True Believers(39)
“You’re still talking about public relations,” Gregor pointed out.
“No,” the Cardinal Archbishop said, letting out a sigh. “I’m talking about motive. I’m afraid that there’s a very good chance that the arsenic used to kill both Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly came from St. Anselm’s Church. It was bought three days before the two young people died by Father Healy himself, wearing full clerical dress and dealing with a store clerk who happened to be a parishioner and knew him on sight. At four o’clock this afternoon, when the Philadelphia police commissioner holds his press conferences, the entire city is going to know that one of my priests is the prime suspect in two very nasty murders, one of them almost certainly a hate crime. An hour later, when CNN gets done with this, the entire country is going to know as well. I don’t want your expertise for public relations, Mr. Demarkian. I want you to prove that Father Healy isn’t the Jeffrey Dahmer of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.”
2
Twenty minutes later, Gregor found himself standing on the pavement outside the cathedral with Sister Scholastica at his side, wondering how he had gotten to where he was without buttoning his coat. It was worse than a cold day. It was raw as a wound, and gusts of wind blew down the street as if it were a tunnel. February was not his favorite month. It needed something like Valentine’s Day, full of bright colors and silliness, to break it up. In this part of the city there was nothing, not even storefront decorations, to break the gray dullness of a morning without visible sun. He stepped back a little and looked up at the cathedral’s great mock-Gothic facade. In Europe, church architecture had gone beyond the spires and pointed arches. You could find cathedrals built with Renaissance magnificence or with all the madness of the baroque. Even in England and Ireland, there was variety, and history, in church art. In the United States, it was as if time had stopped five centuries before the country had even come into existence. Successful cathedrals here—like successful religions—were always deliberate anachronisms.
“Gregor?” Sister Scholastica said.
Gregor dragged his mind away from speculating on what the actual building of this place had been like. If the contractor hadn’t been one of those legendary Good Catholic Laymen of that long period before Vatican II, Gregor wouldn’t have been surprised to find that he’d gone mad in the process. Scholastica’s veil was whipping back and forth in the wind. Her face was red with cold.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking what it must have been like actually to build this thing. To be the contractor.”
“Oh. Yes. Well. I know he’s not a very pleasant man. His Eminence.”
“He’s a son of a bitch. Sorry.”
“Thank you for the apology, but I hear worse these days in the fourth grade. And yes, he is that, I know that. But he’s a blessing, Gregor, he really is. He came in here after that awful mess, with the priests and the boys and, oh, all that—”
“You weren’t here then,” Gregor said.
“I know, but I heard about it. The order runs six elementary schools and a high school in Philadelphia. We have a lot of interest in the place. And it was bad, Gregor. You must have seen what it was like in the press, but it wasn’t just that.” Scholastica flapped her hands in the air, seemed to realize what she was doing, and blushed. Her hands and arms went back into the folds of her cape.
“So,” Gregor said. “He was good about straightening out the scandal.”
“You know, I look at it all, and it’s not fair, really. I mean, yes, those men did those things, and they shouldn’t be forgiven. But it was 1962. The way the Church responded wasn’t underhanded or devious or even cavalier. We didn’t know about child sexual abuse in those days. Churches and schools, Catholic or not, they all did the same thing. They brushed it under the rug, they transferred the adult, and half the time they blamed the child. And they kept it secret, too, but not to save the adult. It was all considered so much the child’s fault that nobody wanted him branded—branded with that kind of misbehavior. I can remember it happening to a girl in the elementary school I went to. She was about eleven, and she was caught with her uncle doing, you know, things. And forever afterward, we all thought she was a slut.”
Actually, Gregor remembered the same kind of thing, from his own childhood. Especially if the victim was a girl, even a very young girl, the assumption seemed to be that she had gone looking for it.
“So,” he said, “he was good for the scandal. And I’m glad. But I don’t have to like him.”