The first thing he had done was the first thing he had thought of to do. He had gone to the private chapel that the rectory shared with the convent and got down on his knees. This place was not as majestic as the church, but nobody knew about it but the priests and the nuns, and it was empty. He had gone to the kneeler in front of the Blessed Virgin and knelt there. Whenever he was in trouble, he went to the Blessed Virgin first. Some people said they could feel Jesus standing at their sides or hear the voice of God whispering in their ears, but for Robert Healy the only aspect of the immortal that had ever been present to him had been Mary. He took out the plain black wood rosary that he carried in his pocket and began to pray the Sorrowful Mysteries. He had no idea if it was the right day of the week. If you did a third part of the rosary—the five-decade short rosary, instead of the fifteen-decade long one—you were supposed to say the Glorious Mysteries on Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday, the Joyful Mysteries on Monday and Thursday, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday and Friday. He found he had no idea what day of the week it was, but that the Sorrowful Mysteries somehow felt right. The Scourging at the Pillar. The Crown of Thorns. Next to the sufferings of Christ, his own were less than trivial. Even if he were arrested and tried and wrongly convicted, even if he were executed in the bargain, his sufferings would be no closer to the Passion than a tapeworm is. to a kangaroo on the evolutionary scale. Even so, the thought of execution made him cold at the very pit of his stomach. The cold spread to his legs, and he thought that he had frozen here on his knees. He closed his eyes and stretched out on the floor with his arms flung out at his sides, in the form of a cross, the way they had been taught to do in seminary. He began to say the Hail Mary out loud. The words rose into the air around him like smoke. In a while, they began to cover him. The Agony in the Garden. The Scourging at the Pillar. The Crowning with Thorns. The Carrying of the Cross. The Crucifixion. Death and agony in the desert. The mountains shuddering. The earth cracking apart. The graves giving up their dead. There were people out there who knew nothing of this, who hadn’t even heard the story. He thought that if he could get them by the hands, he could show them the truth of it, unfolding out before them, a Passion play that never closed. Christ had died one dark afternoon in Jerusalem, but he was dying still. Christ had risen one Sunday morning, but he was rising still. The Church was a living body, with Christ as its head. If he remembered that, nothing else could touch him.
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.
He had reached the last bead on his rosary and begun the Salve Regina, in Latin, because that was how he had learned to pray it in Rome. He was at peace. The jangled agitation of the last few hours had left him. He lay for a few more moments in the position in which he had prayed, just to go on feeling the Blessed Virgin alive and watching over him, then he got up.
There was still light coming in from the windows, but not very much of it, and it might have been from a lamp. He had no idea what time it was. He was due to say the vigil Mass at seven, but if he had been in any danger of missing that one of the Sisters would have come to get him. He left the chapel and went down the stairs to the first floor. Looking out the front door, he could see that there were still people milling about in front of the church, going in and out. Maybe, if he did nothing at all about them, and just celebrated Mass as usual, they would stay for the Mass and listen. God had done stranger things. He could manage to convert a few rubbernecking fools who had only come to church in the hopes of seeing someone keel over from arsenic poisoning.
He walked around to the side of the building and looked up at the clock on St. Stephen’s spire. It was only five-thirty. He walked over to the side of his own church and slipped in the door there, near the shrine to Mary. The body of the church really was full of people, just like one of the nuns had told him it was. They were mostly subdued, as if, now that they’d gotten there, it had suddenly occurred to them that they shouldn’t treat the place like a circus tent. Most of them were not praying, though, and most of them were not sitting down. Instead, they were wandering around the aisles and looking at the paintings. They were going right up to the Communion rail and leaning over it to get a better view of the monstrance and the altar.
He started to withdraw again, then realized that he was not alone in this part of the church. There was someone kneeling in front of the statue of the Blessed Virgin here. This must be the day for people to need Mary—but then, in his experience, every day was the day for people to need Mary. He started to leave, discreetly, so as not to distract this woman in her prayers, when the woman stood up and crossed herself, and he realized it was Mary McAllister.