“Well,” he said. “Well. I’m glad to have been of help. Really. More than glad.”
It was true, too. He was glad to have been of help, especially since it had cost him so little, and meant so little, to himself or to them. He didn’t even mind the stiff cold wind that came in the door at him as he watched the three men walk away across the courtyard to the church. Cold was good. Cold would keep him awake—at least until he made it upstairs to his bedroom to lie down.
For the first time in hours, Father Robert Healy thought he could sleep.
2
By the time Mary McAllister got Chickie George back to St. Stephen’s, she was exhausted, and she still had at least an hour of studying ahead of her if she hoped to pass her weekly quiz in Systematic Theology. She was also sliding into one of those irritated moods that had been plaguing her for almost a month. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and already dark, although not so dark as it would have been before New Year’s. When she got out of the van and came around to help Chickie down, she could feel the sting of freezing rain against her cheeks. They were gearing up for an ice storm, the worst kind of weather possible. Too many of the homeless people she looked after were too mentally ill, or too damaged from alcohol, to have sense to come in from the cold.
Chickie had an Ace bandage around his ribs. Four of them were broken, and neither he nor she had been happy to hear the doctor say there wasn’t much that could be done about it but to feed him painkillers and wait.
“I’ve always tried very hard to stay away from drugs of all kinds, even the legal variety,” Chickie had said, in that highcamp squeal he affected around people he didn’t know. Later, when they were alone together, he dropped most of the act, and said, “It’s a very sensible policy, Mary. You know what happens to so many of us over at St. Steve’s. I’ve got to stay off.”
In the end, Mary had convinced him to take at least a half dose of the painkillers they had given him—Demerol and Percodan; they weren’t fooling around—and now she could see it was a good thing she had. The van was not the smoothest ride in the world. They had been bumping over potholes for miles. Chickie’s face was a mask of pain, which meant, of course, that it was a mask of pretense. Mary held out her arms to him and felt his weight against her shoulders.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said suddenly. “With the doctor, I mean. I don’t understand why you do. It doesn’t help you any. And it’s not natural.”
“Do what?” Chickie said innocently.
“Do that flaming-queen act,” Mary said, moving back a little. When she was sure he could stand on his own, she left him, and went around his back to slide the van door shut behind him. “You know by now the effect it has on people. They stop taking you seriously. And it’s not as if it’s natural. You’re not really like that at all.”
“Not really like what, Mary? Not really gay?”
“Not really affected.”
“Some people are like that,” Chickie said. “Some people really can’t help it. They’re like that all the time. Why should people hate them for it?”
“I didn’t say people should hate them for it. I said it didn’t make any sense for you to behave that way when it wasn’t natural for you. Don’t you want people to like you for yourself?”
“Yes,” Chickie said. “That’s exactly what I want. Do you understand that?”
“I think so.”
“I’m gay, Mary. I don’t see why people shouldn’t know it. I don’t see why I shouldn’t act gay.”
“Aaron is gay. People know it. It has nothing to do with fluttering your hands and sashaying when you walk.”
“Aaron can pass.”
“Aaron doesn’t pass, even if he can,” Mary said firmly,
“and you don’t have to either. Just be yourself. That’s all I’m asking you. Especially with health insurance as bad as yours is. You’re very lucky that that doctor saw the riot on television and really hated Roy Phipps. It saved you a couple of thousand dollars.”
“It doesn’t look like there was a riot here last night, does it?” Chickie asked. “The street is absolutely clean. I can’t even see lights down there at the hellhole. Do you suppose they’ve moved out?”
“We’ve none of us got that kind of luck.”
“No,” Chickie agreed. “We don’t. Do you mind if I lean on your arm a bit? I’m still not feeling good about standing up.”
Mary let him lean. It seemed to her that she had been letting him lean for a long time now, and that it was one of the few things that she still enjoyed, in this odd tangle of discontent that she had become locked in. The rain made the sidewalk tricky, but they went slowly, around to the side of the church and into the door of the annex—where, Mary suddenly remembered, Scott Boardman had died. Or had started dying. Convulsions and vomiting. She thought of Sister Harriet Garrity and frowned a little, because even though the connections between the deaths were now very clear, there was still something that seemed off about it all. At the door, she left Chickie standing on his own and opened up. The walls of the annex were lined with pictures, just like the walls of the basement over at St. Anselm’s, but here the pictures were simple drawings of the Anglican flag and the symbols of Easter, rather than the productions of Sunday school children trying to express what they felt about the star of Bethlehem.