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

  “Oh.”

  “No offense?”

  “No offense.”

  Who would have thought a little thing like an olive could lead to all this, Father Eudex mused—who but himself, that is, for his association with Monsignor had shown him that anything could lead to everything. Monsignor was a master at making points. Nothing had changed since the day Father Eudex walked into the rectory saying he was the new assistant. Monsignor had evaded Father Eudex’s hand in greeting, and a few days later, after he began to get the range, he delivered a lecture on the whole subject of handshaking. It was Middle West to shake hands, or South West, or West in any case, and it was not done where he came from, and—why had he ever come from where he came from? Not to be reduced to shaking hands, you could bet! Handshaking was worse than foot washing and unlike that pious practice there was nothing to support it. And from handshaking Monsignor might go into a general discussion of Father Eudex’s failings. He used the open forum method, but he was the only speaker and there was never time enough for questions from the audience. Monsignor seized his examples at random from life. He saw Father Eudex coming out of his bedroom in pajama bottoms only and so told him about the dressing gown, its purpose, something of its history. He advised Father Eudex to barber his armpits, for it was being done all over now. He let Father Eudex see his bottle of cologne, “Steeple,” special for clergymen, and said he should not be afraid of it. He suggested that Father Eudex shave his face oftener, too. He loaned him his Rogers Peet catalogue, which had sketches of clerical blades togged out in the latest, and prayed that he would stop going around looking like a rabbinical student.

  He found Father Eudex reading The Catholic Worker one day and had not trusted him since. Father Eudex’s conception of the priesthood was evangelical in the worst sense, barbaric, gross, foreign to the mind of the Church, which was one of two terms he used as sticks to beat him with. The other was taste. The air of the rectory was often heavy with The Mind of the Church and Taste.

  Another thing. Father Eudex could not conduct a civil conversation. Monsignor doubted that Father Eudex could even think to himself with anything like agreement. Certainly any discussion with Father Eudex ended inevitably in argument or sighing. Sighing! Why didn’t people talk up if they had anything to say? No, they’d rather sigh! Father, don’t ever, ever sigh at me again!

  Finally, Monsignor did not like Father Eudex’s table manners. This came to a head one night when Monsignor, seeing his curate’s plate empty and all the silverware at his place unused except for a single knife, fork, and spoon, exploded altogether, saying it had been on his mind for weeks, and then descending into the vernacular he declared that Father Eudex did not know the forks—now perhaps he could understand that! Meals, unless Monsignor had guests or other things to struggle with, were always occasions of instruction for Father Eudex, and sometimes of chastisement.

  And now he knew the worst—if Monsignor was thinking of recommending him for a year of study, in a Sulpician seminary probably, to learn the forks. So this was what it meant to be a priest. Come, follow me. Going forth, teach ye all nations. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils. Teach the class of people we get here? Teach Mr Memmers? Teach Communists? Teach Monsignors? And where were the poor? The lepers of old? The lepers were in their colonies with nuns to nurse them. The poor were in their holes and would not come out. Mr Memmers was in his bank, without cheer. The Communists were in their universities, awaiting a sign. And he was at table with Monsignor, and it was enough for the disciple to be as his master, but the housekeeper had used green olives.

  Monsignor inquired, “Did you get your check today?”

  Father Eudex, looking up, considered. “I got a check,” he said.

  “From the Rival people, I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Well, I think you might apply it on the car you’re wanting. A decent car. That’s a worthy cause.” Monsignor noticed that he was not taking it well. “Not that I mean to dictate what you shall do with your little windfall, Father. It’s just that I don’t like to see you mortifying yourself with a Model A—and disgracing the Church.”

  “Yes,” Father Eudex said, suffering.

  “Yes. I dare say you don’t see the danger, just as you didn’t a while ago when I found you making a spectacle of yourself with Whalen. You just don’t see the danger because you just don’t think. Not to dwell on it, but I seem to remember some overshoes.”

