An Evening with the Waterbury Left

A MEXICAN WIFE languishing in the brick-and-neon waste of an industrial town naturally leaps at any tropic glimmer—even a lecture amid the folding chairs of the Community Room of Trinity Church. I was unenthusiastic. What I remembered about Maryknoll missionaries were collections taken up in parochial school to save Chinese children from heathenism and Communism, and a monthly bulletin my mother used to receive with pictures of pith-helmeted servants of God reading the Bible to fat-bellied African primitives.

But then there was my friend Wally Inglis. In parochial school, he had played taps at every military funeral in town. He went through Taft and Yale with scholarships and honors and never smoked or drank or dated. Naturally,...