by Michael Nava
“I would never do that to you.”
She only repeated, “I won’t be set aside, Daniel. I won’t.”
At such moments, when her composed mask slipped and she revealed the wounded woman beneath it, he wanted to tell her he loved her. He wished he could tell her everything— about Wyatt and Gwen— and share with her his doubts and fears about his ability to counsel the injured people who came to him for help. He wanted a real marriage, not the business arrangement they had agreed to, but after so many years of that, and with his secret creating an abyss between them, he did not know where to begin.
••••
Daniel took his place at the head of the table in the executive conference room. Around the long rosewood table were a dozen comfortably padded seats. His own seat, inherited from his father-in-law, had a higher back and scrolled armrests— a throne, in effect, that he disliked but that Jessica insisted he maintain in her father’s memory. Behind him a large arched window looked out on the courtyard where children shrieked in the playground, their voices muffled by triple-paned glass. Plates of doughnuts were arranged on the table along with coffee and water carafes; the air had a sweet, yeasty smell.
Jessica sat quietly in a corner of the room, knitting. It seemed to him it was always the same bit of work she busied herself with but never finished. She was not, of course, an Overseer— women were barred from the office— but no one begrudged her presence. Indeed, most of the men appeared not to notice her in the room at all.
••••
Daniel poured himself a glass of water and smiled gamely at the twelve Overseers, all but one white, and more than half well over sixty. All wore dark business suits, white shirts, and subdued ties— they were lawyers, businessmen, bankers, developers. Rich men, mostly, and men of status and power in their professions; not exactly, Daniel had often thought, the fishermen and laborers Jesus had assembled around himself, nor even the men Daniel would have chosen had he had a free hand.
Most of the Overseers had been chosen by Taggert who, Daniel knew, had had his reservations about Daniel’s orthodoxy at times. It wasn’t that Daniel had ever expressed the slightest doubt about any of the tenets of their faith; Taggert was skeptical of his style. The old man had expressed this skepticism succinctly when, once after hearing Daniel preach, he had growled, “A little less love and a lot more brimstone next time. These people have to be scared into salvation.” The men Taggert had appointed as Overseers— led by his old friend and lawyer, Bob Metzger— shared his hard-bitten theology and were not reluctant to try to rein Daniel in when they thought he strayed too far afield from it. He resisted, and relations between him and Metzger’s faction ranged from tense to hostile. Over the years Daniel had been able to appoint a few Overseers of his own. He looked forward to the day when the deaths or resignations of his father-in-law’s men would give him control of the board. He was playing a waiting game, and he and Metzger knew it. Since he could be removed as pastor only by a unanimous vote of the Overseers— a provision Taggert had written into the church’s charter to protect himself from deposition— they also knew that Daniel would ultimately win.
••••
“Shall we begin?” Daniel said. “Bob, I think you had something to say.”
Craggy-faced, silver-haired Metzger flashed a tight smile at him and uttered a curt “Thank you, Pastor.” He turned to his colleagues. “You all probably know by now that our friend Congressman Schultz has qualified a measure for the November ballot that would give health officials the right to identify people who have this AIDS virus and quarantine them so they can’t spread their horrible disease. He’s asked us to endorse and support Proposition 54.” He paused. “And by support, I mean raise money, recruit volunteers to campaign for the initiative and to publicly lend our name to the Yes on 54 effort. I, for one, am completely in favor of joining his godly campaign.”
Caleb Cowell asked, “Won’t getting involved in a political campaign endanger our tax-exempt status?”
Disapproval soured the faces of some other Overseers. Cowell taught mathematics at LA State and was as precise in his appearance, thought, and manner as might be expected from someone whose world was numeric and logical. Dan had noticed the older Overseers regarded him with a combination of curiosity and low-grade hostility. This could have been due to his cool, detached personality or, more problematically, the fact that he was the only Black Overseer, controversially appointed by Daniel.
