Reading Online Novel

True Believers(127)



At Ohanian’s she stopped and bought a copy of the Inquirer. She paged through the first section and checked the editorials and op-eds, but it was all right. There was nothing about Anne Marie today. She folded the paper up and put it in the nearest wastebasket. She wouldn’t read any more of it today, or any other day. She couldn’t make herself concentrate on the news. She thought about going to the Ararat and decided there was no point. She wasn’t hungry, and the last thing she needed was more coffee. She thought about going to see Tibor and decided that she couldn’t sit still for a tour of his fifteen latest websites, even if some of them would be funny and others would be scary as hell. Some people visited websites for research. Some people visited them because they were looking for a cause that would let them vent their rage. Tibor visited them out of curiosity—not about hate, but about human nature.

In the end, she went back to the wastebasket and retrieved the paper. Then she checked her bag and made sure she had both money and credit cards. Then she walked all the way to the corner past Ohanian’s and looked up the cross street for a cab. There were cabs. There were always tons of cabs near Cavanaugh Street, because cabbies loved to pick up people who lived there. Generations of being told not to be stingy about tips had had its effect.

Bennis got in and asked to be taken to Gump’s. She had no idea why she wanted to go there, since she never bought any jewelry but earrings, and she almost never bought those.

She settled in the cab’s backseat and went back to reading the paper, looking now through the stories that bored her silly, the announcements of weddings and funerals, the two-paragraph squibs about Little League games and zoning-commission meetings on the Main Line. She looked over the television listings and realized that she had never heard of half the shows being listed. She looked over the book and movie reviews and realized that, although she had heard of most of what was mentioned, she wanted no part of any of it. She was about to fold the paper up and tuck it away in her bag, when she saw the picture of a man she thought she recognized. She stared at him for a moment and came up blank. She was sure she had met him, but not where, or why, or with whom, if it had been with anybody. She leaned over and read the caption under his picture. “Ian Holden,” it said, “senior partner at Brady, Marquis and Holden.” She looked for the story and found another two-paragraph squib, announcing some charitable committee he had been named to chair. She rubbed the side of her face compulsively.

Brady, Marquis and Holden was the law firm that handled the work for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Gregor had mentioned that. She didn’t remember his mentioning Ian Holden, or any other lawyer in particular. Besides, she was convinced that she’d actually met him, shaken his hand, seen him in the flesh. Something like that. She had no idea why.

Outside the cab, the traffic was getting worse and worse. It was the middle of the day, and too many people wanted to be in the same place at once. Had Holden been an assistant district attorney, back when Anne Marie was tried? He looked too old for that, and he seemed too senior. She rubbed her eyes again.

She met people every day, in all kinds of situations. She met them at workshops and signings. She met them at cocktail parties given by the organizations she supported. She met them on the street, when they recognized her from Vanity Fair or Good Morning America. It was probably nothing, really. She was making too much of it, the way she made too much of everything lately, because it was either that or deal with reality.

She folded the paper firmly into quarters and put it in the pocket on the back of the front seat. Then she stretched out her legs and closed her eyes.

If she was going to act like a ninny, she might as well get some rest while she was doing it.





3


Out at St. Joseph’s University, in the middle of a class called Roots of the Western Philosophical Tradition, Mary Mac-Allister had a sudden revelation. Actually, she had two, but she was only aware of the first one, the answer to her moods of the past several months, the light at the end of her particular tunnel. The class was being taught by a priest who tended to lecture in the same way he had once given homilies at Mass. He modulated his voice until it sounded as if it were coming from a synthesizer. He gestured with his arms, moving them in big arcs from the shoulders, so that some of the students in the first row had to flinch away to avoid being hit. Worst of all, he explained too much, and too often. Mary already knew St. Thomas’s proofs for the existence of God, and why they didn’t really prove anything. She could do the Argument from Design in her head, and recite the sophisticated spins that had been put on it by modern religious philosophers like Plantinga and Swinburne. She was doing a minor in theology, and sometimes—like now—she didn’t know why, because what she really wanted to do with her life was what she was already doing with it. Bag ladies and winos didn’t care about the Argument from Design, or the Argument from Morality, or even the Argument from Miracles. Most of them were too far gone to understand anything but brutality and kindness, and most of them weren’t really human anymore, most of the time. “Respond not to the man but to Christ in the man,” Mary’s favorite grade-school nun had told her, over and over again, as the very core of religion. It had taken her a while to figure it out, but finally she had. Mr. Morelli and Mrs. Carstairs and Mr. Hemmelwaite and Miss Janns were old and sick and crazy, but she was called to see beyond that. She was called to see inside each of them, where they really were still human, because Christ lived in them, Christ was part of them, as Christ was part of all people everywhere even if they had banished