Sometimes, when things got rocky enough, Roy took them on archeological expeditions in the city: finding the evidence of the flood on the streets of Philadelphia. Most of all, he reminded them of the worst thing, the greatest danger, the vice that was waiting inside each and every one of them, looking for an opportunity to come out. That was another piece of evidence that Roy Phipps wasn’t stupid—although nobody who had ever met him thought he was. Only television reporters, who saw him leading his pickets at AIDS funerals or carrying signs that told the truth about gay men and hell, and who didn’t talk to him, made him out to be an uneducated rube. Roy Phipps was smart enough to understand the television reporters, and to understand the men like Fred Havers, too—the men who understood nothing about themselves, who didn’t know that random sexual arousal was the mark of original sin, that every man felt it, that it didn’t mean anything. As long as Fred Havers and the other men like him thought it did mean something, it would be possible for Roy Phipps to do God’s work on this earth.
The television was set on a wheeled cart at the front of the room, meant to look tentative and temporary. Metal folding chairs were set up in front of it in rows of four across. The scene was supposed to remind people of a movie theater, or maybe a meeting in a town hall—but most of these people would never have been to such a meeting. Most of them had never voted before they joined Roy Phipps’s church. Roy stood off to the side and watched them file in: Fred himself; Doug Frelinghuysen; Carl Schmidt; Peter Gessen; Nick Holt. All the members of Roy’s inner circle were men. Only men could be lectors in the church, and only men could serve on its administrative board. Women, St. Paul had said, ought to be silent in church. Roy had translated this to mean that they should have no hand in the running of it, although he had been forced to hire a woman as his secretary. It seemed to be impossible to find men who could type. The men of the inner circle were all one of two types. Either they were like Fred, and just a little too heavy, with suits that were always a size too small, or they were like Carl Schmidt, and far too thin, in that painful-to-look-at way that spoke of too many childhood meals missed and too little in the way of basic nutrition even now. They arranged themselves on chairs. throughout the room, not one of them sitting directly next to any other, or directly ahead or behind. They must all have gone to considerable trouble to be here, in the middle of the day, when they all had the kinds of jobs that paid by the hour and expected their warm bodies in place at all times.
Roy stood at the front of the room next to the television set and watched their faces. Mostly, they were blank. Fred Havers cleared his throat.
“Three minutes,” he said. “It’s three minutes before they start the press conference. Don’t you think we ought to turn that thing on in case they get started early?”
The other men moved around in their chairs. There was no way to tell if they were agreeing or disagreeing. They were deliverymen and truck drivers, mechanics and repairmen. They were used to impassivity, and just as used to taking orders. Only Fred wore a suit with any regularity, and that was because he worked for the church.
“In a minute,” Roy told them. “We won’t miss anything if we miss the first minute. I wanted to ask if anybody had done anything about what we talked about last Sunday.”
The men moved around in their chairs again. They knew he was referring to their private meeting last Sunday, and not what he had talked about in his sermon or discussed in the Bible class afterward. Most of them looked embarrassed. Then Doug Frelinghuysen raised his hand.
“Mr. Frelinghuysen,” Roy said.
Doug looked uncertain of what to do next—stand, perhaps, the way teachers had once made students stand next to their desks to give an answer, in an era far too long ago for Doug to be able to remember it. In the end, he stayed where he was.
“I went to the meeting of GLAHCOT. On Monday night.”
“GLAHCOT?”
“The Gay and Lesbian Ad Hoc Committee on Tolerance. Ad Hoc. That’s what it said on the flyer. It’s run by those people, you know, the Gay and Lesbian Support Advisory.”
“Very good,” Roy said, biting back the lecture on “ad hoc” that sprang so quickly into his mind. Lectures like that sprang into his mind all the time. If he gave them all, he would never do anything else. “Now,” he said. “Can you tell us what went on there?”
Doug Frelinghuysen nodded. “It was a new members meeting. They had a table with food, you know, and stuff to drink. And they went around meeting everybody.”