The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (9 page)

   “’Richie’,” he insisted. “In
fact,” he said, turning halfway toward the kitchen where Sylvia was
scalding herself with corn water, “I wish everyone would try to
forget I’m a priest. After all, we don’t defer to Charlie here
because he subscribes to the engineering persuasion.”

   “
No
reason you shouldn’t,” Charlie replied, struggling with a cork that
had come apart in the bottle. “Without us engineers you’d all still
be in caves.”

   “
Really?”

   “
Damn straight,”
he said, digging at the stuck cork with a knife. The phrase had
been his favorite twenty years ago.

   “
You
don’t mean to imply that if it were up to Father Richie here we
still would be living in caves?”

   “
God-damn
cork.”

   
Father Walther
regarded the woman carefully. This conversational mood was
certainly preferable to her earlier sulk, just as her present
attire was more appropriate to mixed company. But there was still
an edge to her that he couldn’t fathom.

   “
Just
‘Richie’ will do,” he reiterated. “Or ‘Richard,’ if you
prefer.”

   
Her eyes
met his directly for the first time. They looked sea-green in the
candlelight.

   “
And if
I don’t—prefer, I mean, to forget you’re a priest?”

   
The wine
was good—surprisingly so, since he had never known Charlie to drink
anything but beer, and that with a total lack of discrimination.
The breeze did blow out the candles, but Sylvia doggedly relit them
as if electricity had not yet been invented. By the time they
reached dessert, the wind had died. The surf pounded
emphatically.

   “
Cigar?”
Charlie asked, producing a boxful. “Can’t give you lung cancer.
Only lip- and mouth-.”

   
Father Walther
accepted one.

   “
You haven’t
answered my question,” Rosalie reminded as he blew smoke into a
current of air. He was enjoying the glow of the wine and good food,
marveling at the abrupt changes of fortune he had been subject to
in the last few days. What would these people make of his bizarre
experiences as a hitchhiker, of his nostalgic whim to revisit his
adolescent haunt? But the sardonic sparkle in Rosalie’s eyes
brought him back to the present.

   “
How
often do you have a chance to get away—from your congregation, or
whatever you call it?”

   
He rolled the
ash of his cigar on the edge of an ashtray.

   “
Two weeks in
the summer and a couple days at Christmas. I’m not sure I think of
it as ‘getting away,’ though God knows I need some time off by the
time August rolls around. Being a curate isn’t back-breaking work,
like digging ditches or...engineering,” he added with a grin, “but
it takes its toll.”

   “
Nothing
back-breaking about engineering,” Charlie said, examining the shaft
of his cigar. “Boring, yes.”

   
Father
Walther regarded him curiously. He had presumed Charlie was happy
in his profession if for no other reason than because it afforded
him unlimited opportunity to play with slide rules—or whatever they
used nowadays.

   “How
do
you think of it?”
Rosalie persisted.

   Charlie reached for what was left
of the wine. Father Walther covered his glass to indicate he had
had enough.

   
Rosalie
allowed the host to refill her own.

   “
Maybe I’m just
quibbling,” he said.

   
Her eyes
hardened. Her smile took on a chill. “Not at all. I’m curious to
know how you see your profession. Do you consider it a form of,
say, social work?”

   “
Well, no....
Although there are elements of social work about it,” he added with
a smile for his hosts, who looked benumbed by the subject. “What I
mean is, it’s primarily spiritual—a ministry to the soul as opposed
to, say, a doctor’s ministering to the body. It’s...I’m sorry, but
I don’t know if you’re Catholic or not. Not that it matters. I just
don’t know if you’re familiar with the terms...”

   “
Try
me.”

   
There was
mischief in her eyes. A mocking grin twitched at the corners of her
mouth, which looked very red in the candlelight. He was beginning
to sound pompous even to himself, but he seemed incapable of
talking any other way.

   “
Well,
we work through the sacraments: Penance, or confession. The
Eucharist. Baptism. A social worker, from what I know, deals more
with the more temporal needs of his patient.” He reached for his
wine glass, which he realized too late he had declined to have
refilled. “When it comes right down to it, most of what I do is
routine, like any other job. “What,” he asked, his usually pliable
smile refusing to bend, “is your own line of work?”

   
Rosalie regarded
him with amusement.

   “I’m a hospital
administrator.”

   He had dealt with priest-baiters
before. Usually they were lapsed Catholics trying to salve guilty
consciences. When they were allowed to vent their anger they
usually ended by asking to have their confessions heard, claiming
that he was not like the rest of the clergy, and if only other
priests were as liberal-minded... But they never relented when
there was an audience present. It all seemed to boil down to some
trauma in their religious upbringing—too much emphasis on the
church’s unique path to salvation; too much harping about
masturbation just when their bodies were becoming sexual furnaces.
And it was reassurance they needed that they would not again be
humiliated before they could agree again to accept even a modicum
of the church’s authority. Privately, though, a bit of patience
went a long way toward reaching the lost soul that hadn’t known a
real home since it had turned its back on the faith.

   
Rosalie
showed signs of being one of these fallen-away Catholics, he
decided as the conversation turned to other topics. She had been
disillusioned by men or by sex or by both, but not disillusioned
enough not to still feel nostalgic about old-fashioned values. If
she was indeed an ex-Catholic she was also probably resentful about
assenting to a morality she saw largely as the concoction of
celibate males.

   
Sylvia
suggested a walk on the beach. By now the narrow boardwalk,
obscured by sand during the day, was totally invisible. Charlie had
to lead the way with a flashlight. The only other illumination was
from a neighbor’s living room. This was midweek, Father Walther
reminded himself. Even Fords Pointe had been deserted on
weekdays.

