Virgin (5 page)

But how many
homeless did Senator Arthur Crenshaw know?

These were people. It was easy to forget that. Yes, they were on
the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder--hell, most of them had fallen
off
the
ladder--and they sure as hell didn't look like much. They tended to be
dirty and smell bad and dress in clothing that wasn't fit for the rag pile.
They offered nothing that society wanted, and some of them undoubtedly had AIDS
and wouldn't be around much longer anyway. But each had a name and a
personality, and they'd hoped and dreamed about the future before they'd
forgotten how. Truth was, they could all vanish into smoke and the world would
not be appreciably poorer, and only a few would mark their passing, and even
fewer would mourn them.

But they were
people,
dammit!

People.

Not a cause.

People.

Dan hated that
the homeless had become such a trendy cause, with big-name comedians and such
doing benefits for
them. But after the stars
took their bows, after they were limoed back to their Bel Aire estates, Dan
stayed downtown and rubbed elbows with those homeless. Every day.

And sometimes at the end of a particularly discouraging day of
elbow-rubbing with the folks who wandered in and out of the kitchen he ran in
the basement of St. Joseph's church, even Dan found a certain guilty attraction
in Crenshaw's Domicile Plan. Sometimes he wondered if maybe Crenshaw could
indeed do more for them than he ever could. But at least with Dan they had a
choice, and that was important.

And that was
why they had come here tonight.

They stood
quietly now, waiting for their last-minute instructions. They numbered about
thirty, mostly males. Dan had hoped for more. Forty or fifty had promised to
make the march but he was well satisfied with a two-thirds showing. You quickly
learned to lower your expectations when working with these people. It came with
the territory. After all, if they had enough control over their lives to act
responsibly, if they knew how to follow through with a plan--even as simple a
plan as gathering in Tompkins Square at six o'clock--they probably wouldn't be
homeless. About half of the ones who were here carried signs, most of which Dan
had hand-printed himself during the week. Among them:

SAY
No!

TO CONCENTRATION CAMPS

FOR THE HOMELESS!

and:

WHAT ABOUT
US?

WHERE DO
WE
FIT IN?

and Dan's favorite:

are we our
brother's

keepers?

VIRGIN

OR DO WE TELL

BIG BROTHER TO KEEP HIM?

"All
right!" he said, shouting so he could be heard in the back. "Let us
say this once more in case some of you have forgotten: We're not here to cause
trouble. We're here to draw attention to a problem that cannot be solved by
putting you folks in camps. We're here for informational purposes. To
communicate, not to confront. Stay in line, don't block traffic, don't enter
the hotel, don't fight, don't panhandle Got that?"

Most of them nodded. He had been pounding this into them
all week. Those who could get the message had already got it. This last
harangue was for the benefit of the press microphones and the police within
earshot, to get it on the record that this was intended as a strictly peaceful
demonstration.

"Where's
Sister Carrie?" one of them asked.

That had to be
One-Thumb George, but Dan couldn't place him in the crowd. George had asked the
question at least a dozen times since they'd left Tompkins.

"Sister Carrie is in her room at the convent, praying
for us. Her order doesn't allow her to march in demonstrations."

"I wish
she was here," the voice said, and now Dan was sure it was One-Thumb
George.

Dan too wished
Carrie were here. She'd done as much as he to organize this march, maybe more.
He missed her.

"And I'm
sure she wishes she could be here with us!" Dan shouted. "So let's
make her proud! Waldorf,
ho!"

Pointing his
arm uptown like an officer leading a charge, he jumped off the sculpture base
and marched his troops the remaining blocks to the Waldorf. He was just
starting to position the group when Senator Crenshaw's limousine pulled up
before the entrance. Dan had a brief glimpse of the senator's head--the famous
tanned face, dazzling smile, and longish, salt-and-pepper hair--towering over
his entourage as he zipped across the sidewalk, and then he was through the
front doors and gone.

Damn! He'd
shown up early.

He heard groans
from the demonstrators but he shushed them.

"It's
okay. We'll be all set up for him when he comes out. And we're not leaving
until he does."

They spent the
interval marching in an oval within the area reserved for their demonstration,
demarcated by light blue horses stenciled in white with
police line
-
do not
cross.
Dan led them in chants updated from the sixties, like: "Hey,
hey, Arthur C, why you wanna imprison me?" and "Hell, no! We won't
go!" And of course there were the endless repetitions of "We Shall
Overcome."

The choices
were calculated. Dan wanted to bring to mind the civil rights marches and
antiwar protests of the sixties to anyone who saw this particular demonstration
on TV. Many of the movers and shakers in the country today--the President
included--had participated in those demonstrations in their youth; many of them
still carried a residue of nostalgia for those days. He hoped enough of them
would realize that but for luck and the grace of God they might be marching on
this line tonight.

As he marched
and led the chants and singing, Dan felt
alive.
More truly alive than he
had felt in years. His priestly routines had become just that--routine. Hearing
confession, saying Mass, giving sermons--it seemed little more than preaching to
the converted. The souls who truly needed saving didn't go to Mass, didn't take
the sacraments. His priestly duties around the altar at St. Joseph's had become
. . . empty. But when he left the main floor and went downstairs to the soup
kitchen in the basement--the place he'd dubbed Loaves and Fishes--
then
he
felt he was truly doing God's work.

