The Fancy Dancer

mortification and prayer ..
    My head seemed to be clearing. I had a weird feeling of coming out of the haze, and I stared at him steadily. My intuition told me that he was not talking about himself. He was just a realist about other men that he knew.
    “Or,” I said, “he can live openly as a gay priest.”
    “Would you do that?”
    “I’ve tried your first two alternatives. Either way, you do violence to yourself. And, well, it’s hard to stay hidden. There’s always a Mrs. Shoup who sniffs you out.”
    The Bishop sat down in his Gothic chair again. He seemed to be coming to a decision.
    “You’re young,” he said. ‘You’re just becoming aware of your—ah—tendency. It may be permanent. It may be only a temporary phase. In any case, I don’t want to be the one who throws you away. You know that line in Shakespeare, Father, about the base Indian who throws away the pearl. That line should have come from the Bible—”
    I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
    “I had thought of you as a possible secretary,” he said. “But there is a post that would better use your activist talents. I am creating a diocesan council on the order of the one you started in Cottonwood. It will examine and report to me on contemporary problems as they affect my diocese. But economic problems and moral problems such as the one you are so familiar with. Will you serve, Father?”
    I was open-mouthed.
    “Among your duties, you would maintain a liaison 217
    with these Dignity people. I want to stay informed of what they’re doing, because I don’t doubt that a chapter will be popping up in my own diocese one of these days. But I’ll insist that you conduct yourself with dignity, small d. No public scandal of any kind, is that clear?”
    I shook my head dazedly.
    “I don’t know what to say.”
    The Bishop smiled a little. Like most bishops, he enjoyed surprises, and he was relishing the rather fiendish one he’d sprung on me.
    “You were sure I would order you away on a long retreat to recant your sexual heresy,” he said. “Well, as a matter of fact, by the look of you, I’d say that a good retreat, and some rest and food, might not be a bad idea before you report for duty.”
    I sat thinking. Bishop Carney was kidding himself. He was sure my state was “transitional,” and that I would grow out of it. By plunging me into the kind of intensely humanistic activity that I loved, he hoped to help the process along. If I agreed to serve, wouldn’t I be deceiving him?
    On the other hand, Doric had talked so much about how it was better to dialogue with the Church from the inside than make noises at Her from the outside. Doric would tell me that I was being offered a magnificent chance. But something inside of me shrank back from this very chance.
    “What about Father Vance?” I asked. “How can I leave him?”
    “I have just the young curate for him,” growled the Bishop. “Father Vance will have him in shape in no time.”
    “What about Mrs. Shoup?” I asked.
    “I have told her that she is not to interfere anymore in disciplinary matters regarding my priests. So . . . do you accept, Father?”
    » a »
    My father was at the bank, but my mother was home. She was out in the side yard, cutting the last of her roses before the first frost hit.
    “Tom,” she cried. “What a surprise. Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?”
    We went in the house. She arranged the roses in a cut glass bowl and put them on the dining-room table. Then she and I sat at the table with cups of coffee. The peacefulness of the early afternoon light streaming through the windows, and the gentle curls of steam going up from the cups, seemed to have no relationship whatever to my tom-up insides. I felt like I had a fever of 102°.
    “You’ll want to say good-bye to Rosie,” Mother said. "She’s leaving at the end of the month.”
    “What’re you and Father going to do?”
    “Oh, we’re buying a nice little house down on the flats,” she said. “Not far from St. Peter’s Hospital and the governor’s house. Then we’re going to convert this house into apartments, one upstairs and one downstairs, and rent them.” She looked around. “That’ll be less sad than selling the house.”
    “But won’t it be sad to think of strangers living here?”
    “Oh, no,” she said. “There are happy feelings in the walls. Anybody who lives here after us can feel them.”
    I was sitting there burning alive, playing with my