Act of Darkness (4 page)

It was because of the people who believed in God that moral questions had to be divided into two groups, that there had to be “hard questions” at all. Some of these people were drowning in superstition, and some of them were drowning in fear, but whatever they were drowning in they were managing to take a remarkable percentage of the rest of the country along with them. Things that ought to be perfectly simple, and private, and nobody’s business but your own, suddenly became complicated. You couldn’t come right out and tell the truth about them, because the God people twisted your words around and made you sound like Lizzie Borden. That was what had happened to her when she had given an interview to
People
about her mother. Patchen had been right about her mother. The old woman had been seventy, and the hip she had broken was never going to properly mend. What did it matter that she hadn’t been in a coma or brain dead or whatever you called it? Patchen didn’t think any rational person wanted to live when she knew she was going to be handicapped for the rest of her life, and she said so. Well, good Lord. You’d have thought she’d admitted to dumping nuclear waste in a game-preserve reservoir. She’d had pickets following her around for a month. It was just like Victoria Harte said. Most people were hopeless, locked into the hocus-pocus nightmares of their own imaginations. You had to walk right over them or you wouldn’t get anywhere at all.

Victoria Harte.

Patchen looked down at the collection of crystals and copper bracelets she had strewn across the coffee table and frowned. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and she couldn’t remember where the day had gone. It was always like this when she traveled. Getting to the airport and across the country and from the airport to the hotel seemed to eat up half her time, and then dealing with the hotel seemed to eat up the other half of it. Unlike Victoria Harte, Patchen didn’t stay at the Old Washington or travel with an entourage, although she did carry the home numbers of her astrologer and her channeler. She liked to stay in the kind of place real people stayed in, like the Sheraton or the Holiday Inn, in much the same way and for much the same reasons she preferred to wear jeans instead of designer dresses when she wasn’t at work. The problem was, the Sheraton and the Holiday Inn didn’t provide the kind of services the Old Washington did, and that she sometimes needed, as she needed them now. She needed them to ensure the privacy she would have to have if she expected to get Stephen into her bed on this trip, and she needed them to get in touch with Victoria Harte.

Victoria Harte. Victoria Harte. Victoria Harte.

Victoria Harte had been Patchen Rawls’s mentor, politically and theatrically. More than anyone else, Victoria ought to understand that marriage was an outdated institution, and shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with the natural course of natural passion. At the moment, Patchen Rawls was convinced that the natural course of natural passion was going to cause Stephen Whistler Fox to divorce his wife and marry Patchen Rawls instead.

Patchen got off the couch she’d been sitting on, went to the door of the smaller of the two bedrooms that opened off the living room of this suite, and knocked.

“Gerri?” she said. “Are you there?”

Gerri was her personal secretary, and Gerri was always there. There was the sound of bare feet on carpet, and the door opened.

“I’m answering mail,” Gerri said. “What do you want?”

Patchen bit her lip. She hated it when Gerri talked to her like—well, like just anybody. Sometimes she thought Gerri didn’t even respect her very much. She’d even tried to bring it up once, right out into the open, but the conversation had somehow ended up being about the Harmonic Conversion instead.

“It’s about Victoria Harte,” Patchen said. “I need to get in touch with her.”

“Do you?” Gerri’s eyebrows climbed up her forehead, all the way to her hairline. “Last we knew, Victoria Harte was not answering your calls. Her secretary called a little while ago to find out if you were going to the cocktail party,”

“Yes, I know, Gerri. But that’s just silly. She must have come to her senses by now.”

“Come to her senses about what? The fact that you’re trying to get her son-in-law away from her daughter?”

“Don’t be judgmental.”

“I’m not judging anything, for Christ’s sake. I’m stating a fact.”

“If that marriage wasn’t already dead, Stephen wouldn’t have been interested in me in the first place. I’m not trying to do anything, Gerri. Things just happened.”

“Right.”

“I want to talk to Victoria Harte.”

“Well,” Gerri said slowly, “if you wanted to tell her you weren’t going to that cocktail party tonight—”

“Of course I’m going. Stephen needs me.”

