Dear Old Dead Read Free Page B

indications of Michael’s periodic bizarre behavior. A glory hole was a hole in the wall of a stall in a gay porno theater. A client entered the stall, paid his quarters for the movie, and then, if the whim took him, either stuck his own private parts into the hole for the man in the next stall to service, or serviced whatever was sticking through the hole in his own stall. The very idea made Eamon Donleavy physically ill. For Michael, in this age of AIDS, it was a death wish. For the Archbishop, it was undoubtedly more incomprehensible than genocide.
    There was a cough on the other end of the phone. “Eamon? Are you as worried by all this as I am?”
    “I’m worried about Michael, Your Eminence.”
    “I’m worried about Michael, too. Will he be able to withstand all this publicity?”
    “It depends on what the van Straadt papers do. If they pull out all the stops, he could be in trouble. Maybe not, but he could be.”
    “Will they pull out all the stops? Don’t they fund most of the center’s operations?”
    “Yes, they do. And the old man professes to like Michael.”
    “Only professes?”
    “I don’t know, Your Eminence. I don’t seem to know much of anything today.”
    “You know as much as you need to know. All right, Eamon. I’d better let you off the phone. We’re getting reports of a full-scale gang war going on up there.”
    “Yes, Your Eminence. There’s something like that going on. We have one or two of these every summer.”
    “It’s not summer, Eamon. It’s barely spring.”
    “Excuse me, Your Eminence.”
    “Take care of Michael, Eamon. As much as he’ll let you. God bless.”
    The Archbishop hung up. Eamon Donleavy hung up, too, and stared through his still-open door at Charles van Straadt sitting across the hall. Charles van Straadt was still on the phone, talking to God knows who, doing only God knows what. No, Eamon thought, I don’t like him. I don’t trust him. I don’t want him slithering around on the edges of our lives.
    If I were a man of courage, Eamon thought, I’d do something about him.

4
    S ISTER AUGUSTINE HAD BEEN seventeen years old on the day she entered her order, stubborn and exhilarated and panicked all at once. Those were the days when nuns wore tight white wimples fastened around their throats and so many skirts it felt like wading in water just to walk down a hall. Those were the days when Sisters barely spoke except to ask Sister Anne to pass the salt to Sister Josepha at breakfast. Those were also the days when nuns were never allowed to ask for anything for themselves. Sister Augustine remembered it all without regret. She was not a radical. She didn’t care if women were ever ordained into the priesthood or not. She felt no urge to think of God as a goddess or to call her Heavenly Father “She.” Sister Augustine simply preferred to spend her days in sweatsuits and sneakers rather than habits and nun shoes. She also preferred to be called “Augie.” Sister Augustine had been born Edith Marie Corcoran, which she hated. She had been named “Mary Augustine” by the Mother Superior of her order on the day she received its habit. She had first been called “Augie” here, about ten years ago, by one of the girl junkies in the refuge program. The street kids all thought she was cute. It annoyed her sometimes. She tried not to show it.
    Sister Augustine regretted nothing of the passing of the old order after Vatican II, except this: Before the changes, there always seemed to be hundreds of people milling around, willing to do everything and anything and willing to do it for free. That wasn’t true, of course, not really. Augie knew her own selective memory when she caught it in the act. Even so. Her order used to run two dozen elementary schools, paid for by their parishes and provided to parishioners for free. These days, with no nuns to speak of and lay teachers having to be paid just like public school teachers and provided with benefits besides, it