The Fancy Dancer

I said as casually as I could.
    My parents looked him up and down, and smilingly said they were pleased to meet him. Rosie set an extra place at the table, and we ate dinner at one. My parents were very nice to Vidal, but I could detect a little strain in the air. But how could they possibly know, or even guess, what we’d been doing the night before?
    When we were having our after-dinner Drambuie and my mother was showing Vidal some of her coins, my father said quietly, “Tom, you look awful tired. Can’t you take a vacation?”
    “I guess you’re right,” I said wearily. “There’s a conference coming up in Denver. Maybe Father Vance will let me go for a week.”
    “A conference isn’t a vacation,” said my father. “Maybe you’d like to just come here and eat and sleep for a week.”
    “Believe me,” I said, “just getting away from Cottonwood for a week will be a vacation.”
    “Well, you ought to do it,” my father said. “I can’t remember when I’ve seen you look so bad. You look like something the cat brought in.”
    After a moment, he asked, even more quietly, “Tom, maybe it’s none of my business, but . . . have you been drinking?”
    a a a
    Next I was supposed to drive over to Carroll College for confession. But I didn’t have the nerve. I called Father Matt, told him I was exhausted, and canceled.
    Father Matt said, “Tom, I’ve begun to feel that you’re hiding something from me.”
    “Hiding something?” My stomach plunged with fright. “No, I’m not hiding anything. I’m just halfcrazy from being tired.”
    I talked a lot into the phone about my fatigue and 142
    pretty much convinced him. Finally he said, “The conference .. . that’s the one at Regis College, isn’t it? Why don’t I give Father Vance a call and tell him I think you need a little breath of air?”
    11
    I came home to Cottonwood with a crushing sense of having been humbled. In His mysterious way, God had used the Silver State Ball to show me my weaknesses, and to show me that there was nothing infallible or automatic about my capacity to care for other people.
    In the days that followed, as I rushed around doing the regular parish work, I made a resolution. Never again, with God’s help, would I be guilty of a lapse like that.
    Up until now, Vidal had been my guide. Finally I took my first shaky steps on my own. Vidal had insisted that gay people were my new “parish,” and now, for the first time, I looked for the boundaries of that parish in Cottonwood itself.
    An estimated ten percent of Americans are homosexual. So, even allowing for the fact that so many gays are concentrated in urban areas like New York City and southern California, it still meant that maybe two hundred of the 3500 people in Cottonwood had to be gay. They were not visible, but logic told me that they had to be there.
    So, who were they?
    These secret gays of Cottonwood haunted my waking hours, my prayers, and even my dreams. What stores did they work in? What streets did they live on? Did they live on “nice” streets or on the “other side of the tracks”? What post-office mailboxes did they use? Were there any in the high school? The county old-folks’ home? The sawmill? The jail? The small police force?
    I had a wish that was raw and painful as a bruise, to reach out and touch their lives, know their thoughts and feelings, taste their guilts and their joys. Were any of them free spirits like Vidal? Not too likely. Were they racked with guilt like me? Probably.
    People sometimes talked about A1 Bovington, who owned the florist shop next to the bank, and played the organ for the Presbyterian Church. They said he was “kind of a fruit.” But by now I knew from Vidal that being outwardly effeminate and gentle is not necessarily being gay.
    Once, during those first days in August, I glimpsed the shore of that hidden continent of feeling in my town. And it turned out to be the most shattering experience I’d had so far as a priest.
    8 8 8
    Missy Oldenberg was looking pretty poor, and her doctor and I both had the feeling that she was going to die soon. She had a bladder condition that subjected her to attacks of pain and vomiting. The doctor felt that Missy was already too weak to stand up to an operation.
    So I visited Missy and her friend Clare Faux a couple of times a week, and spent an hour. Seeing the county old folks’ home had opened my eyes to the urgency of making old people feel cared-for.
    The two ladies’