“Isn’t that dangerous?” Gregor asked him. “I don’t mean because you might get arrested. I mean medically.”
“I’m very careful, medically. I wasn’t always, but I am now. No, Mr. Demarkian, at the moment, the chief problem I have in relation to my activities in this direction is definitely legal, although not legal in the everyday sense. I got arrested in that raid, Mr. Demarkian, but I did not get booked and I did not get charged.”
“The district attorney was doing you a favor?”
“The district attorney was doing the city of New York a favor, or so he thought. Everybody seems to think the clinic will collapse if anything happens to me. Whatever. The problem was, I got arrested in that raid, and I got photographed being led out into the paddywagon, and the photographs ended up on the front pages of both the New York Post and the Daily News.”
“Not on the front page of the New York Sentinel.”
“No,” Michael said. “That’s what Charlie van Straadt was doing at the center on the night he died. He’d made sure that the Sentinel and that television station he owns kept strictly off the story of my arrest. He was a good contributor to the center and Charlie and I went back a long way. He couldn’t just let it go, though, and we both knew it. He came uptown that night to talk to me.”
“Yes.” Gregor nodded. “That’s in the Cardinal’s report, not as a fact but as a conjecture. Still, everybody seems to have assumed it.”
“They ought to. What nobody knows is that Charlie called me, in the afternoon, before he came up.”
“He did?”
“Oh, yes, and that’s the funny part. I’ve been thinking about it ever since and I just haven’t been able to sort it out. Charlie was upset about the publicity, of course. I was upset about it, too. I may not have intended to start a clinic, but I have started one and I think the neighborhood would be in even worse shape than it is now—good God, can you imagine worse shape?—if we were forced to close. In spite of the insinuations the police made, I wasn’t worried about Charlie and his money. There were never any secrets between Charlie and me. It was our position with the Archdiocese of New York that was making me antsy. We walk a tightrope with them every day.”
“Because the clinic does abortions.”
Michael shook his head. “Believe it or not, the abortions are a sore point only in a technical sense. Our position and the position of the Archdiocese is that the abortions are performed by the Sojourner Truth Family Planning Clinic, which is a separate corporation from the Sojourner Truth Health Center, and no nuns or recognized practicing Catholics work in family planning. Were you in favor of Roe v. Wade?”
“I don’t think I ever thought about it,” Gregor said. “It’s not an issue that comes up often in my life. Abortion, I mean. The only young woman I’ve known in the past ten years or so who’s gotten pregnant when she didn’t want to be decided she did want to be in no time at all.”
“Well, I was in favor of Roe,” Michael said. “I’m still in favor of it. The black churches don’t like it. They think it’s a form of genocide. It’s an argument that makes me uneasy sometimes. However, getting to the here and now and the Archdiocese of New York and the center’s abortion practices, the fact is that making abortion safe and legal was a wonderful idea as far as I am concerned, but making abortion legal didn’t exactly make it safe in the kind of neighborhoods the center serves. New York State pays for abortions for indigent women and the hospitals in the area do them, but in spite of those two things, most abortions performed in Harlem and Spanish Harlem and the less desirable neighborhoods of the Bronx are still performed by back-alley abortionists. Except now, the back-alley abortionists have offices right out in the open and there’s no way to know whether you’re in the wrong place until it’s too late. They convicted one of these guys a couple of months ago, but he’d killed a few women before they got hold of him and his arrest isn’t going to do his victims any good. Now the Archdiocese is opposed to legal abortion and I am in favor of it, but we both are opposed to the kind of butchery that goes on in the offices of these quacks. And we both know that there isn’t any other way to stop it except to drain off as many clients as can be drained. The state and the city don’t move in Harlem until they absolutely have to. So. The Archdiocese looks one way. I look another. The high-wire act is successful for one more day.”
“But it’s precarious,” Gregor said.