“—or that you weren’t going to Long Island Fourth-of-July weekend—”

“I have to go to Long Island Fourth-of-July weekend. I promised Stephen. That’s the weekend we’re going to, you know, get things settled.”

Gerri looked at her curiously. “Do you really think so? That it’s going to be settled your way, I mean?”

“Of course I do. It has to be settled my way.”

“Has to?”

“The only thing that could stop it is that slimy little Dan Chester. And you know what Amenhet-Ra said. I’m going to find a way to destroy my enemy.”

“Right,” Gerri said again. “Well, why don’t you get what’s-her-name to channel a message from Amenhet-Ra to Victoria Harte. That’s about the only way you’re going to get in touch with her. She wants your head and Stephen Fox’s both. If I were you, I’d be careful what you eat or drink if she’s been near the food.”

“Gerri.”

“I’ve got to finish this mail and pick up your dress at the cleaners.
Will
you let me get back to work?”

Patchen had to let Gerri get back to work, because Gerri shut the door in her face. Patchen stood looking at it, nonplussed. Gerri was invaluable, of course, and the best secretary Patchen had ever had when it came to dealing with the detail, but there were times Patchen really didn’t think it was working out.

She went back to the couch, and sat down again, and picked up one of the crystals. She was just jumpy, she thought. It was all that negative talk—all those bad emanations—about her and Stephen. That was what had done it. Of course Stephen was going to divorce Janet and marry her. He had to. It was in her horoscope.

Besides, Patchen was twenty-seven, and Janet Harte Fox was old.

U
SUALLY, WHEN JANET HARTE
Fox knew she had a political party to attend, she left the Emiliani School early, just after four, when games were over and prayer classes had not yet begun. Leaving early was one of the small prices she paid for being allowed to do what she wanted with her time. There were dozens of these small prices in her life, all of them thought up by Dan Chester and almost all of them having to do with the Emiliani School. It was Dan’s opinion, and therefore Stephen’s, that if she wanted to “do a little do-good work with retarded children,” she ought to do it at Kevin Debrett’s clinic in McLean. The Emiliani School was a cluster of refurbished buildings in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods in the District of Columbia. It was dangerous getting there from Foggy Bottom, and just as dangerous getting back. Worse, in Dan’s opinion, was actually being there: the Emiliani School had a “rep.” It had been founded by a little cluster of retired sisters from the Order of St. Francis as a place to bring up children with birth defects whose mothers, alerted in advance by amniocentesis, had originally intended to abort them. Because what amniocentesis most often pinpointed was Down syndrome, most of the children at Emiliani had that. Janet was always secretly amused that old Sister Mary Ambrose, who had founded the school in the first years after
Roe v Wade,
had named it after St. Jerome Emiliani, patron saint of orphans.

Now it was twenty minutes to six, there was a cocktail party at seven, and Janet was still at Emiliani, sitting at a long table in the writing classroom on the first floor of St. Charles Borromeo Hall. Next to her was a seven-year-old girl named Mary Alyse, who was working with great concentration on a large sheet of paper, making letters with a purple crayon. At the front of the room, near the blackboard, was Sister Mary James, an ancient nun in a habit so abbreviated it looked like a waitress’s uniform. That she wore a habit at all was dictated entirely by the preferences of the children, who liked to know, in as clear a way as possible, who was a nun and who was not. Within the limited framework of their experience, that distinction was very important. Nuns, even nuns they had never met before, could be trusted on sight. Other people required a period of testing.

Mary Alyse had drawn a large, wavering upside-down V in the middle of her paper. She sat back, contemplated it, and sat forward again. Then she drew an even wavier line across the V’s middle and sat back again. She smiled.

“A,” she said, with confidence.

“That’s right,” Janet said. “A.”

“I
write,
” Mary Alyse said.

“That’s right,” Janet said again. “You did write. And you’re going to go on writing.”

“No.” Mary Alyse frowned furiously and struggled to her feet. “I talk to the Blessed Mother now.” She looked appealingly at Sister Mary James, and broke into a smile when sister nodded. “I talk to the Blessed Mother now,” Mary Alyse said again. “I say thank-you.”

