True Believers(41)

The steps of the cathedral were nowhere near as steep as the ones at Sacre Coeur. They weren’t even as steep as the ones Gregor had seen on ordinary parish churches in some places where the landscape was uneven enough to force the architect to make accommodations. Gregor went in through the great Gothic double doors and blinked into the dark of the vestibule. Like any parish church, there was a small table along the wall at the left with bulletins piled on it, and racks along the wall holding pamphlets on everything from praying the rosary to Natural Family Planning. He walked past all this to the inner doors that opened onto the long rows of pews and the elaborate marble altar. He saw the holy water font and did not touch it. He was sometimes drawn into churches to think, but he was never able to take part in any of the rituals that defined them, not even the most minor ones.

He passed through the inner doors and made his way down the center aisle to a pew in almost the exact middle of the church. A Catholic would have genuflected. He did not. A Catholic would have knelt for a while on the padded kneeler and said a Hail Mary, or some other prayer, learned in childhood, meant to change the tone and tenor of the mind and make it fit to come before the seat of God. Gregor only sat down and looked at the people around him, the old women saying rosaries, the young men bent over the backs of pews as if they were in agony. Elizabeth would have understood this—Elizabeth his wife, dead of cancer now over five years. It was one of the things about her that Gregor had never been able to fully understand, that she believed in God as simply and as straightforwardly as she believed the sun would rise in the mornings and set at night. Gregor realized that he knew a number of people like that. Lida Arkmanian. Hannah Krekorian. Even Donna Moradanyan Donahue. He didn’t know what they thought about religion, or how they would resolve the great moral questions of their time, but he did know they believed. He was sure Tibor believed, too, although, Tibor being Tibor, that was more complicated. He wondered what it was like, to know something so clearly, and without hesitation.

After a while, he became aware of the fact that the pew was not padded the way the kneelers were, and that his back had begun to hurt from pressing against the back of it. He stood up. More people had come in while he was sitting there, thinking incoherently. He wondered if they were tourists, come to view the cathedral as an artifact, or ordinary parishioners. He remembered how surprised he had been when he had realized, for the first time, that St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York was, for some people, a parish church. It had to be getting on in the morning. Didn’t most Catholic churches have Masses on and off all day?

He left the pew by the center aisle again. There was a light glowing in the sanctuary. That meant that at least one consecrated Host, considered to be the actual body and actual blood of Jesus Christ, was resting in the—ciroborum? It was incredible, what he almost knew as a result of thirty years of looking into murders.

Out on the sidewalk, the street seemed bare of taxis. He had to wait at the curb looking at nothing for long minutes, feeling the wind get under his still-open coat. Maybe he didn’t believe because he was not constituted to believe. Maybe belief was like an ear for music, and some people had it and some did not. That was the way he would have described Bennis’s approach to religion. His own, though, took in a heavy dose of fear. Religion was dangerous, and not only religion itself, but antireligion as well. There was something about the people who took it all so seriously, who believed that it was a matter of life and death whether you believed that the Host was really the Body and Blood or just a symbol, who believed that they would rather die than have a church take up shop next door, who believed to the point of obliterating the self, whether in the good of religion or the evil of it—there was something about those people that scared him to death.

It would be one thing if the world was made up of believers like Donna Moradanyan Donahue, or Sister Scholastica, or Father Tibor.

The unfortunate thing was that so much of the world seemed to be made up of believers like the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia.





THREE





1


This morning, Edith Lawton did not get out of bed when Will did, or go down to breakfast. She heard the door to the spare bedroom open and close. She heard the sound of Will’s heavy work boots on the carpeted stairs. She even heard the sound of the water being run in the bathroom for his washing up and his shower. He must have left the bathroom door open. The walls in this house were thick, made of plaster six inches through. Usually, she couldn’t hear anything at all through them, and certainly nothing as minor as running water. She lay in her bed and closed her eyes and willed herself not to turn on the light. She didn’t want him to know she was paying attention to the things he did, because she was convinced—convinced—that that would only make him more stubborn. The bedrooms were at the back of the house. If they hadn’t been, she would have had a streetlight shining through her window to make shadows on the ceiling. Instead, she had to imagine her own shadows, the way she imagined music inside her head, to pass the time. By the time she heard the front door open and close, the heavy solid-core door banging into the frame, the metal latch catching to lock automatically as Will went out in the cold, she was so tense her muscles felt as if they were made of porcelain.