“Yes, bless them. They aren’t all Ingrid Bergmans.” No.
“I don’t have much in common with Pat O’Brien myself.” Logan hefted his fresh beer. “Of course, we’re both Irish. Lecheim.”
“Father Logan-Tim,” Ed quickly corrected. “Can I ask you a religious question?”
“If you must.
“If this guy, any guy, came to you in the confessional and told you he’d done someone, murdered someone, would you turn him in?”
“That’s a question I can answer equally as a psychiatrist and as a priest. They’re aren’t many.” He studied his beer a moment. There were times when Logan’s superiors considered him too flexible, but his faith in God and in his fellow man was unwavering. “If someone who had committed a crime came to me in the confessional, or sought my professional help, I would do my best to persuade him to turn himself in.”
“But you wouldn’t push the button?” Ben persisted.
“If someone came to me as a doctor, or seeking absolution, they’d be looking for help. I’d see that they got it. Psychiatry and religion don’t always see eye to eye. In this case they do.”
There was nothing Ed liked better than a problem with more than one solution. “If they don’t see eye to eye, how can you do both?”
“By struggling to understand the soul and the mind-in many ways, seeing them as one in the same. You know, as a priest I could argue the subject of creation for hours, I could give you viable reasons why Genesis stands solid as a rock. As a scientist I could do precisely the same thing with evolution and explain why Genesis is a beautiful fairy tale. As a man I could sit here and say, what the hell difference does it make, we’re here.”
“Which do you believe?” Ben asked him. He preferred one solution, one answer. The right answer.
“That depends, in a matter of speaking, on what suit I’m wearing.” He took a long drink and realized if he had a third beer, he’d be pleasantly buzzed. While enjoying the second, he began to look forward to the third. “Unlike what old Francis Moore used to teach, there are no blacks and whites, Ben, not in Catholicism, not in psychiatry, and certainly not in life. Did God create us out of his goodness and generosity, and perhaps a sense of the ridiculous? Or did we invent God because we have a desperate, innate need to believe in something larger, more powerful, than ourselves? I argue with myself often.” He signaled for another round.
“None of the priests I knew ever questioned the order of things.” Ben swallowed the rest of his vodka. “It was right or it was wrong. Usually it was wrong and you had to pay for it.”
“Sin in its infinite variety. The Ten Commandments were very clear. Thou shalt not kill. Yet we’ve been warriors since before we could speak. The Church doesn’t condemn the soldier who defends his country.”
Ben thought of Josh. Josh had condemned himself. “To kill one-to-one is a sin. To drop a bomb, with an American flag on it, on a village, is patriotic.”
“We are ridiculous creatures, aren’t we?” Logan said comfortably. “Let me use a more simplistic example of interpretation. I had a young student a couple of years ago, a bright young woman who, I’m embarrassed to say, knew her bible better than I could ever hope to. She came to me one day on the question of masturbation.” He turned a little in his chair and jogged the waitress’s elbow. “Excuse me, dear.” He turned back. “She had a quote, I’m sure I won’t get it quite right, but it had to do with it being better that a man cast his seed into the belly of a whore than to spill it onto the ground. A pretty strong stand, one might say, against, ah, self-servicing.”
“Mary Magdalene was a whore,” Ed mumbled as the booze began to catch up with him.
“So she was.” Logan beamed at him. “In any case, my student’s point was that the female has no seed to cast anywhere or to spill on the ground. Therefore, it must only be a sin to masturbate if you’re a male.”
Ben remembered a couple of sweaty, terrifying sessions during puberty. “I had to say the whole damn rosary,” he muttered.
“I had to say it twice,” Logan put in, and for the first time saw Ben relax with a grin.
“What did you tell her?” Ed wanted to know.
“I told her the bible often speaks in generalities, that she should search her conscience. Then I looked up the quote myself.” He took a comfortable drink. “Damned if I didn’t think she had a point.”
Chapter 10
The Greenbriar Art Gallery was a small, fussy pair of rooms near the Potomac that stayed in business because people always buy the ridiculous if the price tag is high enough.
It was run by a crafty little man who rented the ramshackle building for a song and promoted his eccentric reputation by painting the outside puce. He favored long, unstructured jackets in rainbow hues, with half boots to match, and he smoked pastel cigarettes.
He had an odd, moon-shaped face and pale eyes that tended to flutter when he spoke of the freedom and expression of art. He tucked his profits tidily away in municipal bonds.
Magda P. Carlyse was an artist who became trendy when a former first lady had purchased one of her sculptures as a wedding present for the daughter of a friend. A few art critics had suggested that the first lady must not be too fond of the newlyweds, but Magda’s career had been launched.
Her showing at the Greenbriar Gallery was a huge success. People crammed into the room dressed in furs, denim, spandex, and silks.
Cappuccino was served in thimble-sized cups, along with mushroom quiches the size of quarters. A seven-foot black man wrapped in a purple cloak stood mesmerized by a sculpture of sheet metal and feathers.
Tess took a long look at it herself. It made her think of the hood of a truck that had passed through a migration of unfortunate geese.
“A fascinating combination of mediums, isn’t it?”
Tess rubbed a finger over her bottom lip before she glanced up at her date. “Oh, absolutely.”
“Powerfully symbolic.”
“Frightening,” she agreed, and lifted her cup to disguise a giggle. She’d heard of Greenbriar, of course, but had never found the time or the energy to explore this trendy little gallery. Tonight she was grateful for the distraction this gathering provided. “You know, Dean, I’m really delighted you thought of this. I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting my interest in popular, ah, art.”
“Your grandfather tells me you’ve been working too hard.”
“Grandpa worries too much.” She turned away to study a two-foot phallic tube that strained toward the ceiling. “But an evening here certainly takes your mind off everything else.”
“Such emotion, such insight,” a man in yellow silk bubbled to a woman in sable. “As you can see, the use of the broken light bulb symbolizes the destruction of ideas in a society that is driven toward a desert of uniformity.” Tess shifted away as the man gestured dramatically with his cigarette then glanced at the sculpture he raved about.
It had a G.E. seventy-five-watt bulb with a jagged hole just off center. The bulb was screwed into a plain wooden base of white pine. That was it, except for the fact that the little blue sticker indicated it had been sold. The price had been twelve hundred seventy-five dollars.
“Amazing,” Tess murmured, and was rewarded by a generous beam from Mr. Yellow Silk.
“It is quite innovative, isn’t it?” Dean smiled down at the bulb as if he’d created it himself. “And daringly pessimistic.”
“Words escape me.”
“I know just what you mean. The first time I saw it, I was struck dumb.”
Deciding against making the obvious comment, Tess merely smiled and moved on. She could do a paper, she thought, on the psychological implications-mass hysteria-that prompted people to actually pay for esoteric junk. She stopped by a glass square that had been filled with various size and colored buttons. Square, round, enameled, and cloth covered, they huddled and bumped together in the sealed box. The artist had called it “Population, 2010.” Tess figured a Girl Scout could have put it together in about three and a half hours. The price tag read a whopping seventeen hundred fifty.
With a shake of her head she started to turn back to her date, when she saw Ben. He was standing by another display, his hands in his back pockets and a look of unconcealed amusement on his face. His jacket was open.
