The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) (35 page)

Mere admonishment failed with Mac. One day, as they were driving through primitive country, Myles delivered a regular sermon on the subject of drink. He said a man possessed by drink was a man possessed by the Devil. He said that Mac, at night, was very like a devil, going about hotel corridors “as a roaring lion goeth about seeking whom he may devour.” This must have hit Mac pretty hard, for he said nothing in his own defense; in fact, he took it very well, gazing out at the pine trees, which Myles, in the course of his sermon, had asked him to consider in all their natural beauty. That afternoon, they met another hard nut—and Mac took the pledge again, which closed the deal for a production on the following Sunday, and also, he seemed to think, put him into Myles’ good graces. “I wish I could find one that could give it to me and make it stick,” he said.

“Don’t come to me when I’m a priest,” said Myles, who had still to see his first bishop.

That night Mac and the bottle were at the door again. Myles, in bed, did not respond. This was a mistake. Mac phoned the office and had them bring up a key and open Myles’ door, all because he thought Myles might be sick. “I love that boy!” he proclaimed, on his way back to his room at last. Later that night Myles heard him in the corridor, at a little distance, with another drunk. Mac was roaring, “I’m seein’ who I may devour!”

More and more, Myles and Mac were staying together in the same hotels, and Myles, though saving money by this arrangement (money, however, that he never saw), wondered if he wasn’t paying too much for economy. He felt slightly kept. Mac only wanted him handy late at night, it seemed, so as to have someone with whom to take his pleasure, which was haranguing. Myles now understood better why Jack had liked the places he stayed in. Or was this thing that Mac was doing to him nightly something new for Mac? Something that Myles had brought upon himself? He was someone whom people looking for trouble always seemed to find. It had happened to him in the hospital, in the seminary, in the Boy Scouts. If a million people met in one place, and he was there, he was certain that the worst of them would rise as a man and make for him.

But Mac wasn’t always looking for trouble. One afternoon, for no reason at all, he bought Myles a Hawaiian sports shirt. “For next summer,” Mac said, as if they would always be together. The shirt was a terrible thing to look at—soiled merchandise picked up at a sale—but it might mean something. Was it possible that Mac, in his fashion, liked him?

“A fellow like you might handle that end of it,” Mac said one day in the car. He had been talking about the store part of his dream and how he would put out a big catalogue in which it would be wise for manufacturers—and maybe religious orders, too—to buy advertising if they expected to do business with him. “Interested?” he asked.

Myles was definitely not interested, but he was touched by the offer, since it showed that Mac trusted him. It was time to put matters straight between them. Myles spoke then of
his
dream—of the great desire he had to become a priest. Not a punch-drunk seminary professor or a fat cat in a million-dollar parish, he said, but a simple shepherd ministering gently to the poorest of God’s poor. He wouldn’t mind being a priest-worker, like those already functioning so successfully in France, according to reports reaching him. “That can’t happen here,” Mac said. Myles, however, saw difficult times ahead for the nation— Here Mac started to open his mouth but grabbed instead for his ears. Myles felt pretty sure that there would soon be priest-workers slaving away in fields and factories by day and tending to the spiritual needs of their poor fellow-workers by night.

“Poor?” Mac asked. “What about the unions? When I think what those boys take home!”

Myles then explored the more immediate problem of finding a bishop to sponsor him.

Mac said he knew several quite well and he might speak to them.

“I wish you would,” Myles said. “The two I’ve seen looked impossible.” Then, having said that much—too much—he confessed to Mac his real reason for taking the job: the urgency of his position with regard to Selective Service.

Immediately, Mac, who had not been paying much attention, released an ear for listening. He appeared ill-disposed toward Myles’ reluctance to serve in the armed forces, or, possibly, toward such frankness.

“I can’t serve two masters,” Myles said. Mac was silent; he’d gone absolutely dead. “Are you a veteran?” Myles asked.

“Since you ask,” Mac said, “I’ll tell you. I served and was wounded—honorably—in both World Wars. If there’s another one, I hope to do my part. Does that answer your question?” Myles said that it did, and he could think of nothing to say just then that wouldn’t hurt Mac’s feelings.

That night, Mac, in his cups, surpassed himself. He got through with the usual accusations early and began threatening Myles with “exposure.” “Dodgin’ the draft!” Mac howled. “I oughta turn you in.”

