The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (13 page)

   “Uh huh. And then your car broke
down.”

   “No, that happened earlier.” He
hastily recounted his engine failure on the Turnpike and, in a
general way, how he ended up at the shore. As he spoke he kept his
eyes fixed on the highway’s white center line. “Believe it or not,
I’m a Catholic priest.”

   
The
young man regarded him as if he had just announced he was a federal
agent.

   “
The
friend I mentioned owns a summer house down this way. Instead of
going back to my parish, I decided to spend a few days with him and
his wife.”

   
The cop
took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one without
taking more than one hand off the wheel. Blue smoke filled the
vehicle.

   “
I got a
brother-in-law’s a priest,” he said then. “Ever hear of Father
Rosa?”

   “
Gus Rosa? Saint
Mary’s, Oradell?”

   “
Paul. Jersey
City.”

   “
No, I’m afraid
I don’t know him.”

   They didn’t speak for the next
half mile.

   “I was supposed to be a priest
myself,” the young man said, palming the steering wheel and shaking
his head. “Me and Tommy Miller. Tommy even went in the seminary for
a couple years. But I knew right away that life wasn’t for me.”

   
There
was a pause. Father Walther decided he was supposed to ask why
not.

   
The cop grinned
like a mischievous schoolboy. “Girls.” He blushed pink. “Couldn’t
keep my hands off them.”

   “
How about your
friend?”

   “
Tommy?” He
stared hard at the road ahead, then took a long drag on his
cigarette. “Got killed in I-raq.”

   
The car
suddenly came to a stop. For a moment the priest was afraid the
driver had decided his passenger was an imposter and was going to
arrest him. There were no buildings nearby, just highway and scrub
brush. He could make a break into the woods that began just a few
yards from the road’s shoulder. It was crazy to think such an idea,
but the prospect of going to jail even for a few hours was suddenly
unbearable. If he did run, the cop might shoot him. He wasn’t
afraid of getting shot, he decided, but he balked at the sin of
inviting damage to his body.

   “
You can
catch a bus to New York right here,” the policeman said, pointing
to a metal sign—the same white and black circle under which as a
boy young Richard and his mother used to wait for the 82 bus to
Hackensack. It depicted the silhouette of a slim 1940s woman, her
foot on the first step of a waiting bus. The pole was rusted and
bent where something had run into it. “You know, when I picked you
up I had half a mind to turn you in. But then you told me about
being a priest. Well, I’m not saying I’m convinced—although you
passed the little test I gave you: I don’t have no brother-in-law a
priest—my wife’s a Presbyterian. Still and all, you seem like a
pretty decent guy,” he went on sententiously. “You get to be a
pretty good judge of character in my job. So, I’m gonna give you a
piece of free advice.

   “
I
figure you must be in some kind of trouble or you wouldn’t be out
standing on a highway. I don’t know what your problem is—alcohol,
drugs, whatever—and, to tell you the truth, I don’t care. I’m just
giving you a friendly warning that you’d better get yourself some
help before you land in some real trouble. I happen to know they
got special places for priests to dry out or kick their habits.
Like I said,” he concluded with a deep drag on his cigarette, “in
my job you get to learn a lot about human nature.

   
He
shifted back into drive. “There’ll be a bus along in a while. Say a
prayer for me.”

    
Two hours later he was looking out the window of a bus bound
for New York City. The sunny morning had turned gray. As the bus
sped across the flats approaching the Lincoln Tunnel, he recognized
some of that grayness as the back side of the Hudson Palisades. The
drab landscape, relieved only by a bicycle assembly plant and a
discount clothing outlet, had a decidedly behind-the-scenes look. A
raucous motel sign heralded the impending metropolis.

   
A pale
fat man was asleep in the seat beside him. He had gotten on
somewhere north of Asbury Park, inquired if the seat beside the
priest was taken, and fell immediately asleep. Now his head rested
almost on the priest’s shoulder. His face looked like dough that
had settled to one side. His mouth formed a perfect “O”.

   
An old
lady across the aisle who looked absurdly like his mother had told
him the bus was traveling express. He had a notion that she not
only knew he was a priest but was aware of everything that had
happened to him in the past week. He had pretended to nap in order
to avoid her attentions. But he soon found himself dozing off for
real. Now, inexplicably, she was gone and he was wondering if it
was possible he had only imagined her. The idea that his sanity
might be abandoning him did not disturb him the way it might have a
few days ago. He even felt something like bemusement that
experience, which had always made some sort of immediate
sense—suffering as a divine test or means to increased grace, joy
as a revelation of that grace—had suddenly become enigmatic. Could
reality, after all, be so fickle?

   
He
hadn’t been to New York in months, not since he took the Rosary
Society to a Broadway musical during the Christmas holiday. They
had chartered a bus and made a day of it, eating out at one of the
tourist traps near Times Square. Prior to that excursion he hadn’t
ventured into Manhattan for almost a year. Most of his parish lived
the same provincial existence.

   
The Port
Authority terminal had changed considerably from the way it had
looked when his mother used to take him into New York for new
school clothes or to window-shop and meet his father for dinner.
The terminal building itself looked newer and, paradoxically,
bigger. The bus let him off on a semi-enclosed deck rank with the
odor of exhaust fumes. He would not have known his way out except
by following the other passengers. Once on the mezzanine, though,
he recognized the long banks of escalators extending up from the
main concourse below. He stood staring down at the flow of
travelers until a policeman or security guard—it was hard to tell
which—took note of him, and he thought it best to move
on.

