Precious Blood(3)

Judy got out of the car, flexed her feet—when she wore heels this high, her toes cramped—and checked out the parking lot to make sure Stuart Reeve had arrived before her. He had. His little red Jaguar was parked across two spaces at the far end of the lot, flanked on one side by a Ford Comanche and on the other by a Jeep Wagoneer. Its back windshield was facing her, and through it she could read his latest piece of self-advertisement: STUART REEVE. YOUR MAN IN ALBANY. Judy sighed. Sometimes she thought Stuart had a political death wish—that he wanted to make sure Albany was as far as he ever got. She’d told him and told him not to park across two spaces in places like the State Street. It infuriated the men in the pickup trucks. It made Stuart look like a first-class snot.

Of course, Stuart was a first-class snot.

Judy adjusted the shoulder strap of her black leather Dior bag and took a moment to contemplate the buttressed side of Holy Name Cathedral. Looking at the Cathedral always made her feel better, especially since the Pope had made John O’Bannion a Cardinal as well as an Archbishop. Colchester had come a long way since her childhood, when it had really been nothing but a dying industrial city, gasping its way through an impoverished old age. Now there were computer companies everywhere and branches of Saks and Lord & Taylor right in the middle of town. If you lived in one of the new, expensive townhouses that now marked the border between St. Agnes and Cathedral parish—which Judy did—you could even get The New York Times delivered to your door. It was just too bad the place was halfway up to the St. Lawrence Seaway the way it was. If it had been more centrally located, it might have amounted to something.

Judy pushed through the glass doors into the diner, waved to Mike the counterman, and located Stuart in their usual back booth. He looked like he wished he were wearing a gas mask.

Judy went down to the booth, shrugged off her Calvin Klein cashmere coat, and tossed all $600 of it over the metal hook at the booth’s front end. If she hadn’t been coming to the State Street since she was six years old, she would never have gotten away with it. As it was, Mike and his “working men” tended to think of her fondly as Local Girl Made Good.

She slid onto the bench opposite Stuart and said, “For God’s sake. At least try to look as if you’re enjoying yourself.”

“You got your ashes already,” Stuart said. “I thought we were going to the Cathedral at noon. To get them from the Cardinal.”

“You’re going to the Cathedral at noon. I’m having lunch with Marcia Bremmen. She wants her daughter’s coming-out party catered, and she wants all the food to be pink.”

Stuart stared into his coffee. He had drunk a little of it—at this hour of the morning, he could hardly help himself—but he obviously didn’t want to drink any more. He didn’t want to eat his breakfast, either, which was a big plate of ham and eggs and toast and bacon he had pushed into the middle of the table. Judy wondered if the suit he was wearing was new. She didn’t remember it, but she never paid much attention to Stuart’s suits unless there was something wrong with them. This was a custom gray flannel three piece from Brooks Brothers. Maybe Stuart was having one of his periodic flirtations with rebellion.

“So,” she said, “you’re going to go to the Cathedral, and after you get your ashes you’re going to stand around and talk to some of the old ladies.”

“It’s raining, you know, Judy. The old ladies might not want to stand around and talk.”

“They’ll talk in the vestibule. It matters, Stuart. The old ladies want to think they’re voting for a nice Catholic boy.”

“What about the young ladies?”

“The young ladies want their boy to be not too Catholic a Catholic. It’ll be all right, Stuart. You go to the Cathedral for the old ladies, I run St. Agnes’s for the yuppie set. It all works out.”

Stuart shook his head. “I don’t know, Judy. I don’t know why you had to take on St. Agnes’s on top of everything else.”

“I was elected President of the Parish Council.”

“You ran.”

“Yes, I did. Andy Walsh asked me to.”

“You don’t do anything else Father Walsh asks you to do. And I don’t like him. I think he’s dangerous.”

“I think he’s crazy, but that’s beside the point. We’re trying to build an image here. Sort of a Mario Cuomo with class.”

“For God’s sake,” Stuart said, “don’t compare me to Mario Cuomo. He’s such a wop.”

It was at times like these Judy Eagan wished she drank or smoked. Or anything. She needed something to take her mind off the fact that she was going to marry this fatuous ass in less than three months and probably couldn’t get out of it now if she wanted to. Did she want to? She turned to look out the plate glass window at her side, at the block of small stores across the street. The stores were closed and free of all secular Easter decorations. The Cardinal disapproved of displays of pink rabbits and fuzzy baby chicks during Lent, and nobody wanted to offend the Cardinal this close to his home turf.