True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  Now she swung around the stone walk that led from St. Stephen’s back courtyard and stopped when she came to the church’s front doors. She knew there was no longer any reason why she should not enter, or even take part in a service if she had a reason of courtesy to do so, but she always felt uncomfortable at the idea of being in a church that was not a Catholic church. She felt especially uncomfortable in this one, because she knew that the Reverend Burdock supported not only gay rights but abortion. The gay rights part seemed perfectly natural to her. In a church full of men like Chickie, there was very little else he could have done. In spite of the fact that the Catholic Church officially believed that it was possible for any gay man to live a celibate life according to the word of God, and Mary always tried very hard to accept anything the Church taught as true, in this one instance she secretly felt that somebody in the Vatican was seriously confused. Nobody could meet Chickie George and not understand, in an instant, that whatever it took to heal him would be a lot more complicated than just saying “no” to sex. Not, Mary thought, that he needed to be healed of his homosexuality. It wasn’t that. It was just that he needed to be healed from something.

  She ran up the church’s front steps and looked through the doors. She really had come a long way on this subject since she’d first started to come to St. Anselm’s. Back in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she had grown up, she had never doubted for an instant that gay men were sinners who needed to learn some self-discipline so that they could lead normal and not so dangerous lives. It seemed odd to her that her ideas on abortion had not changed in the same way. Instead, she had become ever surer of her original position. She had started out thinking of abortion as wrong. She now thought of it as a holocaust, the deliberate slaughter of children, no different from taking a sword to a football stadium full of infants in their high chairs and hacking away at them until they were nothing but pieces of flesh and oceans of blood on the ground.

  She went through the front doors and into the church’s vestibule. She went through the vestibule and into the church itself. Chickie was up near the front, fussing with what seemed to be a bouquet of flowers too large for the vase he had put it in. Gladiolas, Mary thought irrelevantly. Then she went up to the front.

  “Chickie?”

  Chickie turned around. When he wasn’t pulling his fullblast act, he was an incredibly handsome man, slight and straight, with a face that looked as if God had revised it over and over again until it had reached perfection. Sometimes Mary wanted to grab him and say: see what you are? see what you are? don’t playact the way you do. But of course it was impossible. As soon as he knew she was looking at him, he took it all back on again, the swish, the exaggeration. Mary sighed a little.

  “Duckie,” he said. “How are you? I’m having the most awful time with these flowers.”

  “They’re beautiful. I think you need a bigger vase.”

  “I may need one, duckie, but I’m not going to get one. These were given by Mrs. Van De Kamp. It’s her vase. And you know nobody around this place is ever going to offend Mrs. Van De Kamp.”

  “Maybe you could take out a couple and put them to the side or something.”

  “Maybe I could. Although I wouldn’t put it past the old cow to come and sit in a front pew and count the things. What’s up with you, duckie? You look absolutely miserable.”

  “I am absolutely miserable. Don’t ask me for real reasons, though. I don’t have any. I just seem to be in a worse and worse mood lately.”

  “Is it all that fuss across the street?”

  “With Marty and Bernadette? That didn’t help, I suppose. But no. Not really. I’m just—out of sorts, I guess. Not satisfied with anything.”

  “Maybe it’s time for your fifteen minutes of fame.”

  “I’ll skip that, if you don’t mind. I can’t think of anything I’d like less than being famous. That will stand up on its own now if you’ll let it.”

  Chickie stepped away from the vase. It stood up on its own. “I suppose I shouldn’t tamper with it. It isn’t up to my usual standard, though. Gladiolas are such a perfect flower. Do you know they come in autumn orange with black streaks, like tigers? Why do people like Mrs. Van De Kamp always have to buy pink?”

  “Maybe she likes pink.”

  “All her taste is in her mouth, duckie, and she hasn’t got much there. Last potluck, she brought a green bean casserole made with cream of mushroom soup. I nearly died.”

  “Don’t die. Make me some coffee and help me feel like there’s some point in going to class this afternoon.”

  Chickie walked around the flowers one more time, sighed, and stepped back again. “I suppose there’s nothing else to do here. It’s a shame, though. The people who have money never seem to have the faintest idea what to do with it.”

