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to the fan-vaulted ceiling, and warmer this time of year than any cathedral in the world. It was less than an hour’s drive from his apartment down Lake Shore if he went in the middle of the morning and came back after rush hour. The snow wasn’t bad this year, and he was used to the wind. The bonus was that he could get away from that letter on his desk from Turner Klein, which was surely about whether he was making progress on the panel he had agreed to produce about Philip for the AIDS quilt. He’d intended to stay away from the AIDS quilt all last summer, and even into October—he’d thought it would be a tasteless memorial, a type of headstone in piecrust. Much better, he was vocally convinced, to build a shining and searing black structure identical to and parallel to the Vietnam Memorial, but he’d ended up going to Washington after all, and had found the two thousand panels laid out on the Mall strangely affecting, in spite of, or because of, their bright colors and homey shapes. He hadn’t broken down, though, until he and Turner did get to the Vietnam Memorial, and he did touch the name of Timothy Brinks Manning carved into the gabbro (in his pedantic way, Henry had told Turner, who was streaming tears, all about gabbro,magma, large grains…). But when he touched Tim’s name, he was thinking of Philip and of Lionel and of Warren, the three AIDS victims he knew best, though only Philip had been his lover. Turner, who was in his thirties, a little panicky and insistent, would not let him get by without somehow seeing to the construction of a panel for Philip, a panel full of words—something severe, he thought, rigorously tasteful, yellow embroidered upon black. How this might be done, Henry hadn’t yet figured out.
    He had not nursed Philip in the last year—Turner, Philip’s ultimate lover, had done that—but he had visited them in New York every month or so and sent them money; he was still sending Turner five hundred dollars a month.
    What he was doing at the U. of Chicago was idle work, since he was not doing it in Europe, but it gave him an edgy sort of pleasure. There was that Pope, the evil Innocent III, who had sent Simon de Montfort to Béziers to slaughter the Cathars in the Cathedral. Henry’s sympathies were entirely with the Cathars, and he had driven around Carcassonne and Narbonne and the Hautes-Pyrénées several times now, pondering the Cathars at Foix, pondering them at Pamiers and Lavaur, where one of their female leaders was thrown down a well and stoned to death. But through Pope Innocent, he had been reminded of Gerald of Wales, who had met with Innocent several times in order to wrangle himself a position in the English Church, preferably to get Innocent to certify the independence and importance of St. David’s Cathedral in Wales, as opposed to Canterbury Cathedral. Gerald (really “Gerallt”) had failed, but, out of curiosity, Henry had looked into his many volumes of writings, thinking there might be a subject there for a book or a monograph. He had done the work intermittently and idly, a relief from everything else, but, perhaps because of Philip, the passage that stuck in his mind was not about the exhumation of the bodies of Arthur and Gwenhwyfar, the real Arthur and the real Gwenhwyfar, from the crypt at Glastonbury Abbey in the 1190s. What snagged him was the connection between Arthur’s defense of Britain in the sixth century against invading Germanic armies and the Plague of Justinian. He imagined Gerald, who was well traveled and lived into his late seventies, as someone not unlike himself, healthy, active, curious, a man of the Church who wrote about the people he met, the animals he saw, the places he visited. Inall his years of fascination with language, wars, and cultural invasions, Henry had never actually identified with anyone until Gerald of Wales.
    No one talked much about the Plague of Justinian. It had occurred in the darkest of the Dark Ages, but it was