To Play the Fool (5 page)

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 playing
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.