FATHER WALTHER’S TEMPTATION
by Thomas J. Hubschman
Copyright © 2012 Thomas J. Hubschman
Published by Savvy Press at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-0-9826069-0-2
All rights reserved.
All the characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Published by:
Savvy Press PO Box 63
Salem, NY 12865
http://www.savvypress.com
FATHER WALTHER’S TEMPTATION
Diocesan rules forbid going about the streets of one’s parish in sport shirt and slacks. But there was no rule governing the sort of attire a priest should wear when he set out on his vacation. Many men kept the roman collar on until they were safely out of the diocese, then changed to casual dress. Father Walther was of two minds on the subject: if parishioners saw him drive off in a Hawaiian print, there was no telling if the story would include a sexy blonde by the time it finished its rounds. On the other hand, a priest had as much right as the next person to a life of his own. If some busybodies wanted to gossip, they would find opportunity to do so, no matter how well or badly he behaved. He liked to think he was striking a small blow for clerical liberation by leaving town in mufti. But he also realized that few of the tongues that could be expected to wag were up and about at one o’clock on a Monday morning.
He liked driving at night. There was less traffic, it was cool, and there was no glare to contend with. He got to see little scenery, but how much countryside was there to observe along the turnpikes and interstates that connected the cities of the eastern seaboard? A mechanic had pronounced his Ford aging but healthy. That was like telling a ninety-year-old there was nothing wrong with his heart. The mechanic gave, or pretended to give, a break on labor he did on the car, making it difficult for the priest to dispute his diagnoses. It was just one of the many special considerations a cleric suffered at the hands of the laity. Someone was always trying to do you a favor—the milkman who left a free quart of orange juice, then looked as if you had run over his dog when you turned down his offer to sell you twice the cream you needed (at a discount, of course); the used car dealer who always had a “clean” heap stashed away on a corner of the lot that he was saving for the pope, Jesus Christ or, in the event either of those two preferred public transportation, yourself.
The swamps of Secaucus were behind him. So were the refineries and other evil humors of central Jersey. It was clear sailing all the way to Baltimore. He had been holding the Ford to fifty-five miles an hour, not out of respect for the legal speed limit but to lessen the strain on its organs. The distance between exits was steadily lengthening. Half the traffic consisted of long-distance trucks cruising along at sixty-five and seventy, creating a turbulence as they passed that caused the Ford to veer skittishly from one side of its lane to the other. New York stations had disappeared from the radio dial, replaced by hillbilly music and all-night preachers.
It was as if the bonds that tied him to his parish were loosening. Maybe that was what he liked about these night journeys to his mother’s. Everything and everyone, from the huge tractor-trailers that tried to sweep him off the road to the sleepy waitress in the Howard Johnson’s he had stopped at for coffee a few exits back, took him for what he seemed to be—a (young) middle-aged man on an indeterminate journey. No one tipped his hat in deference to the roman collar he wore the other fifty weeks of the year. No one felt an urge to make inane conversation or abrupt confession. And, perhaps best of all, no one felt obliged to censor his or her behavior and vocabulary. It was like being a spy in a foreign country without any of the risks. If someone should take a heart attack at a lunch counter or fall asleep at the wheel, he had only to reach into his glove compartment for the narrow satin stole that proved his priestly identity. The rest of the time he was Joe Schmoe.
The coffee he had drunk an hour ago was beginning to wear off. If he didn’t get more soon, the temptation to close his eyes would become acute. But even if he pushed the Ford to an even sixty miles an hour, he would have to keep awake another half hour without the benefit of caffeine. He should have asked his housekeeper to fill a thermos for him. It wouldn’t do to fall asleep and run the car off the road. Of all ways to die, that surely was the most senseless.
He pumped the brake pedal to alert the huge tractor-trailer in his rearview mirror that he was slowing down. The truck’s massive grille, headlights blazing like the eyes of some angry monster, closed to within a few feet of his rear bumper, then swerved into the outside lane and all but blew him off the road. He pulled cautiously onto the shoulder, his own headlights scarcely able to penetrate the darkness.
