“I can't give a million dollars a year,” he said. “I don't know anybody who can.”
“We aren't asking you to give a million dollars a year,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “We're asking you to put together a committee to raise it. Ten or so men, perhaps, with enough stature to contribute, say, fifty thousand dollars eachâ”
“I can do fifty thousand,” Andy said. “At least, I can do it this year.”
“âwho could mount a long-term effort to cover what we need. Because quite frankly, if we don't find some way to cover it, this archdiocese is finished. We'll be bankrupt in six months. We'll be absorbed into another archdiocese within a year.”
Andy sat down again, abruptly. “A committee,” he said.
“We thought you'd be a good person to head it,” Father Doheny said. “You know a lot of people. You belong to a lot of organizations. You're active in the church. And you're known to be a successful man. We thought there would be a number of other good Catholic laymen who would want to be part of anything you were part of.”
The Cardinal Archbishop blinked. Andy O'Reilly seemed to be swelling up in front of his eyes. “It's very kind of you to say so,” he said. “Very kind of you. I have always tried to be a good Catholic and a supporter of the Church.”
“And you've succeeded,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“And I guess I could put together a committee. I don't know if we could really raise a million dollars a year. But I could put together a committee.”
“That's all we're asking, really,” Father Doheny said. “We realize you can't guarantee us results. We're only hoping for somebody willing to try, and with a decent chance of making a success of it. You seemed to us to be the obvious choice. You're one of the most committed laymen in the cathedral parish.”
Andy had brought a briefcase in with him. The Cardinal Archbishop hadn't noticed it. Now Andy picked it up off the
floor and put it on the conference table, and the Cardinal Archbishop was shocked to see that it was an exquisite Mark Cross number, made of black leather and probably costing the earth. It was totally at odds with the image Andy presented in his television ads, and with the image he had been careful to present hereâthe JC Penney suit, the Timex watch whose metal wristband was just a little too large for his wrist. Andy folded his arms across the briefcase and put his chin down on his hands.
“You should run it like the Knights Templar, or whatever it was,” he said. “A club of ten, and make it a club. Men who are on the inside. Who get information nobody else has. Like those secret societies are supposed to be.”
“Secret societies?” The Cardinal Archbishop was confused.
“You know,” Andy said. “Like Opus Dei. Or the old Jesuits. The Pope's army. Except this time we'll make it the Cardinal's army. And we'll meet here. Because they'll want to be part of it. They'll want to know that they belong. Don't you see?”
“No,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“I see,” Father Doheny said. “It's a very insightful idea.”
“Yeah.” Andy stood up. “The Church is under attack. She needs an army to defend her. We'll be that army. You give me about a week, okay? I've got to work out who to ask. Then we can get started. There's just one thing.”
“And what is that?” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“If there's more to this scandal, I want to know about it before I read it in the papers. We all will. We can't be blindsided by press reports about issues you know are sitting in the closet waiting to fall out. If we're not informed, we can't help.”
But all they have to do to help is to raise money, the Cardinal Archbishop thought. What do they think they're going to do with privileged information? But then it struck him, because he was not a stupid man, that what they were going to do with it was simply to have it, to be the people who knew when nobody else did, to be the people who could hint to their less fortunate colleagues that they were privy to all the inner workings of the chancery and of Rome. Suddenly, the Cardinal Archbishop's distaste for Andy O'Reilly was overwhelming. The arrogance, the conceit, the soul so lacking in anything of
value that the only thing it could think of when Holy Mother Church was in grave danger was how to use that danger for its own advantage. He expected that kind of thing out of newspaper reporters, and the president of the local chapter of the American Humanist Association, and the writers who fed stories to the tabloid television shows. For some reason, he had been convinced that no “real” Catholic could be anything like this, that the people who knelt in the pews in front of him as the bread and wine became the Body and Blood of their Lord Jesus Christ felt as he did, about Christ, about His Church, maybe even about their own souls.
He looked sideways at Father Doheny, and nodded slightly. Andy O'Reilly caught the look, and the nod.