God's work .
. .
Dan had to smile at the phrase. Wasn't
God's work for God to do? Why was it left to mere mortals like him and Carrie
to do God's work?

And lately, in his darkest moments, Dan had begun wondering if God
was doing
anything.
The world--at least the part of it in which he spent
his days--was, to put it bluntly, a fucking mess. Everywhere he looked people
were sick, hurt, or dying--from AIDS, from racism, from drugs, from child abuse,
from stabbings, shootings, or just plain
old kick-ass muggings. And the violence was escalating.
Every time Dan told himself it can't get any worse than this, sure enough, it
did.

And every year
there seemed to be more homeless-- more lost souls.

Tighten up
on the misery spigot, will you, God? We 're up to our lower lips down here.

Yeah. Where
was
the hand of God in all of this? Why wasn't
it
doing God's work? A
long, continuous howl of agony was rising from this city, this world. Was
Anybody listening? Why didn't He respond? Dan could do only so much.

Like tonight.
This was doing something--or at least Dan hoped it was. Who knew if it would
accomplish anything? All you could do was try.

And then word
came out that the thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner was over. The doorman started
signaling the hovering limos forward. Taxis nosed in like koi at feeding time.
Dan pulled Dirty Harry out of the line and set him in the middle of the circle.

"All
right, everybody! He's coming. Chant as loud as you can. Harry's going to lead
you."

"Me?"
Harry said. He had long greasy hair, a thick beard matted with the remains of
his last three meals, and probably hadn't changed his four or five layers of
clothing since the winter. "I dunno what to--"

"Just keep
leading them in the same stuff we've been doing all night," Dan told him.
"And give me your posters. I want to get up close."

Harry lifted
the sandwich-board placards over his head and surrendered them with obvious
reluctance. Dan grabbed them, waved, and hurried off. He didn't dare slip them
over his own head--not after Dirty Harry had been wearing them.

He headed for
the Waldorf entrance. As he squeezed between two of the barricade horses, one
of the cops moved to block his way but let him pass when he saw the collar.

Ah, the perks
of the Roman collar.

Celebrity
gawkers, political groupies, and the just plain
curious
had formed a gauntlet along the path from the Waldorf entrance. Dan pushed,
squirmed, wheedled, and elbowed his way to the front row where anyone exiting
the hotel would have an unobstructed view of the sandwich-board's message:

concentration

camps are

unamerican!

Finally he saw
his man. Senator Crenshaw appeared at the door. He stopped inside the glass,
shaking hands and smiling at some of the hundreds of people who'd plunked down
a grand for a chicken dinner. Dan ground his teeth as he calculated how many
people he could feed at St. Joe's for the cost of just one of those dinners.

He watched him
through the glass and reviewed what he knew about Senator Arthur Crenshaw, the
Silicon Valley giant. In the mid-seventies, at age thirty, he'd started
CrenSoft on a shoestring. His software innovations earned him huge profits,
which he plowed back into the company, which in turn yielded even larger
profits. When Microsoft bought him out for an ungodly sum, he traded the
corporate rat race for politics. He didn't start small. He challenged an
incumbent for one of his native California's U.S. Senate seats and won. Now he
had his eye on the Presidency. He hadn't declared himself yet, but no one
seemed to have any doubt that he'd be stumping in New Hampshire when the next
round of Presidential primaries rolled around.

A widower
now--his wife had died five years ago--with one grown son, he was a formidable
candidate. The Born-Again line of moral righteousness and family values he
spouted guaranteed him a built-in core constituency. But he needed a broader
base if he was aiming for national office, and he was steadily building that
with his speech-making and his strong-featured good looks. Especially his
speech-making. Crenshaw was a mesmerizing orator, whether from prepared text or
off the cuff. In unguarded moments even
Dan
had found himself nodding in agreement with much of his rhetoric.

But when he
listened carefully, Dan tapped into an undercurrent that told him this was a
man who had quickly become extremely powerful in his own little world and had
grown used to having things his own way, a man of monstrous self-esteem who
knew--
knew
--he had the answers, who believed there could be only one way
of doing things--the Arthur Crenshaw way.

But Father
Daniel Fitzpatrick was here tonight to let him know that there were a few folks
around who didn't think Senator Arthur Crenshaw had
all
the answers, and
that he was downright wrong when it came to the Domicile Plan. Here he comes,
Dan thought as the glass door was held open for Crenshaw by a broad-shouldered
Hispanic with dark glasses and "security" written all over him.

A cheer went up from the onlookers as the senator stepped
outside. Lots of normally liberal Manhattanites seemed enthralled with the man.
Dan put it down to his resemblance to Pat Riley, the Knicks' former coach, but
knew it went deeper than that. The man was magnetic.

And as the
cheer rose, so did the chanting from Dan's homeless. Good for you, Harry, he
thought.

Crenshaw walked
the gauntlet, shaking hands and smiling that smile. When he came within half a
dozen feet, Dan held up his placard and thrust it toward the senator to make
sure he didn't miss it. The dark-skinned security man moved to push Dan back
but Crenshaw stopped him. He stared at the message, then looked Dan in the eye.
"Is that directed at me?" he said. Dan was momentarily taken aback by
the man's directness. He'd expected to be ignored. But he met the senator's
steely blue gaze with his own.

"Yes,
Senator. And at your out-of-sight-out-of-mind Domicile Plan. You can't lock the
homeless up in camps and think that will solve the problem."