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the white alb billowing out as he strode up and down the aisle.
    The visitation haunted him all day, the face as vivid as a Rouault saint—if Rouault had ever painted saints. Between the funeral and wedding Masses, he went to see Mrs. Morales and explained to her and the other women on the stoop that the funeral arrangement was not possible.
    The women talked among themselves in Spanish too rapid for his limping understanding of it. Mrs. Morales conducted the council with her hairbrush with which she had been grooming her older daughter’s hair. Anita translated for him: “My mother will bake the cake and put out candles, Father. She wants to know, will you come tonight and say the prayers for the dead?”
    “After nine,” he said. “After confessions.”
    A woman in curlers—he remembered her from the stoop the day before—gave a toss of her head to the apartment windows alongside. “Father, he’s back.”
    He knew she referred to Phelan, but why tell him? It was the same woman who had suggested to him that Carlos’ mother was not home very often. A purveyor of mischief, Mrs. Vargas, no doubt.
    “Good,” he said and left quickly.
    After the wedding Mass—he excused himself from the luncheon—he spent a half hour on the next month’s calendar of parish activities, then an hour on music, feeling all the while that it should have been the other way around. Then having a few minutes before religious instruction, he took the musical score to The Bells into the choir loft and tried it on the pipe organ. The old church fairly vibrated. He pulled out stops that set free voices in the organ that might never have been sounded before in all its years of muted trebling beneath a spinster’s hands. Then to the instructions: for baptized Protestants entering matrimony with Catholics, eager promises and runaway eyes. It was like stamping passports and letting the luggage go. On the subject of birth control, Father? No problem at all to celibates: the words went through his head even as he repeated the church doctrine as lately redefined by the Holy Father.
    Miss Lalor made him a special tea and brought it up to his room on a tray, little sandwiches made up of the fish left from the supper he had not come home to the night before, and the pudding from lunch, but with fresh custard, all done daintily. The thing he was forever forgetting about Miss Lalor was that after her tempers, if you didn’t appease them, she came round on a courtship of her own.
    “I sent your other suit to the cleaners, Father. You got something muckety on it.”
    “Thank you.”
    “It struck me afterwards, if you’d wore it yesterday maybe you were saving it for the police?”
    “No.”
    She lingered in the doorway, wanting to talk about the murder, but unsure of a safe way in. “Wasn’t it nice, them mentioning in the papers that you’re the director of the Girls’ Choir?”
    “Nice?” he said, scowling.
    “I suppose you’re right. There isn’t anything they wouldn’t turn to publicity nowadays. Eat something, Father. You’re losing too much weight.”
    He said nothing, wanting her squat, corseted, lavender-scented presence removed from his doorway.
    “Do you want the door closed, Father?”
    “Please.”
    Alone, he conjured again the girl’s face. He was trying, he told himself, to compare it with his memory of the dead man’s, and there was not any comparison to be made except in his own sense of bereavement at losing both of them so soon. In all the city, and she had fled into the heart of Manhattan, where would you go to look for a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl named Mim? The Duminy Bar? He had thought of going there, but that was Priscilla Phelan’s territory and he did not want to tread on that. Besides, if the girl had known him there, she would not have needed to come to McMahon to inquire what the dead man looked like. She had lost track of him and she had known him by another name, McMahon felt sure. Muller—Mahler: was