Myles said he hadn’t broken the law
yet
.

“But you
intend
to,” Mac said. “I oughta turn you in.”

“I’ll turn myself in when the time comes,” Myles said.

“Like hell you will. You’ll go along until they catch up with you. Then they’ll clap you in jail—where you belong.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Myles said, thinking of St Paul and other convicts.

“Then you’ll wish you were in the Army—where you belong. I’m not sure it’s not my duty to report you. Let’s see your draft card.”

Myles let him see it.

“‘Flynn, Myles’—that you? How do I know you’re not somebody else by the same name?”

Myles made no reply. Had prohibition been so wrong, he wondered.

“Don’t wanna incriminate yourself, huh? Hey, you’re 1-A! Didja see that?”

Myles explained, as he had before, that he was awaiting his induction notice.

“Bet you are! Bet you can hardly wait! I’d better hold onto this.” Mac slipped Myles’ draft card into his pocket.

In the morning, Myles got the card back. Mac, sober, returned it, saying he’d found it in his room, where Myles (who had not been there) must have dropped it. “Better hold on to that,” Mac said.

The next night Myles managed to stay in a rooming house, out of reach, but the following night they were together again, and Mac asked to see Myles’ draft card again. Myles wouldn’t give it up. “I deny your authority,” he said, himself emboldened by drink—two beers.

“Here’s my authority!” Mac cried. He loosened his trousers and pulled up his shirt in front, exposing a stomach remarkably round, smooth, veined, and, in places, blue, like a world globe. There was a scar on it. “How d’ya think I got that?”

“Appendicitis,” Myles said.

There was no doubt of it. The scar testified to Mac’s fraudulence as nothing else had, and for once Mac seemed to know it. He’d strayed into a field in which he believed Myles to be supreme. Putting his stomach away, he managed a tone in which there was misgiving, outrage, and sarcasm. “That’s right. That’s right. You know everything. You were a bedpan jockey. I forgot about that.”

Myles watched him, amused. Mac might have saved himself by telling the truth or by quickly laughing it off, but he lied on. “Shrapnel—some still inside,” he said. He coughed and felt his stomach, as if his lungs were there, but he didn’t get it out again. “Not asking
you
to believe it,” he said. “Won’t show
you
my other wound.”

“Please don’t,” said Myles. He retired that night feeling that he had the upper hand.

One week later, leaving a town in Minnesota where they had encountered a difficult bishop, Mac ordered Myles to stop at a large, gabled rectory of forbidding aspect. As it turned out, however, they enjoyed a good dinner there, and afterward the pastor summoned three of his colleagues for a little game of blackjack—in Mac’s honor, Myles heard him say as the players trooped upstairs.

Myles spent the evening downstairs with the curate. While they were eating some fudge the curate had made that afternoon, they discovered that they had many of the same enthusiasms and prejudices. The curate wanted Myles to understand that the church was not his idea, loaded up, as it was, with junk. He was working on the pastor to throw out most of the statues and all the vigil lights. It was a free-talking, free-swinging session, the best evening for Myles since leaving the seminary. In a nice but rather futile tribute to Myles, the curate said that if the two of them were pastors, they might, perhaps, transform the whole diocese. He in no way indicated that he thought there was anything wrong with Myles because he had been asked to leave the seminary. He believed, as Myles did, that there was no
good
reason for the dismissal. He said he’d had trouble getting through himself and he thought that the seminary, as an institution, was probably responsible for the way Stalin, another aspirant to the priesthood, had turned out. The curate also strongly disapproved of Mac, and of Myles’ reasons for continuing in the Work. He said the Clementines were a corny outfit, and no bishop in his right mind, seeing Myles with Mac, would ever take a chance on him. The curate thought that Myles might be playing it too cautious. He’d do better, perhaps, just to go around the country, hitchhiking from see to see, washing dishes if he had to, but calling on bishops personally—as many as he could in the time that remained before he got his induction notice.

“How many bishops have you actually seen?” the curate asked.

“Three. But I couldn’t say anything with Mac right there. I would’ve gone back later, though, if there’d been a chance at all with those I saw.”

