The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (6 page)

   
When
they reached Toms River the youth saw his passenger safely to the
bus stop.

   “
Be sure
you flag him down, Father. Those drivers don’t stop unless you
practically throw yourself under their wheels.”

   “
I will. And
thanks. Where are you headed now?”

   “
Back to Mount
Holly. Ma will have supper ready.”

   
Father Walther
wasn’t sure exactly where Mount Holly was, but it seemed to him it
was not far from where the young man had picked him up. If so, the
boy had driven clear across the state.

    “
God bless you,
son.”

   
His
first order of business was to find a place to spend the night. In
the morning he would get a bus to Point Pleasant, or he could head
south toward Atlantic City and Cape May. One thing he would not do
again was hitchhike, so he had to plan his next move
carefully.

   
He
hadn’t been in Toms River since those adolescent summers he had
spent at a nearby summer community, but he remembered there was a
diner not far from the bus stop where the young man had let him
off. He used its rest room to wash up and change his shirt. Then he
ordered soup and soft-boiled eggs for his mending stomach. The
waitress brought him a second cup of coffee unasked.

   “
Anything else,
honey?”

   “
No thanks,” he
said. Then, “Yes. Are you familiar with a development called Fords
Pointe?”

   
The
woman glanced down at his black serge pants and dark valise. Her
neighborly smile weakened. She set some dinnerware in front of a
customer who had just walked in, then nodded toward the cashier.
“Better ask Mr. Coleman.”

   
He
presented his bill to a heavy-set man behind the register. He rang
up the bill and carefully counted out the change. Then he said,
“Two blocks to your left”—he pointed south—“Benny’s Car
Service.”

   
The
priest thanked him, then turned back to the waitress, but she was
engaged in conversation with the new customer. He was a block away
from the luncheonette before he realized he had forgotten to leave
her a tip.

   
He had
no special reason to visit Fords Pointe. He just thought it might
be nice to pass by the Willets’ old bungalow before checking into a
motel. It would be a kind of sentimental journey. Besides, the more
he thought about it, the less he felt like sitting on a hot beach.
For him the Jersey Shore meant this short stretch of land between
Lakewood and Forked River. It included the narrow peninsula across
the bay and a patch of woodland to the west. He and Frank used to
water-ski in the bay, crossed it in the Willets’ fourteen-foot
inboard to visit the boardwalk at Seaside, and ventured into the
mosquito-ridden Pine Barrens to explore abandoned
houses.

   
He
recognized very little of the stretch of US 9 south of Toms River.
Twenty years ago there was just a boat store and motel court. That
was before the rise of fast-food chains and the rest of plastic
America. But when the cab turned down the only paved road giving
entry and exit to the Pointe, he saw the same year-round houses
among the pines bordering the road, permanent residents who
resented the annual influx of summer people. Old, heavily screened
dwellings, the heavy mesh that still enclosed them was testimony to
the abiding imminence of the mosquito. When the cab reached the
Pointe, a series of man-made lagoons laid out perpendicular to the
bay, he told the driver to make the second left.

   
The
bungalows were cheap functional affairs, little more than concrete
slabs with room dividers and a roof. Some owners added porches,
grass (which did not fare well), and TV antennas to pick up
Philadelphia stations. But most, like the Willets, were content to
put all their efforts into their bulkheads and boat landings. A
good bulkhead kept in proper repair—a never-ending battle against
erosion—insured the preservation of the real estate and made
possible a secure landing. Boats, after all, were the reason for
buying into a place like Fords Pointe. Everyone fished—all the men,
at least; he could not recall seeing a woman on any fishing
expedition. Even those who could not afford a boat tried their luck
in the lagoon for eels and small blue-back crabs.

   
The cab
passed the Willets’—at least, what used to be the Willets’; Frank
Willet, Sr., died several years ago and his widow might have sold
the property. There was no sign of life, but this was mid-week when
only vacationers and retirees could afford to be at their summer
homes. The cab continued to the end of the block, made a U-turn,
and headed back past the same row of houses. It passed the Willets’
a second time, but he did not ask the driver to slow
down.

   
He had
thought he would enjoy visiting the site of his adolescent summers.
But, even allowing for the wear and tear of time, this was not the
happy place he held in his memory. It was not the landscape that
had changed—the years had worked more of a change on him than it
had on the Pointe. The effect, though, was the same as if he had
found the bungalows leveled and the lagoons filled in. He should
have headed for his usual haunt in the Catskills. His lack of a car
would not have put him at a disadvantage. People befriended a
priest, especially one on vacation, the way they took to a friendly
dog.

   
A
married man, divorced by the time Father Walther made his
acquaintance, once recounted to him how he still returned to the
block where he and his family used to live. What he found each time
he went back was a grotesque, more desolate than if he had found
the place abandoned or burned to the ground. Destruction, in fact,
would have seemed appropriate. But the house looked the same and
the sycamore his son used to play under hadn’t changed a leaf. By
then the place was occupied by strangers, yet something still drew
the man there—an otherwise positive, optimistic fellow. “It called
to me, Father,” he said, his cheerful manner scarcely altered by
the telling of his chilling tale. To see him in action on a Sunday
morning, tirelessly wielding a collection basket, winking at a
child on a parishioner’s lap or nodding at a familiar face, you
would have thought he never had a care in the world.

