The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) (47 page)

He hadn’t seen who had spoken. “For me?” he said, looking them over. He saw Grace sorrowing in their midst.

“No, Father,” said someone else, also hidden from him. “We’re here to see the pastor.”

“Oh,” he said.

“
He
went out on a sick call,” said someone else.

“Oh,” he said, and escaped.

One minute later he was settling down in the garage, on the bottom rung of a folding ladder, the best seat he could find. He picked up a wrench, got grease on his fingers, and remembered that Mr Pint never touched a wrench. He wondered where he’d gone wrong, if there was anything he might have done, or might yet do. There was nothing. He attributed his trouble to his belief, probably mistaken, that the chancery had wanted a man at Trinity to compensate for the pastor. Father Fabre had tried to be that man, one who would be accessible to the people. The pastor strenuously avoided people. He was happy with the machines in his room, or on a picnic with himself, topped off perhaps with a visit to the zoo. The assistant was the one to see at Trinity. Naturally there were people who would try to capitalize on his inexperience. The pastor gave him a lot of rope. Some pastors wouldn’t let their curates dine out with parishioners—with good reason, it appeared. The pastor was watchful, though, and would rein in the rope on the merest suspicion. Father Fabre was thinking of the young lady of charm and education who had come to him after Mass one Sunday with the idea of starting up a study club at Trinity. He’d told the pastor and the pastor had told him, “It’s under study.” You might think that would be the end of it. It had been, so far as the young lady was concerned, but that evening at table Father Fabre was asked by the dormouse if he knew about young ladies.

“Know about them?”

“Ummm.” The dormouse was feasting on a soda cracker.

“No,” said Father Fabre, very wise.

“Well, Father, I had them all in a sodality some years ago.” (Ordinarily untalkative to the point of being occult, the pastor spoke now as a man compelled, and Father Fabre attended his every word. The seminary professors had harped on the wisdom of pastors, as against the all-consuming ignorance of curates.) It seemed that the pastor, being so busy, didn’t notice how the young ladies showed up for induction during the few years of the sodality’s existence at Trinity, but from the day he did, there had been no more of that. (
What?
Father Fabre wondered but did not interrupt.) The pastor was not narrow-minded, he said, and he granted that a young woman might wear a bit of paint on her wedding day. But when sodalists, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of God, Mary Immaculate, presented themselves at the communion rail in low-necked evening gowns, wearing lipstick, stuff in their eyes, and with their hair up in the permanent wave, why then, Gentlemen—the pastor used that word, causing Father Fabre to blink and then to realize he was hearing a speech the pastor must have given at a clergy conference—there was something wrong somewhere and that was why he had suppressed the sodality in his parish.

By God, thought Father Fabre, nodding vigorously, the pastor had a point! Here was something to remember if he ever got a church of his own.

It must have touched the pastor to see his point so well taken by his young curate, for he smiled. “You might say the scales dropped from my eyes,” he said.

But by then Father Fabre, gazing at the cracker flak on the pastor’s black bosom, had begun to wonder what all this had to do with a study club.

“A study club’s just another name for a sodality,” the pastor prompted. “See what I mean?”

Father Fabre did not, not unless the pastor meant that young ladies were apt to belong to either and that, therefore, his curate would do well to steer clear of both. Hear their sins, visit them in sickness and prison, give them the Sacrament. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to be done for or about them. In time they would get old and useful. The pastor, for his part, had put them away in the cellar part of his mind to ripen like cheese. But the good ladies of the Altar and Rosary were something else again. Nuns could not have kept the church cleaner, and the good ladies, unlike nuns, didn’t labor under the illusion that they were somehow priests, only different, and so weren’t always trying to vault the communion rail to the altar.

“You want to be one of these ‘youth priests,’ Father?”

“I haven’t thought much about it.”

“Good.”

