Collin walked the Rue des Lumieres late at night with the vampires and the indigents. He contemplated his pilgrimages to Lourdes, Westminster, now Paris. Tomorrow he’d take the long overnight train to la bella Roma, where he’d end his trip before taking the boat back to America.
There weren’t all that many young men walking about. Most of the people lurking behind trees and bushes, loitering in dark corners, betrayed only by the light of their cigarettes, most of them were as old as his father – that imperious old man who’d told him, just before sending him on his European tour, when he came home, he’d have to go into the seminary.
What did Father know of desire? Mother had died, just after Julia had been born, the eighth and final child of the Doherty family. That’d been ten years ago and since then, he’d ruled the eight of them with an iron fist. The look on Kathleen Conaghy’s face betrayed it all when he told her, he’d become a priest. Her face collapsed into a molten, gelid mass of distraught anxiety. Collin would never forget that expression, if he lived to be a hundred.
Walking by the Parisian church, he saw the young man standing against the gaslight across the street. Gargoyles growled from the church’s roof. He looked at the cross on top of the church and asked for forgiveness. And then he crossed the street to the young man. One time would certainly not hurt.
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