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it, the priest’s expression conveyed the answer. The old man’s eyes closed and then immediately opened as if he did not want to shut out the light.
    â€œThere’s a chaplain on duty,” Father Dowling said when they were again outside the cubicle making way for the fussy nurse
with the bag on her head. “I’ll make sure he knows.”
    â€œIt wouldn’t matter.”
    â€œHis name is Fulvio?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œLei parla Italiano?”
    She shook her head. “Neither does my father anymore. He’s second generation. His father came from Palermo and wanted instant assimilation.”
    â€œYet he named his son Fulvio.”
    â€œBernardos aren’t very consistent.”
    â€œAlmost no one is. That’s why we mustn’t give up hope for your father.”
    He assumed she shared her mother’s faith. Did she? Her life too had been changed when Raymond ran off to California with the nun he later married. The only thing worse would have been if her father deserted her mother.
    After the priest left she got out her phone and put through a call to California.

6
    â€œCan you make the meeting this afternoon?” Anne Gogarty, the chair, asked when she heard that Andrew’s father was in the hospital. “Appointments and tenure.” Her tone was significant.
    â€œHe’s improved.”
    â€œSo you’ll be there.”

    â€œI wouldn’t miss it.”
    She took that for reassurance. “I need your vote.”
    There were five on the committee, the chair ex officio and four elected members. Andrew was the default member of every departmental committee, someone everyone trusted, or at least did not distrust. Everyone, that is, but Cassirer. And Cassirer was the main item of business at the afternoon meeting of the A&T. He had applied for early promotion to tenure after only four years on the faculty, his argument, scarcely disguised, that he was so manifestly superior to everyone else in the department that it was unjust that he should be untenured. All departmental committees were only advisory committees, their decisions going to the dean as recommendations. Holder, the provost, actually made the decisions, but as a matter of practice dean and provost merely endorsed the departmental committees. Alloy, the president, probably learned of promotions from the printed menu distributed at his annual dinner for the faculty. Cassirer had lobbied for votes like a candidate for the French Academy—minus the obsequiousness, of course—thereby solidifying the opposition. Anne wanted the slot for another woman, a reasonable enough objective in these days of affirmative action, not that Anne needed her gender for her position, and Mike Pistoia loathed Cassirer with all the passion of a lover of literature. Whenever Cassirer mentioned Foucault, Pistoia warned him not to speak like that in the presence of a lady. “With a name like his, he should talk,” Cassirer retorted, out of earshot of Pistoia. Lily St. Clair leaned toward Cassirer, in every sense of the term, but if he was aware of her décolletage he gave little evidence of it. Besides, she was inclined to take the opposed position to Anne Gogarty as a matter of habit. Zalinski had a weakness for critical nonsense and was firmly for Cassirer.
    â€œHe infuriates the philosophers.”
    â€œEverything infuriates the philosophers,”

    â€œThey don’t understand a word he says.”
    â€œNeither do the students.”
    â€œThe students!” Like Cassirer, Zalinski despised students. His notion of an ideal college was one in which students were on vacation, all books available on their shelves in the library, and he free to do the New York Times puzzle in the office he shared with Cassirer. A straw vote taken at the last meeting was two to two, leaving Gogarty with the deciding vote. Of course Zalinski passed this confidential information on to Cassirer,