“I don’t know what’s going to happen to the center, Augie. I don’t even know what’s going to happen to me. Maybe, when I get too sick to work, I’ll just check in downstairs and have your nuns take care of me.”
“I don’t understand what you think you’re doing with your life,” Augie said, “I never have understood it. You’re an attractive man. So you’re gay. You’re gay. You could have found somebody to settle down with.”
“I didn’t want to find somebody to settle down with. Augie, don’t do this.”
“Why shouldn’t I do it? Why shouldn’t I? You’re one of the few people I’m close to in this world, one of the few people I’ve ever been close to, you’re closer to me than family, and you’re going to die, die, in two or three or five years, and what for? What for? Glory holes?”
“Augie—”
“Don’t patronize me, Michael. I’m not some seventeen-year-old blushing virgin and I’m not some hysterical woman, either. What you’ve been doing doesn’t make sense. It never made sense.”
“I’ll bet you’re a virgin,” Michael said.
“I told you not to patronize me.” Augie hopped off the examining table onto the floor. Had this room always been so shabby? Augie couldn’t remember ever having paid attention to it before. Augie couldn’t remember ever having had the time. Michael was staring at her. His hands were tucked into the patch pockets of his white smock. His face was set in a serious mask. Augie had the terrible feeling that she was letting him down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I suppose I ought to get back to work. We won’t be this quiet for long. We never are. I have things to get done.”
“Are you going to be all right?”
“Yes, Michael. I’m going to be fine. You’re the one who’s not going to be all right.”
“I’m going to be physically miserable, Augie, but I still think I’m going to be all right.”
“I don’t understand how you could have gone on doing the things you did, knowing what the risks were.”
“I never pay attention to risks, Augie, I can’t. I’m a coward. If I pay attention to risks, I get scared, and then I don’t do anything at all.”
“I have to get out of here,” Augie said.
And it was true. She did have to get out of there. She had to get through the door and back into the hall and then down the hall and then—where? She didn’t know. She was just glad that Michael wasn’t trying to stop her. She couldn’t see anything. Sister Kenna was in the corridor. She was saying hello. Augie felt her own head nod, stiffly, the way it used to with parents she didn’t like when she was working as the head nurse in the pediatrics ward at the last hospital her order had been able to run before Vatican II happened and the world fell apart. Augie was a little shocked at herself. She had never longed for the days before Vatican II. She was not an ecclesiastical Luddite. What was wrong with her?
Sister Kenna was gone. The corridor was empty. There was a big walk-in linen closet just this side of the stairs. Augie jerked the door of the linen closet open and walked inside. Then she closed the door tightly on herself and sat down on a pile of folded white sheets. She didn’t want the pre-Vatican II church back. That wasn’t it. She just wanted Michael. She wanted Michael. She wanted Michael not to be sick.
When Sister Mary Augustine was a very small child, the priest in her parish had been an immigrant from the old country with a head full of fire and brimstone. He had believed in delineating each of the separate flames in the fires of hell and in making his parishioners look on the terrible face of God. The face of God is in the tornado, Father Connaghie had said. The face of God is in the erupting volcano. The face of God is in the tidal wave engulfing the shore. The face of God is not comfort but power, unleashed and vast.
Sister Augustine folded her arms over her knees and put her head down on them. Every blood vessel in her body was throbbing. Her mind felt as if it had been wiped clean. Augie didn’t believe in a God who would send a disease like AIDS to punish people for sex. She did believe in a God who met each and every one of his creatures face to face at the moment of death. She didn’t know if that was orthodox Catholic theology or not, but it was what she had taken away from her from Father Connaghie’s homilies, and what she had held fast to ever since. She tried to make herself imagine Michael standing face to face with God, but all she got was a terrible hole, an absolute emptiness, standing here next to her on earth where Michael should be.