“What is it?” he asked. “Is there more of the scandal still in the closet? Is there something else about to come out?”
“Not about the scandal, no,” Father Doheny said. “There is something else.”
“I think I'll leave you to explain it,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “I'm wanted at the convent” He stood up and held out his hand to Andy O'Reilly, who kissed his ring and came close to kneeling while he did it, but stopped just short.
“You won't be disappointed, bringing good laymen into your confidence,” Andy promised. “We've got the Church's best interests at heart.”
The Cardinal Archbishop had no idea if that was true or not. He only knew he did not want to stay around here to find out. He didn't want to be in this room any longer with the creature this man was. He nodded to both Andy and Father Doheny and went out, walking so quickly that the folds of his cassock beat against his legs like streamers in the wind. He was sick to his stomach, and what frightened him was that he might have to stay this way, for months, for years, until life would become one long exercise in nausea. Take up your cross and follow me, the man had said, but the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia was sure he couldn't have meant anything like this.
For Roy Phipps, the decision to watch the medical examiner's press conference on what the news stations were calling “the
Kelly killings” wasn't even a decision. Since the first he had known about what had happened up the street, he had been nearly obsessed with it. It had been bad enough on the day it happened, when the street was full of police cars and ambulances, and there had been nothing he could do to find out what was happening. He had sent Fred Havers into the crowd, but Fred was not an actor. Catholicism scared him. He looked on St. Anselm's as the home of the devil, with a cloven-footed old goat seated right out in the open on a throne on the altar, and parishioners dancing naked to the accompaniment of a jingling tambourine. Of course, there was no Mass going on at the time. Father Healy was standing right out on the sidewalk where both Roy and Fred could see him. So were a dozen nuns, in habits, and the stocky, angry woman who was addressed as “Sister” but wore ordinary suits. Fred still found it hard to believe that something was not going on in the sanctuary, even while the police were coming in and out. In the end, he had gone, because Roy asked him to, but Roy had watched him. He hadn't gone any farther than the edges of the crowd, and even then he had held his arms stiffly at his sides, trying not to touch or be touched, as if Catholicism were a disease that could rub off on him. Whore of Babylon. Mark of the Beast. When the Antichrist came he would come in glory, and his instrument would be the Pope in Rome, and all men would bow down and worship him.
“Somebody died,” Fred had said, coming back, and then, “somebody committed suicide.”
That was all, and Roy had known better than to try to get something more out of him, or to send him back. There were members of Roy's congregation who would love to be sent off as spies, but for that very reason they would have been unsuitable. Even Fred himself stuck out a little too much on this city street. There weren't supposed to be real rubes and hayseeds anymore. That was all supposed to have been taken care of by movies and MTV. When Fred was growing up, though, his parents hadn't had a television, and the only movies they had approved of had been the Disney animated features from the nineteen fifties. Then there had been home schooling, and church Sundays, and Bible college. It wasn't hard for Roy to understand how Fred had come to be Fred. It only angered him sometimes, the way they all angered him,
all the members of his congregation. Their lack of education was appalling. Their lack of sophistication would have been comical if it weren't so dangerous. Their superstitions were tangled knots of confusion that couldn't be hacked through with a sword, no matter how many sermons he gave on the sin of credulity, no matter how often he railed against astrology as a tool of the devil. They were committed to him, but he thought they wouldn't have been, if they could have found someone who frightened them less. Then again, maybe not. They were used to living on fear. They were afraid of everything. Maybe a man they couldn't fear would be, as well, a man they couldn't respect.
