He was an art critic; he was a book critic; he wrote on politics and morals; he wrote on everything. He was a journalist, both in print and weekly on the radio; he had "sensibility," but he was proud of being "focused." He was a Catholic; he read Cardinal Newman and François Mauriac and Étienne Gilson and Simone Weil and Jacques Maritain and Graham Greene. He reread The Heart of the Matter a hundred times, weeping (Frank Castle could weep) for poor Scobie. He was a parochial man who kept himself inside a frame. He had few Protestant and no Jewish friends. He said he was interested in happiness, and that was why he liked being Catholic. Catholics made him happy. Fumicaro made him happy. To get there he left New York on an Italian liner, the Benito Mussolini. Everything about it was talkative but excessively casual. The schedule itself was casual, and the ship's engines growled in the slip through a whole day before embarkation. Aboard, the passageways were packed with noisy promenaders—munchers of stuffed buns with their entrails dripping out (in all that chaos the dock peddlers had somehow pushed through), quaffers of colored fizzy waters.
