True Believers Page 7

  “Oh. Yes. Another victim of the patriarchal church.”

  “I’ve talked to Father Burdock. He seems to think there’s some danger of a demonstration. By the Reverend Phipps and that sort of person. He’s very concerned.”

  “Isn’t Roy Phipps very convenient?” Harriet said. “He’s so extreme, he makes you look like a moderate.”

  “I’m not a moderate,” Father Healy said. “I’m a Catholic. I wish you were.”

  “The people are the Church,” Harriet said, automatically.

  “You may be the Church, but you’re not this Church. And I don’t understand why you bother. Why call yourself a Catholic at all? If you no longer believe what the Church teaches, why not just leave?”

  “It’s my Church as much as it is yours.”

  “It’s Christ’s Church. It belongs to neither one of us.”

  “Then it’s really strange that you get to run it and keep me out. The Church has to change. You think it won’t, but you’re wrong.”

  “The Church changes all the time, it just doesn’t change at the core. And you won’t change it. I want you to move into the convent with the other sisters. And I want you to wear something, some article of clothing, that will clearly identify you as a nun.”

  “The sisters are not sisters of my order. I don’t belong in their convent.”

  “You don’t belong in the rectory.”

  “I do wear something to identify me as a nun. I wear this.” She tapped her Eucharistic pin. “I’ve been in this parish for fifteen years. I was here when you were still in the seminary. I’ve been doing it this way all that time.”

  “I’m sure. But you’re going to stop doing it this way, Sister, or you are going to leave. I’ve been patient as a saint for the last three years. I’ve had enough. You have forty-eight hours to get into some kind of habit. I don’t care if it’s a sweat suit and a veil, as long as it is a veil, and as long as you’ve got some Christian symbol on you larger than a Kennedy half dollar, displayed where the public can see it.”

  “You can’t give me orders like this. Only the archbishop can make these kinds of decisions, and he’s—”

  “—willing to call you into his office and make it clear that he is supporting me in this in every way possible. I’ll arrange it for later this afternoon.”

  “Sisters in my order—

  “The sisters in your order,” Father Healy said, “amount to nine women, all of them older than you, and you must be—what?—sixty? Your order is dying. It has no new vocations. It has no young nuns. When you go, it will go with you. If it doesn’t go before. Go buy a veil, Sister. Because if you don’t, you’ll be out of that rectory apartment by the end of next week, and I’ll have an ordained deacon in the slot for parish coordinator before you’ve gotten off the train at your motherhouse.”

  “Marvelous,” Harriet said. “The dead hand of the patriarchy strikes again.”

  “If the dead hand of the patriarchy had been running things around here, you would have been out on your ass years ago. Go buy a veil. Don’t think I’m bluffing.”

  There was a sound from inside the main body of the church, and they both turned. It was not repeated. Probably, Harriet thought, one of the homeless people was having a nightmare. She was feeling a little breathless. People did not talk to her this way. Not even the Cardinal Archbishop talked to her this way.

  “Excuse me,” Father Healy said. “I’d better go find out what’s going on.”

  If she excused him, it was silently. She had no idea what it was she was supposed to say. She looked back at St. Stephen’s and saw that there were now people in the lit-up entryway, Mary McAllister and the most startlingly beautiful man Harriet had ever seen. She had seen him before, she knew, but she didn’t know his name. Mary McAllister was holding his hand, even though there was no way in hell he could be anything but gay.

  Underneath her, in the basement, there was noise. The sisters had finished their Office and come over to the church. Their voices were muted and giggly. Harriet was suddenly feeling very high, almost as if she’d taken a lungful of laughing gas.

  She had nothing to be afraid of. She really didn’t. She had been waiting for this for years, and expecting it. She just hadn’t recognized it when it first showed up. She was finally going to get what she had always wanted, and when she had it, she was going to be invincible.

  There was only one way to gain real authority in the Church, and that was to be martyred for the faith.