Even before he had come to a full stop and turned on his flashers, the sweet damp smell of open country filled the car. He rolled up the windows and reached into the back seat for the gray cardigan he kept there. Then he folded his arms and inclined his head against the backrest. He expected to fall asleep immediately, but the sounds outside the car, not just crickets but a kind of muted primeval chatter broken irregularly by the roar of a passing truck, kept him awake. He felt no fear of anything that might be concealed beyond the low scrub bordering the roadway, but the unfamiliar noises kept a part of his mind alert when the rest wanted badly to grab forty winks. It seemed a long time before he finally felt himself drift off.
The tapping noise made no sense at first, nor did the bright light shining in his eyes. Then he saw the head of the flashlight. As he rolled down his window he noted with relief the gray uniform behind it.
“Anything wrong?” the trooper asked.
He responded with a sleepy version of his clerical smile, designed more to offer reassurance than to receive that comfort.
“Just taking a nap, Officer. My eyes were getting heavy.”
He only remembered there was nothing visible to indicate his priesthood when the trooper directed his flashlight into the back seat, then trained it on the unoccupied place beside him, and finally onto his lap where, he only then realized, an erection was subsiding.
“There’s a rest stop down the road where you can get coffee,” the trooper said, mercifully pointing the light away before he had had time to notice the priest’s blush. Father Walther had a chance now to see his face. It looked surprisingly young.
“I’ll do that. Thanks very much for stopping.”
The trooper hesitated, then nodded cautiously and returned to the white patrol car parked behind the Ford. He got in, said something into his car radio and pulled back onto the Turnpike.
It was one thing to wake up with an erection caused by a full bladder. Even that rarely occurred anymore, and besides, he had taken care to relieve himself at his last stop. When he was younger, in his teens and twenties, he rarely awoke without a stiff penis. He used to wonder if it wasn’t a sign he might not have a vocation after all. But his confessor and, later in the seminary, his spiritual mentors assured him there would only be something wrong if he did not get erections. His vocation did not mean he was not a sexual being. What mattered was how he controlled these libidinous forces, whether or not he sublimated them (as a psychologist once put it to him and his fellow seminarians) into “productive channels.” He had known priests well into their thirties and forties who were still troubled by sex. But once he had decided on a celibate life it was as if he had been granted a dispensation from that burden. His sexual self did not disappear (the occasional wet dream was enough to dispel that illusion), but his sexual self became like a talent he simply chose never to exercise, like being able to throw a baseball ninety miles an hour or lift great weights. He liked to think that if he had been called to a non-celibate life, he would be one of those men who never gave a second thought to any woman but his wife.
He turned the ignition key, but nothing happened, not even the groan of a dying battery. He switched off and tried again, with the same result. He tried his headlights. They too were dead.
He fished a flashlight out of the glove compartment and got out to have a look under the hood. Apart from the dipstick, radiator cap, and battery leads, an automobile engine was foreign territory to him. His most recent problems with the car had been in the transmission and suspension, not with anything that could conceivably cause sudden death. He closed the hood, then realized he should leave it open and attach a white rag to his radio antenna. He still could not believe that if he just turned the ignition key one more time, the engine would not start as usual. But it did not.
He waited the better part of an hour for a trooper to arrive—the same who had stopped earlier. He explained the problem, half-expecting the cop to have a look at the engine himself. But the young man only glanced contemptuously at the car’s ragged interior, returned to his patrol car, and sent a radio message.
“They’ll be a tow along.”
“I’m sure it’s only a loose wire.”
The trooper gave the Ford another look, this time noting a rusty dent in the front fender. The look seemed to say that anyone who took a wreck like this out on the highway, his highway, could expect to get just what he deserved. The priest wanted to point out that the car’s beat-up condition was the result of long service in the Lord’s work. But he doubted that fact would make any difference to the cop (whom he took for Protestant, in any case, because of the English name on his ID plate).
They sat, the trooper in his patrol car, Father Walther in the Ford, until the tow truck arrived. By then it was past four a.m. Even if the serviceman could fix the car right there on the highway (he could not) he would still be late getting to his mother’s. The best he could hope for was a prompt repair at the garage.
“Tore through here like a cyclone,” the tow driver said, his fat pink arms encircling the truck’s steering wheel. “Lost power three hours.”
They were racing along an unlit country road. Father Walther could see the Ford in the sideview mirror bouncing behind like a trussed animal. His experience of country places was limited to Boy Scout hikes and seminary picnics. There was scarcely a vacant lot left in the northern New Jersey suburb where his parish was located.