But, as the pastor must have noticed, Father Fabre had wanted to get some “activities” going at Trinity, believing that his apostolate lay in the world, with the people, as the pastor’s obviously didn’t. Well, he had failed. But he wasn’t sorry. Wasn’t there enough to do at Trinity, just doing the regular chores? For the poor, the sick and dying, yes, anything. But non-essentials he’d drop, including dining out with parishioners, and major decisions he’d cheerfully hand over to the pastor. (He still thought the man who rented owls to rid you of pigeons might have something, for that was nature’s way, no cruel machines or powders. But he’d stop agitating for the owls, for that was another problem for the pastor, to solve or, probably, not to solve.) Of course the parish was indifferently run, but wasn’t it a mistake to keep trying to take up
all
the slack? He’d had himself under observation, of late. It seemed to him his outlook was changing, not from a diminution of zeal, not from loss of vision, but from growing older and wiser. At least he hoped so. He was beginning to believe he wasn’t the man to compensate for the pastor—not that he’d ask for a transfer. The bishop was a gentle administrator but always seemed to find a place in one of the salt mines for a young man seeking a change. Father Fabre’s predecessor in the curate’s job at Trinity had been antisocial, which some of the gadabout clergy said could be a grievous fault in a parish priest, but he hadn’t asked for a change—it had come to him—and now he was back in the seminary, as a professor with little pocket money, it was true, but enjoying food and handball again. That afternoon, sitting in the garage, Father Fabre envied him.

The pastor handed a wicker basket to Father Fabre, and himself carried a thermos bottle. He showed no surprise at finding his curate waiting for him in the garage and asked no questions. Father Fabre, the moment he saw the basket and bottle, understood that the pastor was returning from a picnic, and that Miss Burke, telling the ladies he’d gone on a sick call, thought it part of her job to create a good impression whenever possible, part of being loyal, the prime requisite. Who but the pastor would have her for a housekeeper?

They walked to the back door at the pastor’s pace.

“Some coffee in here for you,” the pastor said, jiggling the thermos bottle.

“Thanks,” said Father Fabre, but he’d not be having any of that.

“One of the bears died at Como,” the pastor said. “One of the babies.”

“That’s too bad,” said Father Fabre. He pushed in the door for the pastor, then stood aside. “Some women to see you in the converts’ parlor,” he said, as the pastor passed in front of him.

The pastor nodded. Women in the converts’ parlor; he would see them.

“I don’t know,” Father Fabre said. “It may concern me—indirectly.” Then, staring down at the kitchen linoleum, he began an account of his afternoon at Mrs Mathers’. At the worst part—his chagrin on learning of the setup there—the pastor interrupted. He filled an unwashed cup from the sink with the fluid from the thermos bottle, gave it to Father Fabre to drink, and watched to see that he did. Father Fabre drank Miss Burke’s foul coffee to the dregs and chewed up a few grounds. When he started up his account again, the pastor interrupted.

“That’s enough,” he said.

Father Fabre, for a moment, thought he was in for it. But when he looked into the pastor’s eyes, there was nothing in them for him to fear, nor was there fear, nor even fear of fear, bravado. The pastor’s eyes were blue, blank and blue.

Father Fabre followed the pastor at a little distance, out of the kitchen, down the hallway. “Will you need me?” he said.

With an almost imperceptible shake of his head, the pastor walked into the converts’ parlor, leaving the door ajar as always when dealing with women.

Father Fabre stayed to listen, out of sight of those inside. He soon realized that it had been a mistake to omit all mention of Velma in his account, as he had, thinking her presence at Mrs Mathers’ incidental, her youth likely to sidetrack the pastor, to arouse memories of so-called study clubs and suppressed sodalists. Why, if the pastor was to hear the details, didn’t they tell him that Grace had been invited to dinner? Then there would have been five of them. The pastor was sure to get the wrong impression. To hear the ladies tell it, Mr Pint and Father Fabre were as bad as sailors on leave, kindred evil spirits double-dating a couple of dazzled working girls. The ladies weren’t being fair to Father Fabre or, he felt, even to Mr Pint. He wondered at the pastor’s silence. When all was said and done, there was little solidarity among priests—a nest of tables scratching each other.

In the next room, it was the old, old story, right from Scripture, the multitude crying, “Father, this woman was taken in adultery. The law commandeth us to stone such a one. What sayest thou?” The old story with the difference that the pastor had nothing to say. Why didn’t he say, She that is without sin among you, let her first cast a stone at her! But there was one close by who could and would speak, who knew what it was to have the mob against him, and who was not afraid. With chapter and verse he’d atomize ’em.
This day thou shouldst be pastor
. Yes, it did look that way, but he’d wait a bit, to give the pastor a chance to redeem himself. He imagined how it would be if he hit them with that text. They, hearing him, would go out one by one, even the pastor, from that day forward his disciple. And he alone would remain, and the woman. And he, lifting up himself, would say, Woman, where are they that accused thee? Hath no one condemned thee? Who would say, No one, master. Neither will I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more.

