A Stillness in Bethlehem(18)

Now she just jogged through, not bothering to imagine queens, and went down the steps to the door to the tunnel that went under the lawn to the rectory. The rectory was only 100 years old, but it was just as magnificent a building as the church was. The ceilings were fourteen feet high. The staircase at the front entrance was a curving sweep worthy of hoop skirts and Scarlett O’Hara. The cubed patterns that surrounded the interior doors had been cut from three-inch pieces of teakwood. It was a house built at a time when Episcopal priests were assumed to be Episcopal gentlemen, with all that that entailed in a nineteenth-century world. Gemma would never have believed it, but she looked perfectly natural in this place. Her genetics were in favor of it. She was, after all, the descendant of the very same aristocratic WASPs who had wanted their rectories to look like this one. Her temperament was in favor of it, too. No one who had known Gemma Bury for ten minutes would have been the least surprised that she imagined herself as Queen Elizabeth the First. They would have suspected her of imagining herself as Catherine the Great. Given the time and place of her birth, she had turned out to be an Episcopal priest—but she had been born to be an empress.

She made her way to the rectory’s second floor, down a short corridor and then through a door to a longer and narrower one. In the old days, these had been the servants’ quarters. Gemma now used the rooms as offices for the church groups she especially favored. The Women’s Awareness Project had an office up here. So did the Social Justice Committee. So did the Ecumenical Society. Gemma had considered turning one of the rooms over to a Sikh who had been expelled from El Salvador, but the Sikh had found other Sikhs and Gemma was never able to figure out what he had been doing in El Salvador anyway.

Gemma stopped at the third door on the right, listened for a moment to the sound of an IBM electronic typewriter rattling away and knocked. Knowing Kelley, she didn’t wait for her knock to be answered. She just opened the door and stuck in her head. Kelley was sitting with her back to the door, hunched over the typewriter, copying something out of a notebook she had to scrunch over to read. Kelley was working on her dissertation for a doctorate in sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and she was always scrunching over something trying to read.

Gemma flicked a glance at Kelley’s one sentimental concession to the season—a glass snow ball with a Vermont-like town scene in it—and cleared her throat. Kelley sat up straight and took her glasses off, but didn’t turn around. Gemma went over to the side of the desk instead and sat down on the metal folding chair that had been left there, as if Kelley were trying to signal that guests were welcome, but not very. Ordinarily, Gemma would not have put up with this sort of behavior. It was inappropriate, and Gemma hated all things inappropriate. Kelley, however, was Kelley. She was short and squat and very, very neurotic.

Gemma stretched out her legs, looked up at the ceiling and said, “Well. I’ve interrupted you. You know I had to.”

“Did you?”

“Oh, yes,” Gemma said. “I’ve been taking phone calls all morning. From all the old ladies. I’m afraid I was beginning to lose it.”

“About Tisha Verek?” Kelley was finally interested. Kelley was always interested in Tisha Verek. Gemma didn’t know why.

“The thing is,” Gemma said, “on the subject of the lawsuit, we can hardly blame her, can we? Tisha, I mean. You know, I’ve thought about bringing a lawsuit like that myself.”

“It would have caused a terrible mess,” Kelley said wryly. “The old ladies would probably have given up writing to the bishop and gone down and picketed instead. Or they would have picketed you.”

“I know. I still think I should have done it. It would have been a wonderful opportunity to show the community what real Christianity is all about. It would have been a splendid object lesson in true tolerance.”

“It would have been professional suicide.” Kelley laughed. She had been threading a pencil through the fingers of her left hand, a nervous habit she fell back on at the start of every conversation. Now she put the pencil down and stretched. “Just be glad Tisha came along and decided to do it herself. I don’t care how you feel about tolerance or Christianity or any of the rest of it. This is a small town. I grew up in a town like this.”

“And you hated it,” Gemma said solemnly. “It stifled you.”

“Not really.” Kelley shrugged. “I felt a lot more stifled at Swarthmore, if you want to know the truth. Stifling isn’t my point. My point is that towns like this tend to get involved in very us and them-oriented wrangles. It’s not true they care so much about your not having been around for twenty years. What they really care about is whose side you’re on.”