Metzger, ever the lawyer, replied, “The law bars us from supporting specific candidates for office, not from taking stands on issues of public morality or public health.”
“Well,” Joe Barton declared, wiping doughnut glaze from his thick fingers on his napkin, “it’s about time we took a stand against these deviants. God has. AIDS is his judgment on their immorality. Romans 1 clearly says the homosexuals will receive in their bodies the penalties of their behavior. This law would protect decent people—”
John Wilson, a thin, jittery man who seemed always on the verge of exploding, broke in, “And let the queers go off and die.”
Metzger grimaced. “That’s not the kind of thing we want to say in public.”
Wilson snorted. “We’re not in public, brother, so don’t get politically correct on me.”
“All I mean,” Metzger said, smoothly, “is we got to be careful how this thing is presented to the unbelievers because we need their votes to pass it.”
Before his silence became conspicuous, Daniel forced himself to speak. “What’s the strategy?”
Metzger sat back in his chair. “We know the homosexuals will play the martyr card and say 54 is singling them out because of what they are,” he began. “Our side will argue that all we’re doing is treating AIDS like any other communicable disease that threatens public health. We quarantine people with TB, for example, and no one says those people are being persecuted. It’s even more urgent to protect normal people from AIDS because we don’t know how it’s spread.”
Cowell interjected in his mild voice, “My understanding is that the virus can only be transmitted through blood or semen.”
An uncomfortable silence followed this incursion of science, broken finally when Barton said, loudly, “That’s what the homosexuals want us to believe, but they’re lying to us. We know there are other ways to get it.”
“We do?” Dan asked.
Barton nodded. “There’s a surgeon up in San Francisco, good Christian woman, who refused to operate on people with AIDS because so many doctors and nurses are coming down with it after they get that tainted blood into their systems. The hospital fired her so she went and wrote a book that proved you can catch it through, what’s it called, casual transmission.”
Metzger, nodding approval, chimed in. “She writes about two teenage brothers living in the same house. One got the virus from a blood transfusion and then passed it on to his brother who was clean. Those boys were obviously not having sex with each other. Then there was a case up in Connecticut where a homosexual bit a police officer during a demonstration and the officer became infected. Of course, the homosexuals want to suppress those cases and the medical establishment goes along because it doesn’t want to create panic. Me, I wouldn’t shake hands with a homosexual or breathe the same air.”
Barton added, “They’ve found the virus in spit, in tears.”
Cowell removed his wire-rimmed spectacles, cleaned them on a snowy white handkerchief, and observed, “If the virus was transmitted by casual contact, a lot more people would be infected.”
“Even the loss of one innocent life is one too many,” Metzger snapped.
Barton chimed in, “Hear, hear.”
Wilson said, “You ask me, we should lock up all the homo-sexuals. My God, they eat each other’s feces.”
“John,” Metzger snapped. “There’s a lady in the room.”
Daniel glanced at his wife whose head was bent over her knitting, seemingly oblivious to the discussion.
Barton said
, “John has a point. It’s the filthy habits of these men that unleashed this disease on the rest of us. It’s time to draw a line in the sand, and hopefully once this passes, we can push them back where they belong.”
“Into the closet,” Metzger said with a smile. “Then lock the door and throw away the key.” He looked around the table. “I move we formally endorse Proposition 54 and coordinate with Congressman Schultz’s campaign.”
“Second,” Wilson said.
They looked at Dan. “Yes, uh, there’s a motion on the floor. All in favor?”
The vote was unanimous.
Metzger gave Dan a sharp look and said, “We’re expecting you to take the lead in this, Pastor.”
Daniel nodded. “Of course.”
••••
The meeting ended and the Overseers filed out. Daniel called to Cowell, “Caleb, a minute.”
Cowell resumed his seat and looked at Daniel without expression. When the room had cleared and the door was closed, Daniel asked, “What did you mean by what you said about casual contact?”
