hopeless. You’re articulate, skilled—you could have a job.”
“Oh indeed, I taught art history at UCLA,” she said, and seeing Kate’s astonishment, she added, “There’s really quite an interesting intellectual community among the street people here. I’ve met an astrophysicist, a couple of other university and college teachers, three computer programmers, and a handful of published poets. To say nothing of the young men, and a few women, who make a deliberate choice to remove themselves from the race of the middle-class rat and as a form of practical philosophy choose this admittedly extreme form of freedom. Wasn’t it Solzhenitsyn who said that a person is free only when there’s nothing more you can take away from him? Dreary man, but unfortunately often right.”
“And you?”
“Oh no, dear. You don’t want to hear about me, it’s not a very pretty story.” Her voice remained light, but her eyes began to shoot around the room, looking for an escape from this topic. Kate relented and gave her one.
“Tell me about Erasmus, then. He won’t, or can’t, tell us anything except that he’s a fool.”
“I told you all I know about him. He comes to us on Sunday morning and leaves us on Tuesday. While he is here, he tells us stories from the Bible, sings hymns, leads us in prayer.
He listens, with all his being he listens, and does not judge. The disturbed are quieted,- the drunks are calmed,- the angry begin to see that there may be ways they can help themselves. He looks, and he sees,- he listens, and he hears. This alone is an unusual experience for most homeless people: We are used to being either invisible or an annoyance. He brings dignity into the lives of those who have lost it. He is like… he is like a small fire that we warm our hands over. What else can I say?“
“But you don’t have any idea who he is or where he came from?”
“He came here in the summer. It would have been two summers ago, I suppose. How time does fly. He gives us Sunday and Monday, he gives the people at this place with the holy hill Wednesday and Thursday.”
“And the other days?”
“Travel, I suppose,” Beatrice said dismissively, but her eyes began to roam and her fingers gave a twitch on the knife.
“Does it take two days to get back from Berkeley?” Kate asked mildly.
“I was never much for distance walking myself.” Beatrice was retreating fast, but this time Kate would not let her go.
“Where does Erasmus go on Saturdays?”
“I have to get back to my drawing.”
“Just tell me where he goes.”
“The world is a big place.”
“Where does he go?”
“It has many needs,” Beatrice said wildly. “Even the world needs comfort.”
“He is off comforting the world?”
“They don’t deserve him. They don’t understand him. All they see is the surface, shallow, silly, violent—no, not that, I didn’t mean that!” she said quickly, looking frightened. “I meant crazy
“Beatrice,” Kate said evenly, “I know Erasmus performs for the tourists at Fishermen’s Wharf. You haven’t told me anything I don’t know. I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you, but I could see that you were trying to hide something about Erasmus and I wanted to know what it was.” Kate did not make it a habit to apologize to witnesses she’d been pressing, but this woman, strong to look at, struck her as being too fragile to leave in an upset condition. Besides, she wanted her friendly and helpful in the future. “Trust me. I won’t be misled by his act for the tourists. Okay? Good. There was just one other thing: Was there ever any direct animosity that you saw between Erasmus and John?”
This last question blew Kate’s soothing words out of the water. Beatrice slapped the top down on her tin box, picked up box and pad, and rose to her feet.
“Don’t I get my drawing?” Kate asked mildly. Beatrice tucked the box under her arm, flipped open the pad and tore off the page, and dropped it on the cluttered table. It was a caricature, a clever one, that emphasized the look of dry cynicism Kate sometimes felt looking out from her eye. She started to thank Beatrice, but the woman had already moved off to another table and was fumbling with unsteady hands at the clasp of her box. Kate put on her jacket, fished two five-dollar bills out of her purse to shove into the for the artist cup, and rolled the caricature gently into a tube.
It was raining lightly when she stepped out onto the street, raining heavily when she got home, and for the first time in her life she lay awake and wondered where the homeless were resting their heads this night.
¦
TWELVE
¦
Saturday morning was clear and clean and cold, and Kate stood drinking her coffee in a patch of sunlight that poured through a high side window onto the living room floor, wearing her flannel robe, talking to Al Hawkin on the telephone, and speculating with one part of her mind on how Beatrice and Erasmus fared this day.
“Fine. Good,” she was saying. “No, I don’t think there’s any need for you to cancel. I’m only going because I’m curious, after Beatrice’s reaction. He probably just talks dirty or something that embarrassed her,- I don’t think she was actually trying to hide anything from me. Right. Fine, yes I have Jani’s number.
I’ll call you if anything comes up; otherwise I’ll talk to you tonight. Have a good time, Al. Say hi to Jani and Jules for me. Bye.“
She pushed the off button and dropped the handset into her pocket, then closed her eyes and absorbed the pleasure of the winter sunlight in the silent house. Saturday mornings, Jon and Lee went to a pottery class, where they produced lopsided bowls and strange shapes from the unconscious. Three whole hours with a house that held only her was a treat she looked forward to every week,- illicit, never mentioned, and resented when her job or an illness—Lee’s, Jon’s, or the pottery teachers—took it from her. This morning she could have half of it before she went hunting Brother Erasmus in his Fishermen’s Wharf manifestation.
Normally she kept this time for something unrelated to daily life: loud music, frozen waffles with maple syrup, a book in a two-hour bath. Not today, though. She pulled a pillow from the sofa and dropped it onto the patch of sunlight. A million dust motes flew up, and she settled herself with a fresh cup of coffee and the folders from Professor Whitlaw. Very soon this case would be pushed to a back burner, superseded by another, probably one considered more pressing than the odd death of a homeless man in a park. But Erasmus interested her—no, he bugged her. He was an unscratched itch, and she wanted him dealt with. So she read the impenetrable files for a second time, this time with a lined pad to write questions on, things she needed to know.
Did Erasmus have the scar of a removed tattoo on his left cheekbone? Might John have had one?
There must have been some organization behind the Fools movement. Where were the original Fools? Someone must have known Erasmus.
Who was the David Sawyer whose notes were marked as a personal communication from 1983? A Fool?
Kate wanted more details on the crimes committed by Fools, both misdemeanors and felonies, primarily the names of those arrested for attempted kidnapping (later dropped) and the murder of the bystander in Los Angeles.
The sun had moved, and Kate scooted the pillow across the wooden floor so as to be fully in it again, then opened Professor Whitlaw’s folder, the one with the loose scraps and notes. She picked up one page at random, and read:
It used to be thought that only through the prayers of aescetic monks did the world maintain itself against the forces of evil, that monks were on the front lines of the battle against evil. Now, we are willing to grant monastic orders their place, for those of excessive sensitivity as well as a place of retreat and spiritual renewal for normal people. However, when a monk comes out of his monastery, we are baffled, and when confronted with a Saint Francis making mischief and behaving without a shred of decorum, we call him mad, not holy, and threaten him with iron bars and tranquillisers.
Christianity is, by its core nature, more akin to folly than it is to the Pope’s massive corporation. The central dictate of Christian doctrine is humility, in imitation of Christ’s ultimate self-humbling. Christians are mocked, persecuted, small: The powerful so-called Christian empires are the real perversion of the Gospel, not the Holy
