True Believers(156)
No, Dan thought, as he inched his way down the street and the crowd inched behind him, the Cardinal Archbishop intoning the Angelus with every step—no, he could not have been the first gay man to enter the ministry and decide to solve his problems with celibacy, and he could not be the first one to realize that celibacy was not the point Sex was not the point. Even having somebody to wake up next to in bed was not the point. He wasn’t particularly horny. His loneliness came and went. Identity was the point, and the need not to feel that he had been born in some way defective.
Of course, according to Christianity, everybody was born defective. That was the point of original sin. Maybe, Dan thought, that settled the question of whether he was an orthodox Christian or not, in the negative. He did not believe in original sin. He did not believe that anybody should believe in original sin. It made him feel a little odd to realize that the Cardinal Archbishop mostly likely not only believed in original sin, but celebrated it.
They were all the way down the street and at Roy Phipps’s door. Dan had no idea how they’d gotten there so quickly. It had felt to him as if they were barely moving at all. He looked at the windows that flanked the door and saw that the lights in the rooms beyond them were all on. Roy was a lot of things, but he was not a coward. He would not retreat. It struck Dan suddenly that there was something wrong in this, something wrong in the way they had defined religion from the beginning, something whacked-out at the core, because he shouldn’t be here now. None of them should be. Roy Phipps should not be what he was in this place and at this time, because it was a betrayal of everything else he was and had been, from the very beginning.
Dan took a deep breath and mounted the steps to Roy’s front door. The crowd behind him was quiet. The Cardinal Archbishop was not intoning prayers. Dan rang the doorbell and stepped back. Then everybody began to pray the Our Father, as if it had been arranged in advance.
Years ago, at Princeton, Roy Phipps was a phenomenon. He was the sort of boy the system had been designed to celebrate, the diamond in the rough, the genius in the muck pile. He was supposed to go on to graduate school and then a career in academia or law, with an avocation in cultural alienation. Dan himself was supposed to go on to a career in academia or law, and then, and then—what?
The door opened wide, and Roy stepped out, dressed in sports jacket and tie, looking like a businessman checking to see if his newspaper had come in the morning. He looked Dan over from head to foot, then turned his attention to the Cardinal Archbishop. Dan could see the rhythmic twitching of a muscle in the side of his face, the only one that Roy had never been able to control when he was angry.
“The Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon,” Roy’s voice boomed out—and it did boom. The man had a deep and carrying bass that Dan never quite got over the sound of. “The God of wrath will bring down the apostates and the adulterers and the sodomizers and on the last day He will cast you all into the pit of fire, into the pit of hell, to suffer an eternity of agony in the company of Satan and his fallen angels—”
The Cardinal Archbishop, it turned out, had an even deeper bass voice, and it carried even farther. He began to intone something in Latin, and for a few moments, Dan couldn’t figure out what it was. The crowd had become very still. Dan didn’t know if they understood what the Cardinal was saying or not. The Catholics might. His own men almost certainly would not, except for the one or two of them who had been to seminary or studied classics.
Then the flow of the words began to seem familiar, and one or two of the words themselves began to seem familiar, too. The wind had picked up and was coming down the street at a furious pace. Dan felt it in his ears and on his neck and wished he were off the steps and down in the crowd where the press of people would shield him from the cold. Some of the crowd had picked up the rhythm, too, and a few people were saying what seemed to be responses.
And then, somehow, Dan knew. It had been thirty years since he had heard any version of this rite, but he knew—and as soon as he did, the responses began to come quite naturally to him, too, although he had no idea how. He had never performed this rite in his life, or known anybody who had. He didn’t even think Episcopalians believed in it. What he remembered, he remembered from a theology class so far in his past it might as well never have existed, and he thought he must have learned the old version, the before—Vatican IIVERSION, although it didn’t seem to matter.
The Cardinal Archbishop mounted the steps in front of Roy Phipps and raised his hands above Roy’s head. Dan stepped back and down. Did Roy know what this was? Of course he knew. Anybody who was looking into Roy’s face at this moment knew he knew.