“Truly it’s not, Father. And if that’s the miracle your receptionist referred to, I told her I didn’t know anything about it.”

“She’s not a receptionist, she’s a housekeeper. We’re not fancy enough to have a receptionist. And we’re not sure yet whether it was a miracle or not, so I’ll thank you not to be spreading it around that Father Fogarty said it was.”

“What did happen then?”

“I thought it wasn’t that you came about.”

“Forget it,” I said irritably. “I’m not that interested.” I moved toward the door, but he held up his hand.

“Hold your temper. Sit down.” He indicated a chair, then shuffled around to the swivel chair behind the desk and lowered himself into it with some difficulty. “I just have to be careful. I can’t have every Tom, Dick and Harry coming in here pestering me. I’m too old for it.”

“That seems an odd way of operating a religious institution,” I said.

“You wouldn’t think it so odd if you were in my shoes and could see some of the nuts we get. And some of them pathetic too, I don’t deny that. People wanting jobs, wanting husbands back and wives, wanting sons and daughters to come home and, more than anything else, wanting to be cured of every disease you ever heard of and a lot you haven’t. We’ve had ambulances pull up to the door and people carried into this rectory on stretchers because they couldn’t get into the church.”

“Why couldn’t they get into the church?”

“Because it’s kept locked most of the time now, except for Masses and other devotions. For one thing some of them were spending the night there. Others were crawling from the curb up the steps of the church and down the aisle to the shrine on their hands and knees. One old fella, so crippled with arthritis he couldn’t straighten up, told me he had crawled back and forth three hundred and forty-­nine times.”

“Was he cured of his arthritis?”

“Not at all. He’s probably worse off now than before.”

“Have you had any cures as a result of people coming here?”

“None that I know of, unless you want to count the one who caused all the trouble. You see, we always had a nice quiet little shrine here where parishioners could come and offer their devotions to the Mother of God, and if they wanted anything, they could ask for it, but nobody ever pretended he had any more advantage praying here than he had at home on his knees beside his own bed. Then this Eyetalian woman, this Mrs. Scaravelli, came along and ruined everything. She was cured of cancer, or so it’s claimed.”

“Is that bad?”