“I suppose.”
Sister Scholastica went to the window and looked out. This was Father Healy’s church office, not the rectory one, so the window faced the street and St. Stephen’s front courtyard, where the people from Roy Phipps’s church sometimes sat in for hours on end. Father Healy drummed his fingers on the top of the desk.
“Are they going to be over there,” he asked, “Roy Phipps and his people? You know, with the picket signs.”
“What? Oh. I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so. The man didn’t die of AIDS. The Reverend Roy is very focused when it comes to that kind of thing.”
“Well. That’s good.”
“On the order of thank heaven for small favors, I suppose.” Scholastica moved away from the window. “I wish I knew where they’d gone. She’s not a well woman, no matter how young she is, and I don’t like the idea of her wandering around loose in a diabetic coma. If you can wander in a coma. I’m sorry. I’m not making any sense.”
Smash Mouth had disappeared from the television screen. In their place, somebody named Melissa Etheridge was singing something called “Angels Fall.” She was not as conventionally pretty as Christina Aguilera, but Father Healy liked the sense he got of her much better. This was a woman you could talk to.
“Well,” Scholastica said, “I’d better get going. I’ve been up all night. I’m going to be a wreck in school today. Maybe I’ll take one more tour and see if they show up.”
“It’s probably a good idea.”
“It probably is. All right, Father. With any luck, you’ll see them both right up front when you process in for Mass.”
Scholastica went out, her long habit skirts hissing in the air just above her ankles, her long veil billowing out behind her as she walked. Father Healy got up and walked over to the window himself. There were people on the stone steps in front of St. Stephen’s, tight little clusters of men leaning their heads together, looking cold. Everything had seemed so clear to him, when he first got here, so straightforward and sure. Homosexual practice was an objective moral evil. That was true, and it was also true that the Church had to take a public stand against its acceptance in the culture at large. A public stand had to be public. If you took a stand that nobody could see, you might as well not have taken a stand at all. It was like abortion. There was a good reason to have people out there on the streets in front of abortion clinics, praying the rosary, even if their acts did nothing to stop a single child’s death. It created a climate of opinion. It made it clear that this act was not celebrated by everyone everywhere, that people all around the world knew it was wrong.
Out on the steps of St. Stephen’s, there was movement. Father Healy focused his eyes on the front doors and saw that Daniel Burdock had come out, dressed all in black with a clerical collar on. In all the years that Father Healy had been in this parish, Daniel Burdock had come closest to being somebody who could truly be a friend. He was one of the few that Father Healy respected without reservation, for his commitment to his vocation, for his scholarly erudition, for his uncompromising attachment to all things anchored in moral principle. The only problem was, Daniel Burdock didn’t speak to him, except to say hello in the chilliest voice possible, if they happened to pass each other on the street. That was because of Father Healy’s insistence on upholding the Catholic understanding of homosexual practice, which Dan seemed to think was—
What?
Father Healy turned away from the window and sat down again. The song on the screen had changed again, this time to something he knew—The Beatles, all four of them together, looking very young. He rubbed the palms of his hands against his face until his eyes began to tear. He could hardly have made more of a mess of things if he had set out from the first day to sabotage himself, and now he was going to make a bigger mess of things by forcing a showdown with Sister Harriet Garrity. Surely, there had to have been a way for him to have said what he had to say to her without sounding as if he were starting a war. Surely Father Kennedy, at St. Bridget’s, would have known how to—finesse—this sort of thing. Then again, Father Kennedy had had a parish coordinator, too, and she had been just as much of an … unpleasant person … as Sister Harriet was.
On television, The Beatles had been replaced by Will Smith, whom Father Healy knew on sight. After the disaster of The X-Files evening, Sister Peter Rose had tried again by asking him over to see the video of Men in Black. Father Healy got up and crossed the room and turned the television off. In an hour, he would be able to say Mass, and then things would be better, by definition, at least until he recessed out of the church with the altar boy carrying the cross in front of him. Other priests might hurry through the seven o’clock Mass, but Father Healy never did. He got lost in it.