   
Father
Walther did not believe he felt the same as that man did when he
stood contemplating his lost home. But he did have a nagging sense
of abandonment. Brooding on the past was never a good idea. He did
not, after all, regret anything. Why, then, this empty feeling? he
wondered as he lay staring at the cracked ceiling of the first
motel he had come upon after the cab left Ford’s Pointe. The room
smelled all too familiar—a blend of institutional linen and the
damp odor of buildings near salt water. Every rectory he had ever
been in smelled the same way. His parents’ house never smelled like
this. Nor did anyone else’s, as best he could remember. Some
smelled of garlic, cabbage or dead cigarettes, but those odors,
however unpleasant, were the kind real people created. A rectory’s
smell was anonymous. Next year he would vacation further from home,
not here in New Jersey where nothing was any longer what it seemed,
but someplace he had never been before—Maine, or the
Carolinas.

   
In the
morning he inquired at the check-in desk where the nearest Catholic
church was located. The Willets used to attend one in Forked River,
but he knew there had to be one closer by. He was right. He called
the car service, but after a dozen rings there was still no answer.
He checked his watch (he no longer needed an alarm clock to wake
up): 6:30. Was it possible they weren’t open? He rang the desk
again, but the sleepy clerk told him there was only one car
service.

   
He took
a portable mass set out of his valise and set it up on the dresser:
chalice, wafer, a small bottle of white wine, a stone containing a
relic that turned any flat surface into a temporary altar. Dressed
in a clean pair of khakis and T-shirt, he hung his purple stole
around his neck and began the ceremony, making the altar boy’s
responses for himself.

   
He had
not said mass since Sunday morning. Even when he was sick, he had
never gone more than twenty-four hours without celebrating the
sacrament. Mass set the tone for the rest of his day. Long before
he was ordained, when still a child, he felt disoriented if he
failed to attend early mass. More recently, mass had become a
habit. Any activity, his confessor told him, even a sacred rite,
could become routine. One had to guard against familiarity, just as
marriage partners must not ever take one another for granted. Since
those early days of his youth he had come to see the less glamorous
side of a priest’s life—the chronic loneliness and bizarre
neuroticisms the chosen of God sometimes suffered. Thus far he had
escaped the worst of those afflictions, although for some time now
he had been finding it difficult to get up for early mass and his
attention, even during the more critical moments of the
confessional, had a way of wandering. He prayed for grace. But God
rarely seemed to move in straight lines and, as far as he could
tell, he was no better off now than he was two or even three months
ago.

   
This
morning he spoke each word deliberately, like someone newly
ordained, or the boy who used to play-act the sacrifice on his
mother’s vanity, pretending her bottles of scent were cruets of
water and wine. But when he reached the consecration his eye was
distracted by the image in the mirror behind the dresser. It was a
long time since he had considered what he looked like when he was
speaking the words of consecration—his body bent forward almost to
a right angle, his lips carefully enunciating each word: “This
...is ...my ...body . . .” Gold wavelets reflected onto his face
from inside the chalice, emphasizing the dark rings under his eyes.
Once thick hair seemed grayer than he remembered it. “In like
manner, He took the cup, blessed it, and gave it to them, saying .
. .” He hunched over the chalice where a small amount of wine (even
the smell could make him lightheaded) rocked back and forth.
“...this ...is . . .”

   
He
hesitated. The face in the mirror also hesitated. He hadn’t
forgotten the words; he could sooner forget his own name. The face
in the mirror waited for him to resume, its blue-green eyes staring
back at him. He knew they were his own eyes, just as the
high-bridged nose and prominent cheekbones were no one else’s. But
it was as if only the physical appearance of the face were his, a
simulacrum of the more substantial man he ought to have found
there. Every morning he shaved this face and combed the thinning
hair on its head. He took care not to mar his appearance with a
razor nick or a delayed trip to the barber. He did not consider
such care vanity, because he tended himself only in order to serve
his God more perfectly. But despite the daily shaves, clipping of
nose hairs and other ministrations of toilet, he had never seemed
to confront the man in the mirror as he was doing now. However
accurately they matched his own, the eyes staring back at him
seemed empty and confused. Who was this middle-aged man who seemed
so devoid of a wisdom he had taken for granted as his, if not by
his merit, then by virtue of his calling? Martha’s eyes, though
hard with Luciferian pride, seemed sage by comparison.

   “
Is that
you, Father?” his housekeeper said, having agreed gleefully to
accept the charges.

   “
The
very same,” he replied, dropping into the bantering tone he always
assumed with her. Innocent, a slave to work, and loyal as a
spaniel, she thought him a wit. He had no such illusions about
himself. Setting a light tone was just part of his job, like
running the Rosary Society or Knights of the Altar. If his silly
jokes amused her, what harm was done? “How’s tricks at Holy
Name?”

   “
Oh, you
know how it is,” she said, managing by a coy twist of her voice to
include him in her conspiracy against the pastor and co-curate.
“Your mother called! She left a message. Wait. I wrote it down
someplace.”

   
He
listened to her rifle through the memos on the telephone table in
the rectory’s parlor. Even a hundred miles away, he could smell the
room’s musty odor. He wished she would hurry up and find what she
was looking for.

   “
Here it is.
‘I’ll be staying on a few more days in the mountains. I hope his
car is better.’”

   
He was
too shocked to reply. His annual visit was something they both
cherished. How could she just decide to “stay on a few more
days”?

   “
Did you have
trouble with the Ford again?”

   “
You could say
that.”

   “
Don’t you think
it’s time you got a new car? A nice blue one? I saw a car the other
day that would suit you just fine. They’re on sale now, you know,
to get ready for the new models in the fall.”

   “
You
have a point there, Margaret. Were there no other
messages?”

   “
No, I
don’t think ...Wait. Here’s one. Father George must have taken it.
I’d recognize his chicken scrawl anywhere.”

   
He could
see her adjusting her bifocals to make out the second curate’s
minuscule hand.

   “
It’s from
someone named Weeks.”

   “
Charlie
Weeks?”