by Jane Haddam
The steps of the cathedral were nowhere near as steep as the ones at Sacre Coeur. They weren’t even as steep as the ones Gregor had seen on ordinary parish churches in some places where the landscape was uneven enough to force the architect to make accommodations. Gregor went in through the great Gothic double doors and blinked into the dark of the vestibule. Like any parish church, there was a small table along the wall at the left with bulletins piled on it, and racks along the wall holding pamphlets on everything from praying the rosary to Natural Family Planning. He walked past all this to the inner doors that opened onto the long rows of pews and the elaborate marble altar. He saw the holy water font and did not touch it. He was sometimes drawn into churches to think, but he was never able to take part in any of the rituals that defined them, not even the most minor ones.
He passed through the inner doors and made his way down the center aisle to a pew in almost the exact middle of the church. A Catholic would have genuflected. He did not. A Catholic would have knelt for a while on the padded kneeler and said a Hail Mary, or some other prayer, learned in childhood, meant to change the tone and tenor of the mind and make it fit to come before the seat of God. Gregor only sat down and looked at the people around him, the old women saying rosaries, the young men bent over the backs of pews as if they were in agony. Elizabeth would have understood this—Elizabeth his wife, dead of cancer now over five years. It was one of the things about her that Gregor had never been able to fully understand, that she believed in God as simply and as straightforwardly as she believed the sun would rise in the mornings and set at night. Gregor realized that he knew a number of people like that. Lida Arkmanian. Hannah Krekorian. Even Donna Moradanyan Donahue. He didn’t know what they thought about religion, or how they would resolve the great moral questions of their time, but he did know they believed. He was sure Tibor believed, too, although, Tibor being Tibor, that was more complicated. He wondered what it was like, to know something so clearly, and without hesitation.
After a while, he became aware of the fact that the pew was not padded the way the kneelers were, and that his back had begun to hurt from pressing against the back of it. He stood up. More people had come in while he was sitting there, thinking incoherently. He wondered if they were tourists, come to view the cathedral as an artifact, or ordinary parishioners. He remembered how surprised he had been when he had realized, for the first time, that St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York was, for some people, a parish church. It had to be getting on in the morning. Didn’t most Catholic churches have Masses on and off all day?
He left the pew by the center aisle again. There was a light glowing in the sanctuary. That meant that at least one consecrated Host, considered to be the actual body and actual blood of Jesus Christ, was resting in the—ciroborum? It was incredible, what he almost knew as a result of thirty years of looking into murders.
Out on the sidewalk, the street seemed bare of taxis. He had to wait at the curb looking at nothing for long minutes, feeling the wind get under his still-open coat. Maybe he didn’t believe because he was not constituted to believe. Maybe belief was like an ear for music, and some people had it and some did not. That was the way he would have described Bennis’s approach to religion. His own, though, took in a heavy dose of fear. Religion was dangerous, and not only religion itself, but antireligion as well. There was something about the people who took it all so seriously, who believed that it was a matter of life and death whether you believed that the Host was really the Body and Blood or just a symbol, who believed that they would rather die than have a church take up shop next door, who believed to the point of obliterating the self, whether in the good of religion or the evil of it—there was something about those people that scared him to death.
It would be one thing if the world was made up of believers like Donna Moradanyan Donahue, or Sister Scholastica, or Father Tibor.
The unfortunate thing was that so much of the world seemed to be made up of believers like the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia.
THREE
1
This morning, Edith Lawton did not get out of bed when Will did, or go down to breakfast. She heard the door to the spare bedroom open and close. She heard the sound of Will’s heavy work boots on the carpeted stairs. She even heard the sound of the water being run in the bathroom for his washing up and his shower. He must have left the bathroom door open. The walls in this house were thick, made of plaster six inches through. Usually, she couldn’t hear anything at all through them, and certainly nothing as minor as running water. She lay in her bed and closed her eyes and willed herself not to turn on the light. She didn’t want him to know she was paying attention to the things he did, because she was convinced—convinced—that that would only make him more stubborn. The bedrooms were at the back of the house. If they hadn’t been, she would have had a streetlight shining through her window to make shadows on the ceiling. Instead, she had to imagine her own shadows, the way she imagined music inside her head, to pass the time. By the time she heard the front door open and close, the heavy solid-core door banging into the frame, the metal latch catching to lock automatically as Will went out in the cold, she was so tense her muscles felt as if they were made of porcelain.