“You get many of them—thunderstorms?”
“Sure do,” the youth replied, a shy grin creasing his mouth. Earlier, when the boy was hooking up the Ford to the winch, Father Walther had been too preoccupied with his delay to pay much attention to his surroundings. But with nothing but dark cornfields all around and this country boy at the wheel, it seemed as if he had just stepped out of the real world and onto a movie set. The Turnpike he had ridden so many times without a thought for what occurred beyond its well-patrolled macadam now seemed a right of way through a land more foreign than he had ever imagined, an American autobahn linking enclaves of civilization inhabiting the periphery of a vast alien hinterland.
“You from these parts?” the youngster asked after they had traveled the next mile in silence. Father Walther gave the name of the town where his parish was located. The young man had never heard of it. “I could tell you’re from up that way, though. I’m pretty good at figuring where people are from. Are you Jewish?” he asked, then blushed so deeply at his indiscretion that the glow of his cheeks was visible in the dashboard’s dim reflection. “I just heard there’s a whole mess of them up to New York is why I asked.” They road in silence for another half mile. Then, as if in apology for his earlier gaff, the boy screwed up his face and said, “I had me a black girlfriend once.”
Without seeming to slow down, the truck veered into a service station that appeared suddenly in the middle of a cornfield. The boy parked the truck next to the men’s room at the side of the station, jumped down from the cab and disappeared inside.
The station’s mechanic was on his break. The tow driver professed ignorance about how long repairs might take. His interest in his customer seemed to have vanished once they had reached the garage. He had retreated to the shadows of the hydraulic lift and a heavily-thumbed porno magazine. A radio blared country music to the cornfields.
The closest Father Walther had ever come to his present predicament was the occasional blowout, a mishap usually remedied with the help of a passing motorist even before he had a chance to roll the spare out of his trunk. If he were in his own parish now, or anywhere near it, he would simply call Father George and ask for a lift, leaving his disabled machine for the garage to tow away—probably the same garage that had just given the Ford a clean bill of health. But here he had no such recourse. He had no idea what parish he was in—or what diocese, for that matter. Large tracts of the U.S. were still “mission territory,” but he wasn’t sure if southern New Jersey qualified as such. In any event, he hadn’t lit out on his own sans roman collar only to yell for help at his first brush with misfortune. But as he sat in the service station’s office, watching the sky lighten above the cornfields, he resolved never again to take for granted those Good Samaritans who were so willing to come to his aid.
It was half an hour before the mechanic showed up, picking his teeth with a bent wire. He was even fatter than his apprentice, and wore the same dungaree overalls. The two of them conferred for a while, then the mechanic gave the priest a hostile glance as if he were a bill collector or door-to-door salesman. He finally condescended to disconnect the Ford from the tow truck but ignored the priest’s attempts to explain what happened. He asked for the ignition key and, with his assistant’s help, moved the car nearer the repair shop. Then his head disappeared under the hood and Father Walther was left to endure the loud country music.
A few minutes later the mechanic told him the battery was run-down, but Father Walther couldn’t tell if this was the cause or just a symptom of the problem. It seemed inconceivable that a battery could just up and die. He had had no difficulty starting the engine after he stopped for coffee on the Turnpike, and there had been no indication of a discharge.
“What happens now?” he asked as the mechanic connected leads from the battery to a charging machine.
“See if she takes a charge. All we can do, mister.”
It was now six a.m., two hours behind his original schedule. The sky was fully light. Cornfields stretched for miles in every direction. Crows glided lazily across them, looking huge and predatory. His body was demanding sleep. Even if the car was repaired by seven, he didn’t see how he would be able to drive for another three hours.
He decided to call his mother from the pay phone beside the road. Traffic had begun to appear, sleepy men in ten-year-old cars off to do a day’s work. His mother was too groggy herself to appreciate his predicament. He told her he expected to be back on the road shortly. She said not to worry about being late and generally seemed unconcerned by his plight. Even though this was precisely the attitude he had hoped to encourage in her, when she sounded downright cheerful he felt irritated.
At six-thirty the mechanic pronounced the battery dead. Father Walther protested, again citing the absence of any sign of electrical trouble. The mechanic was unmoved: the car needed a new battery.
