True Believers Read online

  Now he stood feeling the steam of coffee rising into his face from a very full cup and watched Will Lawton the atheist get into his truck and turn on the motor. Edith Lawton the atheist was standing in the doorway of her house, barefoot, as if she didn’t have to care if her toes fell off from frostbite. He had been watching them all this week, and he was fairly sure that they were either not talking to each other at all, or only talking barely. He would have to pay attention. The members of this church were fascinated by the two atheists on their own block. Roy had had to warn them more than once not to go down there to gawk. That was all they needed, under the circumstances—a few members arrested for “harassing” the heathens, a big black-and-white picture in the Philadelphia Inquirer of a few Christians being led away in handcuffs for practicing “hate.” It wasn’t that Roy Phipps had anything against hate. In fact, he heartily approved of it. God hated the wicked, and he expected the righteous to hate them, too, and to tell the world the truth about what was becoming of it. God hated lies, which was what the apostate churches trafficked in, all the time, day and night, as if their members could escape their eternal destiny in the agony of hell by merely being bored to death. If there was anybody Roy envied, it was that pastor out in Kansas who had put up the website called www.godhatesfags.com—but then, come to think of it, he didn’t. It was the “fags” that were the problem. Like The Other Word for Negro, Roy never used it—not because it was derogatory, but because it was slang. There was the influence of the Princeton University English Department for you. Roy Phipps, son of a seldom-employed coal miner and a dedicated slattern, raised on roadkill and dandelion greens, valedictorian of his class, could not use slang.

  The door to the study clicked open. Roy put his coffee cup down on his desk next to the silver-framed photograph of a small group of no-longer-exactly boys in front of an elegant pseudo-Gothic building. He noticed himself and paid no attention. He noticed Dan Burdock and almost smiled. He thought—not for the first time—that he might be pushing his people too far to make them come out to this street to go to church. This was a street, after all, that reeked of everything they were afraid of. This was a street that reeked of money.

  The man who had come in was very young and very badly dressed: Fred Havers. Like a lot of just-about-fat men with no sense of taste or proportion, he wore suits and shirts a size too small for him, so that he looked as if he were strangling himself. Still, he was dressed, and at this time of the morning, too. He was even wearing a tie. It was the first thing Roy stressed to his people. Self-discipline was the key. Character was destiny. It was the one thing they didn’t know and the one thing they needed most desperately to hear.

  Fred came up to the desk and cleared his throat. He was still in his twenties, but so badly out of shape that he looked older than Roy did, if looking older meant looking aged. In some ways, Fred would never look older than anybody. He had the face of someone who is permanently, irretrievably clueless, an expression that veered spasmodically between dazed surprise and embarrassment. He had managed to get through the General Studies course at some high school on the outskirts of Philadelphia without, as far as Roy could tell, learning anything at all.

  “So?” Roy said.

  Fred cleared his throat again. “I just got back. You know. From over there. St. Stephen’s.”

  “And?”

  Fred shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t looking for the right stuff. They were praying, is all I could see. And some of them were just sitting. In the pews, you know, and then the casket was in the front in front of the altar.”

  “And?” Roy said again.

  “And nothing. That’s what was happening. His mother is there. The guy who died. And so are a lot of men. Gay men, I think. At least, some of them were. They were, you know, kind of funny.”

  Roy took a long sip of coffee. It was impossible to explain to somebody like Fred that not all homosexual men behaved like flaming queens. There was a piece of slang Roy could use, at least in the quiet of his mind. He put down the coffee cup and stared at the far wall, over Fred Havers’s shoulder. His bachelor’s degree from Princeton was there, framed. So was his master’s degree from Harvard, in history. If he had done what they all wanted him to do, he would have gone on for his doctorate and be teaching in some history department right now, and probably have had tenure before he was thirty-five. He tried to remember when he had had his first vision of hell, and couldn’t. The story he told to new parishioners, and to the media when they bothered to ask, was that he had been lying on a mattress on a floor in an apartment in Cambridge when suddenly the hardwood underneath him had disappeared and he was engulfed by flames. That was true enough, but he had a feeling that it had not really been the first time, only the most dramatic in a series of times when hell had seemed very close to him. It seemed very close to him now.

  “What we want to know,” he said carefully, “is how they’re going to handle this funeral. Is it going to be just a funeral, or is it going to be a platform?”

  “I know,” Fred said. “I went looking for, you know, a bulletin, but I didn’t find one. There was one for next Sunday, but it was all about the loaves and the fishes.”

  “It wouldn’t be in the bulletin. Did you hear anybody talking about the funeral?”

  “Nobody was talking at all. Oh, except the pastor, you know that guy—”

  “Dan Burdock.”

  “Right. But he wasn’t where I could hear him. He was up in the choir loft, and I didn’t think I ought to go there. It was just him and this one other guy.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s strange in there, though. It’s like a Catholic church. And it smelled funny. I got sort of queasy. Are we going to go over there today and picket?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He was gay, that guy who died. His guy friend—whatever you call it—he was there in the church when I went over, kneeling on those kneeler things. So we wouldn’t be making a mistake, you know, if we got the signs and went.”

