To Play the Fool Read online

  There were also more parking spaces. She fought the car into one, fed the meter, and then walked back down the hill to indulge in a few minutes of nostalgia. The Chinese restaurant was still there, and the pizza-and-beer joint in whose courtyard, in another lifetime, Lee the graduate student had oh so casually brushed against the arm of Kate the junior-year student, Kate the unhappy, Kate the unquestioningly hetero, leaving a tantalizing and only half-conscious question that would crop up at inconvenient moments until it was finally resolved almost two years later: Yes, Lee had meant it.

  The espresso bars and the doughnut shop, the scruffy bookstore and the art-film theater, shops selling clothes and pens and backpacks, all crowded into one short block. Browsing the windows in bittersweet pleasure, Kate’s attention was caught by a display of unusual jewelry made of some small scraps of odd iridescent plastic. She went to the shop and bought the hair combs, a pair of extravagant multicolored swirling shapes, the blue of which matched the color of Lee’s eyes. The woman wrapped the box in a glossy midnight paper and Kate dropped it into her coat pocket.

  She turned briskly uphill, crossed the street that brought an end to commerce, and walked up another block to the sign for a Catholic school she had noticed while cruising for a parking space: Surely the Catholics would know.

  As she reached for the door, it opened and a brown-robed monk came out.

  “Excuse me,” she said, stepping back, “I wonder if you can tell me where I might find the Graduate Theological Union?” Sketchy research the night before had brought her as far as the name, and indeed, the monk nodded, gestured that she should follow him back to the street, and once there pointed to a brick building a couple of doors up, smiling all the while. She thanked him; he nodded and crossed the street, still smiling. A vow of silence, perhaps? Kate speculated.

  The ground floor of the building proved to be an airy oak-floored bookstore. The customer ahead of her was just finishing her purchase of three heavy black tomes with squiggly gilt writing on the back covers. When she turned away with her bag, Kate saw that she was wearing a clerical collar on her blue shirt, an odd sight to someone raised a Roman Catholic.

  At the register, Kate showed her police identification and explained her presence.

  “I’m looking for a man in connection with an investigation. He’s a homeless man in San Francisco who apparently comes over to this part of Berkeley regularly. How do I find the head of your security personnel?”

  The man and woman looked at each other doubtfully.

  “Is he a student here?” the woman asked.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Or a professor—no, he wouldn’t be, would he? Gee, I don’t know how you’d find him.”

  “Don’t you have some kind of campus police?”

  “We don’t actually have a campus, per se,” the young man explained. “In fact, you could say that there’s actually no such thing as the GTU. It’s an administrative entity more than anything else. Each of the schools is self-contained, you see. We’re just this building. Or actually, they’re upstairs. We’re just the bookstore. If you want to talk with someone in administration, you could take the elevator upstairs.”

  “And how many schools are there?”

  “Nine. And of course the affiliated groups, Buddhist Studies, the Orthodox Institute; most of them have separate buildings.”

  “What about a student center?”

  “All the seminaries have their own.”

  Kate thought for a minute. “If someone came over here regularly, where would he go?”

  “That depends on what he’s coming for,” the young man said helpfully. Another customer arrived with a stack of books, mostly paperbacks. These titles were in English, but as foreign as the gilt squiggles had been. What was—or were—hermeneutics? Or semeiology?

  “I don’t know what he’s coming for. All I know is that he comes over on Tuesday and returns to San Francisco before Sunday. Look, this is not a part of Berkeley that gets a lot of homeless men. Surely he’d be conspicuous.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Six foot two, approximately seventy years old, short salt-and-pepper hair, clipped beard, Caucasian but tan, a deep voice.”

  “Brother Erasmus!” said a voice from the back of the store. Kate turned and saw another woman wearing a clerical collar, this shirt a natural oatmeal color.

  “You know him?” Kate asked.

  “Everyone knows him.”

  “I don’t,” said the young man.

