All of a sudden, it felt very quiet in the ladies’ room, quiet and ominous, the way the house got just before Reggie really took off or just before her stepfather used to come into her room. That was another house, of course, but it all ran together, it was all one and the same place except for here. Here was different. Here was air that was full of oxygen and quiet that was comforting instead of dangerous and laughter that never got crazy and out of control, and here would be that way as long as she, Candy George, went on being somebody else in a long robe with an angel to come and visit her. That was the key. That was the small wedge of light in this sea of black ink. When the Celebration was over, she would go back to being what she really was, and that was… that was—
Suddenly, Candy George got a very clear picture of a woman she had seen only two or three times in her life. She was Tisha Verek, and in Candy’s vision, she was standing next to a small German car at the side of a road, looking like a deer that had frozen at the sound of an approaching hunter.
7
It was ten minutes after nine when Gemma Bury got her third and last call of the morning about Tisha Verek’s lawsuit, and it was nine-twelve when she decided that the situation was likely to drive her straight into a nuthouse before it was resolved. Gemma Bury liked putting it that way to herself—straight into a nuthouse—almost as much as she had once liked smoking cigarettes in the boiler room at her very expensive girls’ boarding school in Virginia. There was something about indulging in the forbidden that produced a kick nothing else could. Gemma was thirty-eight years old, and she had spent much of her life in search of that kick. At school, it had been easy to find. Gemma’s parents had been fond of the kinds of schools whose rule books were thicker than their curricula. At college, it had been harder. Gemma had gone to Sarah Lawrence right in the middle of the sexual revolution. There hadn’t seemed to be anything that was really out of bounds. Then she’d decided to enter the seminary. At the time, she had made a point of telling everyone who asked that she had finally gotten in contact with the Force of the Universe. Since she was entering a self-consciously modern, studiously New Age conduit for professional practitioners of Anglican alternative, this was even taken as admirable spirituality. Gemma didn’t know if she was spiritual or not. She liked being an Episcopalian because there was so little of it—at least in her branch—that would try to hold her back from experiencing anything in the world at all. She also liked it because it had developed a moral code so involved, so convoluted and so entangling, it was as impossible to escape as the Iron Mask. Of course, she didn’t put it that way to herself. To herself, she said she was an Episcopalian because it was the one truly progressive branch of Christianity, the one that recognized the legitimate aspirations of women, the one that had true compassion for homosexuals, the one that had dedicated itself to the full range of psychic actualization and human growth. She also told herself that there must be something wrong with her, something close to pathological, because in the secret recesses of her mind she used words like “nuthouse.”
Hanging up on old Mrs. Garrison, who had talked for two straight minutes about the tragedy that would ensue if the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration was shut down, Gemma decided it was about time to go upstairs and talk to Kelley Grey. Kelley Grey was Gemma Bury’s assistant, and the one really good idea Gemma had had since coming to Bethlehem, Vermont. Whether coming to Bethlehem, Vermont, had been a good idea itself, Gemma wasn’t sure. It certainly wasn’t what she’d expected it to be. What she’d expected it to be was a re-creation of her seminary, populated by upper-middle-class escapees from Boston and New York and more progressive than a meeting of the American Sociological Society. She’d got some of that, but she’d also got a surprising amount of something else—meaning older people with very reactionary ideas. The amount of sexism, racism and homophobia running rampant in the Vermont hills was truly astounding. It was a blessing most of these people didn’t object to having a woman priest. Gemma had no trouble imagining what they might have objected to, if given half a chance. That was why she didn’t give them half a chance. She had tried preaching about the Goddess once, about how we had to give God Her female face, and the fuss had lasted for weeks. Now she only preached about the Goddess to the Women’s Awareness Project, where she could be sure of her audience.
The phone Gemma had answered to take Mrs. Garrison’s call was in the office off the main vestibule of the church. When Gemma hung up, she went out the office door, across the vestibule and into the church itself. It was a fine old church, over 200 years old, built of stone and mortar. The ceilings were high and the leaded stained-glass windows were full of agony. It was an ecological nightmare, of course. It was impossible to heat and sucked up fossil fuels like a fat baby sucks up formula. It was one of Gemma’s secret vices that she really didn’t care. She liked this church, its gracefulness, its grandness, its majesty. She swept through it sometimes feeling like Queen Elizabeth the First.