Precious Blood(48)

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” Tom Dolan said, “I’ll take them out.”

“I have got too much wine,” Judy Eagan said.

Declan Boyd shoved the chalice and plate into Tom Dolan’s hands. “I’ve got to go back for the cloth,” he said. “The cloth is in there, too. I forgot about it.”

“You’d forget your ass if you didn’t have to sit down on it,” Judy Eagan said.

Tom Dolan shook his head, stood back to let Peg Monaghan come in again, and then went out himself. Peg put a large silver pitcher on the table next to the wine.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” she told Judy, “but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Nothing is ever where it was supposed to be around here.”

That depends on who’s defining what’s supposed to be.” Judy filled the pitcher half-full of wine, then looked at all the other open bottles on the table and shook her head. “I’m losing my mind. I must have thought I was giving a spritzer party.”

“I told you that.”

“Just take the pitcher out and put it on the table.”

“I will.”

Peg picked the pitcher up and departed, leaving Judy Eagan to jam corks back into wine bottles with an angry hand. Then Declan Boyd reemerged from the hall carrying a small white cloth that was stiff in the center. Then Scholastica appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, carrying two large, heavy, gilt-bound books. They both marched out the door beside Judy’s table. Minutes later, Tom Dolan marched back in.

“You’d better go out there and check it for yourself,” he told Judy. “Dec and Peg and Scholastica are all out there racing around, and I’m too tired to take it in.”

“It’s Andy who should go out there and check,” Judy said.

“Let’s not get into a fight about Andy now. Go take a look. Expect the great Father Walsh to make his entrance at one minute and thirty seconds after ten.”

Judy sighed, made a face at the bottles of wine, and turned toward the door. Just as she did, she caught sight of Gregor out of the corner of her eye. She halted in mid-twirl, turned back and stared at him.

“Good God,” she said. “It’s you. Have you been there all this time?”

“I’m just a bit lost,” Gregor said. It was half a lie, but he said it in his pleasantest voice.

“Well,” Judy said, “you’d better come with me. The Mass is going to start any minute and I have to go to the altar anyway.”

“I’m going to go to the altar?”

“Of course not. You’re going to go across the altar and down the side chapel steps and find yourself a seat. Do I have to think for absolutely everybody around here?”





[3]


The seat Gregor found himself was at the very back of the church, on a folding chair instead of in a pew. It was, however, on the aisle, and he sank into it grateful for the view. Judy Eagan’s estimate of the crowd had been conservative. St. Agnes’s was a large church, and it was packed. At the front, taking up nearly a third of the pew space, were row after row of parochial-school children in neat little green plaid uniforms. Behind them were several rows of children in mufti who must have been from the public schools. Behind them, on the Gospel side, were John Cardinal O’Bannion and Father Tom Dolan. O’Bannion was so extravagantly dressed up, he looked like an actor in a PBS production of a medieval morality play.

Gregor skimmed over the ordinary parishioners and the little knot of television newspeople who had taken up one of the back corners and trained his attention on the altar. The coming and going had mostly petered out. There was only one man up there, a pudgy little man in a badly fitting grey suit, and he didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. While Gregor watched him, he touched the cloth that covered the altar, shook his head, and turned away. Then he hurried off to the side, down the steps, and into the crowd around the pews.

That was Barry Field, Gregor thought. I know it was. What could he possibly be doing here?

He started to turn around to see if anybody else had noticed—meaning the television people, who would have reason to notice—but as he did the doors at the back of the church were pulled open and the organ began to moan in the loft above his head. Then the choir started up, and the center aisle was full of people.

It had been years since Gregor had attended a Roman Catholic Mass—so long, in fact, that the Mass he had attended had been in the old Tridentine Rite instead of this new one. He had been given to understand that the Novo Ordo was a radical break with the past. The Tridentine Rite had been much like the Armenian one he was used to, which in turn was nearly identical to the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom as it had been used in the Greek Orthodox Church for more than 1,600 years. The continuity had been deliberate and inevitable. The breaks between these three churches had come about because of their passionate desires to preserve what they understood their tradition to be, not—as had been the case in the Protestant Reformation—to smash that tradition and replace it with something new. Then along had come Vatican II and, according to the Armenians and the Orthodox, the Church of Rome had fallen into clutches of modernism.