THE VALIANT WOMAN
THEY HAD COME to the dessert in a dinner that was a shambles. “Well, John,” Father Nulty said, turning away from Mrs Stoner and to Father Firman, long gone silent at his own table. “You’ve got the bishop coming for confirmations next week.”
“Yes,” Mrs Stoner cut in, “and for dinner. And if he don’t eat anymore than he did last year—”
Father Firman, in a rare moment, faced it. “Mrs Stoner, the bishop is not well. You know that.”
“And after I fixed that fine dinner and all.” Mrs Stoner pouted in Father Nulty’s direction.
“I wouldn’t feel bad about it, Mrs Stoner,” Father Nulty said. “He never eats much anywhere.”
“It’s funny. And that new Mrs Allers said he ate just fine when he was there,” Mrs Stoner argued, and then spit out, “but she’s a damned liar!”
Father Nulty, unsettled but trying not to show it, said, “Who’s Mrs Allers?”
“She’s at Holy Cross,” Mrs Stoner said.
“She’s the housekeeper,” Father Firman added, thinking Mrs Stoner made it sound as though Mrs Allers were the pastor there.
“I swear I don’t know what to do about the dinner this year,” Mrs Stoner said.
Father Firman moaned. “Just do as you’ve always done, Mrs Stoner.”
“Huh! And have it all to throw out! Is that any way to do?”
“Is there any dessert?” Father Firman asked coldly.
Mrs Stoner leaped up from the table and bolted into the kitchen, mumbling. She came back with a birthday cake. She plunged it in the center of the table. She found a big wooden match in her apron pocket and thrust it at Father Firman.
“I don’t like this bishop,” she said. “I never did. And the way he went and cut poor Ellen Kennedy out of Father Doolin’s will!”
She went back into the kitchen.
“Didn’t they talk a lot of filth about Doolin and the housekeeper?” Father Nulty asked.
“I should think they did,” Father Firman said. “All because he took her to the movies on Sunday night. After he died and the bishop cut her out of the will, though I hear he gives her a pension privately, they talked about the bishop.”
“I don’t like this bishop at all,” Mrs Stoner said, appearing with a cake knife. “Bishop Doran—there was the man!”
“We know,” Father Firman said. “All man and all priest.”
“He did know real estate,” Father Nulty said.
Father Firman struck the match.
“Not on the chair!” Mrs Stoner cried, too late.
Father Firman set the candle burning—it was suspiciously large and yellow, like a blessed one, but he could not be sure. They watched the fluttering flame.
“I’m forgetting the lights!” Mrs Stoner said, and got up to turn them off. She went into the kitchen again.
The priests had a moment of silence in the candlelight.
“Happy birthday, John,” Father Nulty said softly. “Is it fifty-nine you are?”
“As if you didn’t know, Frank,” Father Firman said, “and you the same but one.”
Father Nulty smiled, the old gold of his incisors shining in the flickering light, his collar whiter in the dark, and raised his glass of water, which would have been wine or better in the bygone days, and toasted Father Firman.
“Many of ’em, John.”
“Blow it out,” Mrs Stoner said, returning to the room. She waited by the light switch for Father Firman to blow out the candle.
Mrs Stoner, who ate no desserts, began to clear the dishes into the kitchen, and the priests, finishing their cake and coffee in a hurry, went to sit in the study.
Father Nulty offered a cigar.
“John?”
“My ulcers, Frank.”
“Ah, well, you’re better off.” Father Nulty lit the cigar and crossed his long black legs. “Fish Frawley has got him a Filipino, John. Did you hear?”
Father Firman leaned forward, interested. “He got rid of the woman he had?”
“He did. It seems she snooped.”
“Snooped, eh?”
“She did. And gossiped. Fish introduced two town boys to her, said, ‘Would you think these boys were my nephews?’ That’s all, and the next week the paper had it that his two nephews were visiting him from Erie. After that, he let her believe he was going East to see his parents, though both are dead. The paper carried the story. Fish returned and made a sermon out of it. Then he got the Filipino.”
Father Firman squirmed with pleasure in his chair. “That’s like Fish, Frank. He can do that.” He stared at the tips of his fingers bleakly. “You could never get a Filipino to come to a place like this.”
