The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (27 page)

   
It took a moment
before he reconnected with Margaret’s codes for the other priests
of the parish.

   “
His
heart?”

   “
We don’t know,”
she went on, struggling between honest hysteria and her natural
bent for milking every dramatic moment for all it was worth. “He
collapsed at mass. By the time we found him he was unconscious.
Doctor Rafferty thinks it might be a stroke, but we won’t know for
sure until they run some tests.”

   “
Which hospital
is he in?”

   
She told him the
county hospital. That could only mean there wasn’t time to get him
to the Catholic hospital in Teaneck. He glanced toward the screen
door and the lavender sedan waiting in the driveway. The news of
the Monsignor’s collapse did not surprise him; the old man had been
on his last legs for some time. What did concern him was that his
housekeeper had made a copy of Rosalie’s telephone number; he still
had the original note in his pants pocket.

   
He told her he
would drive directly to the hospital. “Father George can take
charge at the rectory.”

   “
Alright,
Father. But you know how he is.”

   “
I know he’s a
perfectly capable man, as you should yourself by this time. Tell
him I’ll be on my way shortly and will stop at the hospital before
I return to the rectory. Do you have Rafferty’s number handy? A
number where he can be reached right now?”

   
He heard a
flutter of activity on the other end of the line. He could not
recall ever speaking so firmly to his housekeeper.

   “
Here it is,”
she said, her voice unnaturally submissive. She read him the
number.

   “
That’s his
service, I suppose.”

   “
Yes, I think it
is.”

   “
Is anyone with
the Monsignor now?”

   “
Father George
went up there after the eight o’clock mass. But of course he has to
be back to say the ten.”

   “
What about
Donovan?”—the fill-in for Father Walther’s own Sunday duties, a
philosophy instructor at Seton Hall.

   “
He’s scheduled
for the eleven and twelve. He hasn’t arrived yet.”

   
George would
indeed be in a dither. There was nothing to do but leave right
away. He would never forgive himself if the old man died alone in
that hospital room. Everyone had a right to have someone at their
side when their time came. It was not just a question of getting
the last rites—George would already have attended to that. What he
was thinking of had to do with a more basic human need.

   “
Alright,
Margaret. I’ll be there shortly.”

   “
Thank you,
Father,” she said. Then she added, “I didn’t know what else to do.
I tried your mother, but she said you left on Friday. And your
friend, Mr. Weeks, said he hasn’t seen you in a week.”

   
She had
certainly been scouting about, he thought as he heard the old
impertinence return to her voice. She would love to know what he
had been up to, but he would not give her the satisfaction of even
a cursory explanation. If she wanted to take the matter up with
someone else, let her. Who would she go to? The comatose pastor?
The chancery? He couldn’t care less. What had seemed important to
him two weeks ago—getting a parish of his own—now seemed empty
ambition. Why should he aspire to such an achievement? So that he
could learn how to squeeze the extra buck out of Mr. and Mrs.
Parishioner the way the Monsignor had done? So that one day, if a
stroke didn’t claim him first, he could receive a red cloak from
the bishop and gain the right to wear a miter and carry a crook a
couple times a year like His Excellency? Or should he aspire to the
bishop’s see itself, become an ecclesiastic chief-executive-officer
and wheel and deal in real estate and the bond market? He had had
his fill of all that. His life would be different from now on—it
had to be, or he would end up spending the rest of his life
drinking tea with the blue-haired ladies of the Rosary Society and
keeping accounts of the take from the Sunday collections, all the
while ruled over by Margaret or one of her sisters.

   “
You have to
leave right away?” Rosalie asked.

   “
I’m afraid so.
The other curate is alone. Score a birdie for me,” he said,
checking to see that all his belongings were stowed in his blue
two-door. After he had slammed the trunk closed he noted that her
eyes had become moist. He held out his hand. She hesitated, then
took it without feeling, and his spirits sank. He wanted her to let
him go willingly, or at least without resentment. He needed to take
away intact what she had given him in order to be able to face what
was waiting for him. If she refused to let that part of him go, he
would perish as surely as any soul damned to hell. But he couldn’t
explain any of this to her. She had to sense it and give him back
himself freely.

   
Her hand
tightened on his own. Tears filled her eyes. Then her arms were
around his neck and she was holding him the way she did the night
she had her nightmare. This time he responded more
generously.

    CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

   
The Monsignor
was either comatose or heavily sedated. His mouth hung slack like a
dead man’s, but his breathing was strong and regular. The small,
wasted body lay carefully arranged beneath the hospital sheet, the
feet scarcely reaching to within a foot of the bed’s end. His hands
were placed as if by a mortician across his oddly protruding chest.
It was hard to believe this was the same fiery man who had made
life so difficult for the young curates assigned to him. He looked
more like a sleeping child—an ancient child, to be sure, but hardly
the guileful and grasping old man who watched his collection
baskets the way a miser did his hoard of gold. Father Walther
considered that he could pick the comatose form up as easily as he
would a doll. Would he then be holding half a century of
priesthood, not to mention the wheelings and dealings with how many
bishops?—plus all the confessions, masses and last rites
administered in his younger and perhaps idealistic days? Never once
in the last seven years had this man offered him a word of
spiritual advice. Their conversations had always been about
business—incomes and outgoes, debits and credits. The Monsignor
might as well have been a tax accountant, one of those fawning,
effeminate yes-men the archdiocese seemed exclusively to employ
whenever it hired laymen. Only, there was nothing obsequious about
this old bird. He was willful as they came. The only person he
deferred to was the archbishop himself, whose ring he kissed on
bended knee as if it were the pope’s. Even his attitude toward the
sacrament was cursory, businesslike, almost belligerent.

