True Believers(144)

“Do you want to tell me what you’re doing here?” Dan Burdock asked. “Are you trying to start another riot?”

“I’m standing in the middle of a church, admiring its altar. I don’t see how that could start a riot. Among normal people.”

“From what I remember, it wasn’t my thoroughly normal people who started the riot the last time.”

Roy swung his head back in the direction of the altar. “No,” he said. “That’s true enough, and on camera, so I won’t bother to deny it. On the other hand, the blame for the escalation is entirely on you.”

“What are you doing here?” Dan Burdock asked again. “What could you possibly hope to accomplish? I’ve got one person dead myself and across the street—”

“The priest died. Yes, I know. We hear everything down the block, you know. We’re not exactly in Siberia. Tell me, was it the same thing? Was it arsenic?”

“They’ll have to wait for the autopsy.”

“They must have a guess,” Roy said. “I sent Fred down to find out, but you’ve met Fred. He isn’t exactly a superspy.”

“Yes,” Dan said. “They think it’s arsenic. I haven’t actually been over there. I don’t exactly have the nerve for that. Or the bad taste—”

“Oh, let’s not get started on my bad taste.”

“Why not? Why not, Roy? You’ve chosen to make a vocation out of it, why not talk about it?”

“Why don’t you just come out and say it? Why don’t you just tell everybody that you’re gay? Everybody knows it anyway. Your bishop must know it, by now. It’s the cowardice I can’t stand. It was the cowardice I couldn’t stand at Princeton.”

“I thought it was the prep school you couldn’t stand at Princeton.”

The pews in this church were made of carved and polished wood, with swirling ridges on the ends of them. Roy sat down on the arm of the one just behind him. He had entered the little Episcopalian church in Millard’s Corner only once or twice, and been suitably impressed, but it had been nothing like this—or, for that matter, like the college chapels at Princeton and Yale and all the other places he had been since. He knew something about the Gothic aesthetic, about the idea that the house of God ought to reflect the glory of God, but he could never get used to it. In his mind, Christianity would always be a religion of the disenfranchised—of what, in his childhood, would have been called the deserving poor.

“I won’t go away,” he said finally. “Oh, I’ll go away now, in a bit. I’ve got work to do, and it’s getting late. But I’m not going to disappear from down the block, and I’m not going to fall off the face of the earth. I’ll be here as long as you’re here. I’ll move to wherever you decide to go next. As long as you stay in the ministry, I’ll be here.”

“Would you disappear if I left the priesthood?”

“But you won’t leave the priesthood,” Roy said. “You know that, and I know that. And your bishop won’t throw you out. Oh, you’d be a little safer if you were in Newark with Spong, but not a great deal safer. You’re safe enough. So you won’t leave, and I won’t leave, and I won’t be quiet about what I see going on here. With the men. With you. Even if you’re more discreet about it than most.”

“Roy, you could have taped every second of my sex life for the last twenty years, and it would be suitable viewing on Sesame Street.”

“Really? How very intelligent of you. But then, you were always very intelligent. Not as intelligent as some other people, but very intelligent.” Roy got up off the pew’s arm. “I came to look around, because I hadn’t been in here before. I don’t know why not. I should have come in and watched you on Sunday one week, but I never did. Have you ever come to watch me?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“But you must have seen me, once or twice, at least in clips. I think they’ve broadcast me giving sermons a million times by now. They don’t broadcast the whole sermon, and they’re always trying to find the three seconds out of two hours when I look like I might be sweating, but they do broadcast me.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Dan said.

Roy stood up and brushed lint off his jacket. It was probably true. Dan probably didn’t understand what he was getting at. On the other hand, as much as he would like to be understood, he had what he had come here to get, and there was no reason for him not to leave. He brushed lint off the arm of his jacket and wondered what it meant, that Dan was wearing a clerical collar and he was not. Really, it was worse than that. Dan was wearing one of those agonizingly tacky black polyester shirts meant to take a clerical collar, the kind you bought out of a catalogue of clergy supplies, and Roy was wearing his best Brooks Brothers camel hair. Roy thought suddenly of D. James Kennedy, with his Coral Ridge Ministries, always dressed in academic robes to preach. Maybe it was just a kind of social anxiety. When you were not to the manner born, you had to rely on costumes.