The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (3 page)

   
The ride
was short and fast. It was also conversationless. It was too much
trouble to shout above the engine noise as they cut a swath through
the cornfields. They skidded to a stop on a dirt driveway beside a
peeling clapboard house. The front yard extended half an acre in
from the road. A tractor squatted just ahead of where the Plymouth
ground to a halt. Two other vehicles, a pickup and a faded green
relative of the Plymouth, lay rusting in the dusty yard. Father
Walther had a feeling the Plymouth was soon to join
them.

   
The
mechanic got out and headed for a bulging screen door. Father
Walther balked. When the mechanic offered to take him into town for
lunch, he assumed that meant driving him to a diner. But this was
obviously the man’s home (or someone’s home). The mechanic might
only be stopping here to run an errand. He might even have
forgotten he had a passenger, Father Walther considered, until the
man paused at the screen door and waved for him to
follow.

   
Inside,
the house was cool and dark as an old church. A staircase descended
toward the cellar. Another, shorter set of stairs led upward. He
followed them and found himself at the entrance to a well-lit room
mostly occupied by a large round dining table. The table was
covered with a thick white plastic cloth. A set of dark wooden
chairs were grouped a round it. None of them was
occupied.

   “
Have a
seat, mister,” a woman’s voice called from another room. “My
husband will be down shortly. You can wash up then
yourself.”

   
He did
as she suggested, noting that the woman pronounced “wash” the way
Ma Kettle did in the old movies he had seen—warsh. He didn’t think
he was that far from civilization.

   
The
scant space left by the table and chairs was taken up by a tall
dark sideboard and a dish cabinet, both of which looked to be older
than the house’s present occupants. He guessed they were
hand-me-downs, “heirlooms” the ladies of his parish would have call
them. The plates in the cabinet were mismatched and cracked, pieces
of sets that had belonged to a mother or grandmother. There was
also a silver candelabra, a Viennese figurine, and a miniature
violin—a perfect three-inch replica. Behind the cabinet and
sideboard the wall was papered with scores of Victorian ladies on
swings, their forward motion arrested at precisely the point
gravity would have begun pulling them back into the plaster. The
paper was dark with age and had come loose near the ceiling. Not
quite directly over the dining table was suspended a brass
chandelier. One of its six sockets contained what looked like a
hundred-watt bulb.

   
When his
turn came he washed up in the second-floor bathroom, vintage 1920.
Actually, it wasn’t very different from his rectory’s, right down
to the blue cafe curtains on the window. His housekeeper had a
fondness for blue, the Virgin’s color. She used it wherever
possible—tablecloths, slipcovers, curtains, even doormats. Whenever
he complained about his Ford she suggested he buy a new, blue one.
Naturally, all her own clothing was blue or white.

   
When he
returned to the dining room he found the table set and bowls of
steaming vegetables—potatoes, corn, and green beans—occupying its
vast interior. The meat was cold ham, probably left over from
Sunday dinner. His hostess, a sharp-featured, wide-hipped woman,
looked like Mormon spouses he had seen in old photographs. She
apologized for the meat.

   “
Nothing
wrong with cold ham, Martha,” her husband replied before Father
Walther had a chance to. “I’m sure Mr. Walther doesn’t mind.”
Without checking to see if he was right (Father Walther hadn’t been
called “mister” since he was a boy, and then only in teasing), the
mechanic dug into the plate of rudely sliced ham and passed it
on.

   
He was
touched by their hospitality. As a priest he had become used to
people opening their homes and larders to him. He even came to take
it for granted, just as he expected policemen and
school-children—parochial school-children, at least—to greet him on
the street. But the mechanic and his wife were not hosting a
priest. To them, he was just a stranded motorist. If they felt any
compassion it was not because he was someone special but because he
was at a temporary disadvantage, as anyone, themselves included,
could have been.

   
He was
too tired to eat much. The woman did not press him, unlike the
ladies of his parish who vied with each other at priest-fattening.
When the meal was over, the mechanic (he never bothered to
introduce himself; the sign over his repair barn said “Sonny’s”)
called the station. The news was not good. His daytime assistant
told him the problem was not with the alternator, but the battery
still showed a discharge whenever the engine was let run. The
mechanic advised him not to drive the car until the source of the
trouble was located. If he did, he would only have to shell out
another eighty dollars a few miles down the road.

   “
I’ve
fixed a room for you to nap in, Mr. Walther,” Martha said as she
cleared the table and her husband prepared to return to work (when
did he sleep?). Father Walther protested, but the mechanic told him
he may as well grab some shut-eye, since there was no point to his
hanging around the station. He himself would be returning home in a
few hours. Maybe by then he would have some good news.

   
There
was hardly anything he could do but accept their hospitality. He
had become very sleepy since eating, and he sensed they would be
insulted if he declined. He was moved by their neighborliness. How
many people would take in a stranger, feed and even leave him alone
with his wife? He had to believe his manner, even without a roman
collar to put it into context, had something to do with their
trust. Even so, Good Samaritans were few and far
between.

   
The
bedroom looked as if it belonged to a male adolescent. There were
college pennants and posters of rock stars. Above the bed hung a
shelf of boy’s books and magazines. A corner of the bedclothes was
turned down, just as his mother used to do for him. The blinds were
drawn to shut out the afternoon sun.

   “
If you
want anything,” Martha told him, closing the door halfway as she
exited, “just give a shout. I’ll be in the kitchen or out in the
yard.”

   
He
thanked her and lay down on the blue quilt. It was warm in the room
although the window was open wide behind the drawn blinds. He
wished he had his office to read. Even so, he still had most of the
day in which to complete it. His best move now was to get some
sleep. He felt himself already drifting off.