  The was a small door at the back of the church that opened onto the courtyard. The rectory was just across the miniature quadrangle, and made of stone just like the church was. St. Stephen’s always reminded Mary of a college, one of those ritzy little places the children of rich people went if they didn’t want to enter the fray at Harvard. She let Chickie lead her through the passageways in the rectory to his office and settle her in a big wing chair. Then she settled back and watched him get her coffee. Chickie always made real coffee. He did not use instant, or freeze-dried, or even those little coffee bags they sometimes gave out at the university cafeteria. He had a grinder right there next to his desk, and four different kinds of roast in bags beside it, and a real percolator with a glass bubble on top so that you would know when the coffee started to bubble.

  “So,” he said, “I hope this isn’t about what’s-his-name, the boyfriend.”

  “Ned.”

  “Ned. What a name. Ned. I hope you’ve been listening to your Uncle Chickie, though, and not letting yourself get talked into anything you don’t want to do. You have, haven’t you? Because it’s like I told you, I’ve let myself get talked into enough sex I wasn’t interested in having to know by now that—”

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that.”

  “He hasn’t been—pressing?”

  “Well,” Mary said, “he’s always pressing, to one degree or another. But nothing unusual. No, it’s not that. I’m just all messed up lately, that’s all. I don’t seem to be satisfied with anything. And then there’s something going on over at the church. My church. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it in the air. Do you know how that goes?”

  Chickie nodded, the mask momentarily gone. A second later, it was back. “Yes, I do,” he said. “It’s happening here, too. Dan Burdock has got some kind of bee up his ass—excuse me. I don’t remember where I am sometimes.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I hate being out of the gossip. I’m never out of the gossip. All I can think is that Dan is the only one who knows, and he’s not saying anything.”

  “Do you think they could be connected? What’s going on over there and what’s going on over here? I don’t see how they could be.”

  “Maybe it has something to do with the pray-in,” Chickie said. “Rick Luca had this idea that we should all dress up in prom gowns and go over there and pray in with you, but I don’t think Dan is going to stand for it.”

  Mary bit her lip.

  “What?” Chickie said. “You think that’s funny? Let me tell you, I’d look worlds better in a prom gown than that cow who was queen my senior year in high school. I mean, I know mammary glands are supposed to be attractive on a woman, but there really is such a thing as overdoing it.”

  Mary laughed. “Not something I’ve ever had to worry about.”

  “Listen, duckie, you’ve got the kind of body that would look perfect in Balenciaga. Don’t knock it. Do you want a whole cup of this stuff or only half? I made it a little strong.”

  “A whole cup. The thing is, though, the pray-in may be part of it. Part of what’s going on, I mean. Because there isn’t going to be one this year.”

  Chickie pu
t the coffee cup down on the little round table next to Mary’s chair and raised his eyes to heaven. “It’s a miracle! God has answered me! The heavens have opened, and a voice has come from the clouds—”

  “Oh, hush,” Mary said. “No voice came from the clouds. It came from the chancery. Or at least that’s what I heard. The Cardinal Archbishop put his foot down. No pray-in this year. No pray-in ever again.”

  “The son of a bitch, really? Excuse me again. There I go—”

  “It’s okay, really. You should hear some of the things Ned says.”

  “Well, if he says them around you, he’s a clod. And don’t think I don’t mean it.”

  He did mean it. The mask was gone again, lickety-split, and back just as quickly. Mary drank more coffee. Sometimes she wondered if Chickie had friends far closer to him than she was, with whom he could drop the mask for hours at a time. It frightened her to think that he might never drop the mask except when he was alone. It said something about his life that she did not want to look at.

  “You know,” she said, “I think it might have been Sister Scholastica. The new principal over at the school. She just hated the idea of that pray-in, the first time she heard about it. And she’s not like Sister Harriet Garrity. She’s still in a habit. She’s very traditional, really. People have to take her seriously.”

  “I take Sister Harriet Garrity seriously. I won’t tell you as what.”

  “Well, everybody takes her seriously as that. But it’s true, you know. Nobody would listen to Sister Harriet about the pray-in because, you know, what would you expect her to say. And she doesn’t have the Church’s interests at heart. But Sister Scholastica is so committed, really, and so—I don’t know. Mainstream, I guess. So the Cardinal listens to her. Sort of. Do you suppose, if there’s no pray-in, Reverend Phipps will come anyway?”

  “He will if he knows there’s a television camera in the vicinity.”

