“I am making sense.” Daniel leaned over the rail and looked one more time at Chickie George, and then at Scott’s mother, a pale woman in a worn brown coat who looked exhausted beyond belief. He wondered what she made of it, what she made of them. He wondered if she realized that all the men in this church were gay, and not only the ones like Chickie.
“I’m going to go take a shower,” Daniel said. “I feel like I’m covered in crud. Are we going to have picketers at this funeral?”
“I don’t think so. It wasn’t AIDS.”
“And he wasn’t famous. Thank heaven for small favors. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Right,” Aaron said.
When Daniel went out the gallery door, it squeaked one more time, so he didn’t bother to shut it behind him. The stairwell was steep and winding. Everything had been done that it was possible to do to make this church look as if it had been built by the same people who had built the Houses of Parliament. Back in the nineteenth century, when Philadelphia had been a rich city and the Episcopal Church had been the richest denomination in it, that had probably seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do.
Daniel got to the bottom of the stairs and headed across the foyer to the side hall that led to the rectory at the back. The doors to the church had been propped open, but he didn’t even bother to look inside. He felt light-headed beyond belief, and annoyed with himself for more reasons than he was able to enumerate, or even define. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep. Maybe it was just that he had always thought that Scott would make it through, when he was good and ready—and instead, all he had been ready to do was die. He knew all the good arguments against making decisions on the basis of emotion, but at the moment none of them seemed to apply. Hell, he thought. Sometimes, if you didn’t make a decision on the basis of emotion, you didn’t make a decision at all.
The back hall ended at an arched doorway. The doorway led into another hall. Daniel hurried through and came out in the rectory mudroom. There was a wooden bench against one of the walls. Under it, there were boots and shoes, the kinds of things Daniel wore when he was not wearing his collar. On another of the walls there was a rack with hooks. The hooks held snow parkas and barn jackets and a long yellow rubber slicker he’d bought once to keep out the rain, but never worn. Looking in this room, you could imagine yourself in the house of any upper-middle-class WASP in America: the sort of person who bought his suits from Brooks Brothers and his outdoor things from L. L Bean; the sort of person who had been to a decent prep school before going on to Princeton; the sort of person who had tickets to the symphony every season. It was a very good description, Daniel thought, of the sort of person who belonged to the Episcopal Church.
He went through the mudroom into the kitchen and looked around. It didn’t look like anyplace he had ever been before. It didn’t even look like his coffeepot, sitting there at the edge of the stove.
He thought his head was about to explode into a million and one different pieces, and when it had finished doing that it was going to reconstruct itself—as something other than a head.
3
Sister Mary Scholastica had never met a parish coordinator before she came to St. Anselm’s Roman Catholic Church, but now—two weeks into her tenure—she was sure that the title was nothing but a polite term for bitch.
Well, not “bitch” exactly. Scholastica’s order, the Sisters of Divine Grace, wore recognizable habits. They weren’t elaborate habits, like the ones Mother Angelica and her sisters wore on EWTN, but they were impossible to miss. A black dress that went to just below the calf line, black stockings, a black veil with a white brim that showed only the smallest amount of hair at the very front of the head: there was no way to mistake the fact that Scholastica was a nun, even before you saw the large metal crucifix that hung around her neck. Habits were more than a witness to the world. They were also a constraint. Considering what it was they constrained, Scholastica was willing to admit that that might not be a bad thing. If she was ever going to call Sister Harriet Garrity a bitch, she was going to have to wait to do it in her bathrobe—and that wouldn’t work either, because she would never be in her bathrobe in any place where anybody outside her order would have a chance to see her. She went over and over the rules in her mind. It was barely past four in the morning. She was tired beyond belief, and she was not thinking well. All she came up with was a mishmash of emergency scenes: the convent was on fire and she was out in the parking lot in her bathrobe because of that; she was confined to a hospital bed for something like a broken leg or a bad case of sciatica; Sister Harriet burst in through the convent door in a mad attempt to free them all from patriarchal oppression. Patriarchal oppression made Sister Scholastica’s head ache, but not nearly as much as Sister Harriet Garrity did. She should have taken a Tylenol when she’d still had a chance.