'Who?'
'The Society of Jesus. Jesuit is short for that.'
'Oh, I see.'
'The Society sent me through medical school and through psychiatric training.'
'Where?'
'Oh, well, Harvard; Johns Hopkins; Bellevue.'
He was suddenly aware that he wanted to impress her. Why? he wondered; and immediately saw the answer in the slums of his boyhood; in the balconies of theaters on the Lower East Side. Little Dimmy with a movie star.
'Not bad,' she said appraisingly, nodding her head.
'We don't take vows of mental poverty.'
She sensed an irritation; shrugged; turned front, facing out to the river. 'Look, it's just that I don't know you, and...' She dragged on the cigarette, long and deep, and then exhaled, crushing out the butt on the parapet. 'You're a friend of Father Dyer's, that right?'
'Yes, I am.'
'Pretty close?'
'Pretty close.'
'Did he talk about the party?'
'At your house?'
'At my house.'
'Yes, he said you seemed human.'
She missed it; or ignored it. 'Did he talk about my daughter?'
'No, I didn't know you had one.'
'She's twelve. He didn't mention her?'
'No.'
'He didn't tell you what she did?'
'He never mentioned her.'
'Priests keep a pretty tight mouth, then; that right?'
'That depends,' answered Karras.
'On what?'
'On the priest.'
At the fringe of his awareness drifted a warning about women with neurotic attractions to priest who desired, unconsciously and under the guise of some other problem, to seduce the unattainable.
'Look, I mean like confession. You're not allowed to talk about it, right?'
'Yes, that's right.'
'And outside of confession?' she asked him. 'I mean, what if some...' Her hands were now agitated; fluttering. 'I'm curious. I... No, No, I'd really like to know. I mean, what if a person, let's say, was a criminal, like maybe a murderer or something, you know? If he came to you for help, would you have to turn him in?'
Was she seeking instruction? Was she clearing off doubts in the way of conversion? There were people, Karras knew, who approached salvation as if it were an unreliable bridge overhanging an abyss. 'If he came to me for spiritual help, I'd say, no;' he replied.
'You wouldn't.'
'No. No, I wouldn't. But I'd try to persuade him to turn himself in.'
'And how do you go about getting an exorcism?'
'Beg pardon?'
'If a person's possessed by some kind of demon, how do you go about getting an exorcism?'
'Well, first you'd have to put him in a time machine and get him back to the sixteenth century.'
She was puzzled. 'What do you mean by that? Didn't get you.'
'Well, it just doesn't happen anymore, Miss MacNeil.'
'Since when?'
'Since we learned about mental illness; about paranoia; split personality; all those things that they taught me at Harvard.'
'You kidding?'
Her voice wavered helpless, confused, and Karras regretted his flipness. Where had it come from? he wondered. It had leaped to his tongue unbidden.
