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I think I ought to get her together with Sam Harrigan and see what comes of it.”
    Hernandito was offended. “Sam Harrigan is a television star,” he protested. “He would not want something so old as Miss Daniels.”
    “No? Well, Hernandito, you’re very young.”
    “I’m old enough,” Hernandito said. “You’re a priest, Father. There are things you don’t understand.”
    “Trust me, Hernandito, they don’t let you enter the priesthood if you don’t understand that .” Michael stretched his legs and back, looked out the window again, shook his head. “It gets worse by the minute. I can’t understand it. Are you ready to brave the land of the green and the home of the shamrock up there?”
    “Of course I am,” Hernandito said. “I like St. Patrick’s Day. I march with the Fife and Drum Corps.”
    “That’s right, you do. I’d forgotten.”
    “We’ve all made a decision about this, Father. All of us here. There were two ways we could go. We could ignore them all up there, or we could join the party. Joining the party had certain advantages.”
    “Green beer?”
    “A future. Someday there will be enough of us here, we will have a celebration for St. Rose of Lima. Since we have always helped them, they will have to help us. No?”
    “It’s beyond me. All right, Hernandito, go find some friends and get going, door to door, don’t miss one. Father Fitzsimmons up at Iggy Loy doesn’t think there’s going to be a real problem, but we shouldn’t take any chances. The last thing we want to do is come back here in a day or two to find out some little old lady has drowned.”
    “I know every little old lady on the block.”
    “Keep a list,” Michael said. “Oh, and when you get downstairs, send Sister Gabriel up. Old Señora Sanchez is going to need an insulin shot and she sure as hell isn’t going to give it to herself.”
    “Should a priest say hell, Father?”
    “It depends on where he is, who he’s with, and what he intends to accomplish. Go, Hernandito.”
    “I’m going.”
    He was, too. The next thing Michael saw was his retreating back, making the sharp turn that led down the rickety stairs to the basement. Michael looked down at the papers on his desk, decided that most of them were useless, incomprehensible and out of date, and ignored them. He sat down instead, swiveling so that he could stare out at the rain.
    Years ago, during those long dark months just before he turned forty, when he had first begun to think he might be called to be a priest, he had imagined himself as a kind of clone of the priests he had known when he was growing up. Big men with big voices, they had ruled over little fiefdoms of good Catholic families. Irish-American and working class themselves, they had preached the Word of God in a world where Irish-American and working class was all there seemed to be. There were people now who said that parishes like that had disappeared, but Michael knew it wasn’t true. Iggy Loy was just like that, and Father Fitzsimmons, fifteen years Michael’s junior, always seemed to Michael to be an older man out of an unquiet past. Michael wondered sometimes if he was suppressing a wish to be posted to a place like that. In some ways he thought it would be nice: a place where he wouldn’t have to run a clinic every day, or, God help him, do autopsies as a “courtesy” to his people and the ME’s office; a place where violence would come down to bare fists after too much beer; a place where men would work too much and women would clean too much and everybody would eat too much until the day when a combination of bad habits and the genetic bad luck of the Irish produced the expected heart attacks. Oh, yes, there was something very pleasant in the thought of all that kind of thing, and in the thought of saying Mass for people who spoke his language and had lived his past: On the other hand, there was also something inestimably boring.
    He got out of his chair, and stretched