Precious Blood(4)

Judy took a sip of her coffee, closed her eyes, and counted to ten. The problem, of course, was that she did want to marry Stuart. He was a snob, an idiot, and an unreconstructed chauvinist, but he had one thing going for him: he gave great television. Faced with a Minicam, he could talk about a new sewage treatment plant scheduled to be built in Oswego and come off sounding like Jack Kennedy rallying the troops at the Berlin Wall.

At the moment, Stuart was just a minor member of the state legislature, an insignificant cog in the great New York Democratic party machine—but he was popular with the electorate and the media both, and his strange talent had gotten him a lot of air time. Now there was an off-year election coming up and his district’s seat in Congress was vacant. If he got the nomination—which Judy was working overtime to make sure he did—he would win the election. Once he won the election, there would be no stopping him. He was a fool, but he was a presidential fool.

Judy took another sip of coffee and put her cup down carefully in its saucer. A woman had just come into view on the other side of the street. She was small and bent and wrapped in a shapeless car coat, and she shuffled along as if she were wearing slippers instead of the dirty white sneakers that were actually on her feet. Low rent, Judy thought vaguely, and then: That’s somebody I know.

The woman stopped to look through the windows of a store called Chocolate Moose. Stuart said, “I don’t think Father Walsh is a good person for us to know. I don’t care how modern Catholic he makes us look. The man is—unreliable.”

“Unreliable,” Judy repeated, in a tone meant to let him know how much she disapproved of the word.

Stuart blushed and bristled and started in on another tirade. Judy caught the beginning of it—“sometimes I think you’re laughing at me Judy I really do”—but nothing more, because the woman on the other side of the street had turned away from Chocolate Moose. She had gone to the corner and was waiting to cross, giving Judy a clear view of her face.

She is somebody I know, Judy thought. Then her stomach rolled over and she began to feel sick.

“Judy?” Stuart said.

“What?”

The light changed and the woman crossed, disappearing in the direction of North Carter Street. Judy turned away from the window and looked into her coffee.

Cheryl Cass, she thought.

Black Rock Park.

That was then—

“Judy,” Stuart said. “You aren’t listening to me.”

And that was true. She almost never listened to him. There was nothing to listen to. On the other hand, there was a lot to think about.

She had just seen Cheryl Cass, and for the last twenty years she had been sure that Cheryl Cass was dead.





[3]


At first, Father Tom Dolan had not been happy to be assigned to Holy Name Cathedral. He wouldn’t have been happy to be assigned to anything in any part of Upstate New York. His whole reason for entering the seminary, at least in the beginning, had been to get away from all this: Colchester especially, but also the towns in the immediate vicinity, where he was too well known. That was why he had entered the Third Order Regular, instead of taking Diocesan orders, like Andy. The TOR seminary he’d attended had been smack in the middle of Ohio. Tom had been confident of spending his life as a priest at one midwestern university after another. Then, three years ago, John O’Bannion had been named first an Archbishop and then a Cardinal. Even the Third Order Regular didn’t go around telling Cardinals they couldn’t have the priests they wanted as aides.

Now, Tom Dolan sat in John O’Bannion’s office, feeling scratchy in his Franciscan habit and taking notes on a legal pad. The Cardinal was pacing circles around his desk, holding his hands behind his back and looking more like a priest in a Barry Fitzgerald movie every minute. It had not, Tom thought, been as bad as he had feared it would be. O’Bannion had always liked him, even in his wilder days, and the old man was much too smart to make casual references to the less saintly aspects of Tom’s adolescent career. Besides, being at the Cathedral was almost like being back at the seminary. He wasn’t restricted to the building by regulation, but he might as well have been. The Cardinal kept him busy, the paperwork kept him busy, and he was never given anything to do outside. He hadn’t been able to avoid all contact with the people he’d known then, but he’d come close. Kath he had to talk to now and then—she was a nun and principal at St. Agnes Parochial School—but Barry Field was just a face on television and Peg Morrissey had disappeared into domesticity and Judy Eagan might as well have been on Mars. The only one of the old group he hadn’t been able to keep his distance from had been Andy, and that figured. If he ever ended up in Hell, Hell was going to turn out to be an eternity locked into a small room with Father Andrew Walsh.