THE RIGHT REVEREND Monsignor Vincent Fahey, wearing black trunks he had adopted under protest when the University Club admitted women to the use of its athletic facilities, swam length after length in the indoor pool at the red brick building on Stuart Street in Boston. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (he arrived around 11 a.m.), he did sixty laps in the pool. He was a trained swimmer, and had competed occasionally in informal meets with other clubs in his younger days, but upon turning fifty had started to beg off.

“Getting too old to help the club, Tommy,” he would reply when Thomas Emmett approached him. Emmett arranged all the meets. He resided in Worcester but he lived in an apartment on Somerset Street, next to the State House. “Still got the moves, like you on the Executive Council, but I don’t have the speed anymore.” Monsignor Fahey prided himself on his ability to appraise realistically any matter of earthly or heavenly concern referred to his attention. “The best I can do now, Tommy, is endurance, and keep myself in shape. Cant let yourself get into the sad condition of the fellows on the track up there.”

Monsignor Fahey left very little wake as he moved through the water, doing a steady Australian crawl with great economy of motion. He wore ear plugs on a black rubber head-gear. He put his left side down and dug powerfully with his right hand at the slightly steaming surface of the pool. His legs and feet kicked just below the surface; he took air through his mouth, rolled onto his right side, submerged that ear, dug the water with his left hand, reached the end of the pool, submerged, did a kick turn off the wall and broke the surface once again, working like a diesel engine. On the track suspended above around the pool, the runners labored along, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, panting. Men half Faheys age wore headbands, wristbands, sodden tee-shirts, shorts, sneakers and socks. Their faces became red and their feet sore thudding on the wooden surface.

“Running,” Monsignor Fahey would scoff in the men’s locker room, toweling off his flat belly and his muscular chest and legs, refusing both offers of beer and invitations to join the runners. “Cant do it. Haven’t got the equipment for it. I don’t like beer so I don’t have the belly that it looks as though a man needs for the first lap. My face wouldn’t get red fast enough. You guys’d all be sweating like horses and I’d still be comfortable. The only thing that’d get me is shin splits, and I don’t want those.”

Completing his laps, Monsignor Fahey climbed out of the pool and took his white towel from the hook. He removed his headgear with the ear plugs and dried his bald head and the fringe of gray hair at the base of his skull before he mopped his face and neck. From the bench beneath the hook, he took the glasses with the black frames and fitted the bows over his large ears, reddened by the water. He put his feet into slippers made of coarse brown paper and walked toward the door and the stairs to the locker room. Above him the early lunchtime joggers thumped earnestly around the wooden track. He shut the door on their noise behind him.

On the carpet before his gray-green locker, Monsignor Fahey scuffed off the disposable slippers. He removed the black nylon bathing suit and the white supporter he wore under it. Entering the same row of lockers, Daniel Minihan of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority paused in the act of taking off his green-and-blue-striped silk tie when he saw Fahey undressing. Minihan wore a gray linen suit, with a vest, and a white broadcloth shirt. His face was well tanned. “Father Fahey, as I live and breathe,” Minihan said. “And not wearin’ the trunks so’s you’re lookin’ down on the unemployed.”

Fahey turned toward him. “Monsignor Fahey to the likes of you, Minihan,” he said. “No, as a matter of fact, I try to keep it out of sight in case you might forget sometime when I’m around you which one belongs to whom, should your hand start twitching. Still shaving your palms are you, to dispose of the evidence?”

“Ahh, Father,” Minihan said, “and fine talk it is, comin’ from a man of the cloth like yourself. I’m afraid the only benefit of your celibacy as it were is unseemly envy of the normal men around us, that know wimmen was put upon the earth for our delight. It’s a narrow view you have, Father, that would deny another man his pleasure because you get none for yourself. Although I see by the papers that there’s one or two of you lately that’s apparently seen the light of day and found the consolation of a woman’s arms. Judgin’ only by what I read, of course.”

“It’s good news that you can, Minihan,” Fahey said. “That’s one of the things I always wondered about you. Whether a man as popular in the press as yourself was aware of the fine reputation you’ve acquired as a faithful son of Holy Mother Church and a man of many other enterprises as well.”

“Now, Father,” Minihan said, removing his coat and unbuttoning his shirt, “I would remind you, do not be uncharitable to those who are afflicted by the infidels. Nobody’s ever charged me with anything.”

“No, they haven’t,” Fahey said, turning toward the showers, “and Judas had to hang himself, too, there being nobody else around with the wit to see it needed doing and the common decency to do it for him.”

“I’ve betrayed no one,” Minihan bellowed at Faheys naked back, as the priest removed his glasses, put them in the locker, and headed for the showers.

“I know, Daniel, I know,” Fahey said, at the entrance to the showers, “that I know. Which is not to say you haven’t been afforded the opportunities, on many occasions, what with all those subpoenas and all. I will say this for you, Daniel: You may be a reproach to your family, your Church and your community, but you give the lie to one proverb, and that may be to your credit—obviously there is some honor among thieves. Not much, but some.” He went into the showers.

