True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  FIVE

  1

  For almost three years, Dan Burdock had known that there would come a day when he would have this particular request sitting on his desk. The only thing that surprised him, now that it had come, was that he was so calm about it. That was a good thing, because Aaron Wardrop was watching him, very intensely. If he showed the least sign of distress, this interview would change character in no time at all. Dan was no stranger to the shifting emotional landscapes of true believers. Ever since he had come to St. Stephen’s, he had imagined himself in the role of Sane Older Friend, the one who wants to hold the hero back from doing something foolish, the one nobody listens to until it is too late. The ones like Chickie George were bad enough—and Scott Boardman. Everybody said that Scott had been trying to commit suicide most of his life. Dan thought all that crowd were, the ones who went trolling in the bathhouses at four o’clock in the morning, the ones who kept score in five figures, the ones who thought that if you did it stoked to the gills on vodka and methamphetamine, it didn’t really count. Except, Dan thought, that wasn’t really true about Chickie. Or might not be.

  “What?” Aaron said.

  “I was thinking about Chickie George,” Dan said. “About how I always think of him as being like Scott, you know, because of the camp. But I don’t think he is.”

  “This isn’t about Chickie George, Dan. Why don’t we try sticking to the subject.”

  Dan looked down at this desk again. Aaron, of course, did not go trolling in the bathhouses at any hour of the day or night. He would consider it beneath his dignity, and he was far too fastidious to put up with the dirt and mess. This form had been fastidiously done. It was so perfect, it might have been produced by a professional printer.

  “You must have run this through the scanner,” Dan said. “I’ve never seen one of these so flawlessly done.”

  “I was just being careful. Under the circumstances.”

  “Under the circumstances.” Dan pushed the paper away, off the felt blotter, onto the polished hardwood of the desk. “So what do you want me to do, Aaron? Say yes? Say no? Give you a fight with me or a fight with the bishop or a fight with the city of Philadelphia? What’s the point?”

  “The point is that Marc and I have been together for twenty-three years, and now we would like to make it official.”

  “Quite.”

  “That really is the point, Dan. I’m not saying there aren’t other points, but that’s really the important one and has been for the past six or seven years. We would like to make it official. We think we should have the legal right to make it official—”

  “But you don’t.”

  “But we don’t,” Aaron agreed. “So we’re looking to do the next best thing. We’re looking to have our church, this church, where we have given of our time and our money and our devotion for a decade—We’re looking to have our church validate our union. That’s it. It’s not hard, Dan.”

  “When Scott died you were warning me not to do anything too—obvious—that might jeopardize my position here.”

  “I know. At the time, I thought, Marc and I thought, that we would want to do this quietly. Just a small gathering. Nobody would have to know. We’ve changed our minds.”

  “Why?”

  Aaron shrugged. “I don’t know that it’s only one thing. Marc has always been more intense about this than I am. He’s always taken more risks.”

  “Well, this would be a risk, all right. Forget the bishop, for the moment. Forget the media. Think of our friend Roy down the road. Do you really think you and Marc would be able to have this ceremony without a lot of unwanted company?”

  “What makes you think it would be unwanted?”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “That means I’m arguing your side of this issue, Dan. At some point, we’ve got to be honest about it, about ourselves, with other people. If we’re not honest about it, we only feed into people like Roy. We don’t want anything camp. Marc isn’t going to dress up in a white gown like Dennis Rodman, and neither am I. We don’t intend to put on a freak show. We just want what any other two human beings who have been together as long and as faithfully as we have been together would have by right. We want to get married. And since we can’t actually do that, we want the closest thing we can get. Why is this so hard?”

  The question was so ridiculous, even Aaron couldn’t ask it and go on looking him straight in the face—and Aaron could do anything. Dan had seen him negotiate with sharks. Still, Aaron walked away, to pretend to be looking at the stained-glass window. Dan looked down at the form again, the answers typed out instead of handwritten in pen, the questions printed slightly bolder and numbered in green. The odd thing was, although he was upset, he wasn’t upset for the reasons Aaron probably thought he was. The idea of performing a marriage for two gay men didn’t bother him. He was sure that, twenty years from now, that would happen in the Episcopal Church as a matter of course. It would happen because it had to happen. It was the only right thing that could happen—the only way this problem could be resolved in a way that was consistent with Christian love. There were bishops in the church right this moment who agreed with him, and more than a few laypeople. Spong had ordained a sexually active gay man in Newark. One of the new women bishops was rumored to be a lesbian. If she wasn’t, she had a lot of sympathy with gay “issues.” Dan made a face and rubbed his hands against his forehead, as if he were wiping off sweat. There was no sweat. If anything, he was far too cold. He hated the words that were used in cases like this. Issues. Community. Outreach. Maybe he would have felt better if he had been a priest in the Diocese of Newark. Maybe he wouldn’t have, because as much as he admired Spong’s stands on a lot of things, he did not like Spong’s relentless skepticism.

  He looked up to find that Aaron had crossed the room from the window and was standing right next to the desk.

  “Well?” Aaron asked. “Will you do it?”