   
When he
opened his eyes again he noted that the sun was no longer shining
on the venetian blinds. He estimated he had slept for an hour. If
the car was ready, he could make it to his mother’s for late
supper. He stood up, feeling remarkably refreshed, and started down
the carpeted stairs.

   
Martha
was not in the kitchen. Neither was she out in the yard, where long
lines of wash were drying between the back porch and two white
posts at the far end of the lot. He walked to the front of the
house where the pickup and other vehicles were baking in the sun,
but she was not there either. The Plymouth was still gone. There
wasn’t much he could do until one of them returned, so he began a
slow tour of the property. He found a covered porch at the back of
the house and sat down in a wicker rocker. Corn stretched as far as
a white storage tank on the horizon.

   
He had
not been sitting five minutes when he heard footsteps inside the
house. A screen door opened behind him and the mechanic’s wife
stepped out onto the porch. He started to get up, but she waved him
back into the rocker as if to forestall any unnecessary exertion on
such a hot day. Her gray hair was combed up from the neck. Her brow
was moist with perspiration, her eyes puffy, as if she too had been
napping. When he met her a couple hours ago he took her for a woman
of fifty or fifty-five (the mechanic was of indeterminate age,
anything from forty upward). Now he lowered his estimate of her age
by several years. It was not that she looked younger than she had
earlier but that her face, he realized, had been pinched then as if
from having endured too many prairie winters. It looked softer now,
more exposed, vulnerable.

   
She asked if he
had slept well.

   “
Like a top. I
was more tired than I thought. I want to thank you again for your
hospitality Mrs....”

   “
You can
call me Martha,” she said, settling into a second rocker on the
other side of the screen door.

   
During
lunch there hadn’t been much conversation, an unusual situation for
the curate. Whenever he was invited to a parishioner’s home, he
always became the center of attention. The best china and
dinnerware were brought out, and the talk, directed toward himself
as if he were a celebrity on a television talk show, never let up.
At first he felt awkward with the mechanic and his wife because no
one was competing to hold his attention. But as the meal had
progressed he came to understand he was not being accorded any
special notice precisely because, as far as his hosts knew, there
was nothing unusual about him. After realizing this he relaxed and
even began to enjoy their cryptic but somehow intimate remarks
about the upcoming harvest and other local matters.

   
Even so,
long periods of silence, even of the significant, if not quite
pregnant, variety these people engaged in, made him uneasy. He
decided to start a conversation, actually a series of questions,
about the corn, the garage and other topics he thought might
interest the woman. She replied laconically, rocking gently as if
merely to keep the air in motion across her body.

   “
I
notice you have a son,” he said finally. “I hope he won’t mind a
stranger usurping his bed for an hour.”

   
This
time the woman did not reply at all. She went on rocking as before,
her face expressionless. But her very lack of response and the way
she continued to rock and stare at the hot cornfields,
signified.

   “
We
had
a son, Mr.
Walther.”

   
He waited, but
all that followed was a hardening of the lines around her mouth and
eyes. Her face no longer looked vulnerable. She had become again
the steely-eyed Mormon. She drew a quick breath through her narrow
nostrils.

   “
Our boy
died—was killed—two years ago.”

   
It was not the
sort of statement, given the frequency with which he had to deal
with death and its announcement, that should have brought him up
short. But something about the woman’s manner made him feel guilty
for so ineptly blundering into this family tragedy. Had she spoken
to him as a priest he could have responded appropriately. As it
was, he was at a loss what to say.

   “
I’m very
sorry.”

   
She elevated her
chin a fraction of an inch, but that was her only acknowledgement
of his sympathy. It was as if he had proffered an unacceptable
apology on behalf of some distant potentate. Her rocker pressed
relentlessly against the dry-rotted boards. Her expression was
fixed, determined, but devoid of self-pity. It was not the look of
a woman who wanted or would accept sympathy. He had not come across
many Marthas.

   “
He died
accidentally,” she declared with the suddenness of a thunderclap.
“A football scrimmage.... No one was to blame.”

   
He could
see the high school football field as clearly as if she had given a
detailed description: the prone youth, the stunned teammates, the
whining ambulance. Two years ago there must have been tears, bitter
tears. He glanced again at her puffy eyes. But everything else
about her denied the use, and even the existence, of tears. No one
was to blame—except chance, fate or whatever it was she saw across
those cornfields measuring our lives with fickle rule.

   “
Perhaps
Our Lord wanted him,” he ventured, feeling bound to offer some
alternative to her hard resignation.

   
For a
moment her eyes remained fixed on the horizon. Then she turned
slowly toward him. Her face was strangely animated—with anger, he
realized. It gave her a terrible beauty. But she spoke quietly,
without rancor.

   “
I
wanted him more.”

    CHAPTER THREE

   
The car
was not worth repairing, the mechanic said, his eyes dark from lack
of sleep. There were half a dozen things wrong, some of them major.
Any one of them could disable the vehicle without warning.
Operating it could even be dangerous.

   
Father
Walther hadn’t considered replacing the Ford for another year. Some
parishioners had offered to buy him a new car, but he put them off
with jokes about his attachment to the old shebang. Now he may have
no choice but to go to them for help—a car was an essential for a
priest.

   
The
mechanic offered to buy back the battery at cost and charge only a
nominal amount for labor. He also offered to tow the car to a
junkyard or, if Father Walther preferred, ask one of the other
service stations in the area to do so.

   
His
offers seemed reasonable enough. Even if the man made some sort of
arrangement with the junkman, he would probably not come out any
better than if he left the battery in, replaced a couple other
parts, and sent his customer on his way.