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brother’s startled face and down into that ivory light. And then, for good measure, I said it again, into the teacup itself. “Amadan.”
    The pretty room tilted then—folded white tablecloth and black polished wood and the light of the simple chandelier—as my mother, with an iron grip on my upper arm, swung me out of my chair and into the tiled bathroom where the cup was filled beneath the silver stream of warm water and the soap dipped into it, once, then twice. “Again,” my mother said as I tasted the bitter water and, leaning over the porcelain, spit it out into the sink.
    In the dining room, my brother—the scholar—was asking my father what it meant, amadan. My father said, “A fool. It means someone’s a fool.”
    Even with the water running, the cup of soapy water at my lips, I could hear my father’s shout of laughter when my brother asked him, “Who is?”
    They called me “our little pagan” after that, whenever their pride in my brother’s saintliness was in need of some deflating. Self-deflating, as was their way. When the priest from St. Franciscame to say there was clearly a vocation. When the letter from the seminary arrived.
    “We’re not so enamored of the priesthood as some,” my mother said, washing the dishes after the priest had come for tea, blushing with pride, but also holding her lips in such a way that made it clear she was not going to go overboard—as she would have put it—with her delight in Gabe’s success. There were just as many men in rectories, she said, who were vain or lazy or stupid as there were in the general population.
    “One bishop,” my father joked, his hand to the top of my head, “and one little pagan. We’ve run the gamut in just these two.”
    I climbed the staircase of Gertrude Hanson’s house, my hand on the wide banister. The carpet here was threadbare and there was the familiar odor of dust in the air. What light there was came through the transom above the entrance or filtered down in a single yellow shaft from the dirty skylight four stories up. Gertrude Hanson’s apartment was on the third floor. I knocked on the heavy door. The corridor was warm and airless. I heard Mrs. Hanson’s voice inside, laughing, and I rose up on my toes.
    “Come in, Marie,” Mrs. Hanson called. “We know it’s you.”
    Because this was the Saturday-morning routine, Gerty and I being even then the best of best friends. I opened the door and leaned in.
    The Hansons’ front room was crowded with furniture: the great black dining-room table, eight chairs with tapestry seats, a heavy sideboard, a tea cart, a china cabinet with bowed glass—indication, in those days, of a family’s propriety and prosperity. Twice in my recollection I had arrived at Gerty’s on a Saturdaymorning and been startled to find the front room starkly empty, only the lamps still there, the good dishes and the tea set piled in a corner on the bare floor. “Repossessed” was the word Gerty used with an easy shrug. But on this morning it was all solidly in place, and beyond it I could see Mrs. Hanson in a wide chair just outside the kitchen entry, her bare feet on a plump hassock, her hands beckoning. “Come in, come in,” she said. “Come in and take this poor child out into the fresh air. She’s been cooking all morning.”
    Mrs. Hanson had always been fleshy, with thick wrists and a broad, round face, but now with her fifth child on the way she was huge in her chair, her feet and ankles swollen, her stomach straining against the flannel of what had been her husband’s dressing gown. She had tucked a handkerchief into the collar of the robe, and the bit of lace at its edge, caught between her full breasts, made her look like a woman in an old painting. As if she were a woman in an old painting, she wore her black hair partially pinned up, partially fallen over her shoulders. There was a moist gleam to her white skin, her cheeks and her forehead and her bare arms, as if they