“Probably not,” Father Nulty said. “Fish is pretty close to Minneapolis. Ah, say, do you remember the trick he played on us all in Marmion Hall?”
“That I’ll not forget!” Father Firman’s eyes remembered. “Getting up New Year’s morning and finding the toilet seats all painted!”
“Happy Circumcision! Hah!” Father Nulty had a coughing fit.
When he had got himself together again, a mosquito came and sat on his wrist. He watched it a moment before bringing his heavy hand down. He raised his hand slowly, viewed the dead mosquito, and sent it spinning with a plunk of his middle finger.
“Only the female bites,” he said.
“I didn’t know that,” Father Firman said.
“Ah, yes . . .”
Mrs Stoner entered the study and sat down with some sewing—Father Firman’s black socks.
She smiled pleasantly at Father Nulty. “And what do you think of the atom bomb, Father?”
“Not much,” Father Nulty said.
Mrs Stoner had stopped smiling. Father Firman yawned.
Mrs Stoner served up another: “Did you read about this communist convert, Father?”
“He’s been in the Church before,” Father Nulty said, “and so it’s not a conversion, Mrs Stoner.”
“No? Well, I already got him down on my list of Monsignor’s converts.”
“It’s better than a conversion, Mrs Stoner, for there is more rejoicing in heaven over the return of . . . uh, he that was lost, Mrs Stoner, is found.”
“And that congresswoman, Father?”
“Yes. A convert—she.”
“And Henry Ford’s grandson, Father. I got him down.”
“Yes, to be sure.”
Father Firman yawned, this time audibly, and held his jaw.
“But he’s one only by marriage, Father,” Mrs Stoner said. “I always say you got to watch those kind.”
“Indeed you do, but a convert nonetheless, Mrs Stoner. Remember, Cardinal Newman himself was one.”
Mrs Stoner was unimpressed. “I see where Henry Ford’s making steering wheels out of soybeans, Father.”
“I didn’t see that.”
“I read it in the Reader’s Digest or some place.”
“Yes, well . . .” Father Nulty rose and held his hand out to Father Firman. “John,” he said. “It’s been good.”
“I heard Hirohito’s next,” Mrs Stoner said, returning to converts.
“Let’s wait and see, Mrs Stoner,” Father Nulty said.
The priests walked to the door.
“You know where I live, John.”
“Yes. Come again, Frank. Good night.”
Father Firman watched Father Nulty go down the walk to his car at the curb. He hooked the screen door and turned off the porch light. He hesitated at the foot of the stairs, suddenly moved to go to bed. But he went back into the study.
“Phew!” Mrs Stoner said. “I thought he’d never go. Here it is after eight o’clock.”
Father Firman sat down in his rocking chair. “I don’t see him often,” he said.
“I give up!” Mrs Stoner exclaimed, flinging the holey socks upon the horsehair sofa. “I’d swear you had a nail in your shoe.”
“I told you I looked.”
“Well, you ought to look again
. And cut your toenails, why don’t you? Haven’t I got enough to do?”
Father Firman scratched in his coat pocket for a pill, found one, swallowed it. He let his head sink back against the chair and closed his eyes. He could hear her moving about the room, making the preparations; and how he knew them—the fumbling in the drawer for a pencil with a point, the rip of the page from his daily calendar, and finally the leg of the card table sliding up against his leg.
He opened his eyes. She yanked the floor lamp alongside the table, setting the bead fringe tinkling on the shade, and pulled up her chair on the other side. She sat down and smiled at him for the first time that day. Now she was happy.
She swept up the cards and began to shuffle with the abandoned virtuosity of an old river-boat gambler, standing them on end, fanning them out, whirling them through her fingers, dancing them halfway up her arms, cracking the whip over them. At last they lay before him tamed into a neat deck.
“Cut?”
“Go ahead,” he said. She liked to go first.
She gave him her faint, avenging smile and drew a card, cast it aside for another which he thought must be an ace from the way she clutched it face down.
She was getting all the cards, as usual, and would have been invincible if she had possessed his restraint and if her cunning had been of a higher order. He knew a few things about leading and lying back that she would never learn. Her strategy was attack, forever attack, with one baffling departure: she might sacrifice certain tricks as expendable if only she could have the last ones, the heartbreaking ones, if she could slap them down one after another, shatteringly.
