“Dan,” she said, once she was far enough past him so that she could no longer see his face, “I’m not Pat Mallory. I’m not a cop or a newspaper reporter or one of those people from the mayor’s office you have meetings with at seven o’clock in the morning. I’m your sister and I can tell when something is not quite real with you. Now you know and I know that Father Tom Burne is the only person down in the Congo making any headway at all against those people on Sedger Street. And you know and I know that Father Tom Burne has not molested any of the children at Damien House—”
“—Bruce Ritter—”
“No matter what Father Bruce Ritter may or may not have done,” Susan said. “We’re not talking about Bruce Ritter here. We’re talking about Tom Burne. You have built your reputation in this state on fighting cases of child abuse. Now you’re doing your best to knock out of commission the greatest force against child pornography and child prostitution this state has ever seen. You’ve started an investigation on the unsubstantiated word of a boy who is, from all reports, both an habitual liar and a borderline psychopath. You had the fact of that investigation leaked to the press and you were very proud of yourself for doing it—and don’t lie about that, Dan, because I was here to see it. No matter what you believe, I am not a naive little nun who believes anything anybody tells her. I am perfectly willing to believe that that cop I talked to this morning had it all wrong. But, Dan, I’m going to find it very hard not to believe that cop if you won’t tell me why you’ve started this insane holy war against Father Tom Burne.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Dan said. “Jesus fucking Christ, Susan, I have told you and I have told you and I will tell you again. I am investigating Tom Burne
because I have to.
”
“Right.”
Susan dropped her cup into the sink. It landed with a thud, but didn’t break. She turned away from it and headed for the kitchen door.
“Where are you going?” Dan asked her.
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“I don’t know.”
That was a lie. Susan hadn’t thought she would care, but she did. She cared more that Dan not know where she was going.
Out in the foyer again, she looked up the stairs, expecting to see Andy sitting on them, and got blackness and absence instead. She wondered vaguely where he was and then went into the closet for her things.
It was a long trek out to the Yale-New Haven Hospital, and she was already very tired.
T
HE OFFICES AND STUDIOS
of WNHY-TV were on Orange Street at the very edge of the commercial district, on the third, fourth, and fifth floors of a six-story building with a dry cleaner and a sex aids shop on the street level. Walking up to the building, Father John Kelly found himself resenting his life—his real life—for the first time. It was strange. Even if he hadn’t had a vocation—and he had, you had to to accept celibacy with any kind of equanimity; it was just that with everything else that was going on, with his head full of fears and confusions left over from a childhood horror story, it was hard to remember it—even if he hadn’t had a vocation, he might still have wanted to be a priest. There were so many advantages to it. In fact, unless you were some kind of sex fiend, there were nothing but advantages. The Jesuits had given him an education the like of which could not be had anywhere in the world outside the Church. They had sent him to London and Paris and Rome and taken care to see that he read half a dozen languages, ancient and modern, just in case he needed them. He knew more about the economy of Central America than the radical nuns who lived in the base communities of Nicaragua. He knew more about the theology of the patristic Church than the schismatic traditionalists who surrounded Marcel Lefebvre. He knew more about English literature than most Oxford dons who taught the subject and more about French philosophy than most of the existentialists who had preached Sartre at the Sorbonne—and it was all side knowledge, what the Jesuits considered necessary background for his serious education. That had been in theology, and as far as he could figure out, he knew more about that than the Pope and almost as much as Cardinal Ratzinger.
Then there were the living conditions. Over a period of years, he had lived in every possible kind of place, from a palazzo in Venice to a hut in the Mojave desert, but most of the time he lived in ordinary Jesuit rectories. Ordinary Jesuit rectories were not luxurious, at least not most of the time, but they were comfortable. They were certainly much more comfortable than any of the places he had been allowed to occupy as a child. They offered good food and good books and good conversation. They offered refuge from the craziness of the rest of the world. They offered a kind of automatic acceptance of the intellectual life that left him free to work and to think without being under pressure to also be “normal.”
