BACK AT THE CLINIC, THE CROWD HAD THINNED. PUFFY HAD put down his sign to eat his usual lunch, French fries and Chicken McNuggets. He nodded in Claudia’s direction, a friendly guy in his real life. She gave him a half wave.
She was two paces from the door when she noticed the protestor leaning against the side of the building, a beardo in a red jacket, a ski lift ticket hanging from the zipper. He didn’t accost her, didn’t even see her. It was his sign that caught her attention—hand-painted, a bespoke creation. ABORTION CAUSES BREAST CANCER. Beneath this caption was a cartoon drawing of a naked woman, rendered in pornographic detail: melon breasts, nipples like small fingers. Over one grotesquely large breast was a red bull’s-eye.
It is said that certain animals—ornery males, bulls and roosters—are inflamed by the color red. Claudia imagines they have no idea why the color provokes them and no memory of their aggressive behavior unless, like her, they see a video posted later on the internet.
In the video she starts out calmly, conversationally, explaining that the sign is factually inaccurate. Just so you know, there is no connection at all between abortion and breast cancer. Her smile is tense, wincing. I mean, just so you know.
She can remember feeling a human presence behind her—a slowing of sidewalk traffic, pedestrians stopping to listen—but she had no idea that someone was filming her with a cell phone.
By the end of the video she looks and sounds like a shrieking madwoman. （Abortion is not a risk factor! Having breasts is a risk factor!） It was the man’s smugness that inflamed her, his undeserved power. The power to threaten strangers—female strangers—with the illness women fear most.
The video is sixty-eight seconds long. It ends with heavy footsteps, a male voice off camera. Luis, the security guard, had been watching on closed circuit.
Sir, please step out of the way.
The video doesn’t show what happened next: Luis dragging Claudia into the building, grasping her arm, hissing into her ear: “For God’s sake, have you lost your fucking mind?”
When they were safely inside, he let her go. “Claudia,” he said, more gently. “Are you all right?”
It was a hard question to answer. Was anybody all right? At best, she was mostly right. Objectively speaking, all right was an impossibly high bar.
6
Anthony went to the morning Mass, not every day but most days, often enough that he was seen and recognized. At St. Dymphna’s, early Mass was poorly attended, the crowd made up entirely of old people. He would remember it as the defining ritual of his time on Disability: the sonorous language of the liturgy, old people croaking out the hymns, the familiar prayers welcome as rain. Not to mention he needed to get out of the house.
The advanced age of the congregants didn’t trouble him. At Sunday Mass the mean age was younger, but this came with its own complications. For instance: some of the younger people had been known, during the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, to raise their hands to heaven like Pentecostal snake handlers calling forth spirits, a practice that struck him as distinctly Protestant. The old priest, Father Cronin, wouldn’t have tolerated this. His replacement, Father Quentin Roche, seemed not to have noticed. He was twenty years younger, a brisk, busy man who zipped through a full Sunday Mass in thirty minutes, endearing himself to the congregation and earning a genial nickname, Quentin the Quick.
The Mass ended, Anthony lingered in the vestibule. It was a slow-moving crowd, what with the canes and walkers and Mrs. Paone’s wheelchair creating a bottleneck in the aisle. As he watched their halting progress, Mrs. Morrison touched his shoulder.
“How are you feeling, dear?”
Mrs. Morrison looked a hundred years old, but possibly wasn’t. Possibly she was his mother’s age, which was sixty or seventy. At a certain point the exact age no longer mattered. Mrs. Morrison had passed that point long ago.
He had a theory about old people, their greater devotion. Like everything in life it came down to timing, the historical moment, large impersonal forces at work in the world. Mrs. Morrison’s generation had hit it lucky. They were products of a better time.