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girls—he’s got two working for him—and he’ll look after her himself, and even take her to Mass with him until she’s found her way.
    Goes to a big church called Saint Matthew’s. Says he can’t pay Smoky much, but he can see that she comes to no harm, and he says she’s got that kind of talent ought to be given a chance—”
    “Is he married? Does he have a family?” my mother said.
    “Well, of course he does. I mean, he didn’t say, but no chamber of commerce is going to be giving a grand new magazine to some young, unmarried upstart, now are they?”
    My mother said nothing.
    “Well, Smoky girl?”
    “Oh, Daddy, oh my God—” I breathed.
    “Don’t blaspheme,” my mother said automatically.
    And so I was on my way at last.
    It was the first of the many miracles I personally witnessed Matt Comfort perform, that toppling of my father’s towers without a shot being fired. It gave me a great and giddy sense of possibilities, the sense that, in that city to my north, on fire and on the make, assorted

    ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 22
    minor miracles might truly be within beck and call, at least that of Matt Comfort.
    Then send me one right now, I thought desperately from the passenger seat of the Vista Cruiser stalled in Tight Squeeze, watching from the corner of my eye my father’s face harden into the resolve to take me home to Corkie. God or Our Lady or Matt Comfort or somebody, send me a miracle or this whole thing is surely going to end right here in this car.
    And it being the night for them, miracles as well as epiphanies, my deliverance presented itself at that instant, standing on a street corner under a streetlight on the corner of Tenth and Peachtree Streets.
    “Look, Daddy,” I said, incredulous laughter bubbling up like ginger ale in my chest, tickling giddily behind my eyes.
    “Look over there.”
    He followed my pointing finger and saw them, too. Three young nuns in full habit and a young priest in jeans and a crewneck sweater over his dog collar, standing in the middle of a throng of the tatterdemalion, half-naked young, strum-ming guitars and singing and laughing as if the whole scene were a Sunday School picnic. Over my father’s silence I could hear, faintly, the sound of the chords, and their singing: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind….”
    My father did not speak again until we had cleared the lights of Tight Squeeze and were at the corner of Fourteenth Street, where we were to turn left for the Church’s Home.
    “I’m leaving you here against my better judgement, Maureen Aisling,” he said. “And I’ll be in touch with this Matt Comfort at least once a week, and if he notices the slightest thing amiss with you, the slightest wee thing, I’ll be up here for you before he hangs up the phone. Don’t you forget that.”

    23 / DOWNTOWN
    “I won’t, Daddy,” I said meekly.
    When we had reached the forbidding dark-brick pile of Our Lady, my father decided that he would not come in with me. His innate sense of otherness from all but Corkie had gotten hold of him, I knew; I had seen it happen before. His plan had been to deposit me safely in the arms of the Church, to find himself a cheap motel room nearby, and drive back early the next morning, but I knew that he would get back into the Vista Cruiser and start for home when he left me off, fleeing for safety in the cradling arms of the huge car.
    He would play the radio all the way, the sentimental stations he favored fading out as he left the city behind and the raw all-night gospel stations of the wiregrass and the coast coming in, singing along with them, emerging whole and vigorous once more as he neared Savannah and Corkie, like a photograph in developing solution.
    He carried my bags to the sagging front porch and set them down and rang the bell, and when he heard a ponderous tread coming toward us, he hugged me stiffly, ruffling my careful new Sassoon cut, and kissed me on the cheek.
    From the bottom step