The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (21 page)

   “
Care to come on
in?”

   
The house’s
interior was as cool and homey as he remembered it. The same
Victorian belles were suspended midway through their swing out of
the wallpaper. The old plates in the hutch were untouched. He had
thought frequently about this room in the past couple days. After
the shock of his experience with Anne-Marie and his disappointing
visit to Fords Pointe, he had lumped together everything between
his breakdown on the Turnpike and his arrival at Charlie Weeks’
house into one eminently forgettable episode. But since his trip to
Maryland, and especially during his ride north this morning, he had
begun to distinguish between the good and the bad moments.
Anne-Marie, of course, and the mendacious store keeper were not
among his fonder memories, although even these were no longer as
distressing to recall as they had been. But the mechanic and his
wife and the boy who drove him to Tom’s River were warm, even
cherished recollections. In a way, he was grateful to Sidney Small
for coming along when he did. The trip to Maryland had become more
of a chore than a pleasure. It was not that he loved his mother any
less; they simply did not have as much in common anymore. She was a
good, God-fearing woman. But she was entitled to live her life as
she saw fit, just as he—he had decided that morning as he was
approaching the Delaware border—was entitled to live his
own.

   
Such a
conclusion would not have been possible for him two weeks ago. At
that point he didn’t even have a clear idea what his own desires
were—except for a need to go incognito for a couple days. And even
that modest ambition he only dared realize inadvertently, using the
excuse of the long drive to Maryland to achieve it. It was not
until Martha and her husband took him in that his ambition became
something more than a clerical daydream. All priests wondered what
it would be like to be free of their priestly identity and be
treated like other, normal men. Some, like himself, indulged their
fantasy by taking off the roman collar for a few hours. But was
that anything but childish pretending, no more realistic than a
kid’s dressing up as a goblin for Halloween? Real life, acceptance
into the world that lay people inhabited, was something he had
experienced only after the control of his own fate had been taken
out of his hands. Reality was Martha’s anger at her son’s untimely
death, however she obscured the details. Reality was the
storekeeper’s cruelty and, yes, it was that woman Anne-Marie’s
unvarnished lust.

   
Martha and Sonny
had left him alone in the dining room. He could hear their voices
in the kitchen but could not make out what they were saying. He was
content to sit at the big round table and enjoy the room’s
churchlike coolness. He felt more at home here than he had at his
mother’s, even in those years prior to the appearance of Sidney
Small.

   “
Would you like
something to drink?” Martha asked. “I have iced tea.”

   “
Iced tea would
be fine. Thank you.”

   
She returned to
the kitchen, but from the sounds of footsteps on the ceiling, he
surmised the mechanic had slipped upstairs.

   “
Don’t have much
call to keep fancy stuff in the house,” she said when she returned.
“I could offer you beer, but I don’t suppose you’d much care for
that.”

   
He accepted the
iced tea and thanked her. “No, I’m not much for beer, I’m afraid.
This will do just fine.”

   
She stood near
the big circular table, her arms folded across her faded
housedress, watching him. Her vigilance made him feel like he was a
child again, eating or drinking under his mother’s attentive
gaze.

   “
Somehow I
didn’t figure you for a drinking man.”

   
He swallowed and
looked up. There was no sign of humor on her tight mouth, and her
eyes had the same steely look they had taken on when he had
suggested that God had taken her son for His own purposes. “I’ve
thought a lot about what you and your husband did for me last week.
I wanted to stop by to thank you again. I hope I didn’t pick a bad
time.”

   
She regarded him
carefully for a moment, then said, “One day’s the same as any
other. We’re just what we seem to be. We don’t try to pretend to
something we ain’t.”

   “
That’s always
best,” he offered as an amen and finished his drink. He could have
drunk more, but she didn’t offer, nor did she take the empty glass
from him. She simply remained standing a few feet away, her arms
crossed against her chest.

   “
See you got
yourself a new car.”