  The overshoes! Monsignor referred to them as to the Fall. Last winter Father Eudex had given his overshoes to a freezing picket. It had got back to Monsignor and—good Lord, a man could have his sympathies, but he had no right clad in the cloth to endanger the prestige of the Church by siding in these wretched squabbles. Monsignor said he hated to think of all the evil done by people doing good! Had Father Eudex ever heard of the Albigensian heresy, or didn’t the seminary teach that anymore?

  Father Eudex declined dessert. It was strawberry mousse.

  “Delicious,” Monsignor said. “I think I’ll let her stay.”

  At that moment Father Eudex decided that he had nothing to lose. He placed his knife next to his fork on the plate, adjusted them this way and that until they seemed to work a combination in his mind, to spring a lock which in turn enabled him to speak out.

  “Monsignor,” he said. “I think I ought to tell you I don’t intend to make use of that money. In fact—to show you how my mind works—I have even considered endorsing the check to the strikers’ relief fund.”

  “So,” Monsignor said calmly—years in the confessional had prepared him for anything.

  “I’ll admit I don’t know whether I can in justice. And even if I could I don’t know that I would. I don’t know why . . . I guess hush money, no matter what you do with it, is lousy.”

  Monsignor regarded him with piercing baby blue eyes. “You’d find it pretty hard to prove, Father, that any money in se is . . . what you say it is. I would quarrel further with the definition ‘hush money.’ It seems to me nothing if not rash that you would presume to impugn the motive of the Rival Company in sending out these checks. You would seem to challenge the whole concept of good works—not that I am ignorant of the misuses to which money can be put.” Monsignor, changing tack, tucked it all into a sigh. “Perhaps I’m just a simple soul, and it’s enough for me to know personally some of the people in the Rival Company and to know them good people. Many of them Catholic . . .” A throb had crept into Monsignor’s voice. He shut it off.

  “I don’t mean anything that subtle, Monsignor,” Father Eudex said. “I’m just telling you, as my pastor, what I’m going to do with the check. Or what I’m not going to do with it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. Maybe send it back.”

  Monsignor rose from the table, slightly smiling. “Very well, Father. But there’s always the poor.”

  Monsignor took leave of Father Eudex with a laugh. Father Eudex felt it was supposed to fool him into thinking that nothing he had said would be used against him. It showed, rather, that Monsignor was not winded, that he had broken wild curates before, plenty of them, and that he would ride again.

  Father Eudex sought the shade of the porch. He tried to read his office, but was drowsy. He got up for a glass of water. The saints in Ireland used to stand up to their necks in cold water, but not for drowsiness. When he came back to the porch a woman was ringing the doorbell. She looked like a customer for rosary beads.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “I’m Mrs Klein, Father, and I was wondering if you could help me out.”

  Father Eudex straightened a porch chair for her. “Please sit down.”

  “It’s a German name, Father. Klein was German descent,” she said, and added with a silly grin, “It ain’t what you think, Father.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Klein. Some think it’s a Jew name. But they stole it from Klein.”

  Father Eudex decided to come back to that later
. “You were wondering if I could help you?”

  “Yes, Father. It’s personal.”

  “Is it matter for confession?”

  “Oh no, Father.” He had made her blush.

  “Then go ahead.”

  Mrs Klein peered into the honeysuckle vines on either side of the porch for alien ears.

  “No one can hear you, Mrs Klein.”

  “Father—I’m just a poor widow,” she said, and continued as though Father Eudex had just slandered the man. “Klein was awful good to me, Father.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  “So good . . . and he went and left me all he had.” She had begun to cry a little.

  Father Eudex nodded gently. She was after something, probably not money, always the best bet—either that or a drunk in the family—but this one was not Irish. Perhaps just sympathy.

  “I come to get your advice, Father. Klein always said, ‘If you got a problem, Freda, see the priest.’”

  “Do you need money?”

  “I got more than I can use from the bakery.”

  “You have a bakery?”

  Mrs Klein nodded down the street. “That’s my bakery. It was Klein’s. The Purity.”