  “Sure you do,” said the woman (priest?). “She means the monk who preaches and sings in the courtyard over at CDSP. I’ve seen you there.”

  “Oh, him. But he’s not homeless.”

  “Do you know where he lives?” Kate asked.

  “Of course not, but he can’t be homeless. I mean, he’s clean, and he doesn’t carry things or have a shopping cart or anything.”

  “Right,” said Kate. “Where is CDSP?”

  “Just across the street,” the man said.

  “I’ll take you if you want to wait a minute,” said the woman. (Priestess? Reverend Mother? What the hell did you call her, anyway? wondered Kate.) She waited while the woman rang up her purchases, and Kate glanced at these titles, then looked again with interest: Living in the Lap of the Goddess, Texts of Terror, Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto. Well, well.

  “Thanks, Tina,” she said to the cashier.

  “Have a good one, Rosalyn.”

  Kate followed her out the door and down the wide steps. On the sidewalk the woman stopped and turned to study Kate.

  “I know you, don’t I?” she asked, uncertain. Kate became suddenly wary.

  “Oh, I don’t live around here.”

  “I know that. What is your name?”

  There was no avoiding it. “Kate Martinelli.”

  “I do know you. Oh, of course, you’re Lee Cooper’s partner. Casey, isn’t it? We met briefly at a forum at Glide Memorial a couple of years ago. Rosalyn Hall.” She held out her hand and Kate shook it. “You won’t remember me, especially in this”—she stuck a finger into her collar and wiggled it—“and with my hair longer. I was into spikes then.”

  “Sorry,” Kate said, though she did remember the forum on community violence and vaguely recalled a woman minister. She relaxed slightly. “I go by Kate now,” she added. “I grew out of Casey.”

  “Amazing how nicknames haunt you, isn’t it? My mother still calls me Rosie. Tell me, how is Lee? I heard about it, of course. It’s one of those situations where you feel you should do something, but to intrude seems ghoulish.”

  “She’s doing okay. And I don’t think it would be intrusive. Actually, she’s lost a lot of friends in the last months. People feel uncomfortable around wheelchairs and catheters and the threat of paralysis.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll try to find some excuse to go see her. Something professional, maybe. Her profession, I mean. Is she working?”

  “She just started up again, and that would be ideal, if you need an excuse.”

  “Fine. I’m glad I stumbled into you, Kate. I’ve got to get myself together for a lecture, but we’ll meet again. Oh—stupid of me. Brother Erasmus. I’ll show you where he holds forth.”

  They crossed the tree-lined curve of street with its sodden drifts of rotting leaves and winter-bare branches and went through an opening in the brick wall into a broad courtyard, at the far side of which were doors into two buildings and, between them, steps climbing up to more buildings. Rosalyn went to the doors on the right, and Kate found herself in a long, dimly lighted and sunken room with a bunch of tables, some of them occupied by men and women with paper cups of coffee.

  “This is the refectory,” said Rosalyn. “The coffee isn’t too bad, if you want a cup. And that’s where Brother Erasmus usually is.” She nodded toward the opposite windows, which looked out on another, smaller courtyard, this one grassy and with bare trees, green shrubs, and a forlorn-looking fountain pl
aying by itself in a rectangular pond. Rosalyn glanced at her watch. “He may be in the chapel. I’ll take you there, and then I have to run.”

  Across the refectory, out the doors at the corner of the grassy space, and up another flight of stairs, more brick and glass buildings in front of them—the place was a warren, Kate thought, built on a hillside. Up more stairs, more buildings rising up, and then suddenly confronted with what could indeed only be a chapel. Rosalyn opened the door silently and they slipped in.

  “That’s Erasmus,” she murmured, nodding her head toward the front. “In the second pew from the front on the right-hand side. He’s sitting next to Dean Gardner,” she added with a smile, then left.