Most of all—and John Kelly knew this—the Church had given him a community of merit, a world working overtime to ensure that oldest and most startling of Western ideals, the absolute equality of every soul under God. When he told people that they argued with him. They brought up dozens of things that had nothing to do with anything. Weren’t women barred from the priesthood? Wasn’t the Church a hierarchy? It was all true and all beside the point, only credible to people who had spent four years of college hearing that all that mattered was gender, race, and class. In the world John Kelly had entered on the day of his ordination, gender, race, and class were not supposed to matter at all. Every man and woman was a descendant of Adam and Eve. They were brothers in blood as well as in metaphor. Every man and woman, rich and poor, black and white and red, was stained with the same Original Sin and charged with the same mission: to work out his own salvation and give glory to God. What the Church was trying to be was what the rest of the Western world had always considered itself to be, inaccurately and unreflectively: a world where advancement was won by
merit only
and sanctity was a gift that could not be boasted of because it could never be deserved.
Just why he was standing on Orange Street thinking about these things, he was not sure. It was passive thinking anyway. What little active thinking he was doing was all about nonsense. Dan Murphy, Victor Coletti, Tom Burne: the fact was, he was afraid to go inside, and he didn’t want to be. He was a little embarrassed by the homily he’d written, too, but that was something else. He looked up Orange Street and found it empty. There was a girls’ school up there, run by the same nuns who ran Albertus Magnus College, a good one. The order was a good one, too, or had been before Vatican II.
He checked out the curious display in the plate-glass window of the sex aids shop—it was called A Marriage Made in Heaven, and all it had for decoration was a lot of Valentine hearts edged in paper lace; if it hadn’t been for the discreet sign on the door,
PRACTICAL HELP FOR THE HO-HUM RELATIONSHIP,
he wouldn’t have known what was going on in there—and then forced his way through the glass doors. The small lobby inside was empty and cold and floored in stale linoleum.
What he should have done with his homily was to make it the first in a series, the start of a course in the Catholic religion, the kind of course no one ever taught anymore in America but that he had been trained to put together when he was in the seminary. Either that, or he should have prepared a statement on the plight of Father Tom Burne. Anything would have been better than what he had done, which was to put together half an hour of platitudes and abstractions on the Trinity.
He let himself into the elevator, pressed the button for the second floor, and sighed.
“The recording studios are up on three,” the receptionist said, when he had presented himself at her desk. “That’s where we’ll be going, Father. If you want to smoke, you have to wait in the green room. Fire regulations don’t permit smoking in the studios and common sense doesn’t permit it in the technical rooms—I don’t know if you realize, but the lens on a single one of our cameras, just the lens, costs over fifteen thousand dollars.”
The receptionist was a tall woman in middle age, very thin and very well put together, wearing a gold crucifix on a chain around her neck. John Kelly had tagged her immediately as being the kind of cradle Catholic who prided herself on having “her own opinions.” There were more and more of those running around every day, and the opinions they prided themselves on having were usually heretical. It made him a little nuts. A Catholic who did not believe that the Consecration changed the bread and wine into the true Body and true Blood of Christ Jesus was a Protestant, and so was a Catholic who thought Rome had too much to say in the affairs of the American Church. The receptionist had gone back to the elevator and pressed the call button, and John found himself holding back, reluctant to follow her.
The elevator came to a stop in front of them and the doors popped open. The receptionist held one of them open with her hand and shooed him in.
“Dan Murphy has told us all about you,” she said as she followed him. “We’ve been very excited. Most men don’t have the kind of commitment to his faith community that Dan does, don’t you think?”
“Mmm,” John Kelly said. He was biting his lip, trying not to wince. “Faith community.” Dear God in Heaven.
The receptionist punched the button for three. “I know everybody talks a lot about community these days,” she said, “but they don’t really do anything about it. You work in the bishop’s office, not in a parish, don’t you?”