  “He didn’t die of AIDS.”

  “Do we really know that?” Fred asked judiciously. “Don’t they try to lie about it, and put other stuff in the paper to keep it quiet? You know, died of cancer—but they don’t say the cancer was caused by AIDS.”

  “In this case, it wasn’t AIDS. It was cocaine. Have you ever taken cocaine?”

  Fred blinked. “I’ve never done anything worse than drink a few too many beers, except maybe one time I had some boilermakers. They’ve got whiskey in them. Not that I don’t know what a curse drink can be, Pastor Phipps. I know that. But it’s not cocaine.”

  “Quite.” Fred reminded him of his brothers, that was the trouble. Rock stupid and worse. Roy got up and went back to the window. St. Stephen’s was quiet, as usual. St. Anselm’s was doing its usual traffic in homeless people.

  “All right,” he said. “This is what we do. We do not picket. Not today. We send somebody to attend the funeral. Is Didi Billings going to be around today?”

  “She’s due to come in and do some typing at nine.”

  “Good. We can make her pass, if we have to. Send her in to me as soon as she gets here. We may have to send somebody downtown to buy her a dress. The funeral’s at noon. We should have a decent amount of time to get her ready. I don’t want her to be obvious.”

  “What’s she going to do?”

  “Listen,” Roy said. “I want to know if Dan Burdock pulls anything. I want to know if he makes some kind of issue out of Scott Boardman’s homosexuality. And then I want the rest of us ready. We won’t picket at the church, but if we have to, we’ll picket at the cemetery. And if we do, I want the media there. Can you arrange that?”

  “Yeah,” Fred said.

  “Good.” It was true, too. Roy had taught Fred himself, and it wasn’t that hard, getting news reporters where you wanted them to go, as long as you weren’t competing with a major airline disaster. Roy looked up the street and down it again. Everything was quiet.r />
  Back in his freshman year in college, when he and Dan Burdock had been roommates, Roy had known nothing at all about homosexuality, or about God, either. He had only known that he was untouchable, and that his untouchableness came from a whirling vortex of trivialities he could never quite understand. The way he dressed, the way he spoke, the fact that his ambition was so thoroughly single-minded and so thoroughly ruthless—he had changed his dress and his speech, but the ambition was with him still. He would always remember himself his first night at the YMCA, that summer when he’d come north to earn some money before the start of school. That room, with central heat and a slick linoleum floor, with a bathroom down the hall with running water and a real shower. It had shocked him into speechlessness to realize that down-and-outs in New Jersey expected to have more in the way of amenities than coal miners and sharecroppers in most of West Virginia, and that people in the North believed that there was no one, anywhere, who still had to go out in the cold in the middle of the winter to use a chemical latrine.

  It was 1962, and on the streets the girls wore skirts so short they looked like bathing suits, in colors so bright they shone even when there wasn’t any sun. On campus once the school year had started, the Princeton boys wore polo shirts and penny loafers they wore until they had to be held together with masking tape. Roy went back and forth from his classroom to his bedroom to the library, over and over again, and only on the outside did he begin to change. www.godhatesfags.com

  He wished he had thought of it. He really did. He wished he could go down the street to St. Stephen’s and look Dan Burdock in the face.

  Instead, he went back to his desk and started to go through the material he would need if they did decide to go out to the cemetery and picket. People thought it was easy, but it really took enormous planning, especially if he meant to keep his people in line. They had to be kept in line. When they were let loose on their own, they got violent. There were people who thought he meant them to be violent, but he didn’t. He only wanted them to be violent if they were not also out of control.

  A minute or two later, he stopped, thinking that something had been odd, and he hadn’t noticed it. Looking down the street at St. Stephen’s. Looking down the street at St. Anselin’s. All those homeless people. What was it?

  His mind came up blank. His coffee cup was empty. He got up to fill it.

  It would come back to him, eventually, whatever it was he had seen, and then he could think of what to do about it.

  7

  Mary McAllister had met the Reverend Roy Phipps only once, but that had been enough to tell her that she never wanted to meet him again. It wasn’t that she hated him, exactly. She had expected to hate him. She had seen him on the news, carrying his signs at the funerals of people who died of AIDS, saying that those people were right now burning in the fires of hell. If there was one thing Mary remembered with perfect clarity from her religion classes as far back as First Holy Communion, it was that no human being could ever know whom God had sent to hell. That was because no person could know what was going on in a person’s mind at the very moment of death, when God gave everybody a last chance at repentance. Mary had always suspected that this was a chance everybody took advantage of, so that nobody ever went to hell at all—maybe not even Hitler. She was sure that none of the men she had met so far at St. Stephen’s, like that poor Scott Boardman who had just died, was in any danger at all of going to hell. It wasn’t their fault that they were confused, or that the people around them had been so cruel to them that they felt there was nothing they could do but band together and fend off the world. In Scott Boardman’s case, he had been molested by a priest. He couldn’t be held responsible for his hatred of the Catholic Church. If she had been a saint, Mary thought she might have been able to bring one or two of them across the street to St. Anselm’s and a life of principled chastity, but she wasn’t a saint. She wasn’t even close. What she did instead was to make a point of being friendly to all of the men she met, and to tell them “God bless you” at every possible opportunity.