  9

  Bennis Hannaford did not think of herself as someone who had quit smoking, even though it was three months since she’d given up cigarettes. Instead, she thought of herself as someone who was being required not to smoke, both by the person she loved most (Gregor Demarkian) and by her doctor, who seemed to think that she had to either get rid of the coffin nails or die. Coffin nails. It was quarter to six in the morning, and she had spent almost all of the night wide-awake and thinking about death. There was a lot of death to think about. On her desk in her spare bedroom, she had the scribbled message she’d taken when Chickie George had called to tell her about Scott Boardman’s funeral. Scott was a man she had known only slightly, because he did graphic design work for her publisher and they ran into each other at parties in New York, but Chickie she knew very well. Chickie was one of those people who exist in every city, the people who know everybody of any importance without being in any way important themselves. She also liked Chickie, which was more to the point. She got a little uncomfortable with his act every once in a while—was it really necessary for anybody to be that much of a flaming queen?—but he meant well, and there was no malice in him, which was more than she could say for a good many of the straight people she knew. In this case, he also had a point. St. Stephen’s was right there on that same street as Roy Phipps’s Full Gospel Independent Baptist Church. Roy Phipps’s people were always picketing funerals.

  “We need all the help we can get,” Chickie had said when he’d called. “We need as big a presence as possible. We can’t let them outnumber us at Scott’s funeral.”

  Bennis thought it was very unlikely that Roy Phipps could get enough people together to outnumber the men who would be at Scott Boardman’s funeral even without Chickie’s efforts at organization, but she had agreed to come, and she still thought it had been the right thing to do. The only problem was that she was going to show up so tired, she would barely be able to see. It might even make sense for once to give in and take public transportation. It might make more sense to get some sleep, but at the moment it was impossible. There was more than the message she’d taken from Chickie’s call lying on her desk. There was also the formal invitation to her own sister’s execution, last scheduled for November and then delayed three more times for a month at a shot.

  “It won’t be delayed again,” Gregor had warned her, when the invitation came. “The governor is fed up, and there isn’t a lot more room to move. And she doesn’t have the attractiveness factor. Not that a woman’s attractiveness counts as much as it used to in these things. It didn’t count at all for Karla Faye Tucker.”

  No, Bennis thought, Anne Marie was nowhere near as attractive as Karla Faye Tucker. If she had been, she might not be in the mess she was in to begin with. Bennis reached to the side table automatically, expecting to find her pack of cigarettes and her Bic plastic lighter, but they weren’t there. Then she looked over at Gregor Demarkian and got out of bed. He looked so peaceful when he was sleeping, and he slept so much. Bennis could barely get five hours a night without feeling awful. Gregor could get five hours in the afternoon when he was supposed to be watching football, and once he conked out, it was worth your life to wake him before he wanted to be woken. A freight train could drive across the ceiling, blowing its whistle at full power, and all he would do was turn over and mutter something incoherent about how somebody ought to get the cows off the tracks.

  Bennis sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Then she stood up and got
Gregor’s robe from where he had thrown it over the back of the wing-backed chair near the fireplace. They had to do something about these apartments, knock them together maybe, or expand them. It only worried her that it might be pushing things a bit far, even on Cavanaugh Street, to be that open about the fact that they were—uh—she didn’t have a word for it. At least she didn’t have a word that would do in this neighborhood. She wondered why that was. It wasn’t that they didn’t know what she and Gregor were doing. Half the street had been involved in the plot to arrange it. Even the Very Old Ladies didn’t really disapprove. They just put it down to These Days, which were so different from The Way It Used To Be that they couldn’t be judged by the same standard. Even Tibor never said a word about the two of them, and Tibor was a priest.

  “I’d still feel better if we were married,” Bennis said, to the air—and then, mentally, she took it back. She would not feel better if she and Gregor were married. She didn’t want to be married. She had never wanted to be married. She would only feel better about openly living with him on Cavanaugh Street if they were married, and that was a very different thing.