Roy kept the television on the second floor in a special room that only a few people were allowed access to, and then only when he gave them explicit permission to come in. It was important that they understand how spiritually dangerous television was. This was true not only of the obviously bad channels, like Playboy and HBO, but of the ordinary broadcast ones as well. There was enough heresy on the evening news to send a hundred souls to hell. A hundred souls probably went, too, because they had learned to doubt from Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. Doubt, Roy always told them, was the worst possible thing. Doubt was the worm eating into the apple of your soul, eating out your spiritual eyes, until you couldn't see the majesty of God standing right in front of you, but thought you were alone. The problem was, they were not only stupid, but opaque. He had no way of knowing how much of what he was saying sank in and was taken to heart, and how much just passed over them like so much wind. He was sure most of them either didn't have televisions at all, or had those specially sealed sets sold by Home Life that played videotapes but did not get channels. He was sure most of them didn't have cable. He had to stress, over and over again, that even “Christian” programming wasn't necessarily Christian. Kenneth Copeland praying for prosperity, or Benny Hinn working up a sweat while he “healed” one poor deluded soul after the otherâthe devil could heal; the devil could perform miracles; the devil knew what backsliding Christians wanted to hearâall that kind of thing was just as dangerous as watching a sex show or listening to one of those book channels where the author had written another book on how the Bible wasn't true.
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 stupidâalthough 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, tooâthe 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 hallâbut 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 nextâstand, 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.”
“And?”
Doug Frelinghuysen blushed. “And I had to leave early. That's what you told us to do. If we were in danger of getting into any trouble.”
“You were in danger of getting into trouble?”
“You know.” Doug Frelinghuysen blushed again, this time so red he looked as if he had painted his face with oils and then let them dry against his skin until they cracked. “There was this guy, you know,” he said. “And he was, you know. Getting friendly. He was asking me to go out to a bar with him. There was stuff like that going on all over the room. People hitting on each other. And, uh, people kissing.”
Some of the men in the room visibly blanched. Roy kept his temper.
“So,” he said. “While you were there, did you hear anything of interest to us? Any talk of a demonstration, or some news about a public action. Anything of that kind?”
“They weren't doing that stuff,” Doug Frelinghuysen said. “They were just, you know. Eating. And kissing. And. Stuff.”
“Yes,” Roy said. It was harder to keep his temper than ever, but it was important not to lose it too often. He needed his anger for strategic moments, when it would matter. He turned his attention to the rest of the men. “Well?” he said. “Any of you?”
“I bought the
Advocate
,” Carl Schmidt said. “I don't know if it did any good. It was full of personals.”
It was also full of articles about fundamentalists, including one about this very church. Roy had seen this week's issue of the
Advocate
. He counted to ten in his head, the way he had to do so often, and looked over the rest of the small crowd. They were staring at the floor, every one of them. He had sent them on a mission, and they had failed even to start it. If he pressed them, they would take on that pouty resentment they got so often at work. They were in their thirties and forties, but they were still children in the ways that mattered most. They were still people whose decisions were made by authority figures who did not believe they were mature enough to run their own lives.
Roy went over to the television set and turned it on. He
had preset it to the right channel, and the first thing they all saw was the bland, blond prettiness of the KPAL anchorwoman, trying to look serious under a hairdo that would have embarrassed a toy poodle.
“It's always women on the news shows now,” Carl Schmidt said. “You ever notice that? It used to be only men, and now it's always women.”
The other men murmured in what might have been agreement, and might have been noise. Roy turned the volume up and took a seat in the empty front row. The picture wavered, and the next thing on the screen was a bank of microphones on a table with no one behind it. The anchorwoman's voice in the background was hushed, as if she were calling a tennis match.
“Listen to me,” Roy said. “If we're going to carry this off, you're going to have to do your part. Go out to those meetings. Read the newspapers and magazines, but go out to those meetings. Go down the street and sit through the service at St. Stephen's. Keep your ears open. Listen. You don't have to be stealth bombs. You don't have to tell anybody who you are. Just go. Those meetings are open. Anybody can go to them. Go and come back and tell us what was said.”
There was a low murmuring throughout the room, but Roy knew there was no way to tell what it meant. He turned his attention to the set, where a heavyset man carrying a large sheaf of papers had appeared behind the microphone, looking grave. That would be the medical examiner. Roy had never seen him before. He wished he'd brought a cup of coffee with him when he'd come upstairs. By now, this man had to know what had really happened to Marty and Bernadette Kelly. He might even know more than that. Roy wasn't worried.
The trick was always to stay one step ahead, and he was out in front by light-years.