   “
Just renting,
for the time being. It’s secondhand,” he added. “I’ll be on my way
soon,” he said, although he had hoped to spend the rest of the day
with her and her husband. If invited, he would gladly have remained
for the rest of the week. When she failed to respond with an
invitation to dinner, his heart fell. He couldn’t understand how he
could have fallen so much from grace in one short week. He was the
same man he had been when they took him in as a stranded motorist.
Had the bond he felt with them been an illusion?

   “
We don’t take
kindly to deceivers, Mr. Walther. Or should I call you
Reverend?”

   
That was what
Anne-Marie had called him.

   “
We heard about
your little dalliance with Miss Sutherland. So, we know what kind
of minister you must be. We don’t ask who or what a body is before
we take him in. The Lord said, ‘Do until others,’ and that’s what
we aim for. But we like to be dealt with fair and square, just like
the next person. You didn’t deal with us fair and square, Mr.
Walther. No, you didn’t.”

   
He took a moment
to collect himself. He was experiencing the same difficulty
breathing he had felt in his mother’s hospital room the previous
afternoon.

   “
I didn’t think
it mattered, my being a priest,” he said finally. “I really
didn’t.”

   “
Come, now, Mr.
Walther,” she said, unfolding her arms and taking a half-step
toward him. “You know I’m not talking about you being of the cloth.
We’re not Catholics, but we wouldn’t turn someone away for that
reason. I’m talking about the lies you spread about us and”—her
lips suddenly began to quiver—“our boy.”

   “
Your boy? I
didn’t...”

   “
Never
mind explaining, Mr. Walther—Reverend Walther, if you prefer. You
have nothing to explain. I was a fool to trust a stranger with our
private business. It’s my own fault if you went and drug it through
the mud with that whore Sutherland!”

   
Suddenly she
began to weep, covering her face with the small flowered apron she
was wearing. He was at a loss what to do. He was still too shocked
by her accusation to assume the role of comforter which came
natural to him around people in grief. Besides, according to Martha
it was he who was the cause of her distress, a circumstance he had
never had to face when dealing with any of his
parishioners.

   
The mechanic
appeared at the other side of the room. He took in the situation,
darted an unfriendly glance toward the priest, then drew a
protective arm around his wife.

   “
I’m very
sorry,” Father Walther said. He knew he was innocent of whatever
slander Anne-Marie had spread about him, but the force of Martha’s
accusation still overwhelmed him.

   “
Please leave
our house,” the mechanic said.

   
After driving
for half an hour he realized he was heading in the wrong direction.
He pulled into the parking lot of a diner to turn around, at first
thinking the place closed because there was no other car about. But
then he noticed a waitress wiping down the deserted counter, and he
decided to stop for coffee. He looked around for other signs of
life, but the diner, a gray bullet-shaped structure that looked
like an old-fashioned Pullman car, seemed to have been plunked down
arbitrarily on some cinders at the side of the road. Nothing else
was near it, or even in sight, just more of the underused concrete
he had seen so much of during the past week.

   
He ordered
coffee, then despite a lack of appetite, a hamburger as well. The
waitress disappeared into the kitchen, apparently to cook it
herself. He took the opportunity to visit the men’s
room.

   
As he was
washing his hands in the small sink set almost flush against the
toilet’s one ancient urinal, he noted there were dark rings under
his eyes. His skin seemed sallow and lifeless in comparison with
the way it had looked when he had examined himself at Charlie
Weeks’. His face was certainly not any longer a young man’s,
although he had never noticed before, or cared about, the obvious
signs of aging. His eyes were bloodshot, as if he had been on a
debauch instead of an innocent visit to his mother. Margaret would
take one look at him and try to put him to bed. His mother hadn’t
seemed to notice his fatigue, having other matters on her mind.
There was a time when she would have kept him home from school at
the slightest sign of a cold or upset stomach. He had had to resist
her pamperings lest she turn him an invalid, if only in his own
mind. But now he could drop dead before she took note of any
debilitation. In effect, he decided, staring glumly at the
middle-aged man in the cracked mirror, he no longer had a
mother.