Now, over three hours later, sitting in her sunroom office, she was tense again, but for an entirely different reason. Not ten seconds ago, she had heard the thunk of the mail as it came through the slot in the front door. This street got its mail earlier than almost any other in this section of the city. She knew that it was lying out there in the little foyer space in front of the front door, spread out across the round rug she had placed there to take the dirt from people’s shoes. She knew, as well, that if she left it there, Ian would pick it up when he came in, and that would be anytime now. Nine-thirty. She checked the clock and it was almost nine-fifteen. Ian said there wasn’t going to be any sex, but Edith knew he was lying. He always was. Now that she had become squeamish about doing it in her own soft bed, they did it on the floor in the master bedroom, with her bare back pressed into the scratchy green carpet and her head hitting into the wood underneath it. They did it on the couch in the living room, with the shades drawn only halfway. They did it in the kitchen, on the tile, until their nakedness was etched with tile lines and they looked as if some artist had plotted a pattern to break them up into collages of themselves. Edith would have thought that they would slow down, once Will caught them, but the opposite was true. They never seemed to be able to get enough sex now. They never seemed to want to do anything with each other but get naked and go at it. Edith wondered if Ian did as she did, sometimes, and, right at the moment of climax, imagined Will bursting in on them once again.
Edith went on making her way carefully through the letters that had been posted to her website. She had erased the one Bennis Hannaford had sent, but Bennis Hannaford was apparently not the only one who knew that there was something called Christian Humanism that had come before Secular Humanism. The trouble was that she herself had not known. She clicked through the essays on the page she called Getting It Out of My System, found the offending piece, and flushed. It wasn’t fair, really. She must have read a thousand essays by self-important media pundits that were just shot full of holes, but nobody ever called them on it. They didn’t lose their jobs. They didn’t lose their chances. They just went on being “real” writers, and here she was, sitting in a sunroom in Philadelphia, unpublished except for her column in Free Thinking magazine and her deal with Freethinker Press—and that didn’t count. When she was honest, she admitted it. She brushed hair out of her face and tried to forget that she was, at the moment, embroiled in a huge argument with the two women who ran Free Thinking magazine, and that if that went on much longer, she wouldn’t be published there anymore either.
She pushed her chair away from her worktable and stretched. She clicked at her mouse again and got rid of her own Web page. She ignored the rest of the e-mail. She didn’t want to read another word about how C
hristian Humanism was just another name for the Renaissance, and anybody who had ever had so much as a freshman college course in Western Civilization should have known this.
Even “freethought” organizations weren’t really all that impressed with “freethought” writers. When they held conventions, their stars were always people from the outside: Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollitt, Richard Dawkins, Wendy Kaminer. Edith felt a wave of heat roll over her and took her hands away from her head. She had started to get hot flashes. She hated them.
The mail was out there on the carpet. It wasn’t going to go away while she sat there. Edith got out of her chair. She hated the thought of going through the dining room, because the copy of Vanity Fair was still there, still marked at the place where Bennis’s picture was. She solved this by looking above it, out the window to the side, and catching a glimpse of a police car parked somewhere down the street, its lights flashing slowly but its siren silent. It did not faze her. Ever since that fool man, with his dead wife and his religious faith that had done him no good but to make him crazy, had shot his head off at the altar in St. Anselm’s, there were police cars in this street all the time. It was almost comforting. This was Philadelphia, after all. They could always use a police presence. Edith made a mental note to write a column about faith healing, something everybody hated, something she couldn’t be made a fool of for writing. Then she realized that she was standing there in front of the mail slot with the mail at her feet, and that all the news was bad.
“First rule of real life,” Bennis Hannaford had told her. “When they want the piece, they don’t send mail in your stamped, self-addressed envelope. They don’t even use e-mail. They get on the phone and call.”
What was lying on the carpet in front of the mail slot was a little pile of her self-addressed stamped envelopes, four of them, from Redbook, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal. Edith picked them up and turned them over in her hands. She didn’t know if it was good news or bad news that there was no other mail. The bad news was that the mailman had had no other letters to distract him. He had seen these and probably knew what they were. The good news was that she couldn’t miss one between the gas and the electric bill, where it would fall out and into the hands of Will when he came back from work.
She opened the first one and found a printed rejection slip. It started “Dear Contributor.” She opened the second one and found the same. She opened the third and fourth ones and barely paid attention. This was, she thought, all Bennis Hannaford’s fault. If Bennis had really been interested in helping her out, she would have introduced her to some people, or made a few phone calls to the right people in the right offices, so that Edith’s proposals would not have been coming in over the transom blind. Instead, all Bennis had ever really done was give her the kind of advice she could have gotten for herself out of Writer’s Digest, and most of that was clearly worthless. Edith didn’t believe for a minute that it was necessary to do as much research for a proposal as you would for an article. It was, in fact, just branding yourself as an amateur. When Bennis Hannaford proposed an article, she just got on the phone and asked.
Edith looked down at the paper in her hands and began ripping it all apart. Then, when it was a mass of shreds in her hands, she suddenly felt as if she were willing to do anything but stay in the same house with it. She didn’t even want it in her own garbage cans out back. She opened the front door and stepped into the street. The police car was still there, parked in front of St. Anselm’s again. It would be wonderful if it turned out there was more going on down there than just the aftermath of a suicide. Maybe the priest had been caught interfering with little boys, like the priests who had been part of the lawsuits had. Maybe one of the nuns was pregnant and had had an abortion. It was all hypocrisy and lies, religion was, but it was slick hypocrisy and lies. You had to work hard to expose it for what it was. She saw a policeman going down a little walkway to the side of the church, the one that led to the convent, the rectory, and the school. Then she nodded slightly to herself and went down the sidewalk to the trash can at the curb.