   
They
were not alone. Someone was surf-casting just inside the breakers,
his high boots glistening like shark fins. Someone else was running
a dog. “There’s the Milky Way,” Charlie announced, arching his neck
and pointing. Father Walther looked up at the riot of stars. He had
forgotten how full the sky looked when there was no city glare. A
band of faint whiteness indicated Charlie’s Milky Way.

   
Rosalie
was also bent-necked for the view. She had taken off her sandals to
go barefoot in the wet sand. She had declined a sweater for her
halter top but had put a wrap-around skirt over her shorts. Sylvia
was more interested in shells than celestial splendor.

   “
You are
now looking at the heart of the galaxy,” Charlie declared as if he
were a voice-over for a planetarium show.

   “
The
heart of which galaxy?” Everything had always looked the same to
Richard Walther—planets, stars, satellites. Except the sunlight and
shadow on the mountain peaks of the moon.

   “
This
galaxy, of course. Do you suppose you could see some other galaxy
so plainly?”

   Charlie’s tone was that of a
petulant teacher with a slow student.

   “You mean the Earth isn’t located
at the middle of the galaxy?”

    “Of course not. My God, Richie.
Where have you been?”    “Actually, we didn’t get
all that much astronomy in the seminary.”

   “
I’ll
say you didn’t. The Earth is on the galaxy’s outer rim. That’s why
we can stand here and look into it.”

   “If we were able to look
in the opposite direction,” Rosalie asked, her voice sounding as
disembodied as her silhouette, “could we see into the space between
the galaxies?”

   “Theoretically. But you’d
have to look through sunlight—not the easiest thing to do.”

   “
Do you
think there are creatures like us out there, wondering if anyone
exists besides themselves?”

   “
No reason to
suppose there aren’t.”

   “
Statistically,”
Father Walther put in.

   “
That’s right.
Anything wrong with statistics?”

   “
I only meant
nothing is proven until some of those little green men show up in
Paramus.”

   “
Still Richie
the Skeptic.”

   
Father Walther
was aware he was playing to Rosalie the way he sometimes played to
school children, coyly soliciting their attention so he could
illustrate the meaning of a Gospel parable or catechism response.
“Isn’t skepticism a requisite of good science?”

   Charlie shuffled his feet
irritably.

   “The laws of probability tell us
thousands, maybe millions of stars in our galaxy have planets
capable of supporting life as we know it. That’s a scientific
fact.”

   “
No,
it’s a probability. I thought that’s what science is all about:
distinguishing fact from hypothesis.”

   
They
were reenacting an old scene, though of course Rosalie could not
realize it. They used to spend entire nights arguing such matters.
He waited now for the familiar retort. When Charlie replied
angrily, “God damn it, Richie. Why can’t you just stick to your
religious hocus-pocus?” he felt as pained as if his own blood had
reprimanded him.

   “
I
didn’t mean to make him angry,” he apologized to Sylvia after her
husband had stormed off. “We used to argue all the time about these
things.”

   “
It’s
alright,” she said, her skirt full of jetsam she had been
collecting while the others were contemplating the galaxy. Her full
thighs were plainly exposed beneath her cache of shells and
driftwood, but she was no more self-conscious than if she were
wearing pants. “He’s been under a lot of pressure. Every now and
then it shows. He’ll be himself again by the time we get
back.”

   
Just as
she predicted, when they returned to the house Charlie was
tinkering with a telescope and humming contentedly.

   “
I want
you to have a peak through this, Richie. Built it myself.
Four-and-a-half-inch reflector. Electric drive. Makes the rings of
Saturn look as close as the neighbor’s wash.”

   
Father
Walther wasn’t sure if Charlie’s easy chatter was genuine. As he
watched him adjust the gleaming silver instrument, he recalled
other moments Charlie had flown off the handle—usually when he was
having trouble with one of his girls. There had been a steady
procession of them, although young Richard got to meet very few,
partly because he rarely attended a school dance but also because
most were recruited from Charlie’s neighborhood in Paterson or
Morristown. Charlie had little use for the giggly maids who
attended Catholic high schools near Saint Francis.

   
In those
days Richard never took Charlie’s bouts of temper seriously,
precisely because they were romantically induced. Romance was a
phenomenon that the priest-to-be had experienced not at all and
which at the age of sixteen he already viewed as an old man might
look back on the emotional tempests of his youth. He had tried to
be sympathetic, but the question of whether a particular girl was
or was not in love with Charlie just didn’t measure up to the more
serious matters of nuclear war and mass starvation, not to mention
the perennial machinations of the devil. But tonight he felt more
inclined to make allowances for the personal element in human
experience. Few of us could keep his or her mind on the eternal
questions all the time. Perhaps few of us should even
try.

   “
Let’s take it
up on the deck.”

    CHAPTER SIX

   
Waking
up in a real bedroom was a treat. Even the sheets smelled good,
neither the sterile odorlessness of a motel’s bed linen nor the
soapy anonymity of Margaret’s laundry. This was someone’s home.
This was how real people lived.

   
Even his
mother’s apartment didn’t look and smell like this. How could it,
when she was living in an institution herself?

   
He lay
beneath the bedclothes (it was cool enough for a blanket, imagine,
in July), lingering in the warmth of his body as he never would
have done in his parish rectory. Nothing about the big room he
occupied there induced him to spend any more time in it than was
necessary. Perhaps that was as it should be; he did not become a
priest so he could sleep late or curl up with a novel and a box of
chocolates. But he could not help envying those who took for
granted the aromas of their own homes, whose possessions bore the
stamp of their own individual identities. It was not inconceivable
that a touch of hominess might even enhance one’s ministry. The
Protestants didn’t seem to be going out of business—quite the
contrary. One could surely improve on Margaret’s funereal
housekeeping without risking one’s immortal soul.