Am I sounding a little sour here? Maybe. Because I began to resent having my wife host meetings of her fellow pro-lifers. And having to put up bail four times when Agnieska was arrested for blocking clinics. Or approaching women entering Planned Parenthood up in Los Feliz with red roses and telling them there was another choice awaiting them with Angels Assist. Maybe as well it was the ongoing memory of a Sunday when my wife convinced me to go to Mass with her a week or so after she had been arrested with Teresa for lying down in front of an abortion clinic in Reseda and refusing to move when the cops tried to talk them into leaving. During the service I did take Communion with my wife and afterwards waited while she popped into the confessional to be cleansed of her sins. When it finished, Agnieska told me that we were invited to a lunch at Teresa’s house. I said that I didn’t want to go; that I had to start work at four and …

But Agnieska told me it would mean the world to her if I would stop by for just an hour. I could see the subtext of her request: she wanted to show her church girlfriends that all was good between us after her recent arrest.

So after Mass I drove us to Teresa’s house in Boyle Heights. She was always dressed up in severe black suits, as if she was about to give evidence at a trial. Her husband had died of cancer five years ago when he was eighty-five. She’d never been able to have children. Nor did they find a way of adopting – which, given her ultra-Catholic credentials, surprised me. She herself was almost forty when she married her husband – a man many decades her senior. A first marriage – and a late one. My wife noted that the state and even Catholic charities were dubious about placing children with older parents. And Teresa refused to adopt directly from an agency in Central or South America ‘because you can never know his or her actual parentage and you could be buying into a whole genetic nightmare’. She made this statement when over at our house around five years ago on the occasion of Klara’s nineteenth birthday. My daughter – who wasn’t fully radicalized yet – heard Teresa’s pronouncement and later asked me:

‘How can she be so Catholic and so cruel?’

I wanted to reply: sometimes the two go together. But this was not the sort of thing you told a kid. Instead I said:

‘She’s just a little severe, that’s all.’

‘You can’t say anything really hard about others, can you?’

To which I could only reply:

‘There is enough hardness in the world already.’