A Great Day for the Deadly(7)

Gregor could just imagine what the Association of Catholic Psychotherapists of New York State had thought of that. He didn’t have to imagine what certain other people had thought of it. Reactions to that speech had appeared in everything from the Saturday Evening Post to the New Republic. The more populist press had tended to approve of it, in a vague and uncomprehending way, because they also tended to approve of God in general and to disapprove of psychotherapists. The “intellectual” press had been furious. Gregor was neither a religious man nor a moralist. He had no strong ideas one way or the other about the existence of God or the philosophical advisability of engaging in acts of promiscuous fornication. He thought O’Bannion had simply stated the obvious, the absolute bottom-line core definition of Christianity, without which Christianity would not exist. The irrationality of the literate press’s attacks on O’Bannion had startled him.

The irrationality of the literate press’s reactions to the death of Brigit Ann Reilly had startled him, too. It was now ten o’clock on the morning of Friday, March 1, and Gregor was standing in the anteroom to the Cardinal’s office in the Chancery in Colchester, rocking restlessly back and forth on his feet and smiling nervously every once in a while at the Benedictine nun in full habit who served as the Cardinal’s secretary. The nun was perfectly pleasant and even friendly, but Gregor wasn’t used to nuns. All that black and white and unnatural calm made him nervous. He was also very tired. He had opened the Cardinal’s envelope yesterday afternoon as soon as he’d got back up to his room from lunch. He had read through it carefully, called the Cardinal, agreed to come up to Colchester and go on to Maryville, and then gone out and bought every newspaper, newsmagazine, and tabloid with a story about the murder in it. The reading proved to be irresistible. He had expected to get at least eight hours of solid sleep before he had to go to the train station in the morning. He had gotten less than five, and those sprawled out across crumbled newsprint while still wearing a suit. He had told himself he would doze on the Amtrak trip upstate. Instead, he had reread the report in Time and skimmed through the long quasi-editorial in The Nation, looking for God only knew what. It wasn’t that any of these pieces contained essential information about the murder itself. Reading them, Gregor wasn’t sure the press had any information beyond what had been given out the day the body was found—and that wasn’t much. If he wanted details, he had the Cardinal’s report to look through. It contained just about anything he could have expected to get, considering the fact that he was attached to no official policing force anywhere in the country. If Gregor Demarkian had formed distinct impressions of the Cardinal Archbishop, the Cardinal Archbishop had formed distinct impressions of him. At least, the Cardinal Archbishop had remembered that Gregor liked his information organized, exhaustive, electic, and typed.

What was fascinating to Gregor about the press accounts of the death of Brigit Ann Reilly—especially the ones in the prestige weeklies—was their tone. From Time to the New Republic, from Newsweek to The Nation, the editorial voice seemed to be a cross between the grimly prissy schoolmarm of nineteenth-century fiction and the hell-and-brimstone preacher. Father Tibor back on Cavanaugh Street was always telling Gregor that the American press was hysterically hostile to religion, but Gregor had never listened to him. Tibor was a refugee from Soviet Armenia. He had lived with real-life persecution for so long, he was entitled to one or two conspiracy theories. Now Gregor thought he owed Tibor at least a mental apology. These stories were so bizarre, to call them anti-Catholic was to give them too much credit. The New Republic seemed to imply that there was something about “the rigid morality of traditional Catholicism” that led inevitably to violent death. Time quoted Charles Curran (briefly) and Richard MacBrien (at length) on the psychological health of women who joined religious orders that still wore close to full habit. The consensus between them seemed to be that these women were not psychologically healthy at all. Then there was Newsweek, which presented a perfectly bewildering article that seemed to imply that there was some connection between this murder and the Church’s response to AIDS. At one point, it even managed to imply that the Church’s traditional stand on homosexual practice had caused AIDS. What any of this had to do with the matter at hand—the brutal murder of an eighteen-year-old girl in the storeroom of a public library in Upstate New York—Gregor didn’t know, but then the writers of the articles didn’t seem to know either. They didn’t seem to know much of anything, except that they really, really, really didn’t like the Catholic Church.