True Believers(26)

“It has the virtue of explaining a great deal that is otherwise inexplicable,” Tibor said. “Maybe I will go to this funeral with you. Just to make certain you do not drive.”

Bennis stood up again. She picked up a copy of J. M. Roberts’s History of Europe and put it down again. She picked up a copy of something in Latin and put that down again, too. She felt as if she had taken a whole load of methamphetamine and it was just starting to kick in. This was not good news. The crash, when it came, was going to be awful.

“Crap,” she said. “I’m right off the wall, aren’t I? Do you think that if I went back to the apartment, Gregor would be awake?”

“You could always wake him up.”

“Mount St. Helens at full spew couldn’t wake him up. He goes to the Ararat at seven, though. What time does he usually get up?”

“You should know that better than I do.”

“I don’t pay attention. Oh, damn.” Bennis ran her hands through her hair. “I hate it when I get like this. I really do. It was a mistake to quit smoking, no matter what any of you think. Smoking could always calm me down. What am I supposed to do now?”

“Warm milk and honey and a hot bath?”

“That sounds really awful,” Bennis said. She checked the clock on the wall, the big round L. L. Bean one Donna Moradanyan had given Tibor the Christmas before last. It still wasn’t six o’clock yet. She was moving faster and faster, and time had slowed to a crawl.

Bennis went over to the stove and found the kettle. She didn’t like tea, but she could at least make some coffee for herself. She filled the kettle at the tap and put it on the burner. Then she took a deep breath and tried to slow herself down.

It would help, she thought, if she knew what it was she was really worked up about—Anne Marie, or the possible pickets at the funeral, or Chickie’s story about the rat poison on the altar, or what. Instead, it all went around and around in her head, and she was beginning to suspect that she was worried about nothing but the lack of nicotine in her lungs. Cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes, she thought. She used to buy six cartons at a time in North Carolina and then stack them up on the top shelf of her linen closet, above the place where she kept the pillowcases.

Tibor kept a little box of those coffee bags in the cabinet next to his mugs. Bennis got both a bag and a mug and grabbed the kettle as soon as it started to go off.

“The thing is,” she said, “sometimes it makes perfect sense, and that’s what worries me. There are times when I could smash somebody’s face in. But that’s the difference. I couldn’t sneak around about it. I couldn’t plan it.”

She put the mug full of coffee and coffee bag at the place she had cleared for herself and sat down in front of it, wondering if Tibor would realize, as she did, that she didn’t know if she was talking about the rat poison on the altar, or about Anne Marie.




10

When Father Robert Healy first came to St. Anselm’s parish, he had been sure he knew what it was he needed to do. That was three and a half years ago, before Roy Phipps had taken the storefront at the end of the block and put his makeshift “church” there. Father Healy had just finished a five-year assignment as parochial vicar at St. Bridget’s in Radnor, where he had gone right after he came back from studying at the North American College in Rome. The Cardinal Archbishop had warned him that he would not like parish life, and the Cardinal Archbishop had been right—but Father Healy had put it down to the fact that he was an assistant, instead of the head of his own parish. Robert Healy had never done very well when he was forced to take second place. Sometimes he tried to think back to what he had been like, growing up, and found to his surprise that he really could not remember anything. He had graduated from a tough Jesuit prep school at the age of sixteen, valedictorian in his class. Then they had made him go to Georgetown for three years to wait, because he wasn’t old enough to enter a seminary. He wondered if they had expected him to change his mind, or to go so mad with sex that he wasn’t able to think straight enough to pass his theology courses. Instead, he had had three sexual experiences, all with the same girl, which he had liked very much but been a little impatient with, because they were so distracting. Then, as soon as the diocesan seminary would take him, he had packed up his things and come back to Pennsylvania.

Now he moved things around the desk in his office and thought that he was going about it all wrong. This was one more proof that he belonged on the faculty of a theology department, or on the staff of a marriage tribunal or a canon law court, but not in the trenches, where what mattered was how much you knew about people. Father Healy liked people—he liked them quite a lot—but it was like his relationship with that girl at Georgetown: he found them distracting. He also found them puzzling. When he wanted to relax, he sat down with one of Michael Grant’s histories of ancient Greece and Rome, and put Bach on the CD player in the rectory living room. He did not watch television. He had tried to watch television once, when Sister Peter Rose invited him to the convent to have popcorn and take in The X-Files, but he had ended up entirely confused. As far as he had been able to tell, the message of The X-Files was that aliens from outer space were among us, and that they provided the explanation for everything from the tinny taste in well water to witchcraft. The bit about witchcraft had alarmed him. There were no such things as witches—not in the sense of women who made pacts with the devil and could do magic spells—and if there was one thing the reading of history had taught him, it was that religion was very dangerous when it became unmoored from the discipline of reason. That was all they needed now, with the Church under attack from every side—another season of witch-hunts, with stories about exorcisms in the New York Times. It was bad enough, the kind of nonsense that was written about the Church and homosexuality, as if a straightforward moral objection to unlimited sexual license turned you into … Roy Phipps.