“How much will it run me?”
The mechanic stared up at the garage ceiling, pursing his lips as if the price of a battery were something he hadn’t calculated for some time.
“I could let you have one for eighty.”
“Eighty dollars?”
The man wiped his hands on an already greasy rag.
“That’s if I had one.”
Eighty dollars was a large chunk of his vacation money.
He followed the mechanic into the office and watched him sit down on a low stool, his huge bottom spilling over it like blue pudding. He pulled a telephone directory toward him and thumbed his way to a page already blackened by other greasy thumbs. Then he reached for the receiver and dialed with cretin-like precision.
“No answer.” Until now the priest wasn’t even sure the call had something to do with his Ford. It was as if the mechanic had dismissed that matter and gone on to other business. “There’ll be someone by and by,” the man said, finally showing some hint of sympathy for his customer’s predicament. The priest smiled but decided that once this episode was over he would write a letter of protest to whatever state agency had charge of assigning tow contracts for the New Jersey Turnpike.
CHAPTER TWO
A new battery would not arrive before midday. A new battery should solve the problem, the mechanic told him after they had shared some donuts and day-old coffee. But there was no guarantee something else might not also be on the fritz. They wouldn’t know until the new battery was in stalled.
Meanwhile, the priest had to think about how he was to get some sleep. The easiest way was to call a nearby parish and explain his situation. But he wanted to rule out that option until he was faced with an actual emergency. He could check into a motel for a few hours, but that would mean using some of his meager funds, thus curtailing his activities after his visit to Maryland—golf and other R&R in the Cat skills. He decided to wait to see if the battery arrived by noon.
It did, but after the mechanic installed it he said there also seemed to be a problem with the alternator and possibly with some other part of the engine Father Walther had never even heard of. He had no way of knowing if the man was telling the truth. He had come to expect a certain amount of gulling by merchants even when he was wearing his roman collar. But this was the first time he had felt as if he were completely at someone’s mercy. He could take his chances with just a new battery, but if the mechanic was not deceiving him, he might only have to go through this rigmarole a few miles down the road. Besides, he was too tired to drive.
The mechanic said he would work on the alternator right after lunch (since the battery arrived, two more breakdowns had been towed into the station). As if to show good faith, he offered Father Walther the use of his business phone to make any local calls he wanted. But who would the priest call in this godforsaken part of the world? He wasn’t even sure where he was, except that it was somewhere south of Trenton. To pass the time and help keep awake he opened one of the roadmaps in the office. As best he could tell, he was stranded somewhere between Exits 4 and 5. But he wasn’t sure if he was on the east or the west side of the Turnpike.
His eye strayed toward the Atlantic coast. The town names were totally unfamiliar until he reached a dark red line snaking north along the eastern edge of the peninsula. Then he spotted Tom’s River, Barnegat Bay and a number of other resort towns whose names rang familiar. He had spent his adolescent summers water-skiing along that stretch of mosquito-ridden beach. A classmate’s parents owned a bungalow by the bay. Every weekend they drove seventy-five miles (sometimes seventy-three, sometimes eighty; Frank Willet, Sr., kept a close account of such things), fighting turnpike and parkway traffic for a couple days relaxation. Half of his home town—but not his own parents, who bought even their son’s school uniforms on credit and owned a car already ten years old when they bought it—owned property in that same development, concrete-slab, single-story houses fronting on narrow lagoons. Most of his friends at school knew he intended to become a priest, but the kids in Ford’s Pointe, including an abundance of girls, did not. Maybe that was why he recalled those summers with such warmth, he decided as he refolded the map—not because of the girls, but because for the last time in his life he seemed to be just like everyone else.
When he called his mother back she was perplexed by his delay but still had no idea of the fix he was in. He could have used a little sympathy, but at her age she didn’t need more worries than she already had. As it was, half the tenants of the senior citizens project she lived in looked to her when they were sick or depressed, which was most of the time. His brother Ted had moved her into the project after their father died. When Ted was subsequently transferred to the west coast, Father Walther tried to get her to move back to New Jersey into a similar development near him. But she insisted her place was with those who needed her most.
“How long did the mechanic say it would take?” she asked as he stood baking in the roadside phone booth (he didn’t have the heart to call her collect from the mechanic’s phone; she had even less surplus income than he did).