“Think he can handle it?”

Whirling, Father Fabre beheld his tempter. “Be gone, John,” he said, and watched the janitor slink away.

Father Fabre, after that, endeavored to think well of the pastor, to discover the meaning in his silence. Was this forbearance? It seemed more like paralysis. The bomb was there to be used, but the pastor couldn’t or wouldn’t use it. He’d have to do something, though. The ladies, calmed at first by his silence, sounded restless. Soon they might regard his silence not as response to a grave problem but as refusal to hold council with them.

“We don’t feel it’s any of our business to know
what
you intend to do, Father, but we would like some assurance that something will be done. It that asking too much?”

The pastor said nothing.

“We thought you’d know what to do, Father,” said another. “What would be best for all concerned, Father. Gosh, I don’t know what to think!”

The pastor cleared his throat, touched, possibly, by the last speaker’s humility, but he said nothing.

“I wonder if we’ve made ourselves clear,” said the one who had spoken before the last one. She wasn’t speaking to the pastor but to the multitude. “Maybe that’s what comes from trying to describe everything in the best possible light.” (Father Fabre remembered the raw deal they’d given him.) “Not
all
of us, I’m afraid, believe that man’s there against Mildred’s will.”

“’
S not so
.”

Father Fabre gasped. Oh, no! Not that! But yes, the pastor had spoken.

“Father, do you mean to say we’re lying?”

“
No
.”

Father Fabre shook his head. In all arguments with the pastor there was a place like the Sargasso Sea, and the ladies had reached it. It was authority that counted then, as Father Fabre knew, who had always lacked it. The ladies hadn’t taken a vow of obedience, though, and they might not take “’S not so” for an answer. They might very well go to the chancery. At the prospect of that, of the fine slandering he’d get there, and realizing only then that he and the pastor were in the same boat, Father Fabre began to consider the position as defined by “’S not so” and “No.” The pastor was saying (a) that the situation, as reported by the ladies, was not so, and (b) that the ladies were not lying. He seemed to be contradicting himself, as was frequently the case in disputations with his curate. This was no intramural spat, however. The pastor would have to make sense for a change, to come out on top.
Could
the dormouse be right? And the ladies wrong in what they thought? What if what they thought was just not so?
Honi soit qui mal y pense?

One said, “I just can’t understand Mildred,” but Father Fabre thought he could, now. At no time had Mrs Mathers sounded guilty, and that—her seeming innocence—was what had thrown everything out of kilter. When she said Mr Pint lived with her, when she said she was thinking of giving up her apartment, she had sounded not guilty but regretful, regretful and flustered, as though she knew that her friends and even her clergy were about to desert her. Mrs Mathers was a veteran nurse, the human body was her work bench, sex probably a matter of technical concern, as with elderly plumbers who distinguish between the male and female connections. It was quite possible that Mrs Mathers had thought nothing of letting a room to a member of the opposite sex. She could not have known that what was only an economy measure for her would appear to others as something very different—and so, in fact, it had become for her, in time. Mrs Mathers and Mr Pint were best described as victims of their love for each other. It was true love, of that Father Fabre was now certain. He had only to recollect it. If it were the other kind, Mrs Mathers never would have invited him over—and Grace—to meet Mr Pint. Mr Pint, non-Catholic and priest-shy, had never really believed that Mrs Mathers’ friends would understand, and when Grace defaulted, he had become sullen, ready to take on anybody, even a priest, which showed the quality of his regard for Mrs Mathers, that he meant to marry her willy-nilly, in or out of the Church. There must be no delay. All Mrs Mathers needed now, all she’d ever needed, was a little time—and help. If she could get Mr Pint to take instructions, they could have a church wedding. Velma, already Catholic in spirit, could be bridesmaid. That was it. The ladies had done their worst—Father Fabre’s part in the affair was criminally exaggerated—but the pastor, the angelic dormouse, had not failed to sniff out the benign object of Mrs Mathers’ grand plan. Or what would have been its object. The ladies could easily spoil everything.