   
He
decided to put a call through to his confessor. Bill Lapchek was an
easygoing sort, cursory in the confessional—perhaps too cursory,
almost as if he were...well, bored when his younger colleague
confessed to letting his attention wander during mass or when he
was hearing confessions. Lapchek had suffered a breakdown a few
years back. Father Walther had assumed the man’s restlessness was a
consequence. But as he stood waiting for his call to go through to
New Jersey, he suddenly realized he had never really believed
Lapchek behaved the way he did because of a nervous collapse—or at
least not merely because of it. The man had been ill at ease right
from the start of their relationship. The signs had all been
there—the nervous fingering of his brow; his pat, almost glib
responses to requests for guidance. Yet he had preferred to see
Lapchek as someone with a purely physical disorder, as if a nervous
breakdown were in the same category as a broken leg or a case of
angina.

   
An
unfamiliar voice finally answered the rectory phone and told him
Father Lapchek was not in. Father Walther didn’t enquire when he
would be back or ask to leave a message.

   
He found
himself on Eighth Avenue. He began walking south past some noisy
street work and klatches of dark men loitering in front of discount
stores and cheap bars.

   
Why had
he not seen through Lapchek before? For two years he had adopted
the official diocesan fiction about the man, never allowing himself
to suspect that Lapchek’s crisis might be one of faith rather than
psyche. Was it because he had just felt his own sanity shaken that
he was able to see the man for who he was? At the time, he had
considered his choice of Lapchek to be his spiritual counselor as
partially an act of charity: his previous confessor had been
transferred to a parish too far away for him to easily get to;
Lapchek had just recently returned from a convalescent home. But
maybe he had had another, less conscious motive. Perhaps he had
unconsciously sensed the man was not up to anything more rigorous
than going through the motions and would not confront his younger
colleague with any hard questions about his own spiritual
doubts.

   
He kept
an eye out for a church as he continued south past topless bars and
rundown electronics stores. His father used to confess on his lunch
break, but that had been in the Wall Street area, much farther
downtown. He looked for a clock to corroborate what his wristwatch
indicated: 11:30. It seemed as if much more than half a day had
passed since he had awakened in Charlie Weeks’
guestroom.

   
He
turned east on Fifteenth Street and found himself in a new world.
Gone were the knots of young blacks and Latinos drinking out of
paper bags. Facing him was a residential corridor of handsome
townhouses. The largely deserted sidewalks were dotted with young
trees. A well-dressed woman—from the back she could have been a
millionairess or a whore—was walking one of those small
artificial-looking dogs he associated with movie stars. An
expensive bag was slung low from her shoulder, the same arm with
which she held the animal’s leash. In her other hand she carried
something that looked like a plastic toy. As he approached she
reached down and scooped up the animal’s feces with it. Then she
glanced up, looked the priest over boldly, and smiled. The dog,
meanwhile, had become lighthearted and was scampering at the end of
his leash. She deposited the feces in a nearby trash can, then
turned and smiled again. It was more than a neighborly grin. She
was fifteen years his junior. They were in a part of the world
proverbial for violent crime. Yet she was smiling in a way, were he
a different sort of man, he might feel encouraged to approach her.
She certainly couldn’t expect that shrunken quadruped to protect
her.

   
He
continued east along Fifteenth Street. Halfway down the block an
odd-looking building on the south side of the street interrupted
the row of townhouses and low-rise apartment buildings. It was some
kind of dirty stone or stucco, absurdly colonnaded like a squat
Greek temple. A series of wide steps rose steeply to the main
doors, all but hidden by the sooty columns. He thought at first it
must be a bank. Only, a bank would have been cleaner. More than
anything, it resembled a mausoleum. There were similar, though
smaller, crypts in his parish cemetery that housed the well-to-do
of the last century. But what was a mausoleum doing in Lower
Manhattan?

   
He had
to let a garbage truck and then a procession of cars in its train
pass before he could cross the street. It was only then he noticed
the service board affixed to the building’s facade. Suburban
churches rarely used announcement boards anymore—at least Catholic
churches didn’t. But the white plastic lettering outside this one
listed both mass and confession times, including a midday service
and lunch-hour confession.

   
A few
steps further down the block, flush against the facade of the
church, stood a modern school building. St. Francis used to play
their football and basketball teams. Their students wore maroon
uniforms crisscrossed by shiny black belts, making them look like
pubescent staff officers from some East European dictatorship. He
used to feel sorry for those boys. St. Francis’ own dress code
consisted merely of a jacket and tie. The rival school’s teachers,
Jesuits, were reputed to be strict, although not brutal like the
faculty of some Brothers schools. It was rumored that if you
confessed anything less serious than adultery to a Jesuit, he would
dismiss you with little or no penance just to teach you the
difference between real sin and an old maid’s scrupling.

   
His
watch told him it was just noon, the start of the confession hour,
according to the sign outside the church. He had only confessed to
a Jesuit once before, a missionary recently posted back from the
orient. The man had been well up in his seventies, but energetic
enough for two people and anything but the stereotypic
intellectual. He had come to Holy Name to conduct a week-long
mission. Each night at dinner he recounted tales worthy of
The Arabian Nights
:
emperors, overlords, slave girls and of course martyrdom by the
most excruciating tortures imaginable. He had spent ten years in a
Communist prison, living on a few daily ounces of rice. But he
spoke of his hardship the way a proud coach might recall a winning
football team. He was, of course, a hero, but he did have a
tendency to rattle on interminably, never giving either Father
Walther or Father George (the Monsignor was usually half-asleep) a
chance to ask a question.

   
Even so,
at the end of the mission he had asked the Jesuit to hear his
confession. He had only the usual distractions to confess, but the
old man listened attentively and delivered remarkably apt words of
counsel, never once showing the overbearing, all-but-psychotic
personality he had displayed at the dinner table. Father Walther
found it hard to believe this was the same divine fool of the East
who just that evening insisted on demonstrating how Chinese women
used to have their feet bound, using—God help us—Margaret as a
model.