A fly buzzed over the butter, and Mikie batted at it with his knife. He had taken off his hat, disclosing a gray cowl of hair low on his forehead. His whole face labored with the effort of mastication. Every time he licked his lips, a pat of butter on his chin evaded his tongue. His eyes cunningly followed the fly. He swung his knife again and this time knocked it into the butter dish, where it lay quite still. His face labored on.

Father Conroy was oppressed by a sense of time running on and on and on to no end. My God, he thought, what am I doing here? Yet what was he to do? Where else could he go? He rolled a forkful of bacon, and as its warmth slid on his tongue, looked despairingly at the thick slices still waiting on his plate. Is this what eternity is like, he wondered (trying to make a joke of it), eating with the Donovans, picking at a plate of bacon which won’t diminish no matter how much you eat? Kate! he wanted to call out, breaking the long silence, can’t we talk? It doesn’t matter a damn what we say, as long as we talk. You’re the only one I have left.

But, with Mikie there, he could not call her.

Then her voice sounded. “Tom!” A call out of the void, unsolicited, measureless in its reassurance.

He looked up eagerly. “Yes, Kate?”

“Did you hear about Maurice?”

“Maurice?”

“Maurice Connolly.”

Who was Maurice Connolly? He had a bad memory for names; he could never attach them to faces, like phrases to their context.

“Don’t you remember Maurice?”

“Maurice Connolly,” he said, baffled, searching back through hundreds of faces glimpsed at communion rails, through confessional grilles, in kitchens, and on football fields.

“We went up the mountain once, up to the lake.”

“Yes, Kate.” When? He tried to prize out the face.

“One Sunday, Fraughan Sunday we used to call it.” And her voice trailed away in her dreamy way, “Ah, but sure you don’t...” And she drifted back into her silence.

But he had a face now. It tilted quizzically upward, eyes screwed up in the sunlight. Maurice Connolly stood half-in, half-out of the shadow of trees. He was addressing himself, with careful indolence, to two girls who sat on a grassy bank above him, their long skirts demurely gathered about their legs. Nearby, on the roadside, bicycles were stacked, leaning together, light shining from the spokes of the wheels. Yes, he remembered that tilted face, the thin, arrogant, whiplike curve of the body.