  “Mmmm.” Mary stood up. The coffee in her cup was gone. The way she felt, she wouldn’t need another for a week. Chickie had been right to say he’d made the stuff very strong. Mary stretched a little and got her bag from the floor. “I’d better go. Thanks a lot, Chickie. I needed to be cheered up. I’ve got Intellectual History of the Middle Ages this afternoon. It makes my head ache.”

  “It would make my head ache, too. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine. Really. I hope you are. You’ve been looking very tired these last couple of weeks.”

  “I’ve been thinking. It wears me out. But you take my advice, you hear me? Never go to bed with anybody unless you really, really want to. Don’t do it just because you feel sorry for this Ned person. Especially don’t do it because you feel sorry for this Ned person.”

  “I promise to wear my largest and bluest Miraculous Medal every time Ned and I are out on a date. Thanks again, Chickie. I’ll talk to you on Saturday.”

  “Drive carefully.”

  “I’m not driving. I took the bus.”

  Out in the courtyard, the day seemed to have gotten darker, and colder, and to have begun to verge on wet. Mary cut diagonally across the quadrangle and went out the side gate. Then she went around the front of the church and crossed the street so that she could go into St. Anselm’s. At this time of day, there was no Mass. The next Mass would be at twelve o’clock. She had already been to Mass, and to Communion, at seven. Now it occurred to her that she might not have been right to go to Communion at all. She was feeling so—dead—inside these days. Her praying wasn’t doing her any good. She spent a lot of time at Mass just daydreaming, and then when she came to she couldn’t remember what she had been daydreaming about. Surely there was something about all that that rendered her—unfit—for Communion?

  She dipped her fingers with holy water from the font and crossed herself. She came up the middle aisle and genuflected in front of the altar. She slid into a pew halfway down the line of them and knelt carefully on the padded kneeler. She had been in dozens of Catholic churches in half a dozen states, and every one of them had been close to identical: the pews, the kneelers, the fonts. It had startled her, the one time she was in France, when she realized that very old churches did not have kneelers, or even pews that were set in place like the ones she was used to at home. She had tried to imagine herself a medieval woman, going to church to stand and kneel, unsupported, on a stone floor, but the picture had not fit. She could no longer imagine herself anywhere, because the picture did not fit anywhere. At some point when she wasn’t paying attention, she had been set adrift in space. Now she was no one and nothing, weightless and loose, tossing in the wind without an anchor.

  Mary sat back in her seat and turned her attention to the statue of the Virgin that stood watch over the huge bank of candles in the niche they called the Mary Chapel.

  “All right,” she said, in her head, although she could hear the words as clearly as if she had spoken them. “You’re supposed to have all the answers. What do I do now?”

  3

  For Sister Harriet Garrity, the issues surrounding the execution of Anne Marie Hannaford were problematic. On the one hand, she was a woman, oppressed by definition, and, due to the fact that she was anything but conventionally attractive, one of the victims of the vicious lookism that pervaded every segment of American society. On the other hand, she was the daughter of one of the great hegemonic capitalist oppressors of the Reagan period, and from all the evidence she was not a rebel trapped in the patriarchal fold. Harriet didn’t think she had ever seen such a thorough case of false consciousness. Anne Marie hadn’t given a lot of interviews over the past ten years, but the ones she had given were monuments to hierarchical thinking. It was just so obvious that the woman thought herself better than just about everybody she met, and that she was convinced that the only reason she had been convicted in the first place was that the jury was full of lower-class Blacks and Latinos acting out a fantasy of revenge on their “betters.” She had actually used the word “betters” at one point in one interview, and the very sight of the word had made Harriet flinch. Still, there was principle involved here. Harriet knew the death penalty for what it was, judicial murder, the legal construct that allowed the ruling class to murder the troublesome members of the classes beneath them before those troublesome members could gain disciples and become agents of change. She didn’t think it would be possible for her to pretend that this particular judicial murder was not happening. No matter how much she might dislike Anne Marie Hannaford personally—from a distance, of course, since she had never met the woman face-to-face—Harriet couldn’t imagine herself staying home while the state of Pennsylvania pumped poison into the woman’s veins. Besides, it might all be a trick. Journalists had been gotten to before, and most of them didn’t even need to be gotten to. They bought the patriarchal line without ever thinking to question it. In real life, Anne Marie Hannaford might be nothing at all like the woman she seemed to be in interviews. She might be a sister under the skin, or someone who had struck a blow against repression and now just didn’t know how she was supposed to behave. Harriet knew from experience how hard it was for women to own their anger, or excuse themselves for acting in their own interests, and without permission.