“That’s right. Actually I’m not at the chancery at the moment, I have my own—”
“You really wouldn’t believe what it’s like in the parishes. You wouldn’t. We held a sleep-in for the homeless in my parish only last week—”
“A sleep-in?”
“It was a gesture of solidarity. My parish priest—Father Reynolds, out in Branford, at Saint Thomas Aquinas—Father Reynolds has a really inspiring passion for social justice, a real sense of empathy for the poor. It was his idea. We were all—the whole church, except tiny children and sick people and like that—we were all supposed to bring sleeping bags and spend a night in the basement of the church to show our solidarity with the homeless—”
“Oh.”
“—and practically nobody came!” The receptionist looked triumphant. “Can you believe that? Nine o’clock on the night, a Friday night, nobody has to work on Saturday morning, and still there were only six of us there. It’s Ronald Reagan, that’s what I think. He turned the entire country into a pit of mindless greed.”
“Mmm,” John Kelly said again. They were walking through windowless winding corridors. John thought that the floor must have been gutted and reconstructed to accommodate the studios, or actually built for the studios. He couldn’t imagine any other kind of business that would need this kind of arrangement. After a while, the windowlessness ended, but what windows there were didn’t look out on the street. They looked in at rooms, full of couches or equipment, lit by dim fluorescent lights. In the rooms with the couches, men in jeans and sneakers and flannel shirts were smoking cigarettes. In the rooms with the equipment, they were fooling with dials.
“Are you going to want to smoke?” the receptionist asked him.
“What?”
“Smoke,” the receptionist said patiently. They had stopped before a door with a window in it, looking in on the shabbiest carpet and the shabbiest couches John had seen yet. The receptionist was frowning at him sternly, maybe because she had tagged him just as surely as he had tagged her. He was a lump with his consciousness unraised.
“Smoke,” she said for a third time. “It’s the way I told you downstairs, the only place you can smoke—as a visitor, I mean; people can smoke in their own offices—the only place you can smoke is in the green room. This is the green room.”
“It is a green room,” John said, “yes.”
“It would be called the green room even if it wasn’t. That’s just the name for it. I don’t know why. If you don’t want to smoke, you can go directly to Studio Four.”
“I do want to smoke.”
“That’s all right. A lot of people do, their first time on television. They get intimidated.” She popped open the door of the green room and looked around. “It’s really a mess, isn’t it? Everybody thinks commercial stations are practically minting money, but it doesn’t seem to be that way around here. We are going to get this room redecorated, though. Dan Murphy arranged it.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“Well,” John said, “as I understand it, it’s a man named Victor Coletti who owns this station, not Dan Murphy. Why would Dan Murphy want to get the green room redecorated.”
“Victor Coletti?” the receptionist said. “I don’t know, Father. You must be mistaken. I’ve never even heard of anyone named Victor Coletti.”
She put her hand on his arm, pushed him into the room, and closed the door behind him.
Half an hour later, after he had read through his first issue of
Hustler
in growing alarm and smoked enough cigarettes to make his throat ache, someone came for him. He was relieved beyond measure to see that it was not the receptionist, but a young girl dressed in much the same way the men he had seen were dressed, in jeans and sneakers and a flannel shirt. She had her hair pulled to the back of her head in a rubber band and a wedding ring on her left hand. She introduced herself as, “Tracey, you know, the story editor on your series.”
“Story editor?”
“Don’t worry about it, Father. In your case, all I do is make sure the art people get your name straight on the intro board and work with your title.”
“I don’t have a title.”
“Let me have your script while you’re in makeup. I’ll read it and we’ll come up with a title.”
He had the “script”—which he thought of as a “paper”—in a folder in his briefcase. He took it out and handed it over and then let Tracey lead him out of the room and back into the hall. They were going deeper and deeper into the building, past more and more rooms with windows on the corridor. It was an alien place, and for a while he let himself drift with it. Consoles and cameras and lights on tripods. People moving either too quickly or not at all. Silence. The whole floor seemed to be soundproofed.