   
He began to cry.
One moment he was drying his hands on a piece of brown paper
toweling, and the next his face was contorted with misery, a
child’s hopeless grief made all the more grotesque by his
forty-year-old features. A geyser of self-pity had erupted inside
him, carrying with it all the pain and humiliation he had not
allowed himself to feel at his mother’s betrayal or Martha’s cold
rejection. He was a friendless middle-aged priest, more than
halfway to the grave, errand-boy for a senile monsignor who cared
more about squeezing an extra few dollars out of his bovine
congregation than about ministering to the sick and
poor.

   
What had become
of the fire that had filled his youth, that enthusiasm for winning
souls to Christ and realizing the kingdom of heaven? How had he
come to be so bogged down in incidentals? And how had he arrived at
this sorry state of friendlessness, cut off from his fellow human
beings, unloved and—the shame of it brought fresh tears to his
eyes—apparently incapable of loving?

    “
Ketchup?”

   “
Please.”

   “
Right there.”
The woman, surprisingly pretty for such a dead-end job, pushed a
half-filled bottle toward his plate. “Give a yell if you want
anything else,” she said, returning to the kitchen.

   
He ate
mechanically. When he was through he left payment on the
counter.

   
He started the
car and shifted into reverse. But as he began backing toward the
road, checking his rearview mirror for the improbable oncoming
vehicle, he realized he didn’t know which direction he should take.
It was still only midweek. He had three days vacation left—four,
counting today. He had no desire to return to the Catskills. The
shore was out of the question. He shifted back into park, placed
his arms across the top of the steering wheel, and laid his head on
them. A vent blew lukewarm air at him from the dashboard. The hot
sun beat down through the windshield. He pressed his lips together
until they hurt and stared down the highway to where it vanished
behind a stand of scrub pine. After almost forty years, all spent
in virtually the same locale in daily contact with scores of
different people, he had no place and no one to turn to. He had
lost touch with all his old friends, not just Frank Willet and
Charlie Weeks, but even seminarians and priests he had befriended,
and he had failed to make any new ones. Even his mother had begun a
new life that did not include him. His only brother lived three
thousand miles away. Every time he searched the landscape of his
mind for a place to light, the only welcoming image he could come
up with was Margaret’s. She, at least, would be glad to see him.
She would not betray, deceive or molest him. In return, though, he
must play her game, assume the role of buffoon and pet. Was that
the best he could do? Other men had homes to go to when the rest of
the world rejected them. Were a domineering housekeeper and musty
rectory all that he could count on?

   
He put the car
in gear and pulled out onto the highway, heading north. He drove
slowly, well below the local speed limit, reluctant to shorten the
journey back to Holy Name. The air-conditioning now blew cooler air
at his face and feet. The engine purred efficiently. Not much
chance of a breakdown in this car. Before long he would be on the
streets of his parish. However he chose to while away the next
three days, after Sunday he would resume his old life again. No
more adventures as Mr. Nobody. No more excursions into the world of
ordinary people with its uncertain jogs and disappointments.
Life—all that remained until it ended in one of those dreary
old-age homes for priests or in an equally claustrophobic Catholic
hospital—would go on as before. He would continue to serve as
assistant pastor, bogged down in the minutiae of account books and
fund-raising, until the monsignor finally died or he was reassigned
to a different parish. Perhaps he would receive a pastorship of his
own while he was still relatively young and had his wits about him.
Then he too would administer the diocesan will until he began to
lose his place saying Mass, a rite that had already lost most of
its meaning for him. Then some eager young curate would take over
for him in the hopes of inheriting the parish or one like it, just
as he had hoped to take over from the Monsignor. Between that day
of dotage and this he could look forward to innumerable tea parties
with the Catholic Daughters of America, thousands of hours in the
stuffy confessional which only old maids and innocent children
seemed to frequent any more, year after year of contending with
dishonest vendors, fawning morticians, crooked police, effeminate
sextons and scrupling, overworked but incurably hero-worshipping
nuns.