“I meant what I said.” Cowell spoke slowly as if to a not very bright student. “If you could be infected with HIV by shaking someone’s hand or breathing the same air, we’d have millions of cases, but we don’t, so we have to infer that the virus isn’t transmitted by that kind of exposure.”
“What about those cases Brother Metzger mentioned? The surgeon, the teenage brothers, the police officer?”
Impatiently, Cowell said, “They don’t prove anything without all the facts. Maybe the brothers shared a razor or a toothbrush and exchanged blood that way. And the police officer and the demonstrator? What actually happened there? Maybe the bite broke the officer’s skin and the demonstrator’s gums were bleeding. Who knows? Maybe the officer had been exposed to the virus before.”
“A quarantine won’t stop the spread of the disease?”
“Of course not,” Cowell said, firmly. “The latency period for HIV is years. Lots of people walking around now don’t know they’re infected. How are you going to catch them all except by forcing every man, woman and child to take the test? And even then you’d miss some people.”
“What’s the solution?”
“Educating people about how the virus passes and how they can protect themselves while scientists look for a cure.”
“You seem to know a lot about the subject,” Dan remarked.
“My nephew,” Cowell said briskly. “Homosexual, but a good boy. When he got sick, my sister came to me because I’m the educated one. Read up on it. Couldn’t give her any good news, but I learned a lot.”
“There are no treatments?”
He sat back in his chair and thought. “You know, I read about these drugs. One was ribavirin and the other one was . . . I forget, starts with an i. Some people report a good result with them. Not approved for treating AIDS in the US but available over the counter in Mexico. Some of the gays have been going down there, buying them in big quantities and smuggling them across the border. Apparently, there’s a whole underground network.”
“That sounds illegal.”
“Probably is but if it were your life, you’d break some laws, too, I imagine. I called around the AIDS organizations and asked about those drugs for my sister’s boy. They were pretty cagey, but I got a couple of names. Gave them to her. Don’t know if she followed up.”
“You didn’t follow up yourself?”
“I have my tenure to protect,” he said. “Can’t get involved in breaking the law.”
“Caleb, if you know all this, why did you vote to support endorsing the proposition?”
“I’ve learned to pick my battles,” Cowell replied. “This isn’t one I want to fight.”
“Do you think AIDS is the judgment of God on homosexuals?”
Cowell squinted at him. “You’re asking me? You’re the pastor.”
••••
Jessica was waiting in his office when he came in, sitting on a sofa in a corner of the spacious room with her little bit of knitting abandoned at her side. On the low table before her was a thermos of coffee, two cups, cream and sugar. He joined her. Across the room the big bulk of his father-in-law’s nineteenth-century partner’s desk was flanked by an American flag. On the wall above it was a reproduction of the painting by Heinrich Hofmann of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.
It was the kind of painting the young convert Daniel and his Jesus People friends might have gently mocked back in the day for the spotlessness of the Savior’s robe, his beautifully groomed hair and beard and stately look of sanctity. Their Jesus back then looked like them: holes in their clothes, unkempt hair and untrimmed beards, filled with laughing, joshing energy. Someone who, as Daniel had at the beginning of his ministry, would have baptized the young by dunking them into the ocean at Venice Beach. Would have slapped together cheese and baloney sandwiches to pass out on LA’s Skid Row where Daniel had preached in the shadow of St. Vibiana, the Catholic cathedral. Sometimes a couple of Franciscan monks had joined him in feeding the homeless or Mormon missionaries had wandered by and stopped to listen and compare notes on conversion techniques. There was always singing. Someone had a guitar, and everyone had a voice and they sang the old songs in a van decorated with flowers and the words “Jesus Saves” in psychedelic script.
“Coffee?”
“Thank you, Jess,” he replied.
He watched her pour him a cup, mixing sugar and milk in the exact proportions he preferred.
“I thought the meeting went well,” she said, pouring her cup, black with two teaspoons of sugar.