  “Of course I’ll do it. That’s why you brought it up in the first place. Because you knew I’d do it.”

  “We guessed, yes.”

  “Have you got a date picked out for when you want it done?”

  “The end of the month, we thought. We aren’t interested in having any sort of big reception, if you know what I mean. It’s not the way either of us operate.”

  Dan nodded. “What about banns? Do you want us to publish them?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “What about announcements? Do you want to put one in the paper? The Inquirer would probably take it. I don’t know about the Star.”

  “I thought you were interested in keeping this quiet.”

  “Not exactly.” Dan got up and took the form with him. There was a filing cabinet on the other side of the room where he kept “official” papers like this, but of course the whole parish was now run on a computer. If he gave this form to Mrs. Reed, she would copy it laboriously into her files, and then it would disappear, the way all forms disappeared, so that if they should desperately need it again, they would have to go through her elaborate system of classification to find it. He hesitated over the filing cabinet, then walked past it and into the outer office. Mrs. Reed was already off to lunch, or somewhere. None of them quite knew what she did or where she went, only that since she had come there had never once been a problem with scheduling or the budget. Dan put the form down in the center of her desk, where she would be sure to see it, and then looked for a moment at the small framed photograph of her two daughters and their children. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine her any younger than she was now, with her hair streaked grey and held back in a knot on the nape of her neck, with her shirtwaist dresses and her string of pearls. Years ago, the marriage form had asked for the bride’s name and the groom’s. Now it asked only for the names of the “communicants.” Dan didn’t know if that was lucky, or what.

  He went back into his office. Aaron was sitting in the big leather chair, his legs stretched out in front of him
. He would have looked better if he had been smoking a cigarette. It was that kind of pose. But men like Aaron Wardrop didn’t smoke cigarettes anymore.

  “There,” Dan said. “It’s done. We’ll see what Mrs. Reed has to say about it.”

  “She won’t blink an eye.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Maybe you ought to take the rest of the day off and see a movie. It’s a weekday. Nobody will be expecting you around here. Except that you always are here.”

  “I’m fine,” Dan said. He reached into his trouser pocket and found a tube of soft mints, half-eaten. He took it out and offered one to Aaron.

  Aaron hesitated. Dan could see his ambivalence as if it were a physical thing. There was something wrong with the atmosphere in this room. A woman would have gnawed away at it. A gay man like Chickie would have made fun of it. Aaron didn’t know what to do with it. At some other time, Dan might have helped him out. Now he only waited, almost desperate for Aaron to be gone. That was in the air, too.

  “Well,” Aaron said. “That’s it, then. I’m somewhat at a loss for words. I expected more of an argument.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Loyalty to the institution, maybe. A wish to protect the Church from controversy. A natural hesitancy. Something like that.”

  “The Anglican Communion is not a stranger to controversy.”

  “Right,” Aaron said. “Never forget Henry VIII.”

  Dan smiled, and said nothing, and waited. The air in the room had become thick with something like a miasma, the residue of emotions left unfelt, of positions left untaken. Aaron shifted his weight uneasily from one leg to the other and back again. He was in such perfect shape, his discomfort looked deliberately chosen, as if it were a dance move.

  “All right,” he said. “That’s it, then. I’ve put down the first Saturday in March. That should give us all enough time.”

  “For what?” Dan asked.

  “For deciding how we want this to play on the evening news.”

  Somebody else might have accused Aaron of being in it for the publicity, but Dan did not, because he knew that there was going to be no way to keep this off the evening news. Instead, he waited patiently while Aaron decided to get out, looking more uncertain and uncomfortable by the minute, the way people do when they expect to have a fight and get acquiescence instead. Except that Dan wasn’t really acquiescing. That was not what was going on here. It was much more complicated than that. Aaron backed out of the office door and looked around, probably to make sure that Mrs. Reed was still gone. She must have been. Aaron said nothing to anybody, not even to Dan. When he had backed away far enough so that he was clear of the door, he turned around and began to hurry out of sight.

  Dan waited until he heard steps on the stairs. Then he got out of his chair and went to the window on the other side of the room from the one Aaron had been looking at. He didn’t want to look at stained glass, at a mosaic of St. Stephen being stoned to death in Jerusalem. He wanted to see the street and the traffic and the weather and the things that were really real.

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see. This was never a very busy street. There weren’t any businesses on it. Anyone who wanted to have a cup of coffee or buy a paper had to go around the corner where the plate-glass storefronts were. The only time this neighborhood ever really heated up was on Sunday, when the churches were all having services at once and the asphalt was choked with cars whose owners couldn’t find enough places to park. If he strained sideways, he could see just far enough to catch the white cross on the sign in front of Roy Phipps’s place. Sometimes Roy had his people out on the sidewalk with signs, for no reason Dan could tell. Sometimes they were gathered there on their way to a demonstration at a gay bar or the local offices of the Gay and Lesbian Support Advisory. Today, there was nothing, just dead air. Roy Phipps might have been nothing but another neighbor with a job in a bank and a car that needed to go to the mechanic’s place almost every month.

