The Fancy Dancer

and hold back his sin, we just talked.
    “The sixties, Father, they weren’t so bad, were they?”
    “They were all right,” I said. “But the party’s over.” “I’ll say,” he said. “How did you spend the sixties, Father? I don’t know why the fuck I’m calling you father, we’re the same age. How old are you, Father?” “Twenty-eight.”
    “I’m coming twenty-seven in July.”
    “Well,” I said. “I didn’t do much different from you. I was class president at Helena High, and I played football, and I studied music for about ten years.”
    “You play the organ real nice.”
    “I’ve just about forgotten how to play. My parents had a lot of fights about where I was going to go to school. Only thing I can ever remember them fighting about. My father wanted me to go to Harvard business school and play college ball—”
    “Harvard,” said Vidal. “Lah-de-dah, whoop-de-do.” “My mother wanted me to go to Juilliard and be another E. Power Biggs. I couldn’t stand the arguing, and I had other things on my mind. I went a year to Montana U. and then I dropped out and joined VISTA.”
    “We must have been at Missoula together. Funny I never met you.”
    “Well, you were in education, and I was in the music school. Not too surprising we didn’t meet.”
    “VISTA. Christ, Where’d you go, New York or something?”
    “California. And that was where I decided I wanted to go home and be a priest.”
    Vidal shook his head. “Everybody knows the Catholic Church is on its last legs. Why does anybody want to be a priest?”
    I sat silent for a moment. He really didn’t have any business asking me that question yet, because he didn’t know me well enough. But strangely enough, I wanted to answer it. Something in me fumbled around for the right words.
    “Isn’t that like saying that it isn’t worth being a president after Watergate?” I said.
    Vidal kept after me stubbornly, and I sensed that there was some motive behind his questioning.
    “Do you really believe in all that old shit, Father? About abortions and divorce and sex?”
    I looked at him studyingly. “To be honest with you, the way things are right now, I believe that the only thing a person can do is follow his conscience. The only real judge of that is God, isn’t He?”
    “So if I had sex with a person, and it was against what the Church said, and if I really believed I had done the right thing, then everything would be okay?”
    I searched in his eyes and his face for the anxiety that ought to be there. What I saw was not anxiety, but just a peaceful, stoned curiosity. So he was really asking me what my attitudes were.
    “If you really believed you were right, you would be okay,” I said.
    I rolled my eyes up toward heaven and said, “Father Vance would crucify me if he could hear that But that’s what I think.”
    My watch said eight-thirty. We were getting nowhere fast, and I had to go to a meeting of the parish council pretty soon.
    “What’s really on your mind?” I said. “You didn’t come up here just to tell me you smoke Bitterroot weed. In the church the other night, you acted like somebody who’s pretty disturbed about something.” Vidal turned his head to one side for a moment, as if considering whether to spill it or keep it back. I was struck by his profile, so fine that it might have been pried off a Roman coin. Even the wavy hair, which brushed his rumpled embroidered collar, gave him a classical look. But he was no pretty body for Hadrian. He was too old, and too scarred, and too wild, and he was tainted by the touch of woman.
    He looked around the office uneasily, then back at me.
    “This place is almost as bad as that little box in the church. I don’t like talking in here.”
    “Maybe you’d like to talk somewhere else.”
    “Do they let you have supper with people?”
    “Sure they do. I’m not a prisoner, for Chrissake.” “How about you come to our house for supper tomorrow night?”
    “No can do. Tomorrow night is bingo night. How about Wednesday?”
    “Okay. Wednesday.” He got up. “I’ve sure wasted your time, haven’t I, Father?”
    I got up too. “Not unless you think you have.”
    No one else was waiting for counseling, so I walked Vidal out.
    The sun was just getting low over the mountain range to the west. The clouds looked as if some heavenly neon sign maker had gone crazy and wired them all for colors: reds, coppers, yellows, pinks. We walked slowly along the