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though, from what little I’ve learned of her, she herself was a woman of great character, industry, and forbearance, it is yet due to the Maguire strain that all my life I’ve heard about, and quake at, the tales of one great-uncle or uncle after another.
    Each possessed his (it seems inevitable) drunkenness, garrulousness, wit, deviousness, scatology, humor, mysticism, blarney, amorality, poverty, xenophobia, blasphemy, reverence for language and tale-telling, his inclination to monologue, his bleeding leprechauns of Gort na Gloca Mora, ad infinitum, those things I despise, fear, and am most ashamed of in myself. This, then, is the distressing and somewhat frightening heritage with which I’m saddled.
    Now, in Chicago, abruptly realizing, as laymen and nuns and priests began eagerly mobbing the economy section and settling into their seats, that the only reason an airline would delay a scheduled transpacific flight forty minutes was the almighty dollar a full complement of passengers would bring, I began to laugh aloud, which brought the old lady’s alarmed eyes to me and had her wagging her head no as if she abhorred what she imagined my boorish-ness. Seeing how shabbily most were dressed, unable to comprehend a word they were saying so that I initially honestly believed they were blabbing away in some foreign gibberish—something Slavic, I guessed—I could see the old lady thought me laughing rudely at this rum randy group and I therefore clenched my teeth, compressed my lips, let my eyes roll histrionically up into my brows, and shook my head emphatically no to indicate she had misread my laughter.
    So rapidly was the cabin filling up that I was on the verge of crossing the aisle and sitting in the center seat next to the old lady, so as not to be separated from her on the long flight, when two nuns, hands muffled in their billowing sleeves, bobbing their heads politely up and down the way nuns do by way of seeming to excuse themselves (for being alive? one always wonders), were sliding past the old lady’s forcefully cramped-in legs and into the two empty seats. Before I could get her attention and hustle her over next to me, I was confronted immovably at eye level by the American-flag red of stewardess Ms. Robin Glenn’s skirt, its tautness breathlessly suggesting the shape of her marvelous full thighs, and I hence looked questioningly up into her great gray vacuous and haunting eyes. Ms. Glenn informed me that every blessed seat on the flight would be taken but one, and as a member of the tour had broken his left leg asked if he could occupy the window seat and stretch out his cast in the space between us. Looking solicitously across the aisle at the old lady, I saw she was caught up in that farcical head-bobbing with the lady penguins and suddenly sensing how much comfort their proximity would provide her (this was, after all, a voyage to death), I said sure and asked Ms. Robin Glenn if this group was Russkis or Polacks or what?
    “You are some kind of very funny man,” Ms. Robin Glenn said. “By the looks of your kisser, you’re probably one of them!”
    Even then I had no idea what Ms. Robin Glenn meant. One skinny fiery runt of a hunch-shouldered, tottering, and rather maniacal-looking priest appeared to be the head honcho. His pallor was ghostlike, the glowingly pale folds of his skin fell so droopily and scarily away from his facial structure he seemed some grotesque from a horror movie. His snow-white hair, which might have lent him a somewhat distinguished look, was so tinged—out-and-out stained—an agingly discomfiting and sickening-looking yellowish orange, almost an ocher, that he looked some back-alley Fagin, some dirty old man given to popping out of blind alleys and for little girls displaying what would assuredly be a sorry shriveled specimen.
    Quite as unsettling as his yellowish-orange hair were the index and middle fingers of his right hand. Between these—or pursed in his lips—he