It was a small building, simple and calm. The pews were well filled, Kate thought, for a weekday morning. There were two priests near the altar, and a woman at the lecturn reading aloud earnestly from the Bible. Kate chose a back pew, sat one space from the aisle, and listened to the service.
She hadn’t even thought to ask what kind of church this was. She knew that each school in the Graduate Theological Union was run by a different church, or an order within a church—the first building with the silent but friendly monk, for example, had been the Franciscan school. However, Church Divinity School of the Pacific could be anything. The service going on in the front was vaguely like the familiar Catholic Mass, but she imagined that most churches would at least be similar. Rosalyn, she thought she remembered, had belonged to a small, largely gay and lesbian denomination, but it surely could not be the possessor of a grand setup like this.
She looked at the books of various sizes and colors in the holder in front of her. The first one she pulled out was a Bible, which didn’t help much. The next one she tried was a small limp volume, its onionskin pages covered with Greek writing and a sprinkling of English headings such as “The ministry of John the Baptist” and “The five thousand fed.” That went back into the holder, too. At this point, the man next to her took pity on the poor heathen. He handed her a book, put his finger to the page to guide her reading, and smiled in encouragement.
She studied the page for a minute, which seemed to offer alternate choices for prayers, and then flipped to the front of the book: The Book of Common Prayer didn’t tell her much, but farther down the title page she came across the key words
Everyone stood up. Kate nearly dropped the prayer book, then rose belatedly to her feet. There was a reading and a brief hymn, for which she had to flip back thirty pages in the prayer book, after which came a familiar prayer called the Apostles’ Creed, forty pages ahead of the hymn. Then everyone kneeled down to recite an unfamiliar version of the Lord’s Prayer.
After the “Amen” some people sat, although others stayed on their knees,- Kate compromised by perching on the edge of her pew. Her view of Erasmus, partial before, was now limited to the top of his head, and it would not be improved short of sitting on her neighbor’s lap. The important thing was not to let him leave, and she could see him well enough to prevent that. She glanced through her prayer book, looking up regularly at the shaggy graying head in the second pew. She learned that The Book of Common Prayer had been ratified on October 16, 1789,- that the saint’s day for Mary Magdalene was July 22 and that of the martyrs of New Guinea, 1942, was September 2.
There was a shuffle and everyone stood up again with books in their hands, but not the book Kate held. Fortunately, the hymnal was clearly marked on its cover, so she traded the two books, found the page by looking over her neighbor’s arm, and joined the hymn in time for the final verse. When they sat, it was time again for the prayer book, but at that point Kate decided the hell with it and just sat in an attitude of what she hoped looked like pious attentiveness.
More words from the altar, response from the congregation, another hymn, a final blessing, and then everyone was rising and chattering in release. Kate stayed in her pew, allowing the people on the inside to push past her until the two men she had been watching hove into view, and she realized that she had made a profound mistake: The unkempt graying head belonging to the ratty tweed turned out to be that of a much younger, shorter, and beardless man. Brother Erasmus, on the other hand, was wearing an immaculate black cassock that swept from shoulders to feet in an elegant arc, broken only by the white rectangle of a clerical collar at his throat. Brother Erasmus was dressed as a priest.
She tore her eyes from him and studied the altar as he went past, his head down, listening to something the dean was saying. She turned to follow them out, noticing Brother Erasmus do two interesting things. First, an older woman wearing rather too much makeup hesitated as if to speak to him. Without breaking stride, he reached out his left hand, fixed it gently to the woman’s cheek in a gesture of intimacy and comfort, and took it away again. The woman turned away, beaming,- the dean kept talking,-a gold ring had gleamed dully from the fourth finger of the Brother’s hand. Then, as they reached the doors to go out, Erasmus took a step to one side and reached out for a tall stick that stood against the wall. Outside in the sun, Kate could see that it was a gleaming wooden staff. Its finial had been carved to resemble a man’s head, with a bit of ribbon, colorless and frayed with age, around its throat. The stick was almost precisely the same height as the man, who did not so much lean on it as caress it, stroke it, and welcome it as a part of his body—a part temporarily removed.
Kate looked at the fist-sized knob on top of the heavy stick and found herself wondering if the postmortem now going on across the bay would find that the man John had been killed by a blow to the head.
A part of the congregation now dispersed, most of them touching Erasmus somehow—a handshake, a pat on the back, a brief squeeze of his elbow—before leaving. The dean was one of them, and he added a brief wave as he walked off, fingers raised at waist level before his arm dropped to his side.
Erasmus himself, surrounded by fifteen or twenty of his fellow worshipers, moved off and down the steps Kate and Rosalyn had come up, which led to the grassy courtyard and the adjoining refectory. Kate trailed behind. She had to see the dean, who she assumed was the man in authority here, but first she needed to be certain that Erasmus would not leave the area.
However, he planted his staff into the damp turf with an attitude of permanence and then stood, his hands thrust deep into pockets let into the side of his cassock, eyes focused at his feet, while people drifted onto the grass, standing about or leaning against the walls, all of them expectant. It occurred to Kate that she had not yet seen him utter a word, but these people were obviously waiting for him to do so, with half smiles on their lips and sparkles of anticipation in their eyes.
Silence fell. Brother Erasmus raised his head, took his hands from his pockets and held them out, palms up, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth to sing. In a shining baritone the words of the Psalm sung by the congregation a short time before rang out and reverberated against the brick and the glass: “Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God. The Lord builds up Jerusalem, he gathers the outcasts of Israel,” he sang joyously. “The Lord lifts up the downtrodden, he casts the wicked to the ground.” And then he stopped, as abruptly as if a hand had seized his throat.
For a very long time, Brother Erasmus did not speak. The smiles began to fade,- people began to glance at one another and fidget. Then, unexpectedly, the man in the priest’s robe sank slowly to his knees, and when he lifted his face, there were tears leaking from his closed eyelids, running down his weathered cheeks, and dripping from his beard. A shudder of shock ran through the assembly. Two or three people took a step forward; several more took a step back. Erasmus began to speak in a deep and melodious voice that had the faintest trace of an English accent, more a rhythm than an accent. At the moment, it was also hoarse with emotion.
“O Lord, rebuke me not in thy anger, nor chasten me in thy wrath! For thy arrows have sunk into me, and thy hand has come down on me. There is no soundness in my flesh because of thy indignation,- there is no health in my bones because of my sin.” His beautiful voice paused to draw a breath that was more like a groan, and the noise seemed to find an echo in the electrified audience. Whatever they had been expecting, it was not this. “My wounds grow foul and fester because of my foolishness, I am utterly bowed down and prostrate,- all the day I go about in mourning.”
It was something biblical, Kate could tell, but with little relation to the readings she had heard in the chapel half an hour earlier,- those cool tones had been nothing like this.
“My loins are filled with burning, and there is no soundness in my flesh. I am utterly spent and crushed; I groan because of the tumult in my heart.” The young man standing next to Kate did moan, deep in his throat. Nearby, a thin young woman began openly to weep. “I am like a deaf man, I do not hear, like a dumb man who does not open his mouth. Yea, I am like a man who does not hear, and in whose mouth are no rebukes.” He paused again, eyes still shut, swallowed, and finished in an almost inaudible voice. “Do not forsake me, O Lord. O my God, be not far from me.”
He bent forward until his forehead touched the grass, held the position for a moment, then knelt back onto his heels again. His eyes opened and he smiled a smile of such utter sweetness that Kate was instantly aware that Brother Erasmus was not altogether normal. Disappointment and relief hit her at the same moment and dispelled the spookiness of the scene she’d just watched: Probably a third of San Francisco’s homeless population had some
