Stuart had hauled himself out of his chair. He was pacing across the small room, trying to look very stiff and very stern.
“I think,” he said, “that we ought to have a good long talk.”
Judy thought of telling him he reminded her of Sylvester the Cat in one of his rages, but she didn’t. She just said, “Stuart, I only have good long talks with people who can think their way out of paper bags.”
[2]
“Listen,” Barry Field’s secretary said when he finally got back to the office. “The Reverend Candor’s office called. I said you’d call them back, but that was at one o’clock this afternoon, and—”
There was a plastic digital alarm clock on the secretary’s desk, the kind of thing people kept on night tables to wake them up in the morning. The two of them looked at it simultaneously, and then looked away again. It was 6:22. The secretary was still at her desk because she was Dedicated, as all Barry’s people were Dedicated. Barry was always surprised at just how Dedicated they would be. Long hours, low pay, late nights, erratic schedules: none of it ever seemed to faze any of them. They were so consistently cheerful, they made Barry think of the Stepford Wives, except that a lot of them were men. His secretary, however, was a woman. It was part of his commitment to Traditional Values to have a woman as a secretary.
His secretary’s name was Moira Dean. She was fifty and looked like somebody’s mother and always wore flower-print rayon dresses open one button at the neck, so that everyone who met her could see the gold cross she wore on a chain there. Sometimes, like today, she also wore a pin just under the line of her right shoulder. This one said CHRIST DIED FOR US ALL in fat, squiggly, quasi-psychedelic script. Barry stared at it for a minute and then looked down at his shoes. People liked to pretend all conservative Christians were either idiots and dupes or hypocrites, but it wasn’t true. Moira really was dedicated. She believed in the Risen Christ the way a botanist believed in trees. She saw Him whole and solid before her every waking minute of her life. When she prayed, she heard His voice as clearly as she heard her married daughter’s during the hour-long Colchester-to-Sarasota telephone call she made every Saturday afternoon at three. Moira was one of the nicest and most decent people Barry Field had ever met, and she was no fool.
Now she was staring at him across the desk, frowning and concerned. “It’s been a bad day, hasn’t it? I heard the news about Father Walsh on the radio, not half an hour ago.”
“I almost stopped into a bar just to get a look at a television set,” Barry said. “And then I didn’t. I just didn’t want to know.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“I don’t drink, Moira. You know that.”
“Oh, I know. I’ve always wondered about it. If you don’t drink because you don’t want to or if—you know.”
“I’m not a recovering alcoholic, either.”
“Good.”
He was still wearing his heavy winter coat. More than any other piece of clothing he owned, it made him feel fat and shapeless. He shrugged it off and hung it on the coat-rack. The coatrack was splintered and worn. The carpet under his feet was bald in half a dozen places. Everything in the studio and the offices was shabby, except for the technical equipment. That was the compromise he had made. It had been a good one. He bought the technical equipment at the best place in New York City. He bought everything else marked down at K-Mart and used it until it disintegrated.
“You might as well know,” he told Moira, “because everybody’s going to, sooner or later. I was there.”
“At that church?”
Barry willed away all recognition of her surprise. “That’s right. I was sitting on the aisle right behind a lot of schoolchildren when he keeled over and—died.”
“He was murdered, according to the radio.”
“I guess he was.”
He had been staring at the coatrack too long. That, he was absolutely sure of. He turned away from it and sat down on one of the long plastic-cushion-covered couches that stood against the wall opposite Moira’s desk.
“He asked me to be there,” he told Moira. “At the church, that is, for that particular Mass—”
“Was he trying to convert you?” Moira had grown up when Catholics were trying to convert everybody, whether they wanted to be converted or not.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think he was—planning something. Something he wanted me to see.”
“Did it have something to do with a goat?”
“Was that on the radio, too?”