  It was a small building, simple and calm. The pews were well filled, Kate thought, for a weekday morning. There were two priests near the altar, and a woman at the lecturn reading aloud earnestly from the Bible. Kate chose a back pew, sat one space from the aisle, and listened to the service.

  She hadn’t even thought to ask what kind of church this was. She knew that each school in the Graduate Theological Union was run by a different church, or an order within a church—the first building with the silent but friendly monk, for example, had been the Franciscan school. However, Church Divinity School of the Pacific could be anything. The service going on in the front was vaguely like the familiar Catholic Mass, but she imagined that most churches would at least be similar. Rosalyn, she thought she remembered, had belonged to a small, largely gay and lesbian denomination, but it surely could not be the possessor of a grand setup like this.

  She looked at the books of various sizes and colors in the holder in front of her. The first one she pulled out was a Bible, which didn’t help much. The next one she tried was a small limp volume, its onionskin pages covered with Greek writing and a sprinkling of English headings such as “The ministry of John the Baptist” and “The five thousand fed.” That went back into the holder, too. At this point, the man next to her took pity on the poor heathen. He handed her a book, put his finger to the page to guide her reading, and smiled in encouragement.

  She studied the page for a minute, which seemed to offer alternate choices for prayers, and then flipped to the front of the book: The Book of Common Prayer didn’t tell her much, but farther down the title page she came across the key words Episcopal Church. So Brother Erasmus, homeless advocate and adviser, traveled across the Bay every week to say his prayers with the church that, if she remembered the joke right, served a vintage port as its sacramental wine. And furthermore, he seemed quite chummy here. Look at him seated next to the dean, two gray heads, one in need of a haircut and above a set of shoulders in a ratty tweed jacket, the other hair cropped short above some black garment that looked both elegant and clerical, both of them—

  Everyone stood up. Kate nearly dropped the prayer book, then rose belatedly to her feet. There was a reading and a brief hymn, for which she had to flip back thirty pages in the prayer book, after which came a familiar prayer called the Apostles’ Creed, forty pages ahead of the hymn. Then everyone kneeled down to recite an unfamiliar version of the Lord’s Prayer.

  After the “Amen” some people sat, although others stayed on their knees; Kate compromised by perching on the edge of her pew. Her view of Erasmus, partial before, was now limited to the top of his head, and it would not be improved short of sitting on her neighbor’s lap. The important thing was not to let him leave, and she could see him well enough to prevent that. She glanced through her prayer book, looking up regularly at the shaggy graying head in the second pew. She learned that The Book of Common Prayer had been ratified on October 16, 1789; that the saint’s day for Mary Magdalene was July 22 and that of the martyrs of New Guinea, 1942, was September 2.

  There was a shuffle and everyone stood up again with books in their hands, but not the book Kate held. Fortunately, the hymnal was clearly marked on its cover, so she traded the two books, found the page by looking over her neighbor’s arm, and joined the hymn in time for the final verse. When they sat, it was time again for the prayer book, but at that point Kate decided the hell with it and just sat in an attitude of what she hoped looked like pious attentiveness.

  More words from the altar, response from the congregation, another hymn, a final blessing, and then everyone was rising and chattering in release. Kate stayed in her pew, allowing the people on the inside to push past her until the two men she had been watching hove into view, and she realized that she had made a profound mistake: The unkempt graying head belonging to the ratty tweed turned out to be that of a much younger, shorter, and beardless man. Brother Erasmus, on the other hand, was wearing an immaculate black cassock that swept from shoulders to feet in an elegant arc, broken only by the white rectangle of a clerical collar at his throat. Brother Erasmus was dressed as a priest.

