And then. It was eleven o’clock on Good Friday morning, and instead of being out on the set sitting by the phone, Barry Field was in his office, looking at a four-color print of El Greco’s Crucifixion. He had recovered from his torpor of the night before. He no longer felt drugged or as if he might suffer a mental collapse—into catatonia—at any moment. He did not, however, exactly feel like himself. It was Douglas Banner, his second in command, out there on the studio stage right now, something Barry had never permitted before and should not be permitting now. Doug had a wild light of ambition in his eyes Barry knew all too well, and he was a pretty face. Anyone with eyes could see that Doug would make a better televangelist than Barry would, even though he would be less trustworthy.
The El Greco print was as tall as Barry’s desk was deep, and almost a third as wide as it was long. It had been made to hang on a wall but never had. Barry had bought it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on one of his few trips into Manhattan, and it had just occurred to him that it had been a mistake. El Greco was such a Catholic painter. His whole sensibility—his eye that saw without flinching the terrible agony of palms pierced by nails, the brutal fleshiness of the only honest vision of the Incarnation—was alien to Protestantism as it had developed in the twentieth century in America. It was alien to most of Catholicism as it had developed in the twentieth century in America. Maybe, Barry thought, it was simply alien to America, period—a place where pain was so infrequent and death so deftly managed, they’d both begun to seem like intolerable intrusions into the tepid, smoothly flowing comfort of Real Life.
Barry stood up and walked away from the desk, to the window, where he wouldn’t have to look at the print any more. For some reason, it felt wrong to turn it upside down, even though it had been hidden in a closet for years. There was something about turning it upside down that reminded Barry of Peter’s denials to the Roman legionaires. He put his head against the windowpane and counted to ten. He had to get hold of himself, he really did. He couldn’t afford a religious crisis at just this moment. He had a mess of details to take care of before his hookup with Mark Candor’s network. He couldn’t go coast to coast with the makeshift arrangements he’d been using up to now, and going coast to coast was just around the corner. There was that, and there was the fact that Andy Walsh was dead.
Barry opened his eyes, looked down on the street outside—there was an Easter basket the size of Ruritania in the window of Bernie’s Hallmark Shop—and made up his mind. Then he went back to his desk and picked up his phone. As he started to dial, he caught the eyes of Christ in the El Greco print and winced. He finished up and turned his back to it.
At first, the secretary at St. Agnes’s tried to pretend that Kath was not available, even though it was nearly noon and almost time for her to go back to the convent for lunch. Barry had expected that. He did what he always did with women like this one. He repeated his request, firmly and monotonously, so many times the words began to sound like gibberish. He tried to be careful with them nonetheless, because it wasn’t natural for him to think of his Kathleen as “Sister.”
Eventually, the woman gave up—they always did—and buzzed him through. There was a lot of fumbling and whirring and beeping. Then Kath said, “St. Agnes’s Parochial School. Sister Scholastica speaking.”
“Kath,” Barry said. “Thank God. I thought for a moment we were going to get cut off.”
“Barry?”
“That secretary of yours hates me,” Barry said. “I think she thinks I’m the Devil incarnate.”
There was a pause on the line, the sound of papers shuffling and something hard being knocked over onto wood. Barry felt a spurt of fear. Maybe Kath had gone sour on him. Maybe Kath had been sour on him and her behavior yesterday had been nothing more than controlled politeness, misinterpreted by him. He made himself relax. If there was one thing he had always known, it was who his friends were. Kath had always been his friend and she had made it clear, yesterday, in ways subtle and not so subtle, that she always would be.
The sound of something hard being knocked over on wood came again. Kath said, “Rats—this vase—just a minute—there’s water.”
“Kath,” Barry repeated.
“I’m sorry. I’m knocking everything over and my desk is full of papers for the First Communion Class and—”
“Kath.” Barry took a deep breath. “Hold it for a minute. I’ve got something I wanted to ask you.”