What was lying on the carpet in front of the mail slot was a little pile of her self-addressed stamped envelopes, four of them, from Redbook, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal. Edith picked them up and turned them over in her hands. She didn’t know if it was good news or bad news that there was no other mail. The bad news was that the mailman had had no other letters to distract him. He had seen these and probably knew what they were. The good news was that she couldn’t miss one between the gas and the electric bill, where it would fall out and into the hands of Will when he came back from work.
She opened the first one and found a printed rejection slip. It started “Dear Contributor.” She opened the second one and found the same. She opened the third and fourth ones and barely paid attention. This was, she thought, all Bennis Hannaford’s fault. If Bennis had really been interested in helping her out, she would have introduced her to some people, or made a few phone calls to the right people in the right offices, so that Edith’s proposals would not have been coming in over the transom blind. Instead, all Bennis had ever really done was give her the kind of advice she could have gotten for herself out of Writer’s Digest, and most of that was clearly worthless. Edith didn’t believe for a minute that it was necessary to do as much research for a proposal as you would for an article. It was, in fact, just branding yourself as an amateur. When Bennis Hannaford proposed an article, she just got on the phone and asked.
Edith looked down at the paper in her hands and began ripping it all apart. Then, when it was a mass of shreds in her hands, she suddenly felt as if she were willing to do anything but stay in the same house with it. She didn’t even want it in her own garbage cans out back. She opened the front door and stepped into the street. The police car was still there, parked in front of St. Anselm’s again. It would be wonderful if it turned out there was more going on down there than just the aftermath of a suicide. Maybe the priest had been caught interfering with little boys, like the priests who had been part of the lawsuits had. Maybe one of the nuns was pregnant and had had an abortion. It was all hypocrisy and lies, religion was, but it was slick hypocrisy and lies. You had to work hard to expose it for what it was. She saw a policeman going down a little walkway to the side of the church, the one that led to the convent, the rectory, and the school. Then she nodded slightly to herself and went down the sidewalk to the trash can at the curb.
She was still throwing scraps of paper into the void when Ian came up, driving, of course, because he drove everywhere. She stopped for a moment to notice how much more impressive his car was than Will’s ordinary Jeep. Money mattered, and Edith had never thought it didn’t. Ian waved to her and pulled his car into the narrow driveway at the side of her house. Will still wasn’t using it. Edith had no idea why. She threw the rest of the paper away and went around the side to meet him.
“What were you doing?” he asked her, when he got back to the street. “You looked like you were doing the trash paper equivalent of sowing the land with salt.”
“I was just throwing out some junk mail,” Edith said. “What do you suppose is going on up there now, at St. Anselm’s?”
Ian looked up the street along with her. “They’re investigating a violent death,” he said. “It takes time. Even with what is clearly a suicide.”
“Was it clearly a suicide?”
“Well, something like six people saw him blow his head off. That’s a pretty good indication, I’d say. I think you’re going to have to let this one go. I’m all for crusading against religion, but sometimes you just don’t get any kind of lucky.”
“I wish Will would be all in favor of crusading against religion.”
“As far as I can tell, Will isn’t much in favor of anything. Are we going to go inside, or do you want me to stage a seduction right here on the street in broad daylight? It’s cold as a witch’s tit. My dick would probably freeze right off.”
It was cold. Edith hadn’t noticed. She looked into the trash can and saw that the scraps of paper had disappeared from sight. They were down there in the muck of other people’s rotting food and soiled Kleenex tissues. She looked back at St. Anselm’s again and then at Ian. He wasn’t really a very good-looking man. Seen in full daylight like this, it was clear that he was one of those people who had done well but not well enough. He had money but not the—authority—of celebrity.
“Well?” he said.
Edith turned slightly so that she could see Roy Phipps’s place, with the white cross on the front door and the smaller one over the front window. Ian was doing a great deal better than she was, even if he wasn’t doing as well as Bennis Hannaford. He had things she could only dream about.