   
Father George
had already administered the last rites, so there was nothing for
Father Walther to do but sit and watch Monsignor’s mechanical
breathing. Actually, there was little difference between his
present state and the condition he was in when he was supposed to
be conscious. As far as Father Walther’s job as assistant pastor
was concerned, anyone with a knack for small-business
administration could handle it. A high school diploma would
suffice. Holy Orders certainly wasn’t required.

   
A nurse took the
pastor’s vital signs. It was odd to see a pretty woman making
physical contact with the old celibate. The girl—she didn’t look a
day over nineteen— smiled at Father Walther when she finished. He
had put on his roman collar after leaving Rosalie’s house, but had
gotten so used to being treated as a layman that he returned her
smile with a willing frankness. She was young enough to be his
daughter. Despite all the children he had confessed, sermonized and
baptized, never once had he looked upon any as a figure of the
child he would never have. Other priests did. What had excluded
even the possibility of parenthood from his mind? Until the
lethargy that had set in in recent years, he had assumed his
freedom from sexual desire was a divine gift to make possible his
vocation to the celibate life. Naturally, the procreation of
children was excluded along with the sexual act. But he had never
given any thought to the emotional deprivation involved. He had
heard of priests adopting children (not without difficulties from
their bishops), but assumed they did so out of charity. It was only
now that it struck him that they might have taken in those kids out
of their own need to have an individual human being to love. Loving
all God’s children for the reflection of the godhead in them was
all well and good in theory, for saints. But perhaps mere mortals,
even those granted the special grace of a religious vocation,
needed to root their affection in something more specific,
immediate, even selfishly “their own.”

   
The Monsignor’s
clockwork respiration was broken by a sudden sigh. His face
quivered for a moment like someone having a bad dream.

   
Father Walther
looked at his watch. At about this time he could have been starting
out on the back nine with Rosalie. He couldn’t help feeling that
this old buzzard had somehow timed things this way. The notion was
preposterous, yet his resentment persisted as he sat watching the
measured breathing. Even a prayer for charity could not dispel
it.

   
A young man in
hospital whites entered the room and, after a cursory nod at the
curate, began monitoring the patient’s pulse.

   “
How is he?”
Father Walther asked as the intern flashed a light into the old
man’s eyes.

   “
No change.” He
fingered the stethoscope around his neck, eyeing the Monsignor as
if he were a box of questionable goods. “He may have been lucky.
Still,” he added, “you never know with a cerebral occlusion.” He
looked more carefully at Father Walther. “Are you a
relative?”

   “
His
assistant.”

   
The young doctor
nodded and pursed his lips.

   “
All we can do
is wait and see.”

   
Back at the
rectory Margaret was in a funk. Her normal Sunday routine of late
breakfasts and early gargantuan dinners was upset. She didn’t even
remember to give Father Walther her usual conspiratorial greeting,
only an, “It’s you, Father,” as if he were just something else she
must now worry about on this already difficult day.

   “
I just came
from the hospital,” he said.

   “
You saw
Rafferty?”

   “
I did not. Has
he called?”

   “
Not since this
morning. He summoned the ambulance himself. Said he’d meet it at
the hospital. How did he look—himself, I mean?”

   “
I spoke with an
intern. He sounded hopeful.”

   
She clapped her
hands fervently. “Please, God, if it’s only true.”

   
He was surprised
by her intense feeling. Considering her usual way of talking about
the Monsignor, he would have thought she had been expecting
something like this any time. A few years ago her sister had died
of heart disease, but apart from one teary moment when she
announced the death and her imminent departure for the wake and
funeral, the event hardly seemed to break her stride. There had
certainly been nothing comparable to her present upset.

   “
Where’s Father
George?” he asked, lingering over a cup of stale coffee while she
flew from one room to another for no apparent reason.

   “
The school,”
she said. “No, he was there earlier. Where did he go?” This was a
Margaret he had never seen before—flustered, out of control,
abandoned by her characteristic misanthropy. “The chapel. To count
the collection.”

   “
And
Donovan?”

   “
He’s long gone,
Father. Left after the last mass.”

   
Then she
suddenly stopped her senseless rushing about and came to a sudden,
desperate halt, wringing her hands. “You don’t think he’ll...?” But
the rest of her thought was washed away by her tears. Despite his
altered feelings toward her, or perhaps because of them, his
instinct was to take her in his arms and comfort her. He did not do
so, not from any inhibition but because he suspected she would
never get over such a gesture.

   “
He’ll pull
through, Margaret. He’s too tough to let a little stroke do him
in.”

   
She wiped her
eyes with the hem of her apron.

   “
Please, God,”
she said, blowing her nose with the tissue she kept tucked up her
sleeve. “I’d better be getting back to my beads.”

   
He had only
spoken to be encouraging, but after Margaret left to say her rosary
he began to think more seriously about what would happen if the
Monsignor did die, or recovered, or got back only the partial use
of his faculties. What would each of those different contingencies
mean for him, Richard Walther? The old man’s death would certainly
mean the appointment of a new pastor. But even if he could consider
himself in the running for that post (the odds were only about
fifty-fifty that a resident curate would be appointed in such a
situation), he no longer wanted the job. A few years ago a parish
of his own was all he thought about. Bishoprics held no allure for
him. Ever since his childhood, his ambition was to have a few
thousand parishioners, a school and a couple curates to show the
ropes to. Odd, that such an aspiration meant so little to him now.
He no more desired to take the Monsignor’s place than he wished to
become potentate of a South Sea Island.