Chapter Twenty-one

Harry's familiar morning exhaustion bowed him. His alarm clock said four fifteen. In two hours he must
say his first Mass . . . before a congregation of perhaps seven, in a church built to accommodate five
hundred.
"Friday," he muttered. "God give me strength." He felt awful. Had he taken a sleeping pill last night? No,
there weren't any left and so much the better. Leave the pills alone. Valium priests, Seconal priests,
Thorazine priests. They were worse than the old-fashioned whiskey priests. He had so far escaped the lure
of depressants and tranquilizers. As a result, his life was raw with loneliness and a sense of unfulfilled
promise. The issue, of course, was faith and the lack thereof. His confessor, Father Michael Brautigan, a
bluff and kindly Jesuit, red with drink, would say that faith was a matter of relaxing one's instinct to touch.
"Don't try to touch Christ," he would say. "That's the point of Thomas, isn't it?"
Harry had to touch. But it worked both ways: one who had to touch also needed touching. Sometimes,
naked in the middle of his silent rectory, he would dip his hands into cold water until they were numbed and
did not feel his own, then he would close his eyes and embrace himself and dance around and around with
himself in the dingy rooms.
Lately he had become too desperate, too full of self-pity even for that. Never to be touched—or even
needed, for that matter—had emerged for him as the poisonous central issue of his life. When he had first
entered the priesthood, he had assumed that his services would be ardently desired by Catholics hungry for
the succor of their Church. Instead he had spent his life struggling to pay bills, working against the
relentless dwindling of his flock, forced to hold jumble sales and bingo and raffles, until finally even those
measures failed.
Then came the Tituses. Old Franklin and handsome Mar­tin, just wanting to rent "the plant," as they had
called it, a few nights a week.
Nobody will know, Father. We help out dozens of parishes in the same shape as Holy Spirit.
Nobody will even care except you.
Our money will keep you going. You won't ever have to close your doors.
At first he had thought perhaps it was drugs or counterfeit­ing or some sort of white slavery.
He had heard their soft chanting, though, and seen the flicker of their candles. He did not actually say it to
himself but he knew the truth. Every Monday and Friday morning, after their nights, he had taken to
reconsecrating his altar. And he no longer kept the Host in the tabernacle on those nights. It stayed under
his pillow, tucked away in the pyx.
Twenty-seven years a priest, twenty a creature of the Tituses. Traitor to his own faith, to his own soul.
How black can sin be? He put his hands to his stubbly cheeks and rubbed. He longed for the velvet fingers
of a woman, or of death.
As time unfolded the sad destiny that had been contrived for him it became obvious that his whole
life—the vocation itself—was not really very valuable. In the world of his youth priests were essential
people, needed by their congre­gations for all sorts of succor. Now when the leaves fell on his walks they
stayed, and his leaking roof leaked on.
Did people sense that he was a traitor? Could they some­how smell the taint of the Night Church in the
great nave of Holy Spirit?
He didn't want to be a priest anymore. He did not even want to live. No, he had a plan for himself. He
intended to die unconfessed, and go to Hell—in which, despite the modern theologians, he still firmly
believed. He actually looked forward to it: he deserved his damnation, wanted it, and had for some years
been seeking the death that would bring it. Once he had attempted to commit suicide by suffocating himself
in a plastic bag, but it had been too terrifying. So he had tried sleeping pills—and vomited them up.
He had asked Martin Titus to kill him, just a few weeks before Titus himself had been killed in an
airplane crash. "I'll think it over," the man had replied absently, and changed the subject. Harry was not
even important enough for martyrdom.
He said a bitter prayer, a Hail Mary, and turned once again to his bed.
As he slid beneath the sheet he heard quite distinctly from the church a human sound. It was a loud,
woeful groan, loud enough to carry across the parking lot to the rectory.
He should have gone straight over there. Damn fool not to. Three rings at this hour, and he had made
himself believe it was a coincidence. Harry Goodwin was a weak man, and that was a fact.
He put his hand on the bedside table. In the drawer was a small pistol. Mike Banion over at the 112th
Precinct had given it to him after the ritual murder of Father Santa Cruz at Saint Thomas in Brooklyn. He
shouldn't have accepted it, but he didn't want Mike to know how he envied old Santa Cruz.
This was the right time to have a pistol. He felt the comforting steel of it in the palm of his hand. One day
soon, when he could bear the taste of the barrel in his mouth, he was going to use it on himself.