Free The Fancy Dancer by Patricia Nell Warren Page A

it was with very bad grace that Mrs. Shoup brought out her famous chocolate cake. If there was such a thing as a culinary obscenity, this cake was it: three layers of meltingly good devil’s food held together by real fudge frosting and decorated with fancy little squig-gles of white icing. That cake, and Mrs. Shoup herself, were the Jesuit Baroque of Catholic housewifery.
    With all that bad feeling in the air, nobody said much as they ate. Through the kitchen door, I could see Meg eating a huge wedge of cake and ice cream. No wonder her mother didn’t notice anything strange about her waistline.
    On the pretext of giving me a piece of cake to take to Father Vance, Mrs. Shoup waved me into the kitchen, and waved Meg out.
    “Father,” Mrs. Shoup said icily as she jerked a length of plastic wrap out of a package, “you must have something against me.”
    “No,” I said.
    “Then you must have something against the Church’s teachings on sexual morality.”
    For a minute there, I had the childish and un-priestly impulse to pick up her cake and hit her in the face with it, like a custard pie.
    “How could IP” I said.
    “Of all the people here tonight, you are the one most responsible for whether Holy Mother Church is obeyed,” she said. “It was your obligation as a priest to vote for my proposal.”
    Mrs. Shoup was busy cutting a big wedge of cake, much bigger than the one she’d given me, and putting it on the piece of plastic wrap. Out of the comer of my eye I saw Meg listening out of a doorway down the hall.
    “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Shoup,” I said as pleasantly as I could, “but I don’t know of any dogma that obliges a priest to vote for removing Ernest Hemingway or Oscar Wilde from a high-school library.”
    “If you can’t see the connection between dogma and applying dogma to real life, then I feel sorry for you, Father,” she said. “Your life as a priest is going to be a difficult one.”
    Mrs. Shoup was wrapping the piece of cake with brusque angry gestures. Her pride was a wreck. Her pet crusade had been put down in her own home, with her own cake waiting in the kitchen. Hell hath no fury like a good cook scorned.
    “Tell Father we miss him at the meetings,” she said crisply, handing me the cake. “I hope he starts coming again.”
    She probably felt that Father Vance would put his 55
    foot down on my youthful heresies. What she didn’t know was that even Father Vance saw her as an extremist
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    Mercifully, in a few more minutes, I was out of there. It was now past eleven, and I still had an hour’s work on the parish books. Father insisted that we keep neat old-fashioned ledgers, because he was always afraid the Bishop would want to see them.
    As I sat over the ledgers in the glow of the battered office lamp, the thought of Vidal returned to haunt me. Would Father give me permission to have supper at their house? I was curious to meet his wife—even Father Vance had mentioned something about how she wasn’t very bright. Just a couple of hours ago he had been sitting there, his necklaces catching the light. I wanted very much to talk to him right then, to confess to him a few things of my own—my oneness, my sense of being tired at twenty-eight. At the moment, being a priest seemed less like a divine vocation and more like a special kind of treadmill. Priests were supposed to be detached from human relationships—but wouldn’t God forgive my need for one good friend of my own sex? It had been so long since I had been able to talk easily and warmly to a man—since the seminary, in fact. But that friendship with Doric Wilton had ended unhappily for both of us. I wouldn’t let it happen again.
    It was after midnight when I got in bed and sat saying the Divine Office for the day. Father Vance insisted that it was supposed to be said before midnight, but he must have been the last priest in America to have this scruple.
    I fell asleep with the light on and the black book open on