The Fancy Dancer

a
    When I got back to the rectory that day, Father Vance yelled at me out of his office door.
    “Father Meeker! Will you come in here?”
    As I went in, my mind got busy inventing a cover story for the hour spent at Drummond.
    Father Vance was sitting at his desk, opening his mail. Just the way he was using the letter opener told me he was boiling mad. He shoved it under the flap and ripped the envelope open in one neat swoop like a vengeful sheepman disemboweling a coyote.
    My legs got a little shaky. Now the price would be paid in full for the talk with Larry.
    But that wasn’t what Father Vance wanted to see me about.
    “Shut the door,” he snapped.
    I obeyed. Through his open window, and through the thick screen of lilac leaves outside it, we could hear the yell of boys playing baseball on the academy playground across the street.
    “I don’t want Mrs. Bircher to hear,” said Father Vance. “She’s as free with her tongue as she is with butter when she bakes cookies. Sit down, Father.”
    A scorching feeling was spreading across my chest, back and shoulders, under the cassock. It made me feel cold, and I shivered.
    “You and I,” said Father Vance, “are going to have a plenary session right now about what to do with that Shoup woman. This time she’s gone too far.”
    “What did she do?”
    “She was in here to see me this morning,” fumed Father Vance. “She tried to tell me some kind of trumped-up story about you.”
    All the blood was falling out of my head, as if someone had poured it out of a bucket from a small plane flying at fifteen thousand feet, and it was falling in dizzy drops toward the earth nearly three miles below.
    “It’s all these women’s lib ideas,” Father Vance was fuming. “First they want to leave their Christian homes to be senators and phone-company linemen. Then they want to be deacons and priests. Next thing you know, some bra-less old biddy is going to want to be the Pope. And in the meantime—” his voice was rising, “—this two-bit inquisitor comes in here and is telling me how to ran my parish, and what to think about my own curate. Well, boy howdy, I told her if she didn’t cut it out, she wouldn’t get any absolution from me the next time she comes around on Saturday. I told her she was committing a mortal sin of gross slander.”
    “What did she say about me?” I asked, trying desperately hard to look only halfway concerned.
    Father Vance ripped open the last envelope as if it was the belly of a sheep-eating wolf. “She was insinuating that there is something unnatural in your friendship with Vidal.”
    Those drops of blood were spaced out now, and falling with the speed of light. The trees and mountainsides were rushing up toward them.
    “Unnatural?” I said, as if I didn’t know what the word meant. There had to be Academy Awards for acting jobs like mine.
    “She and her husband went down to the Denver conference. She says they saw a lot of you down there.”
    “Well, not a lot,” I said. “We had lunch three or four times at the cafeteria. They’re not my most favorite people in the world, so ...”
    “She said Vidal was down there too. You didn’t tell me that he was going down.”
    I shrugged casually. “It didn’t seem to matter. He went down on his own. He had some vacation coming, so he took it. There’s a sister of his living in Denver. He spent some time with her and some time with me. I didn’t see too much of him because I was tied up with the conference.”
    So far, so good. Nothing that was really a lie.
    “Oh, I didn’t know about the sister,” said Father Vance.
    “She’s married and has two little kids in school. Her husband is a Blackfeet too. He’s a carpenter. Vidal took me over there one evening and we had dinner.” Father Vance was beginning to relax a little.
    “Now, let me tell you, young man, the Shoups did a little bit of private-eye stuff down there. I’m not saying that what they did was right. But they followed you around a little. She told me that you and Vidal stayed together.”
    I shook my head as if wonders never cease.
    “There’s a priest in Denver who was in my class at the seminary,” I said. “To save some money, he put me up at the house of a friend of his, a Catholic who teaches at Denver U. The professor had plenty of room, so he put Vidal up too. I don’t see what’s so strange about that. Vidal can’t afford a room at the Brown Palace. That’s where the Shoups stayed, the