“Say thank-you for me, too,” Janet said.

Mary Alyse gave Janet a very dubious look. She had been taught that everyone talked to the Blessed Mother, everyone talked to God, everyone went to Mass and tried to be good—or, at least, that everyone nice did. Janet could see her trying to work it out—surely Janet could say thank-you to the Blessed Mother herself?—and then abandoning the effort. Mary Alyse’s face was taken over by an infinitely wise look that said
Here is another of those things people say but don’t really mean.
She leaned over, gave Janet a tremendous hug, and scampered out of the room.

Up at the front, Sister Mary James put her chalk back on the chalk shelf, dusted her hands against the coarse brown cloth of her habit skirt, and said, “I told you she would do it. It was only a matter of time.”

“I wish all of them could do it,” Janet said. She swiveled a little in her chair, toward the tall window that looked out on the asphalted playground. There were children out there, running and jumping in the heat, teasing and petting Sister Mary Vianney, who had playground watch. In a little while they would be called in for prayers and supper, then read to in the convent’s big living room before being sent off to bed. If the nuns insisted, the children would hear a new story, rewritten and illustrated by one of the sisters from a narrative in the Bible. If the nuns were being indulgent, though, the children would get what they wanted, a story they’d already heard a hundred times and wanted to hear again. According to Sister Mary James, Down syndrome children, like all children everywhere, wanted their favorites read to them “just one more time” into infinity.

In fact, Janet thought, the first thing you learned by spending time at Emiliani was that Down syndrome children
were
like children everywhere, exactly like, except for an intellectual slowness that made them take longer to learn some things than they would have if they hadn’t had the syndrome. Janet was beginning to think this slowness was less “stupidity,” as dear old Dan would put it, than most people thought. Patchen Rawls was stupid. The woman couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag and didn’t have the brains to realize she ought to try. Mary Alyse tried very hard, all the time, and practice was beginning to make perfect. Unlike Patchen, Mary Alyse would have no trouble at all knowing what was wrong with trying to use a copper bracelet to cure arthritis.

Unlike Patchen Rawls, Mary Alyse would have no trouble at all knowing what was wrong with trying to steal another woman’s husband, either.

Janet’s handbag was on the floor next to her seat. She picked it up, rummaged around inside, and came out with a comb.

“I saw an article about your husband in the paper this morning,” Sister Mary James said. “He’s sponsoring a bill to get a program going for children with Down syndrome. Did you talk him into that?”

“No,” Janet said. Then, realizing how rude she must have sounded, she added, “I didn’t know anything about it until four days ago. He and his chief of staff worked it out between them.”

“It’s a good idea,” Sister Mary James said. “We’re in a very unusual situation here. And vocations are down, all across the country, in every Catholic parish. The Church can’t take up the burden everywhere, the way things are.”

“Is it a burden?”

“Working here?” Sister Mary James smiled. “I had to fight three other sisters to get it. I love working here. But laypeople have to be paid, Mrs. Fox. And paying costs money.”

“Mmm,” Janet said. She had been a political wife long enough to know all about political money. What she didn’t say—and what Sister Mary James didn’t say either, although she knew it just as well—was that the Emiliani School wouldn’t get any, even if the bill passed unanimously in both houses of Congress. Its pro-life stance was too uncompromising and too well known, its links with Rome were too public, its determination to be not just a school but a Catholic school was too frequently and too insistently proclaimed. There was also the simple fact that the sisters did not have the money to hire a lobbyist or to attend seminars on Long Island at $100,000 a pop. When the dealing got started, the Emiliani School wasn’t even going to make the bottom of the subsidizing list. The fact that it was the country’s best facility for the education of retarded children wouldn’t matter at all.

If Stephanie had had a chance to grow up, this is the kind of place I’d have wanted to send her to school, Janet thought—and then she shut it down, shut it down fast, because even after all this time thinking about Stephanie made her come apart.

Sister Mary James was looking at her curiously, worriedly, as if the panorama of her confusion had been playing unhindered across her face. Janet made herself straighten her shoulders and smile.