The curate sniffed. “How could you tell?” he asked. “I thought you were desperate. You just
can’t
be guided entirely by private revelation. You have a higher injunction: ‘Seek, and you shall find.’ Perhaps you still haven’t thought this thing
through
. I wonder. Perhaps you don’t pray enough?”

Myles, noticing in the curate a tendency to lecture and feeling that he’d suffered one “perhaps” too many, defended himself, saying, “The man we met today wouldn’t let us set foot on church property in his diocese. What can you do with a bishop like that?”

“The very one you should have persevered with! Moses, you may remember, had to do more than look at the rock. He had to strike it.”

“Twice, unfortunately,” murmured Myles, not liking the analogy. Moses, wavering in his faith, had struck twice and had not reached the Promised Land; he had only seen it in the distance, and died.

“It may not be too late,” the curate said. “I’d try that one again if I were you.”

Myles laughed. “
That
one was your own bishop,” he said.

“The bishop said that?” The curate showed some alarm and seemed suddenly a lot less friendly. “Is that why you’re here, then—why Mac’s here, I mean?”

“I couldn’t tell you why I’m here,” Myles said. In Mac’s defense, he said, “I don’t think he’s mentioned the Work here.” It was true. Mac and the pastor had hit it off right away, talking of other things.

“I heard him trying to sell the pastor a new roof—a copper one. Also an oil burner. Does he deal in
those
things?” the curate asked.

“He has friends who do.” Myles smiled. He wanted to say more on this subject to amuse the curate, if that was still possible; he wanted to confide in him again; he wanted to say whatever would be necessary to save the evening. But the shadow of the bishop had fallen upon them. There were only crumbs on the fudge plate; the evening had ended. It was bedtime, the curate said. He offered Myles a Coke, which Myles refused, then showed him to a couch in the parlor, gave him a blanket, and went off to bed.

Some time later—it was still night—Mac woke Myles and they left the rectory. Mac was sore; he said he’d lost a bundle. He climbed into the back seat and wrapped himself in the car rug. “A den of thieves. I’m pretty sure I was taken. Turn on the heater.” And then he slept while Myles drove away toward the dawn.

The next day, as they were having dinner in another diocese, another town, another hotel—Mac looked fresh; he’d slept all day—Myles told him that he was quitting.

“Soon?” said Mac.

“Right away.”

“Give me a little time to think about it.”

After dinner, Mac drew one of his good cigars out of its aluminum scabbard. “What is it? Money? Because if it is—” Mac said, puffing on the cigar, and then, looking at the cigar and not at Myles, he outlined his plans. He’d try to get more money for Myles from the Fathers, more take-home dough and more for expenses. He’d sensed that Myles had been unhappy in some of those flea bags; Myles might have noticed that they’d been staying together oftener. Ultimately, if the two of them were still together and everything went right, there might be a junior partnership for Myles in the store. “No,” Mac said, looking at Myles. “I can see that’s not what you want.” He turned to the cigar again and asked, “Well, why not?” He invited Myles up to his room, where, he said, he might have something to say that would be of interest to him.

Upstairs, after making himself a drink, Mac said that he just might be able to help Myles in the only way he wanted to be helped. He was on fairly good terms with a number of bishops, as Myles might have gathered, but an even better bet would be the Clementines. Myles could join the order as a lay brother—
anybody
could do that—swiftly win the confidence of his superiors, then switch to the seminary, and thus complete his studies for the priesthood. “I might be able to give you such a strong recommendation that you could go straight into the seminary,” Mac said. “It would mean losing you, of course. Don’t like that part. Or
would
it? What’s to stop us from going on together, like now, after you get your degree?”

“After
ordination
?” Myles asked.

“There you are!” Mac exclaimed. “Just shows it’s a natural—us working as a team. What I don’t know, you do.”

While Mac strengthened his drink just a little—he was cutting down—Myles thanked him for what he’d done to date and also for what he was prepared to do. He said that he doubted, however, that he was meant for the Clementines or for the community life, and even if he were, there would still be the problem of finding a bishop to sponsor him. “Oh,
they’d
do all that,” Mac said. Myles shook his head. He was quitting. He had to intensify his efforts. He wasn’t getting to see many bishops, was he? Time was of the essence. He had a few ideas he wanted to pursue on his own (meaning he had one—to have another crack at the curate’s bishop). The induction notice, his real worry, might come any day.