She was still throwing scraps of paper into the void when Ian came up, driving, of course, because he drove everywhere. She stopped for a moment to notice how much more impressive his car was than Will’s ordinary Jeep. Money mattered, and Edith had never thought it didn’t. Ian waved to her and pulled his car into the narrow driveway at the side of her house. Will still wasn’t using it. Edith had no idea why. She threw the rest of the paper away and went around the side to meet him.
“What were you doing?” he asked her, when he got back to the street. “You looked like you were doing the trash paper equivalent of sowing the land with salt.”
“I was just throwing out some junk mail,” Edith said. “What do you suppose is going on up there now, at St. Anselm’s?”
Ian looked up the street along with her. “They’re investigating a violent death,” he said. “It takes time. Even with what is clearly a suicide.”
“Was it clearly a suicide?”
“Well, something like six people saw him blow his head off. That’s a pretty good indication, I’d say. I think you’re going to have to let this one go. I’m all for crusading against religion, but sometimes you just don’t get any kind of lucky.”
“I wish Will would be all in favor of crusading against religion.”
“As far as I can tell, Will isn’t much in favor of anything. Are we going to go inside, or do you want me to stage a seduction right here on the street in broad daylight? It’s cold as a witch’s tit. My dick would probably freeze right off.”
It was cold. Edith hadn’t noticed. She looked into the trash can and saw that the scraps of paper had disappeared from sight. They were down there in the muck of other people’s rotting food and soiled Kleenex tissues. She looked back at St. Anselm’s again and then at Ian. He wasn’t really a very good-looking man. Seen in full daylight like this, it was clear that he was one of those people who had done well but not well enough. He had money but not the—authority—of celebrity.
“Well?” he said.
Edith turned slightly so that she could see Roy Phipps’s place, with the white cross on the front door and the smaller one over the front window. Ian was doing a great deal better than she was, even if he wasn’t doing as well as Bennis Hannaford. He had things she could only dream about.
“How far do you think someone would go, to make the Catholic Church look bad?” she asked him. “I mean, think about Roy Phipps. He thinks the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon. How far do you think he’d go to discredit it? The Church, you know. So that it didn’t have so much influence.”
“Edie, please. The kid shot himself in the head. Let’s go find a convenient spot and screw like rabbits.”
She didn’t move. She wasn’t a rabbit. Her breasts felt heavy and ugly and dull.
“I think I’d go a fair way,” she said. “It’s so destructive, really. On abortion. On gay rights. On everything that matters. And with all the fuss they’re having over there, you can’t help wondering. Not that it won’t get covered up. This is Philadelphia. The Pope could burn a witch in front of Independence Hall and the papers would hire six theologians to explain how it really was an act of great Christian love.”
“Edie.”
Ian was the only one who had ever called her Edie. In the beginning, she had liked it—the nickname she had not had in junior high school, the badge of belonging. Now it just made her feel tired, or as if she were being forced back into a childhood she hadn’t liked much to begin with. She turned her back to St. Anselm’s and headed for the house.
Sometimes she thought that this anger she had was not really connected to anything. It wasn’t about Bennis Hannaford, or the Catholic Church, or even Will and Ian. It was just there, as it had always been there, all her life, rising up in her in sharp stabbing peaks, making her blind. It wasn’t fair, that was what she thought, but now she couldn’t pin down what it was that
wasn’t fair. Bennis Hannaford, who had been born beautiful and rich and talented and intelligent all at once. The Catholic Church, which could go on spewing hate and irrationality from one end of the earth to the other and still get dozens of new converts every hour. If there was any justice in the world, it would be Edith herself who was in Vanity Fair, and all the churches would be empty.
The front door had swung shut while she had been outside. Edith got her key off her belt and opened up. The foyer was dark. The entire house was dark.
If she had to screw like a rabbit, she might as well do it in the dark.
2
Mary McAllister had spent the last hour looking everywhere for Chickie George, in spite of the fact that it was the middle of the workday and he was supposed to be at his desk in the St. Stephen’s Rectory. Now it was nearly ten o’clock, and she was fed up, almost as fed up as she had been when she first got off work at the soup kitchen. She had a full schedule of classes later this afternoon. She was fighting with both her roommate and her boyfriend. Even the rosary she had said in church this morning while Peter Rose packed the van hadn’t helped, and that was the most disturbing thing of all. Mary McAllister had always been able to lose herself in the rosary. Sometimes she even felt as if the Blessed Mother was in the room with her, listening to her, pleased that she was saying it right. When she was very little, the Blessed Mother had always been in the air above her head. These last few months, she had been right there beside her, close enough to touch. Today there had been nothing. It had been frightening to stare at the polished wood back of the pew ahead of the pew in front of her, and to see only that and nothing else.
