The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors Read Online Free PDF

didn’t know they meant white.”
    â€œSo what? I’m sure she won’t stay long. You know what I’m talking about.”
    â€œOh, pooh. You can’t believe every story—”
    â€œIt was terrible, what happened.”
    â€œIt was a long time ago.”
    Then Amanda was out of earshot.
    The hallway exited into the Lady Chapel, a room arranged with altar and pews in mimicry of the larger sanctuary where she had just celebrated, so ineptly, the mass. In the chapel Amanda found, off its hook, a thurible: the container for the incense Trinity and St. Michael no longer used. She lifted the small vessel, felt a twinge of sadness at the dust that had accumulated on its golden surface, and the several deep dents that made it unfit for service. She wondered who had pulled the thurible down and left it sitting on a pew. One of the children, she decided: the younger acolytes, unable to sit still, who relaxed in the Lady Chapel when their presence in the sanctuary was not required.
    She returned the thurible to what she hoped was the proper hook, then climbed the short stair to the parish hall for coffee hour. She put on a smile and stood very straight, because nobody here seemed to slouch. She shook hands, accepted stiff and formal welcomes, said how happy she was to be here. She wished it were true. At thirty-nine, with a decade of ministry behind her, Amanda had longed for the barricades. The idea of being thrust into the midst of an African-American congregation had thrilled her. But she had never before been around so many black people: not black people like these. They had, most of them, money and breeding, in many cases generations of both, and if their expensive clothes didn’t tell you, the parking lot full of German imports would. They voted Democratic, but their politics verged the other way. Few described themselves as “black,” or even “African-American.” They seemed to prefer unusual formulations, chief among them “darker nation.”
    Making her, Amanda supposed, a representative of the paler nation.
    Roaming the parish hall, she sought out and thanked the choirmaster and the deacon, the chalice bearers and the acolytes, but only the children so much as smiled. The adults looked at her askance, maybe because of her color, or because she had been imposed on them, maybe because—
    I’m sure she won’t stay long. You know what I’m talking about .
    â€”because they knew what the woman in the sacristy was talking about. Trinity and St. Michael had gone through three interim priests in just over a year before the bishop chose Amanda. She had talked to two about their experiences, and both had hinted that all was not well at TSM, but they were older white men, and she had put down their furtiveness to an uneasiness around people of color. Now, crossing the room toward the coffee cake, she remembered how one of them had complained that the congregation was too protective of its secrets. She had taken him to refer to, say, finances, or even gossip; only now did she wonder whether the secret was something else.
    It was terrible, what happened.
    Amanda supposed that whatever they were talking about must be written down somewhere. The church kept meticulous ledgers. Surely anything horrific enough to drive the new rector away would have been recorded—
    Then she was cornered by Mrs. Routledge and Mrs. Madison, black women of a certain age and class, who sized her up from beneath their oversize Sunday hats and explained that she should not take it personally, theirs was just a congregation unused to newcomers. Amanda naturally wondered what they meant by “it,” but found herself too cowed to inquire. And this attitude would have astonished her classmates back at the divinity school, for her outspokenness on every issue under the sun, whether the authenticity of the epistle to the Hebrews or the racial diversity of the reading list for