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nothing but more rich here. Not like Italia—
pittura
, opera.”
    Jared spoke up again, in his strident adolescent voice, seeking perhaps to save the Italian woman from too much attention. “Jamie Cressy got taken to the opera in New York City and said it was horrible. Everybody fat and screaming and he couldn’t understand a word.”
    Stella now, as if to shelter her son, let her voice with its music from gentler climes sound out: “Oh, but the angelic harmonies the soprano and tenor make! And the bits of history you learn! It’s so much healthier, I think, than sitting in a dark smoky building watching the moving pictures, the way all the young people do nowadays! The young people you see on Market Street look pale as ghosts, and I blame the moving pictures—those, and cigarettes.”
    Esther, now that the young people were beginning to speak, said, “Mother, it’s so em
bar
rassing, with the real people on stage! They’re all so
loud
, and I always worry, what if somebody makes a mistake! With the motion pictures, everything is done perfectly, and it’s always the same! And you don’t have to get all dressed up to go!”
    Clarence, though the debate before him seemed a carnivorous phantasmagoria projected on a wall of his inner void, felt obliged to answer his Building Committee chairman, who had asked if he was overstepping. “Not at all, Harlan,” he pronounced, belatedly, feeling thick-tongued and with a waxen distance placed between himself and these vigorous eyes, chewing mouths, clumps of hair. “What better place than the church premises for a frank expression of our views? Speak the truth in love, St. Paul enjoined.”
    “When the workers of the world unite,” Mr. Kleist advisedMr. Dearholt and Mr. McDermott, “let’s see how you and your kind like being stretched. Come the revolution, see how the bosses like being stretched on the rack.”
    “Welcome to the
industrial
revolution, Mr. Kleist,” Dearholt said, beaming at his own humor. “The better the machines become, the fewer workers we’re going to need. Those who don’t take the work that’s offered, at a wage that keeps wholesale prices competitive, are welcome to try the bread line, or to go find gold nuggets in Alaska!”
    “Invention’s a force altogether for the good,” gentle McDermott urged everyone. He had long brown teeth crowded in the front like a beaver’s. A paste of masticated food stuck in their irregularities. “Already it’s made the world a tenfold better place, and there’s more to come, believe you me. What they can do with those Jacquard cards!—they’ll soon be running an entire assembly line.”
    “And where is the benefit for those without capital?” Kleist asked, his aggressiveness somewhat softened as Stella’s sweet ham and three kinds of potatoes percolated through his digestive system. “What profits invention makes possible are gobbled up at the top, and squandered on yachts and mansions and marrying off their daughters to dukes and counts overseas!”
    “Not at all, Mr. Kleist, not at all,” Dearholt said, playing now the Christian placator. “The very clothes you are wearing—a century ago, only a gentleman could have afforded that suit. The profits from ever more sophisticated machines come straight to you, the consumer, in the form of cheaper goods. Even the poorest among us benefits, though he may not know it.”
    Done unto one of the least of these
, Clarence remembered. Ah, but there is no God.
    Little Teddy, gazing from the far end of the table into his father’s face, burst into tears. Clarence heard the child distinctly whimper, as Stella bowed over the boy, “Dad looks funny.”
    Stella glanced toward her husband, but unlike her son did not see into him, just registered with satisfaction the fact that an appropriately dressed man was filling the space at the head of her splendidly supplied and dressed table. The younger Caravello daughter, who had been casting her limpid