  “I go by there all the time,” Father Eudex said, abandoning himself to her. He must stop trying to shape the conversation and let her work it out.

  “Will you give me your advice, Father?” He felt that she sensed his indifference and interpreted it as his way of rejecting her. She either had no idea how little sense she made or else supreme faith in him, as a priest, to see into her heart.

  “Just what is it you’re after, Mrs Klein?”

  “He left me all he had, Father, but it’s just laying in the bank.”

  “And you want me to tell you what to do with it?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Father Eudex thought this might be interesting, certainly a change. He went back in his mind to the seminary and the class in which they had considered the problem of inheritances. Do we have any unfulfilled obligations? Are we sure? . . . Are there any impedimenta? . . .

  “Do you have any dependents, Mrs Klein—any children?”

  “One boy, Father. I got him running the bakery. I pay him good—too much, Father.”

  “Is ‘too much’ a living wage?”

  “Yes, Father. He ain’t got a family.”

  “A living wage is not too much,” Father Eudex handed down, sailing into the encyclical style without knowing it.

  Mrs Klein was smiling over having done something good without knowing precisely what it was.

  “How old is your son?”

  “He’s thirty-six, Father.”

  “Not married?”

  “No, Father, but he’s got him a girl.” She giggled, and Father Eudex, embarrassed, retied his shoe.

  “But you don’t care to make a will and leave this money to your son in the usual way?”

  “I guess I’ll have to . . . if I die.” Mrs Klein was suddenly crushed and haunted, but whether by death or charity, Father Eudex did not know.

  “You don’t have to, Mrs Klein. There are many worthy causes. And the worthiest is the cause of the poor. My advice to you, if I understand your problem, is to give what you have to someone who needs it.”

  Mrs Klein just stared at him.

  “You could even leave it to the archdiocese,” he said, completing the sentence to himself: but I don’t recommend it in your case . . . with your tendencies. You look like an Indian giver to me.

  But Mrs Klein had got enough. “Huh!” she said, rising. “Well! You are a funny one!”

  And then Father Eudex realized that she had come to him for a broker’s tip. It was in the eyes. The hat. The dress. The shoes. “If you’d like to speak to the pastor,” he said, “come back in the evening.”

  “You’re a nice young man,” Mrs Klein said, rather bitter now and bent on getting away from him. “But I got to say this—you ain’t much of a priest. And Klein said if I got a problem, see the priest—huh! You ain’t much of a priest! What time’s your boss come in?”

  “In the evening,” Father Eudex said. “Come any time in the evening.”

  Mrs Klein was already down the steps and making for the street.

  “You might try Mr Memmers at the First National,” Father Eudex called, actually trying to help her, but she must have thought it was just some more of his nonsense and did not reply.

  After Mrs Klein had disappeared Father Eudex went to his room. In the hallway upstairs Monsignor’s voice, coming from the depths of the clerical nap, halted him.

  “Who was it?”

  “A woman,” Father Eudex said. “A woman seeking good counsel.”

  He waited a moment to be questioned, but Monsignor was not awake enough to see anything wrong with that, and there came only a sigh and a shifting of weight that told Father Eudex he was simply turning over in bed.

  Father Eudex walked into the bathroom. He took the Rival check from his pocket. He tore it into little squares. He let them flutter into the toilet. He pulled the chain—hard.

  He went to his room and stood looking out the window at nothing. He could hear the others already giving an account of their stewardship, but could not judge them. I bought baseball uniforms for the school. I bought the nuns a new washing machine. I purchased a Mass kit for a Chinese missionary. I bought a set of matched irons. Mine helped pay for keeping my mother in a rest home upstate. I gave mine to the poor.

  And you, Father?

  RENNER

  EXCEPT FOR A contemporary placard or two, the place conspired to set me dreaming of the good old days I had never known. The furniture did it—the cloudy mirrors, the grandiose mahogany bar, the tables and chairs ornate with spools and scrollwork, the burnished brass coat hooks and cuspidors, all as shiny-ugly as the day they were made, and swillish brown paintings, inevitable subjects, fat tippling friars in cellars, velvet cavaliers elegantly eying sherry, the deadliest of still-life fruit, but no fishes on platters.