“He couldn’t say. Probably sometime this afternoon.”
“Oh, dear. I hope it isn’t expensive. It isn’t the clutch, is it? Your father was always afraid the clutch would go.”
“No, Mother, it’s not the clutch. It’s electrical.”
“Well, that’s not so bad. It could be just a loose wire. Maybe the nice man won’t even charge for it, seeing how you’re a priest.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Don’t be afraid to speak up, Richard. Your father always said you have to let people know you’re not a fool.”
“I will, Mother.”
“Perhaps you could offer to say a mass for his family.”
“I don’t think he’s Catholic.”
“Really?”
His mother was always surprised to find out someone wasn’t Catholic. It was as if she had learned the person wore an artificial leg or had had a liver transplant.
His three minutes were up. He promised to call back when he was ready to leave.
The mechanic offered to take him into town for lunch. He hadn’t eaten anything all morning but coffee and stale donuts, so he accepted.
It was so hot he found it hard to understand why the miles of corn they were passing did not just wither and die. The mechanic’s face and thick neck were bright red. He kept using a blue cowboy handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from his brow. A second handkerchief was tied around his neck. He wore a white T-shirt beneath his thick coveralls. Father Walther had on a print shirt and black slacks. He too wore a T-shirt. He knew it wasn’t fashionable to wear any thing beneath a sport shirt—especially a Hawaiian print— but he would have felt half-naked without an undershirt. He would no more think of going without one than he would consider wearing a cassock without first putting on a pair of pants.
They were riding in an ancient Plymouth—early ‘70s. It was colorless, had a hole in its muffler, and was missing the left front fender. There were no seatbelts. There were scarcely any seats at all, if those were raw springs beneath the old spread he was sitting on. It was not a vehicle to inspire confidence in the professional who drove it. He consoled himself with the thought that doctors’ children were supposed to be among the most medically neglected members of the population.
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.
On the other hand, the priest had no way of knowing if he was being told the whole truth. He believed the only way to keep people honest was to treat them as such. But he knew it probably didn’t work most of the time, and he didn’t enjoy being duped anymore than the next fellow. Some people were hopelessly unscrupulous—almost hopelessly. You couldn’t live as if a little Christian charity would magically cure everyone of greed and selfishness. A mendicant might have the luxury of being able to play Saint Francis, but he was a secular priest—one who had to live in the world, if not of it.
His head ached with confusion. He was again eating the mechanic’s food and making conversation, such as it was. But all the while he was racked with indecision.
“Sleep on it,” the mechanic told him after a dessert of raspberry-lime Jello. No one had mentioned the Ford since they had sat down to dinner, but the man seemed to know what was on the priest’s mind. Meanwhile, there was no question about Father Walther’s not spending the night. The mechanic had brought home his suitcase. The priest was grateful for that. His office was inside and he must complete reading it before midnight—technically, by one a.m. during Daylight Saving Time. He also knew he had no alternative to accepting their hospitality. But to show good faith he decided to tell the mechanic that he would take his advice about the car. The mechanic merely nodded for reply, but Father Walther felt better for having spoken. If nothing else, he felt reassured that secular prudence and Christian ethics could sometimes coincide.
In the morning he returned to the garage to get the rest of his belongings. The mechanic figured the junkman would offer sixty or seventy dollars for the car. Father Walther asked if that would cover the cost of his labor. After a moment’s grave deliberation the mechanic said it would. They rode in silence then. Silence seemed to be the man’s normal medium, but this time he seemed unusually preoccupied. Finally he cleared his throat and declared above the roar of wind and muffler, “I’ll send you a check for any refund.”
He had called his mother the previous evening and finally heard some concern in her voice. He assumed the concern was for his predicament (along with trepidation about his spending the night with Protestants). But when he telephoned again after turning over the keys to the Ford, he realized something else was bothering her.
“The man has offered to drive me to a bus depot,” he told her. “I can be in Baltimore by mid-afternoon. Can I get a connection to your place?”
She wasn’t sure. Only commuter buses ran between Baltimore and her part of the state. Making a connection would depend on what time he arrived there.
“Is something wrong, Mother?”
“No,” she replied without conviction. “I just had some plans to go away for a couple days with the girls. It’s alright.”