  She tore her eyes from him and studied the altar as he went past, his head down, listening to something the dean was saying. She turned to follow them out, noticing Brother Erasmus do two interesting things. First, an older woman wearing rather too much makeup hesitated as if to speak to him. Without breaking stride, he reached out his left hand, fixed it gently to the woman’s cheek in a gesture of intimacy and comfort, and took it away again. The woman turned away, beaming; the dean kept talking; a gold ring had gleamed dully from the fourth finger of the Brother’s hand. Then, as they reached the doors to go out, Erasmus took a step to one side and reached out for a tall stick that stood against the wall. Outside in the sun, Kate could see that it was a gleaming wooden staff. Its finial had been carved to resemble a man’s head, with a bit of ribbon, colorless and frayed with age, around its throat. The stick was almost precisely the same height as the man, who did not so much lean on it as caress it, stroke it, and welcome it as a part of his body—a part temporarily removed.

  Kate looked at the fist-sized knob on top of the heavy stick and found herself wondering if the postmortem now going on across the bay would find that the man John had been killed by a blow to the head.

  A part of the congregation now dispersed, most of them touching Erasmus somehow—a handshake, a pat on the back, a brief squeeze of his elbow—before leaving. The dean was one of them, and he added a brief wave as he walked off, fingers raised at waist level before his arm dropped to his side.

  Erasmus himself, surrounded by fifteen or twenty of his fellow worshipers, moved off and down the steps Kate and Rosalyn had come up, which led to the grassy courtyard and the adjoining refectory. Kate trailed behind. She had to see the dean, who she assumed was the man in authority here, but first she needed to be certain that Erasmus would not leave the area.

  However, he planted his staff into the damp turf with an attitude of permanence and then stood, his hands thrust deep into pockets let into the side of his cassock, eyes focused at his feet, while people drifted onto the grass, standing about or leaning against the walls, all of them expectant. It occurred to Kate that she had not yet seen him utter a word, but these people were obviously waiting for him to do so, with half smiles on their lips and sparkles of anticipation in their eyes.

  Silence fell. Brother Erasmus raised his head, took his hands from his pockets and held them out, palms up, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth to sing. In a shining baritone the words of the Psalm sung by the congregation a short time before rang out and reverberated against the brick and the glass: “Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God. The Lord builds up Jerusalem, he gathers the outcasts of Israel,” he sang joyously. “The Lord lifts up the downtrodden, he casts the wicked to the ground.” And then he stopped, as abruptly as if a hand had seized his throat.

  For a very long time, Brother Erasmus did not speak. The smiles began to fade; people began to glance at one another and fidget. Then, unexpectedly, the man in the priest’s robe sank slowly to his knees, and when he lifted his face, there were tears leaking from his closed eyelids, running down his weathered cheeks, and dripping from his beard. A shudder of shock ran through the assembly. T
wo or three people took a step forward; several more took a step back. Erasmus began to speak in a deep and melodious voice that had the faintest trace of an English accent, more a rhythm than an accent. At the moment, it was also hoarse with emotion.

  “O Lord, rebuke me not in thy anger, nor chasten me in thy wrath! For thy arrows have sunk into me, and thy hand has come down on me. There is no soundness in my flesh because of thy indignation; there is no health in my bones because of my sin.” His beautiful voice paused to draw a breath that was more like a groan, and the noise seemed to find an echo in the electrified audience. Whatever they had been expecting, it was not this. “My wounds grow foul and fester because of my foolishness, I am utterly bowed down and prostrate; all the day I go about in mourning.”

  It was something biblical, Kate could tell, but with little relation to the readings she had heard in the chapel half an hour earlier; those cool tones had been nothing like this.

  “My loins are filled with burning, and there is no soundness in my flesh. I am utterly spent and crushed; I groan because of the tumult in my heart.” The young man standing next to Kate did moan, deep in his throat. Nearby, a thin young woman began openly to weep. “I am like a deaf man, I do not hear, like a dumb man who does not open his mouth. Yea, I am like a man who does not hear, and in whose mouth are no rebukes.” He paused again, eyes still shut, swallowed, and finished in an almost inaudible voice. “Do not forsake me, O Lord. O my God, be not far from me.”