  At a table across the room, Emil, the waiter, and two patrons finished a hand, talked about it, scraped the cards into a muddy deck. They spoke an aromatic mixture of English and German. Emil, a little spaniel of a man, fussed with his flapping sleeves and consoled the fat man whose king had not been good enough.

  Renner, using both hands, elevated a glass of beer in momentary exposition, raised his eyes to heaven, and drank deeply. I wondered if, despite everything, he might still be fascinated by the Germans. I could think of no other reason for coming here.

  I signaled Emil. He smiled too graciously, put down his cards, and came over to pick up our glasses, saying “Gentlemen.” One of the cardplayers frowned at me for interrupting the game. He was the one we called the Entrepreneur. Renner had acquired his English abroad and reporters to him were journalists; the cardplayer, who might possibly be a salesman, had become an Entrepreneur.

  When Emil brought our glasses back, quivering and amber, I became preoccupied with a button on my coat, escaping the gelatinous impact of his smile. I could sense Renner undergoing it. When Emil withdrew, Renner said, “He’s not as simple as he pretends to be.” This struck me as off-key to the point of being funny. And still it may have been that I had already recognized, without consciously acknowledging, something dimly sinister about Emil.

  Renner dipped his glass at a bowl of fruit rotting on the wall. “It’s too bad der Fuehrer couldn’t paint a little. Another bad painter, we could have stood that.” He began to speak in what I had come to know as his autobiographical tone. He appeared to listen to himself, skeptical, though he was accenting words and ideas, of the meaning in what he said, trying to account for himself on earth. “Anyway, my mother hired a sergeant major to discipline me when I was eight years old. The Austrian army was not the most formidable in the world, except of course at regimental balls, but she hoped he could do the job. He couldn’t. I was not to have many such victories.”

  The idea of Renner the child died away wh
en I looked at the man across the table from me. Renner had rusty hair, bristling abundantly, tufted eyebrows, an oddly handsome face with the depth and decision of a wood carving about it. When I looked again Renner the man was lost in our surroundings. I saw an album world: exaggerated bicycles and good-old-summertime girls, picnics and family reunions, mustachioed quartets, polished horses galloping through Budweiser advertisements, the heroes and adventures of Horatio Alger, the royal commerce of the day. The furniture reached boldly into the past and yanked these visions into being. I had only to step out the door to find everything changed back fifty years. Meanwhile the green walls, waiting to be smoked black, stood patiently around us.

  “Because he could paint like that,” Renner said, “my uncle became president of the Vienna Academy.” I glanced needlessly at the pictures. Renner laughed shortly. “He had a patriarchal beard, however, which he used to clean his brushes on. His only attempt at eccentricity and it failed. In fact, it killed him— lead poisoning.”

  There was a fictitious feeling about sitting so casually with a man whose uncle had been president of an art academy. Renner himself had taught at the University of Vienna, had perhaps come into a little eminence of his own, but compared to his uncle he was small fry indeed. Achievement through violence or succession or cunning or even merit is common enough. But president of an academy of art—now there was an inscrutable honor, beyond accounting for, like being an archbishop (except in Italy), only more so.

  A dark man in tweeds came in. Emil threw down his cards, rushed to meet him, and the two left at the table turned slowly to see. First disappointed, then a little disgusted, they turned up Emil’s cards on the table.

  “My good friend, Mr Ross,” Emil purred. Mr Ross extended his hand and they stood there shaking, smiling at each other. Mr Ross finally got around to saying he came in for a glass. Emil went behind the bar and took down a bottle of brandy. Emil was still oppressing Mr Ross with his smile, but Mr Ross seemed to think it no more than right or less than real.

  “Well, Renner,” I said. Renner, who had been watching them, began talking again—against his will, I thought, but anxious to get Emil and Mr Ross out of our minds.