When Fahey reached the last shower, Ted Norman was shaving his swarthy face at the sink, drawing the skin down carefully but strongly from his sideburns, using the razor as he used the instruments in the operating room at the New England Medical Center. He kept his gaze on the mirror. “Hey Vinnie,” he said, “I hear that asshole’s arrived again.”

Fahey threw the damp towel into the plastic barrel and took a fresh one from the stack, along with dry paper slippers and a piece of pink soap. “Ted,” he said, “you’re on the membership committee. Why can’t you remove guys like him the way you’d take any other tumor out of an otherwise healthy body?”

Norman thrust his chin toward the mirror, working the skin around to inspect the completeness of his shave. “Can’t do it, Vinnie,” he said. “Committee’s for letting people in, not throwing people out. We’ve got the shorts here, you know. Besides, you think it’d be a good idea, Armenian kid like me attacking a fine broth of an Irish lad like Minihan? I’d enjoy it, and you’d enjoy it, but Minihan’s not the only one, you know. Where do we stop, will you tell me that?”

“Now that, Ted,” Fahey said, mixing the water in the stall he had selected, “wounds me more than anything Minihan ever said to me. Not because I don’t think there’s a little of truth in it Because I’m more and more afraid there is.”

Norman satisfied himself that the shave was finished. “Cripes, Vinnie,” he said, “there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’ve got this kid named Kamal or something that’s one of the residents in surgery, and my God if the little bastard doesn’t think God put him on the earth to flash a scalpel around like a samurai warrior. Every time somebody tells him he screwed up, Kamal puts it down to prejudice against Mideast types. Naturally, he’s widely admired, and when his requests for references started to come in, the word got around fast enough so that pretty soon even Kamal the Camel, as he is affectionately known, stupid as he is, knew what was happening to him. And that was prejudice too, of course.”

Norman rinsed his face and rubbed it vigorously with a towel. “I, naturally, being the resident Arab, am his friend and confidant. I don’t know what I did to get God so pissed off, but I am Kamal’s unofficial guru and dervish. So he came in to me, practically in tears, and wanted me to do something because all this prejudice was going to cost him a staff position at Columbia Presbyterian. It became my job to explain to him that there is no recognizable benefit to being a little prick and prima donna all the time, because it tends to make people angry. And that made me the quisling of the Arabs at the center, because I was siding with the Aryan hordes.

“I didn’t say anything about his ability,” Norman said, splashing shaving lotion on his face. “I never had a chance to get to that. Fact of the matter is that he’s got the makings of a good surgeon. Matter of fact, by the time I get finished with the little bastard in June, he will be a damned good surgeon, or one of us will be dead. But there’s no way he would listen to such a speech. He knows what’s going on. He is getting the shaft. And because he is so goddamned convinced that he is getting the shaft, he is going to get the shaft. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Neat, huh? Why the hell did Allah appoint us the guardians of the jerks in our contingents?”

Fahey was satisfied with the temperature in the shower. He paused at the open door. “That’s not what bothers me about Minihan,” he said, “the little pisspot. It’s not that he’s Irish. He isn’t Irish. Oh, he’s got an Irish name, which I presume he inherited from his father. Although there are reports that his mother wasn’t really sure who it was that was responsible for the sad event, and took the easy way out by blaming the disaster on the last drunken longshoreman who paid a quarter to have his way with her down at the pier in Chelsea one night when she got lucky and went home with a grand total of two dollars and seventy-five cents for the nights work and her bloomers down around her ankles. Where they usually were when she was working for her meager living, doing the only thing that God gave her the talent to do. And his name may not even’ve been Minihan, for all she knew. It could have been some two-boater from over in Melrose, down at the docks for the night to steal what articles he could and buy what affection he couldn’t obtain from a respectable woman in a marriage bed.”

“He looks Irish, sure enough,” Norman said, stepping back from the mirror. He took a comb from the plastic container of combs standing in antiseptic fluid on the glass shelf above the row of sinks, sweeping his hair straight back so that it resembled the crown of a hawk.

“And a glass of ice water looks like a martini,” Fahey said. “The humidity condenses on the outside of the glass, on a humid day, just as it does when there’s honest Beefeater’s for the clear liquid cold inside. But there’s a difference in the beverages, Ted, and you can tell it right off, by the mere act of comparing the taste of the water to the taste of the merest sip of the real thing. Hell, you can tell the difference by the smell or the lack of it in the old woman’s drink, and the power of it in the man’s.

