The Fancy Dancer

And you responded very well.” As he kept talking, it was plain that he’d kept close track of St. Mary’s parish business.
    “More than that,” he said, fixing his kitten-soft gray eyes on mine, “you seem to have won the admiration of most of the town.”
    He was silent for a moment, sitting very still. Every priest in the diocese knew that Bishop Carney liked to use his physical stillness to test the poise of an interviewee. Anything you did, even normal things like breathing, seemed fidgety by comparison.
    “Which brings me to one of the few exceptions,” he said. “Your famous Mrs. Shoup has been to see »
    me.
    My heart sank. There was no point pretending that I had a chance at the secretary’s job, now or ever.
    “So I presume you know what this is about,” he said.
    It took every ounce of strength to sit there straight and quiet, and not fall apart in front of the Bishop’s eyes.
    ‘Yes, I do,” I said. “Father Vance told me.”
    The Bishop’s keen eyes took in what must have been my strained look, the dark smudges and lines under my eyes.
    “I had a long talk on the telephone yesterday with Father Vance,” he said. “Of course he’s very indignant at this woman’s accusation. But I wanted to talk to you too. Because it is, as you realize, a veiy serious accusation. And also because we’ve had our eye on you for some time.”
    He sat there very still, thinking again, his hands making a steeple in front of his chin, his elbows resting on the beginnings of a stomach under the cassock.
    Suddenly he took another unexpected tack.
    “Last year,” he said musingly, “I attended the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington. For the first tune in the Church’s long history, we saw a nationwide organization of Catholic homosexuals attempting to make official contact with us. As many priests and religious belong to it as laymen. Needless to say, it was quite a shock.”
    I knew without his telling me that this was Dignity.
    “However, they were so—shall we say—well-behaved that we consented to meet with them. Frankly, we were curious to see what they had to say for themselves. They weren’t permitted to address the general assembly. But our committee did meet with them and examine their . . . ah . . . basic philosophy and their demands. I was on that committee.”
    He paused, musing again, looking out the window at the Helena flats and the mountain slopes beyond. The phone on his desk seemed to be ringing, and I wondered why he didn’t answer it.
    The Bishop changed tack a third time, and shot a question at me.
    “What is your opinion of the homosexual issue, Father?”
    Knocked a little off balance by this question, I pulled myself together. There was no harm in an honest general answer.
    “I think it’s a serious issue,” I said. “A handful of well-written pastoral letters are not going to make it go away.”
    “I agree,” said the Bishop. “All through the history of the civil rights movement, the Church has been in the forefront, for the black people, for Indians and Chicanos, for women. Now states and cities all over the country are starting to pass what they call gay rights laws, and the Church is opposing them. I am very troubled by this. It’s one thing to oppose the murder of an unborn child . . . but it’s another to oppose civil rights laws for a minority, however repugnant the Church may find that minority.”
    I sat there in hallucinating silence, as physically still as the Bishop.
    “Father Meeker,” said Bishop Carney, “the truthfulness with which you answer the next few questions will determine how we handle your case. Do you understand that?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “These charges of Mrs. Shoup’s—are they true?”
    Maybe it was my sleepless state, in which the contents of my subconscious lay naked to the big sky. Maybe it was my weariness with the endless lies and word games. Maybe it was the realization that now I had nothing more to lose. Maybe it was God who gave me strength, they way He did to those Jesuit martyrs in the tapestries. For the first time in my life, I discovered that when your back is to the wall, the only way you can go is forward.
    “Yes, they’re true,” I said.
    The Bishop’s gray eyes were boring into mine. The kitten was getting ready to pounce on a fluttering moth. “But you told Father Vance they were not true.”
    “No, I didn’t,” I said. “He never even asked me if they were true. He was so mad at