“When are you supposed to leave?”
“It doesn’t matter. Hop a bus like you said. Only, I don’t know what you’ll do if you can’t get a connection in Baltimore.”
“That’s not a problem. I can always take a cab. When are you scheduled to go away with your friends?”
She hesitated. He sensed she was about to cry.
“Wednesday morning.” He waited while she fished a tissue from the sleeve of her housecoat. “I wouldn’t have made plans, only you said you would be staying just these two days.”
He took a deep breath.
“It’s okay, Ma. You go ahead with your trip. I’ll see you when you get back.”
“It’s just for a couple days. To the mountains. I thought it would be nice to see the mountains again.”
“Of course it would. You haven’t been away in years. I wouldn’t dream of letting you cancel the trip.”
“But what will you do? You haven’t even got a car now.”
“I’ll manage,” he said. “I’ll have a fine time, and so will you. We’ll compare notes next week.”
The mechanic dropped him off at the bus stop outside a lonely grocery store on a two-lane state highway. The bus would take him to Philadelphia, where he could get a long-distance connection north. He would be back in his parish by nightfall. He thanked the mechanic for his hospitality, and the man started to climb back into his dilapidated Plymouth. Then, on an impulse which in a more demonstrative person might have amounted to just a formality, he turned and offered the priest his hand.
He waited half an hour without any sign of a bus. There was very little traffic of any kind, all co-opted, he supposed, by the faster Interstates. He asked in the grocery—a general store, actually—about a schedule, but the elderly proprietor was vague. “There’ll be one by and by.”
He sat down on a weathered bench at the roadside and began reading his office. He was wearing the same black serge pants he had set out in two days ago, but had replaced his Hawaiian print with a blue short-sleeve. His black vinyl suitcase, a Christmas gift from the altar boys, squatted on the gravel beside him. In it were two sets of clean under wear—and one dirty—another sport shirt, a bathing suit, a pair of chinos, socks, handkerchiefs and toilet articles, a mass kit, and a bottle of detergent for doing hand wash. It hadn’t occurred to him to pack any books except his office and a missal. When he was young he used to read lives of the saints. Later he read Chesterton and what he considered to be other good Catholic authors. But as his responsibilities in the parish grew, he found he had less and less time for elective reading. In the last year he had finished only two books, and both had been manuals on parish management.
He peered through the shimmering heat, but still saw no sign of a bus. He was beginning to regret the end of his detour. Despite all the fatigue and frustration, he had enjoyed playing the role of mysterious stranger. He had seen a side of life that a uniformed clergyman was denied. As he sat in the hot sun recalling the mechanic’s gruff generosity and his wife’s proud grief, he realized that he was going to miss them.
He wasn’t ready yet to return to his clerical persona. It wasn’t enough just to play Everyman to a few Howard Johnson waitresses. What he needed was a real vacation, not merely from his life as a cleric but from the identity of the priesthood itself. He did not want to be relieved of his vocation; he could not imagine life without being able to say mass and forgive sins. And he certainly did not want to philander. What he did want was time off from the world’s idea of who he was, an idea that made it impossible for anyone to treat him as a normal human being—not his housekeeper, not the milkman, not even his own mother.
The high metal brow of some kind of oversize vehicle appeared in the waves of heat shimmering above the concrete road. He mouthed a silent prayer, one he had learned in grammar school but had survived all the theology he had received since. In a sense, it was no longer canonical because it addressed the deity as Holy Ghost, while Vatican II had altered His title to Spirit. But the prayer had served him well, especially when he had to make his mind up fast.
It turned out to be just another of those mammoth trailer-trucks that had plagued him on the Turnpike. He greeted it with relief. He was always quick to caution parishioners against believing in omens, but it was hard not to see this as a sign. He picked up his valise and walked back into the store.
“Do any other buses stop here besides the one to Philly?”
The old man completed a column of accounts he had been worrying with a pencil stub. Then he looked the stranger over as if for the first time.
“What sort of bus did you have in mind?”
“Just one that goes some place other than Philadelphia.”
The storekeeper glanced down at the black valise, then returned to his account book. Another consequence of anonymity, Father Walther realized, was suspicion.
“There’s one to Atlantic City. But you missed that by a couple hours.”