  Now she pulled the soup kitchen van into the parking lot behind St. Anselm’s and tried to get a look at St. Stephen’s, but there was nothing to see there but the lighted doorway to the church. Ever since she’d heard that Scott Boardman had died, she had been worried about poor Chickie George, who took this sort of thing very badly. People laughed at Chickie, but Mary knew better. He was really a very sensitive person, very sensitive and deep, and she had learned that if she listened to him long enough and with enough sympathy, he would start to tell her the truth. She had always had an intellectual understanding of how lucky she had been—to have had parents who loved and cared for her; to have had a nice house in a nice neighborhood; to have had a good education and to have the possibility of more. Chickie had begun to make her feel it emotionally. There were times now when she lay in bed in her dorm room at St. Joseph’s and stared at the ceiling for hours, trying to work it out. She couldn’t make the world right. She couldn’t go back in time and give Chickie the kind of parents she had had, instead of the kind he had had, who seemed to have been ogres with credit cards. The Lord God only knew, she couldn’t straighten out the economic mess the world was in and make sure that everybody in South America had enough to eat. So—what?

  She got out of the van and checked the clock over the church. It was five-thirty. She locked up—you had to lock up, even in the church parking lot, even in a neighborhood like this—and tugged at the driver’s side door to make sure it was secure. Then she started across the lot to the back door of the church. It was cold enough so that she knew she should have been wearing a coat, but she hated wearing them when she drove, so she hadn’t. Instead, she had a thick wool sweater and a turtleneck over flannel-lined L. L. Bean jeans. She saw Marty Kelly’s pickup truck and patted it as she walked by it. It made her feel instantly better, because Marty hadn’t been in church for weeks. Bernadette’s diabetes had been acting up. Sister Peter Rose had told her. Maybe Marty and Bernadette had come in for Scott Boardman’s funeral, because Bernadette had been close to Scott the way Mary was to Chickie.

  Mary had gone out to their trailer park once, to see if they might need anything, but they hadn’t been home—and then, last week, when she’d tried to call, the phone had been disconnected. She hadn’t known what to think about that. She couldn’t imagine Bernadette not paying the phone bill, but with their medical expenses—and no health insurance—she couldn’t imagine them being able to move to someplace better. It was one of those cases that brought her very clearly to the understanding that she was not a saint. A saint would have known just what to do in these circumstances: to seek out Marty and Bernadette; to check with the trailer park to see if they’d been evicted; to check with Father Healy and see what he wanted to do. Mary had to admit that she hadn’t checked with Father Healy because she hadn’t wanted to. Father Healy made her nervous and shy, the way Sister Superior had at St. Anne’s Catholic Girls High School.

  Mary got her keys off her clip and let herself into the church’s back door. The small flight of steps led directly to the basement, which had been “finished” to provide meeting rooms and a cafeteria. She stopped at the statue of the Virgin and made the sign of the cross and a little bow. Sister Thomas Marie, who had taught her religion classes, had been very enthusiastic about the idea that they should all develop a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and Mary had chosen the Immaculate Conception to “focus her spiritual life.” That was why she wore a Miraculous Medal everywhere she went.

  The basement was deserted, not only of people but of things, except for the things that were supposed to be here, like tables and chairs. Mary checked into both the conference rooms and the mudroom, where people were supposed to put their coats and shoes. If she hadn’t seen people going in and out the door upstairs, she would have thought the entire church was deserted. She tried the cafeteria and saw that the chairs had been put up on top of the tables so that somebody could mop. The
floor did not look as if anybody had mopped. What was worse, the rat traps were still all over the place, and probably filled with poison, even though several people had complained and everybody was very nervous.

  She went through the cafeteria and out the other side. She was just about to go through to the other stairwell and up to the church proper when she saw Father Healy starting to come down, dressed in black but without his trademark cassock, tucking things into the pocket of his shirt.

  “Oh, Father,” Mary said. “Good morning. I was looking for the boxes.”

  “Boxes?”

  One of the problems, Mary thought, was that he was so young—not all that much older than she was herself. There were rumors that he had graduated from high school at fifteen and been out of the seminary before he was twenty-five. That might be true or not, but it was true that Father Healy was much younger than most priests were when they got to head an entire parish. It didn’t help that he looked even younger than he had to be, thin and dark, with a face still full of acne and scars.

  Mary waited until he got to the bottom of the stairs. “Sister Scholastica and Sister Peter Rose,” she said. “They did a can collection at the school this week. I’m supposed to come pick up the boxes.”

  “Wouldn’t they be at the school?”

  “Sister Peter Rose said to pick them up at the church. Maybe she wasn’t thinking. I can check the school, next.”

  “The sisters are in chapel,” Father Healy said. “It’s time for their—”