True Believers(155)

“Why didn’t you tell us?” he demanded. “We would have loved this. We would have helped you.”

You would have told the immediate universe, Dan thought. Instead of saying it, he pressed forward toward the middle of the street, where the Cardinal Archbishop had now gone to stand and wait for him. A man ran forward and thrust something into his hands and ran away again. Dan looked up to see that he was holding the gold cross mounted on a pole that they used for procession at the start of the Sunday service. He hadn’t realized it was as heavy as it was. He wasn’t the one who usually carried it. He held it over his head and thought that it must be visible for blocks. Somebody parked in a car at the diner this moment would be able to see only two things, the mass of people in the middle of the street and the cross. Then he thought that he should have worn something under all this embroidered linen, like a sweater. It really was February. The air was cold enough to make his bones ache.

He got to the middle of the street where the Cardinal Archbishop was, and stopped. He was, he thought, outclassed in every way. The Cardinal Archbishop was taller, and thinner, and more splendidly dressed. It didn’t help that he was also the sort of person who drew people’s attention, something Dan had never been. Roy Phipps was, though. He had been that way all the way back in college. Dan thought about that for a second and put it aside.

“People,” he said, leaning close to the Cardinal Archbishop’s ear, “are going to think that Canterbury and Rome have reunited, under the direction of Rome.”

“Want to change your mind?” the Cardinal Archbishop said.

“No.”

“Want to go ahead of me?”

“I’ll look like your altar boy.”

“Want to be first when we get to the spot?’

“Want to toss a coin to decide which of us will give his superiors the worst heart attack?”

“Mine are having their heart attack as we speak. We should have arranged for a band. Excuse me.”

Dan stepped back a little and let the Cardinal Archbishop go forward. The street was now so full of people, he could barely move, but they were all quiet, and all well behaved. Nobody was shouting. Nobody was throwing anything at all. He recognized a dozen or more of the men he had called over the last several hours, and those men all seemed to have brought friends with them. He recognized the men of his congregation. Chickie George was holding hands with that Mary McAllister who ran the homeless center—but then, if Chickie were straight, he’d be married to that girl by now.

The Cardinal Archbishop raised his hands high over his head and started the Angelus, blessedly in English, because it had been thirty years since Dan had had a course in Latin and the most he remembered now was a series of swear words he’d been taught by a particularly unsavory classics teacher at his prep school. Now that he thought of it, Dan was sure that that particular classics teacher had been gay.

“The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.

“And she conceived of the Holy Spirit,” the crowd answered—al! the crowd did, because even High Church Episcopalians knew the Angelus.

Then the crowd moved, slowly but deliberately, with the Cardinal Archbishop at its head, and in no time at all Dan found himself pushed to the front of it. Out in front, there was suddenly air to breathe, and space. The crowd was concentrated at the end of the block near the churches. There was nobody at the other end of the block or a block and a half away from that, where Roy was. Dan said the words of the Hail Mary—how he remembered them, he couldn’t say—and moved forward slowly, the way he processed in on Sunday mornings when the organ was working very slowly and the church was hushed. Along the street, lights went on in town houses and front doors opened. People came out to see what was happening. That hadn’t happened when the real riot had been going on. When the real riot had been going on, the neighborhood had locked down tight, hoping to stay out of it.

Once, years ago, when Dan was still in the seminary, he had thought there might be a way out of it. He couldn’t be the only gay man who had entered the ministry, or who had pledged himself to celibacy, either. In those days you never heard about Roman Catholic priests falling from the path of righteousness into the muck of sex—but then, in those days, they might have fallen less often. It had been easier to stay clean in an era when sex had been vigorously repressed in all parts of the culture, when there had barely been a hint of it on television or in the movies. It startled him sometimes to realize how shocked people had been by books like Ulysses, or, even funnier, things like Valley of the Dolls, where there was no real sex on the page at all. Now sex was everywhere. It was on the billboards he passed when he came back to St. Stephen’s from a trip across town. It was on television, butt naked half the time, men and women both. It was, especially, in the books he read. There now seemed to be something like an Obligatory Sex Scene, so that no novel was really a novel without five pages of intimate description.