“When’s the next?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
This gave him pause. It was one thing to take a little detour on the way back to his parish; it was quite another to risk marooning himself.
“How far is it to a real bus depot—where I can get a bus to other shore points?”
The old man again looked up from his figures, now as if at a pesky dog that refused to go away.
“Take this here road five miles north. Then go right at 537. That’ll take you into Camden.”
Father Walther regarded the man mutely. How was he supposed to take a road anywhere without transportation?
“There’s no bus to Camden?”
“Nope.”
“A car service?”
“None I know of.”
What did ordinary people do in such circumstances? It was hard to imagine himself as a layman stranded on a deserted highway in the boondocks. He suspected that ordinary people, certainly a man of his own age and some knowledge of how the world worked, didn’t find themselves in this kind of predicament in the first place. Kids, he knew, hitchhiked. Sometimes he picked one up, always careful to give him (and sometimes even her) a homily about the dangers of thumbing rides from strangers—a silly tack to take, now that he thought about it: if they shouldn’t hitchhike, even priests shouldn’t pick them up. If a cleric could shed his identity just by removing his roman collar, surely a murderer or child molester could just as easily disguise himself as a priest.
He crossed the road and looked down the road as far as where it bent around a stand of scrub pine trees. Directly across the way was the general store. He could not see in through the screen door, but he knew the old man could see out. He didn’t need any spectators for his first attempt at hitching-hiking, so he moved a few yards up the road.
Another tractor-trailer passed him, then a panel truck, then nothing at all. The sun made his hair, already graying at the temples, hot to the touch. His vinyl valise was softening like macadam. The old man came out of the store and surveyed the road without appearing to notice the sweltering priest. Father Walther picked up his bag and began walking north. That was what hitchhikers did—walk in the direction they were headed while waiting for cars to come along. He didn’t understand the logic of it, but at least it put some distance between himself and the store owner.
Two cars passed without slowing down. He was getting thirsty. He should have bought something to drink.
Suddenly a battered pickup appeared and skidded to a stop even before he remembered to stick out his thumb. A woman in jeans and a man’s rolled-up dress shirt pushed the side door open for him. Amazed at his abrupt change of fortune, he told her where he was headed.
She told him to get in, then gave the sideview mirror a cursory glance and skidded back onto the road. Her long blond ponytail made her look younger than her probable age—he guessed forty. She didn’t look like a farmer, but the pickup smelled of animal. She had bright blue eyes.
“You looked like you were fixing to melt,” she said, glancing at his shirt, which was soaked through with perspiration. “You ain’t from around these parts, are you.”
He wondered how she knew that but was too embarrassed by the way she was looking at him to give more than a one-syllable reply. He was used to the opposite sex paying him attention, even in a harmless way flirting (more so when he was younger). He knew his attraction had to do with his being forbidden fruit. If for one moment one of those harmless admirers suspected him of having a reciprocal interest, she would undoubtedly run straight for her boyfriend or husband. But the grin this woman had turned on him made him feel the way he imagined women felt when they said a man was undressing them with his eyes.
“I bet Old Man Crocker gave you a dose of his hospitality. That’s how come you were roasting your butt off in the sun when he could just as easily call you a cab.”
“There’s a car service?”
“Of course there is. Where did you think you were—Injun territory?”
She grinned elaborately and reached onto the floor beside her seat. She came up with a plastic container half-filled with what looked like some kind of pink juice. She removed the cap and took a sip, then offered it to her passenger.
“No thanks,” he said. He didn’t mind sharing the bottle, and God knew he was thirsty. What made him decline was the idea of putting his mouth to the same spout a woman’s lips had just touched.
But her arm, covered with a frost of fine blond hair, remained extended.
“Go on, take some. You must be half-dead of thirst.”
He could see no alternative to insulting her, so he accepted the container and drank. It wasn’t juice, but it was sweet and cold. It slid easily down his throat.
“Keep it,” she said when he paused after two swallows. “I got another right here.”
Sure enough, she produced a second plastic bottle from the floor space next to the driver’s seat.
“How far you headed?” she asked.
“The shore. I started out for Maryland, but my car broke down on the Turnpike.”
He gave a summary of the last two days, including how the mechanic and his wife had put him up for the night. As he spoke, at first hesitantly, he realized how good it felt to be talking again—speaking more than two or three words at a time.