  She tied the belt of Gregor’s robe as tightly around her waist as it would go. Then she padded out of the bedroom and into the living room, where the big plate-glass window looked out over the street. This was Gregor’s apartment they were sleeping in. Gregor refused to sleep in hers, because she always had papier-mâché models of scenes in her books lying around everywhere, and in some of them there were trolls. If the apartments had been knocked together, though, she would have been able to get to her own computer without going out into the hall. She could have used Gregor’s computer, but he had done something to it again, and you couldn’t surf the Web on it. She was going to have to fix that for him someday soon.

  The street below her was empty. It was too early for anybody at all to be up. Even Donna and Russ, who had the closest thing to an ordinary respectable schedule of anybody she knew, didn’t get up until six. The Ararat didn’t open until seven. Here was the real problem with smoking cigarettes, aside from the fact that it made her feel as if her lungs had been ripped out and she would never get enough air. When you didn’t smoke, you had no way to waste time. When you tried to waste time, you were far too conscious of the fact that you weren’t really doing anything. Of course, smoking a cigarette wasn’t really doing anything either. She wasn’t making any sense.

  She went into the bathroom and shed the robe and her pajamas. She had a pair of jeans in there and a turtleneck. She really needed to go upstairs and take a shower and find clean things, but at the moment she was much too restless. She went back into the bedroom and found a pair of Gregor’s socks to put on, because she hated rewearing socks no matter what she was doing. Then she went into the hall and found her clogs. There was one person on this street who was likely to be up at this hour of the morning, because he was almost always up. Bennis didn’t know if she had ever seen Father Tibor Kasparian sleep.

  She could have run upstairs for her coat, but she didn’t. She could have put on one of Gregor’s sweaters, for the layering, but she didn’t do that either. She did stop in the hallway to listen to the quiet of the house, and to wish, not for the first time, that somebody would rent the top-floor apartment. Ever since Donna and Russ had renovated their town house and moved down the street with Donna’s son Tommy, this place had seemed far too empty, and far, far too quiet.

  It was freezing cold outside—at almost six in the morning in February, it would be. Bennis darted across the street and down the block. There were people awake, as a matter of fact There were lights on in the back rooms of the Ararat, meaning that Linda Melajian was already at work and trying to set up. Bennis ducked into the narrow alley next to Holy Trinity Church and came out in the courtyard in front of Tibor’s apartment. It could have been the one day in history when Tibor was actually asleep, but it wasn’t. All the lights in Tibor’s apartment were lit at once. It was as if the man thought he was a lighthouse in a fog, needing to turn the power up high to save a fleet of ships at sea.

  Bennis let herself in Tibor’s front door—he never locked it; almost nobody on Cavanaugh Street locked anything, which was incredibly stupid, if you thought about it. Cavanaugh Street might be a safe place, but the rest of Philadelphia wasn’t. Just inside the door there was a big stack of paperback books leaning precariously to one side. The book on top was Jackie Collins’s Lucky. The one underneath it was Thomas More’s Utopia. Bennis straightened the pile a little and went into the living room.

  “Tibor?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  Bennis went through to the kitchen. It wasn’t quite as much of a mess as it usually was. Lida and Hannah must have been in recently to clean. Still, the oversize kitchen table was covered with books, to the point where it was impossible to find a space to put down a coffee cup. Tibor had managed it only by moving books out of the way and putting them in stacks on other books. Bennis took a copy of Norman Cantor’s Civilization of the Middle Ages and a paperback of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker off a chair and chucked them onto the table with everything else.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  “I can see that. I was out. With the Relief committee. It was depressing.”

  “I’ve been thinking crazy things,” Bennis said. “Like the fact that I don’t know what form of execution they have in the state of Pennsylvania. I don’t think it could still be the electric chair, do you? Does anybody still have the electric chair?”

  “Florida.”