She wore a peach-colored pantsuit over a white blouse with a big bow tied at her neck. Stiff wings of hair, once naturally blond, now discreetly dyed, framed her face. She wore lipstick and a touch of blush. The mask was on. She sipped her coffee, put the cup into its saucer, and said, “I’m so gratified we’re going on record supporting Proposition 54. Those people need to be stopped, Dan. We’re not safe with them around.”
“Caleb Cowell says people can walk around for years without knowing they’re infected. That quarantines won’t catch them.”
A slight frown creased her face. “Caleb spends so much time around those young college students, I don’t wonder that their permissive attitudes rub off on him.”
“He makes a good point. How is the proposition going to catch people who don’t know they have the virus?”
“Bob says the next step will be mandatory testing,” she replied.
“You talked to Bob about this?”
“For a minute or two before you came into the room,” she said, hackles rising.
He suspected from her defensiveness the conversation had been private and longer but asked, “How would mandatory testing work?”
She took another temporizing sip of coffee, as if reluctant to impose herself. “We’ll make getting tested a condition of renewing a driver’s license, entering a public school, receiving medical services, or applying for a marriage certificate,” she said. “Anything that people need from the government or for medical care, they’ll have to give a blood sample first.”
He shook his head. “You want the government invading people’s lives like that? It’s a bad precedent.”
“It’s a public health emergency, like Bob said. Emergency measures are needed.”
“It’ll never pass the legislature, not with the Democrats in charge.”
“If we fail in Sacramento, Bob says we’ll put it on the ballot in 1988. After Proposition 54 passes, it should be no problem to convince the voters to take the next step.”
“Are you so sure Proposition 54 will pass?”
She looked at him quizzically. “Of course it will pass. The polls give the yes vote a twelve-point lead. Do you have doubts, Dan?”
“I remember reading about the last time we took a position on a ballot measure, when your father supported the one that banned school desegregation back in the ’60s. We got called bigots and—”
&n
bsp; “Daddy was not a bigot,” she said sharply. “Daddy was from the South, where the races don’t mix.”
“I’m not saying he was,” Daniel replied, soothingly. “It’s about appearances, Jess. We don’t want to appear to be intolerant.”
“There are worse things,” she replied. “‘Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you for my sake. Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in Heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’ These are the kinds of enemies we want, Dan.”
They drank their coffee in silence for a minute; then he said, “You know, Jess, if Bob Metzger has something to say to me, he can say it directly. He doesn’t have to use you as the middleman.”
“I’ve known Bob since I was a little girl,” she replied. “Of course we talk. That’s what old friends do.”
“Sure,” he said. He stood up. “Thank you for the coffee, Jess. I better get to work.”
She gathered up the coffee things on a tray and left.
••••
He settled himself behind his father-in-law’s ostentatious desk and thought about what Caleb Cowell had told him of the smuggling of drugs for AIDS. He had wanted to ask him who he had called and the names he had been given but that, of course, was out of the question. He opened a heavy drawer and removed the phone book. He started at the A’s for AIDS and there he found it: AIDS Project Los Angeles. He buzzed his secretary and instructed him that he would be in prayer for the next hour and was to be completely undisturbed. Then he dialed the number.
FOUR
Judge Ipswich peered over her half-glasses and said, “I’m ready to deliver my ruling.”
That didn’t take long, I thought glumly. The seat of the chair on the witness stand was still warm from the tight-assed arresting cop who’d just finished filling the air with lies about how he’d entered my client’s apartment and discovered the crack that had assembled us here for a suppression hearing. My client, Jaime Mendez, perched beside me at the edge of his chair nervously tapping his foot. He’d testified that the cop had pounded on the door, pushed his way in with gun drawn, and ransacked the place until he found the drugs where they’d been hidden, in an empty lard bucket beneath the sink. The cop testified my client had let him into the apartment voluntarily and that the drugs were in plain sight on the kitchen counter.