  Dan retreated back to his desk, sat down again, and sighed. Before Aaron had shown up today, he had almost made up his mind to announce his homosexuality from the pulpit this Sunday. He was still unhappy that he had withdrawn from his initial impulse to announce it at Scott Boardman’s funeral. Now he didn’t know if he could do it without putting Aaron and Marc’s enterprise in jeopardy, and he didn’t know what was more important. His head was throbbing so badly it felt as if it were going to split open at the seams.

  He had no idea how long he sat there, thinking nothing, totally blank. The next thing he was aware of was Mrs. Reed, back from wherever she had gone, standing in his open doorway. She looked as placid and thoughtless as she always did. If she disapproved of what went on at St. Stephen’s, if she longed for a more traditional version of religion, she never gave any indication of it to anyone in the church.

  “That police lieutenant called,” she said. “He’s coming over here in about half an hour. I couldn’t put him off. He said it was important.”

  “That’s all right,” Dan said. “They have to do what they have to do. Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “You can ask me anything you like.”

  “Have you been an Episcopalian all your life?”

  Mrs. Reed blinked. “I’m not an Episcopalian at all. I’m a Methodist. I’ve been a Methodist all my life. Does that create some bar to my employment here?”

  “Not at all.”

  Mrs. Reed seemed to be on the verge of saying something else, and then thought better of it. “The lieutenant was very urgent. That was why I didn’t put it off, even though you weren’t around for me to check. I hope you aren’t put out by it.”

  “I’m not put out at all.”

  “Well, then. Thank you, Father Burdock. I’ll get back to my typing.”

  Mrs. Reed went out and shut the door behind her. When she was in her office, the door between their two rooms never remained open. Dan rubbed his forehead again and thought that it had all seemed so simple when he was in the seminary, what he wanted to do, what he had to do. It had just been a question of making a decision, and never for a moment allowing himself to look away from the decision he had made.

  It hadn’t occurred to him, then, that loneliness could be like a black pit on the surface of the moon, cold and dead and silent, going on forever, so that all he had to look forward to were the sounds of himself making the bed creak in the night, and of his own voice calling out the words of the Matins prayer in an empty kitchen.

  2

  If there was one thing the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia did not like, it was having to rely on someone—anyone—to do things for him. He had learned to accommodate the need in small things. He could let Sister Marie Claire type his letters and take his phone calls. He could let Father Doheny handle the negotiations about the electric bill and the talks with the reporters about upcoming archdiocesan celebrations and the schedule and curricula for the parochial schools. It was things like this, things that involved money, or reputation, or the future, that he could not let go of, even when he knew he should. He knew he should let go of this. He even tried to tell himself that he would have let go of it, if he had been able to, but it was a lie, and he was not good at self-deception. There was something a monastery taught you, especially a Carmelite one. When you entered, you took on the discipline of never again looking into a mirror, but you looked at yourself, all the time. It was incumbent on the man in his position to meet with major donors. The donors expected the courtesy. It was part of what they got in return for handing over their money. Even if it hadn’t been, though, he would have wanted to be there when the deal was done. He could never trust the people around him to do what was right when it needed to be done. He could never feel sure that the important things would be handled if he didn’t handle them himself.

  In this case, of course, the problem was that the important things might not be handled if he did handle them himself. He was not in the mood for this now. He didn’t ha
ve the patience. Worst of all, his nerves seemed to be strung so badly they were about to snap. He had too much on his plate today to coddle Andrew Sean O‘Reilly, the King of Discount Furniture, the man who Put Philly on the Home Furnishings Map. He had two strains of music running in his head, in that way that meant nothing he could do would get rid of them. One was the “Hosannah” from Bach’s B Minor Mass. The other was the jingle from Andy’s furniture ads. The ads ran every fifteen minutes all night long from the end of the eleven o’clock news to the start of the network morning shows on every local station. It was as if Andy had decided to make himself famous in the only way he knew how, by making and starring in his own movie, except that it was a movie that lasted only thirty seconds. The Cardinal Archbishop thought his head was going to split open. It hurt that badly. If he had been able to do anything he wanted to do, he would have retreated to the chapel, put the Bach on so loudly they would have been able to hear it at Avery Point, and dropped out of sight for a week. Except, of course, that that wasn’t what he would do if he could do anything at all. What he would really do was to let Andy O’Reilly know exactly where he stood in the grand drama that was Western Civilization, and in the even grander drama that was the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

  Out on the street, a wino had started to walk on the edge of the sidewalk near the parked cars. Any minute now, the Cardinal Archbishop knew, he would begin to urinate on the tires. There was a cultural statement for you. You could think what you wanted about it, but it had a lot more directness—and a lot more honesty—than Andy O’Reilly’s ads.

  The door to the office opened and Father Doheny stepped in. “Your Eminence? Mr. O’Reilly’s here. Finally. I put him in the conference room.”

  “In a minute,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.

  “When I was young, laypeople weren’t late for appointments with cardinals. Not even if they had a pile of money.”

  “You can’t be thirty years old,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “Mr. O’Reilly has us by the short hairs, and he knows it. He’s behaving accordingly. You should never overestimate human nature. Celebrate it, when it exceeds expectations, but never overestimate it.”