  “Oh,” Bennis said. She got out of her chair and began to walk around. She remembered the stories about Florida’s electric chair. They weren’t pleasant. “Gregor says there won’t be a stay this time. That it will really happen. And I was wondering, you know, if I should force the issue. If I should make her see me.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Bennis admitted. “But I haven’t seen her since it happened, and it’s been ten years. And Gregor is really no help, because he gets all rational and philosophical about it, and I’m not feeling rational and philosophical. I’m feeling crazy. It doesn’t seem right, to me, capital punishment. It never did, really.”

  “Mmm,” Tibor said.

  Bennis checked out the coffee. It didn’t look safe. “And the thing is, I know, on the day it happens, if it happens, there are going to be people out there waiting for it. You know what I mean. There are going to be people out there with signs wishing she would die in horrible pain and other people with signs protesting the death penalty, and it just doesn’t make any sense. Why would people come a hundred miles just to stand in the road in front of the state penitentiary and wish for somebody to die a horrible death?”

  “Sit down,” Tibor said. “I have a teakettle. You can have some tea.”

  “I’ve had enough caffeine in the last few hours to last a millennium. No, seriously. Why do they do that? And then this afternoon, I have to go to a funeral. Scott Boardman’s funeral—”

  “At St. Stephen’s,” Tibor put in helpfully.

  “—and the thing is, the reason I have to go is because a friend of mine is worried there are going to be pickets. I mean people picketing the funeral. There’s this guy—”

  “Roy Phipps,” Tibor said.

  “Right. Roy Phipps. I suppose everybody on earth has heard of him. God only knows, he’s on the news enough. He sends out press releases just so the media can show up and call him names. So, okay, say he’s a nut. There are nuts in this world. But what about all the people who follow him, the people who hold the picket signs and go to his church. Are they all nuts? Has this guy put together all the nuts in Philadelphia in one place? I mean, why do people do these things?”

  “I wish you would sit down,” Tibor said. “You’re making me dizzy. And I have only one answer to your question and you do not want to hear it.”

  “Yes, I do. What is it?”

  “Original sin.”

  Bennis
sat down. “You know what Chickie said? That’s my friend who asked me to come to the funeral. He said that last week, one of the people from the Phipps organization tried to kill them. The priest or the minister or whatever he is went to the altar and there was this little cake of white powdered stuff right there next to the wine, and it turned out to be rat poison. Arsenic, isn’t that what rat poison is? And somebody had just put this cake of rat poison right next to the Communion wine.”

  “Did they put it in the Communion wine?”

  “I don’t know. Chickie didn’t say. He didn’t even tell me what they did about it, you know, after they found it. I guess they didn’t turn in the Reverend Phipps, or it would have been on the news. But still. Who else could it have possibly been? And now with the funeral coming up, they have to be especially careful. They’re holding a vigil so that the altar is in sight of at least two people all night. It’s worse than crazy. And don’t tell me it’s original sin. I don’t believe in original sin.”

  “It has the virtue of explaining a great deal that is otherwise inexplicable,” Tibor said. “Maybe I will go to this funeral with you. Just to make certain you do not drive.”

  Bennis stood up again. She picked up a copy of J. M. Roberts’s History of Europe and put it down again. She picked up a copy of something in Latin and put that down again, too. She felt as if she had taken a whole load of methamphetamine and it was just starting to kick in. This was not good news. The crash, when it came, was going to be awful.

  “Crap,” she said. “I’m right off the wall, aren’t I? Do you think that if I went back to the apartment, Gregor would be awake?”

  “You could always wake him up.”

  “Mount St. Helens at full spew couldn’t wake him up. He goes to the Ararat at seven, though. What time does he usually get up?”

  “You should know that better than I do.”

  “I don’t pay attention. Oh, damn.” Bennis ran her hands through her hair. “I hate it when I get like this. I really do. It was a mistake to quit smoking, no matter what any of you think. Smoking could always calm me down. What am I supposed to do now?”