But buried in Father McShane’s pitch to pay Mr. Krause a handsome price for his house and his land was the bad seed of his own destruction-or so the priest told them. (John Keane sought to remember the parable.) “The parish is burgeoning,” Father McShane had said. The school was bursting at its seams. Mr. Krause was a Lutheran so he might not be fully aware, but Father McShane, in his pride and boastfulness (through my fault, he told the men) had assured him that eight Masses were offered every Sunday morning-seven, eight thirty, ten, and one-in the church and simultaneously in the auditorium, and still there were folks standing in the aisles. There were double shifts of kindergarten in the school, morning and afternoon, to accommodate all the children. Building the gym was only the first step. Once it was up and Masses could be held there on Sunday mornings, then the old church was coming down and a new, larger one would take its place. Father McShane was thinking of something “in the round” to suit the new liturgy.

But of course Mr. Krause knew the Mass schedule and the school schedule at St. Gabriel’s. Also the hours of the Mothers Club meetings and the Holy Name Society meetings, the basketball games, the first communions and confirmations. Father McShane said three, sometimes four Masses on Sunday mornings, but he had never once edged his way into Mr. Krause’s little store after any of them, never found himself pressed cheek to jowl with thirty other parishioners vying to order cold cuts or potato salad or those marvelous doughnuts from Mr. and Mrs. Krause, their two sons, and the daughter who worked the counter. He’d never reached an arm through the crowd outside to throw some coins into an open cigar box and grab a Sunday Daily News before they were all gone. Father McShane had forked boiled ham and rolled pieces of Swiss cheese onto paper plates, added a dab of good mustard and some coleslaw, snitched a green olive from the tray, in living rooms after funeral Masses or at backyard graduation parties, but he had never thought to note how these always came from Krause’s store.

The parish is burgeoning, he’d said, and no doubt Mr. Krause saw housewives holding wrapped trays of cold cuts high over their heads, like Copacabana chorus girls, as they maneuvered through the Sunday-morning crush. Husbands sent back to get a good-size container of rice pudding. He saw St. Gabriel’s kids in their uniforms coming in for sodas, for chips, for a quick perusal of the candy displayed beneath the counter, saw them handing their mother’s scribbled shopping list to him over the deli case, or ordering a bologna hero because there had been no time this morning for making lunches. And now added to that vision, thanks to Father McShane and his (he was the first to admit it) big mouth, bricklayers and electricians and plumbers and painters filling the place every lunchtime for however many years or months it took to build the gym and the eighth-grade classrooms, and then to tear down one church and put up another.

Mr. Krause understood that the old places were fading, the dairy farms and the potato fields and the clapboard houses of the last century, and nostalgia over the loss of a past that had never been his had made him momentarily lose sight of the present, and of the indisputable fact that there wasn’t a storefront anywhere on Long Island that could beat this location. When Father McShane returned with his generous offer and a copy of the architect’s drawing that graced the cover of each pledge form, Mr. Krause said simply that he’d be a fool to sell.

How, then, would they break ground in the spring?

From the far end of the priests’ dining room, Pope John XXIII, even in profile, looked benevolent and amused. The men on the building committee had wondered, only half joking, if they had to wait for his canonization before they could send the good old man their petitions or if they couldn’t start praying to him even now. With Mr. Krause’s store stubbornly in place there was only a sliver of street access available to the school-a narrow driveway, an alleyway, really, bordered by the cinder-block wall that divided the church parking lot where the bulk of the new building was to sit and the Dumpsters that served the small strip mall on the far corner. The design, the one printed on every pledge form the men had delivered and returned, displayed on a gold easel in the church vestibule and in Sister Rose’s office at the school, sent to the bishop, approved by the diocese, would have to be scrapped, utterly changed. Father McShane swallowed another burp. “None of these people,” he said, indicating the stacks of pledges, “will feel he’s gotten what he’s paid for.”

Is it too early, the men asked, only half joking, to pray to Pope John? Or would they have to wait till he was a saint? Wasn’t anyone in heaven more or less a saint?

If that’s the case, Mr. Marrs asked, does anyone here know any recently deceased architects?

The six men and the three priests and the accountant all turned their eyes to the living architect who stood above the plans that were spread across the dining-room table with his cheeks puffed out and his brow furrowed. Thus far he had donated his work, both time and material, with the hope that he would then be selected to design the new church, but he could not very well afford (he was considering the best way to say this) to do it all over again, gratis. He could offer them, he said, two options. He could turn the entrance around-he pretended to pick up the building with thumb and forefinger-put the back of the gym and the new classrooms to Mr. Krause’s backyard, but then the spanking-new entrance of steel and glass that Father McShane was so fond of would face only the cemetery.

“Unacceptable,” the pastor said.

Or-he moved the building again-he could turn it to the side, facing the alleyway and the cinder-block wall. Goodbye green lawn, but the white statue of Saint Gabriel might easily be moved into the lobby. And the alleyway, at least, could accommodate a car or a truck or a school bus that needed, for whatever reason, to pull up to the front door. It was a compromise no doubt, the architect said. Not nearly as grand as the original, but they could break ground in the spring and have the gym going in a year’s time. Which meant the new church could get started and it was the new church, after all, that would be the showpiece.

“It seems a shame,” Father McShane said, “that one man’s intransigence will leave generations of St. Gabriel’s students in an alley.”

Collectively, the men bowed their heads and considered this.

The six men on the building committee had jobs that only vaguely qualified them for the task-Mr. Keeley was an electrician, Bill Schultz managed a bank, Mr. Kozlosky sold insurance, both Mr. Keane and Mr. Battle were with the telephone company, Lou Pintaro owned a garden center-but each of them was happy to concede the point when the architect replied that a man had to make a living and provide for his family, first and foremost, come what may. No one could blame Mr. Krause for that.

It was late. No one could blame the men for wanting this business to be concluded. They had work tomorrow. They were missing Bonanza. Mrs. Arnold was waiting in the kitchen to clear away the coffee cups and get home herself. Father McShane folded his arms across his chest. He called the men by their first names, Robert? Bill? Jerry? John? Larry? Lou? And one by one they all agreed. It was not ideal, but it was a solution. With Mr. Krause dug in like this, there weren’t many alternatives. Mr. Marrs said, “Those Krauts do dig in,” and the men laughed, pushing back their chairs. The matter was settled. The new church, then, would be the showpiece.

In the cold black sky over the rectory parking lot, there was Orion, as he’d always been. And always would be. Jacob had drawn the constellation once and labeled it “O’Ryan.” At dinner tonight, Michael had announced that a kid in school asked if Jacob was a Jew. Michael thought this was very funny. Jacob had brushed it aside. So what, he’d said. Jesus was a Jew. There was something rehearsed in the boy’s reply. John Keane wondered if one of the nuns hadn’t provided it to him, against another kid’s teasing. Across the dinner table, his wife had bowed her head, more effective than catching his eye. Fourteen years was no time at all in the life of an I told you so.