“It’s the same with the Irish, Ted,” Fahey said. “There’s them that’re Irish and will always remember it. They don’t try to remember it. It takes no effort at all for the real ones. The effort would be in the try in’ to forget it, because for the real Irish, it’s in the blood and they could no more forget it than they could demean themselves ever to kiss His Majesty’s bright-blue baboon’s arse. His icthial callosity, as it were, all swathed in ermine as it may be to hide the embarrassing fact.

“It’s the Minihans of this world that’ve misled the stupid bastards of the sceptre and the crown into believing that the Irish have resigned themselves to the boot heel of oppression. It’s the Minihans of this world that’ve done that, fawning and licking the hand that cuffs them, like spaniels. Imitation Irishmen. Counterfeit Irishmen. Shit-on-shirttail Irish. Minihans. I despise the lot of them. They give a bad name to the rest of us.”

“He acts Irish,” Norman said, rubbing the flakes of sunburned skin from his forehead. “Damn, I lecture so well to my patients, but give me a day and I’ll be out in the sun myself, no hat and no lotion, doing exactly the same damage to myself that I’m always telling them to avoid. He belongs to the Clover Club and all. I see his picture in the paper every year, when they have their annual dinner.”

“To prance and dance around like the stage cartoons of Irish that they are. And not content with that, make bigger fools of themselves by gettin’ their antics published in the newspapers.”

“He’s always at the dinners down at Southie for the Evacuation Day,” Norman said. He finished rubbing his forehead, rather absently rediscovered the comb in his hand, rinsed it and replaced it in the sterilizing solution. “Bad sign,” he said, “forgetting an instrument like that. Hope I didn’t leave the retractors in Mrs. Samuelson’s duodenum when I closed her up this morning. Every year, when they print the stories of the big political dinner for Saint Patrick’s Day.”

“Evacuation Day,” Fahey said, “and aptly named, too. Evacuation of the bowels of a proud race plagued since the Battle of the Boyne by the presence in the body of human waste such as Minihan. ‘The Wild Colonial Boy.’ Indeed. Jack Duggan wouldn’t’ve wasted his spit on the likes of Minihan. Cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh, when what we really need is cocks and muscles, alive and bursting with strength, to throw off the yoke of the tyrant. Like the men of the Airborne, proud. And fierce. Men of Kerry, climbing up the cliffs from Dingle to defend the faith.”

“I hope your oratory keeps you heated enough so you don’t stiffen up before you finally get into that shower, Vinnie,” Norman said. “What I should do is connect you to some of my more eccentric brothers who aren’t sure Yasir Arafat’s PLO is an entirely bad idea. You sound something like them. You want have lunch? I can even have a drink today.”

“You’re not playing golf?” Fahey said, stepping into the shower, closing the door and raising his voice above the sound of the water.

“Nope,” Norman said. He headed toward the locker room, pausing in front of Fahey’s shower. “The rain out there may not fall upon the Irish hierarchy, but it sure does hamper this Armenian’s golf game.”

“Oh,” Fahey said, soaping himself. “I forgot. Wednesdays. Doctors. I assume: golf. Well, I can’t. Having lunch with the Bishop, as a matter of fact.”

Norman looked in at the steam which hid Fahey. “Command performance?” he said. “What’d you do, come out against busing again.”

“Ted,” Fahey said in the steam, “I never came out on busing. All I said was that I could understand why people didn’t want their kids shipped all over town. As a matter of fact, I am against busing, but that’s a different matter, and I never said it publicly. Not a command performance, though. This’s just Bishop Doherty, and I can’t imagine what he wants. He most likely can’t, either. Rather of a fool, actually. Poor fool. Not the Cardinal Archbishop. The Fall River Fishmonger.”

“Doherty?” Norman said. “God, is he still around? There was awhile there, when we were all being White Liberals and Doing Good, and I thought we’d never hear the end of him. I thought he was dead, he’s been so quiet. Didn’t he have a heart attack or something?”

Fahey remained behind the steam. “Minor one,” he said. “He recovered. He’s tough enough for that, at least, a minor heart attack. Even though there’s quite a bit of the Minihan strain in him, too. Must be it crept in a couple generations back. The Dohertys are sort of mongrel Minihans and Paul’s the carrier of the weakness for this generation. His brother Jerry’s tough enough, I guess. Did some time at Walpole. Man who stands up for his rights.”

“Could see where he might,” Norman said. “Prison. Good God. How do men stand it?”

“With courage,” Fahey bellowed in the steam. “They stand it steadfastly, as they’re doing today in H Block, Long Kesh.”

“Yeah,” Norman said. “Well, okay, Vinnie. I’ll see you about lunch the next rainy Wednesday. Have a few laughs, and if Minihan shows up on my shift in the OR, I’ll check on the malpractice insurance and see if I can afford to do you a favor.”

“Good,” Fahey said. “And if you can’t afford it, call your brother, the lawyer, and see if he can get you court permission to abate a common nuisance.”

“And if he can’t?” Norman said, smiling.

“Do the deed anyway,” Fahey said. “I’ll give you absolution.”