, somebody seemed to be moving back and forth in front of the Stations of the Cross—not praying them, just moving back and forth in front of them. Scholastica went back to the kitchen table and sat down.

  “Well,” she said.

  “It will be all right,” Peter Rose said. “It’s just Harriet. Everybody knows Harriet. Even the archbishop is fed up with Harriet.”

  “Maybe I just can’t understand why a woman like that wants to be a nun. Oh, never mind. I think I’ll go get some work done before we pray the Office. I still think of it as Matins, can you believe that? I still think of all the hours by their old names, but it doesn’t work, because they got rid of one of them.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,” Peter Rose said.

  Scholastica drained the last of her tea—she couldn’t remember drinking it at all, but she must have—and brought her mug to the sink to rinse it out. When she was in the novitiate, her postulant mistress had been relentless in stressing the importance of doing “small work” for oneself whenever it was possible: washing out a cup instead of leaving it in the sink; wiping off the base of a statue when you noticed it was dusty; putting away your cloak as soon as you came in from outside.