“How far do you think someone would go, to make the Catholic Church look bad?” she asked him. “I mean, think about Roy Phipps. He thinks the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon. How far do you think he’d go to discredit it? The Church, you know. So that it didn’t have so much influence.”
“Edie, please. The kid shot himself in the head. Let’s go find a convenient spot and screw like rabbits.”
She didn’t move. She wasn’t a rabbit. Her breasts felt heavy and ugly and dull.
“I think I’d go a fair way,” she said. “It’s so destructive, really. On abortion. On gay rights. On everything that matters. And with all the fuss they’re having over there, you can’t help wondering. Not that it won’t get covered up. This is Philadelphia. The Pope could burn a witch in front of Independence Hall and the papers would hire six theologians to explain how it really was an act of great Christian love.”
“Edie.”
Ian was the only one who had ever called her Edie. In the beginning, she had liked it—the nickname she had not had in junior high school, the badge of belonging. Now it just made her feel tired, or as if she were being forced back into a childhood she hadn’t liked much to begin with. She turned her back to St. Anselm’s and headed for the house.
Sometimes she thought that this anger she had was not really connected to anything. It wasn’t about Bennis Hannaford, or the Catholic Church, or even Will and Ian. It was just there, as it had always been there, all her life, rising up in her in sharp stabbing peaks, making her blind. It wasn’t fair, that was what she thought, but now she couldn’t pin down what it was that wasn’t fair. Bennis Hannaford, who had been born beautiful and rich and talented and intelligent all at once. The Catholic Church, which could go on spewing hate and irrationality from one end of the earth to the other and still get dozens of new converts every hour. If there was any justice in the world, it would be Edith herself who was in Vanity Fair, and all the churches would be empty.
The front door had swung shut while she had been outside. Edith got her key off her belt and opened up. The foyer was dark. The entire house was dark.
If she had to screw like a rabbit, she might as well do it in the dark.
2
Mary McAllister had spent the last hour looking everywhere for Chickie George, in spite of the fact that it was the middle of the workday and he was supposed to be at his desk in the St. Stephen’s Rectory. Now it was nearly ten o’clock, and she was fed up, almost as fed up as she had been when she first got off work at the soup kitchen. She had a full schedule of classes later this afternoon. She was fighting with both her roommate and her boyfriend. Even the rosary she had said in church this morning while Peter Rose packed the van hadn’t helped, and that was the most disturbing thing of all. Mary McAllister had always been able to lose herself in the rosary. Sometimes she even felt as if the Blessed Mother was in the room with her, listening to her, pleased that she was saying it right. When she was very little, the Blessed Mother had always been in the air above her head. These last few months, she had been right there beside her, close enough to touch. Today there had been nothing. It had been frightening to stare at the polished wood back of the pew ahead of the pew in front of her, and to see only that and nothing else.
Now she swung around the stone walk that led from St. Stephen’s back courtyard and stopped when she came to the church’s front doors. She knew there was no longer any reason why she should not enter, or even take part in a service if she had a reason of courtesy to do so, but she always felt uncomfortable at the idea of being in a church that was not a Catholic church. She felt especially uncomfortable in this one, because she knew that the Reverend Burdock supported not only gay rights but abortion. The gay rights part seemed perfectly natural to her. In a church full of men like Chickie, there was very little else he could have done. In spite of the fact that the Catholic Church officially believed that it was possible for any gay man to live a celibate life according to the word of God, and Mary always tried very hard to accept anything the Church taught as true, in this one instance she secretly felt that somebody in the Vatican was seriously confused. Nobody could meet Chickie George and not understand, in an instant, that whatever it took to heal him would be a lot more complicated than just saying “no” to sex. Not, Mary thought, that he needed to be healed of his homosexuality. It wasn’t that. It was just that he needed to be healed from something.
She ran up the church’s front steps and looked through the doors. She really had come a long way on this subject since she’d first started to come to St. Anselm’s. Back in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she had grown up, she had never doubted for an instant that gay men were sinners who needed to learn some self-discipline so that they could lead normal and not so dangerous lives. It seemed odd to her that her ideas on abortion had not changed in the same way. Instead, she had become ever surer of her original position. She had started out thinking of abortion as wrong. She now thought of it as a holocaust, the deliberate slaughter of children, no different from taking a sword to a football stadium full of infants in their high chairs and hacking away at them until they were nothing but pieces of flesh and oceans of blood on the ground.