The snowshoer and I ran south on Park Avenue to East Fifty-second Street, where we ran west to Fifth Avenue. We assumed the protesters would be everywhere we looked on Fifth; we expected they would be all along East Fiftieth, at least as far as Rockefeller Center, perhaps lying down and blocking traffic on East Fifty-first Street, from Madison Avenue to Sixth. There had been demonstrators lying down on Fifth Avenue, Mr. Barlow and I were told, but we’d missed it. You had to be really out of it to be late to the Stop the Church protest.

Inside St. Patrick’s, the Mass had long since started—maybe an hour and a half before we got there, one of the protesters said. The organist had played loudly at times, a demonstrator told us; there’d been shouting from inside the church. The cops had arrested more than a hundred protesters, one of the hangers-on had said. We heard that half the demonstrators who’d been taken away had been seized inside St. Patrick’s. The snowshoer and I were alarmed to hear that the cops had carried protesters out of the cathedral on stretchers.

“Were the protesters injured?” Elliot asked one of the demonstrators, who was just hanging around.

“I don’t think so,” the guy told us. “If you don’t go of your own accord, the cops tie you to a stretcher and you go that way.”

I don’t understand how anything works, I was thinking. Once more, Em had been right: I might as well marry a skier who works in publishing; I might as well be living in Vermont and skiing with my mother. I was of no use to anyone in New York. I couldn’t even get to a demonstration on time. The remaining protesters were barely protesting; there were so many cops around, you couldn’t get close to the cathedral. By the time the snowshoer and I arrived, it seemed there were almost as many bystanders as demonstrators; maybe the bystanders had come to gawk at the protesters. Mr. Barlow and I were just bystanders. From what we’d been told, the more demonstrative of the demonstrators were already under arrest. At 9 A.M., someone said, there’d been about four hundred police officers lining Fifth Avenue. We’d not been there to watch the loaded paddy wagons drive away. I saw only one police van—it was parked near one of the police barricades, in front of the church.

“The twin spires of St. Patrick’s, a Gothic Revival cathedral, look all the more medieval today—under the circumstances,” the snowshoer enigmatically said.

“Under what circumstances?” I asked the little English teacher.