“Why, that’s Sonny Sharp. He and Martha put you up? Shoot, I should have figured you straight off for one of Martha’s strays.”
“Strays?”
“I suppose you heard all about Sonny Junior.”
“Their son?”
She nodded at the blacktop ahead. She was driving with both arms resting on the steering wheel, like the youth who had towed him off the Turnpike. The motion of the pickup, combined with the heat and the sweet drink he had gulped down, seemed to be making him lightheaded.
“If they gave you Junior’s bed, then you got the deluxe treatment. Usually they put folks up on the cot in the sun parlor. They tell you how he died?”
“She did. Martha told me.”
He was not comfortable with this woman’s tone. He considered the mechanic and his wife not just Good Samaritans, but friends.
“Football accident?”
He nodded. She grinned and shook her head at a passing service station.
“Football, my ass. That boy died of an overdose, mister. They just tell that story about his being hurt in a football scrimmage to save face. By now they might believe it themselves.”
He recalled Martha’s puffy eyes and steely expression as she insisted that God’s claim on her boy was no greater than her own. Could she have felt her grief so deeply and yet lied?
“They kept him going for a while on machines—like that girl you probably read about in the papers. But he was just a vegetable. Thank God somebody had the sense to pull the plug on him. Otherwise those two’d still be sitting in that hospital. They had a wild kid there, mister.
“They still can’t believe it happened. That’s how come they haven’t touched his room. They started taking in people like yourself, accidents and breakdowns from the Turnpike, a little after Junior died. I guess they get lonely in that big house all by themselves. But I never heard of nobody getting to sleep in the boy’s own bed before. They must have taken a real shine to you,” she concluded with a sidelong grin.
He found himself grinning as well. He was still lightheaded, but he was no longer ill-at-ease.
“Say, you don’t mind we take a little detour?” she said, already slowing down to turn. She took his silence and his smile, which seemed to have become a permanent part of his face, for an answer and pulled off the highway onto what looked like a dirt track, kicking up a small thundercloud of dust. She bounced down the deeply rutted path at what seemed the same clip as her highway speed. Tree branches slapped angrily at the pickup, driving the priest away from the open window. The woman seemed amused. She took one hand off the steering wheel and laid it on his knee. “Not much of a country boy,” she said. “My name’s Anne-Marie. What’s yours?”
Her breath reeked of cheap wine. But despite the liberty she was taking and his terror of the branches lashing at him through the window, he couldn’t seem to rid himself of his imbecilic grin.
The pickup skidded to a stop as the road seemed to just give out. There was nothing ahead but forest, a low scrub that seemed to cover the entire southern half of the state.
“Where are we?” he said, reaching out the window to push a large pine branch off the windshield.
She put her hand on his crotch. “What’s the matter, honey? Don’t you like Anne-Marie?”
Her touch paralyzed him. Encouraged, she shimmied closer and began fumbling with his fly.
“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like a free blow job?”
His hand suddenly snapped onto her wrist. Undaunted, she began to struggle as if they were playing a game.
“You like me a little,” she said, holding her own in what amounted to a two-handed arm wrestle. “Let’s see the birdie you got in there. Anne-Marie wants to see the birdie.”
They wrestled some more, then she abruptly gave up the contest and began unbuttoning the man’s shirt she was wearing. “Want to feel me up first?”
Finally finding his voice, he said, “My God, woman, don’t you realize I’m a priest?”
“Priest?” She laughed and pulled the shirt open, exposing a large brassiere decorated with tiny pink flowers. He instinctively turned away—a mistake, because this gave her a chance to go on the offensive again.
“Say,” she said after they had again wrestled to a draw, “you ain’t one of them faggots, are you?”
He tried to present her with the look of moral outrage he summoned up whenever he was called in to upbraid the eighth-grade boys for circulating a pornographic magazine. His righteousness was particularly effective in that situation because he had a reputation for being an easy-going fellow who liked to toss a football with them in the schoolyard.
“Miss—whatever your name is—I happen to be a Roman Catholic priest.”
She regarded him as if he had just said he was Joan of Arc. But then she looked down at his black trousers and the dark valise on the floor.
“Holy Jumping Jesus!”
He took a hitching breath and tried not to let her see how badly he was trembling.