  The Action Alert from the Seamless Garment Network was lying across the green felt blotter in the middle of her desk, along with the Urgent Memo from the Gay and Lesbian Support Advisory, which had to do with the priest-pedophilia case, and especially with the men who had once been victims and in many ways were victims still. There wasn’t much she could do about the execution of Anne Marie Hannaford, but six of the men who had been victims of the priest pedophiles worshiped right across the street, and she had already talked to Father Burdock about what she might be able to do to help them out.

  She was supposed to be outlining the needs of the Special Committee for the First Communion breakfast, but she was finding it impossible to concentrate on how many dozen bagels should be plain and how many should be raisin. The whole idea
of the First Communion breakfast made her sick to her stomach, and especially so since she had lost this round of the policy war to Sister Scholastica and her traditionalist nuns. The idea of sending tiny girls down a church aisle dressed in white veils and white gloves as if they were brides appalled her almost as much as the execution of Anne Marie Hannaford did—because it was an execution of its own in a way. What the Church was trying to murder was self-respect, and a sense of empowerment. It wanted those things for boys, but what it wanted for girls was only docility and acquiescence. Pray, pay, and obey—that was the old formula, for all Catholic laypersons and for all Catholic nuns. There was a war going on, just the way those Christian idiots said there was, a war for the soul of the country and a war for the soul of the Church. Harriet Garrity had enlisted on the side of Truth, Justice, and the Legitimate Aspirations of Women.

  She took the Action Alert and the Urgent Memo and pushed them out of the way. She turned to her computer and looked at the First Communion schedule sitting there on the screen, with the major events highlighted in red. She rubbed her head and wished it didn’t ache so much. It had been aching since early this morning, and not even four ibuprofen taken less than an hour apart had done anything to make it better. That was because Father Healy’s deadline was coming up on her as fast as a freight train, and she still didn’t know what to do about it. She had no intention of getting into a habit. None of the women in her order wore habits anymore. She had no intention of leaving St. Anselm’s, either, if only because she didn’t have the faintest idea where she could go. Five or six years ago, there were plenty of jobs in parishes and chanceries for nuns with professional training and management skills, but since the appointment of this Cardinal Archbishop, those things were drying up, at least in this archdiocese. She thought of herself being transferred to some college somewhere, or stuck off in a backwater where her only influence on the course of events would come from journal articles in little magazines and the letters she would write to the newspapers, which wouldn’t bother to print them. She would be no better off than she had been when the nuns in her order had worn habits, and been held to a rule that forbade them to “singularize” themselves. If Harriet had been truthful about herself, she would have had to admit that she was a very ambitious woman. She knew she would have made at least as good a priest as Father Robert Healy. She would have made a better one than half the priests she’d served under in her career, whose only real qualification for the priesthood had often seemed to be that bit of flesh they had hanging between their legs. If she had been a man, she would have been a bishop before she was forty. She would have been a Cardinal very soon after that. She might even have been Pope. As it was, she often felt so stifled she could barely breathe, and then she wanted to blow up at somebody, smash something, do something, anything, to get out of this box without air that she’d lived in for so long she couldn’t remember what any other kind of life was like. Maybe, she thought, that was because there was no other kind of life for a woman. All women lived in boxes, and all women died before they could get completely out. If they didn’t die of exhaustion from the struggle, then the system killed them, the way it was about to kill Anne Marie Hannaford, the way it murdered the countless women who fought against helplessness for birth control and abortion and reproductive rights. Harriet looked guiltily at her computer monitor, but it still showed nothing but the First Communion schedule: rosary before Mass; Mass; scapular enrollment ceremony; breakfast. She rubbed her temples and sighed. She left the Action Alert about the execution openly on her desk, but she never left anything about Catholics for a Free Choice anywhere anyone could find it. She didn’t even go to their website without erasing the cookies they sent and making sure the Web address wasn’t left for somebody to see it on her Internet travel history. The Seamless Garment Network would annoy the hell out of the Cardinal Archbishop and drive Father Healy to distraction, but they couldn’t do anything about it. The Cardinal Archbishop was one of the most vocal opponents of capital punishment in the American Church. The Gay and Lesbian