She played for blood, no bones about it, but for her there was no other way; it was her nature, as it was the lion’s, and for this reason he found her ferocity pardonable, more a defect of the flesh, venial, while his own trouble was all in the will, mortal. He did not sweat and pray over each card as she must, but he did keep an eye out for reneging and demanded a cut now and then just to aggravate her, and he was always secretly hoping for aces.
With one card left in her hand, the telltale trick coming next, she delayed playing it, showing him first the smile, the preview of defeat. She laid it on the table—so! She held one more trump than he had reasoned possible. Had she palmed it from somewhere? No, she would not go that far; that would not be fair, was worse than reneging, which so easily and often happened accidentally, and she believed in being fair. Besides he had been watching her.
God smote the vines with hail, the sycamore trees with frost, and offered up the flocks to the lightning—but Mrs Stoner! What a cross Father Firman had from God in Mrs Stoner! There were other housekeepers as bad, no doubt, walking the rectories of the world, yes, but . . . yes. He could name one and maybe two priests who were worse off. One, maybe two. Cronin. His scraggly blonde of sixty—take her, with her everlasting banging on the grand piano, the gift of the pastor; her proud talk about the goiter operation at the Mayo Brothers’, also a gift; her honking the parish Buick at passing strange priests because they were all in the game together. She was worse. She was something to keep the home fires burning. Yes sir. And Cronin said she was not a bad person really, but what was he? He was quite a freak himself.
For that matter, could anyone say that Mrs Stoner was a bad person? No. He could not say it himself, and he was no freak. She had her points, Mrs Stoner. She was clean. And though she cooked poorly, could not play the organ, would not take up the collection in an emergency, and went to card parties, and told all—even so, she was clean. She washed everything. Sometimes her underwear hung down beneath her dress like a paratrooper’s pants, but it and everything she touched was clean. She washed constantly. She was clean.
She had her other points, to be sure—her faults, you might say. She snooped—no mistake about it—but it was not snooping for snooping’s sake; she had a reason. She did other things, always with a reason. She overcharged on rosaries and prayer books, but that was for the sake of the poor. She censored the pamphlet rack, but that was to prevent scandal. She pried into the baptismal and matrimonial records, but there was no other way if Father was out, and in this way she had once uncovered a bastard and flushed him out of the rectory, but that was the perverted decency of the times. She held her nose over bad marriages in the presence of the victims, but that was her sorrow and came from having her husband buried in a mine. And he had caught her telling a bewildered young couple that there was only one good reason for their wanting to enter into a mixed marriage—the child had to have a name, and that—that was what?
She hid his books, kept him from smoking, picked his friends (usually the pastors of her colleagues), bawled out people for calling after dark, had no humor, except at cards, and then it was grim, very grim, and she sat hatchet-faced every morning at Mass. But she went to Mass, which was all that kept the church from being empty some mornings. She did annoying things all day long. She said annoying things into the night. She said she had given him the best years of her life. Had she? Perhaps—for the miner had her only a year. It was too bad, sinfully bad, when he thought of it like that. But all talk of best years and life was nonsense. He had to consider the heart of the matter, the essence. The essence was that housekeepers were hard to get, harder to get than ushers, than willing workers, than organists, than secretaries—yes, harder to get than assistants or vocations.
And she was a saver—saved money, saved electricity, saved string, bags, sugar, saved—him. That’s what she did. That’s what she said she did, and she was right, in a way. In a way, she was usually right. In fact, she was always right—in a way. And you could never get a Filipino to come way out here and live. Not a young one anyway, and he had never seen an old one. Not a Filipino. They liked to dress up and live.
Should he let it drop about Fish having one, just to throw a scare into her, let her know he was doing some thinking? No. It would be a perfect cue for the one about a man needing a woman to look after him. He was not up to that again, not tonight.
Now she was doing what she liked most of all. She was making a grand slam, playing it out card for card, though it was in the bag, prolonging what would have been cut short out of mercy in gentle company. Father Firman knew the agony of losing.
She slashed down the last card, a miserable deuce trump, and did in the hapless king of hearts he had been saving.
“Skunked you!”
She was awful in victory. Here was the bitter end of their long day together, the final murderous hour in which all they wanted to say—all he wouldn’t and all she couldn’t—came out in the cards. Whoever won at honeymoon won the day, slept on the other’s scalp, and God alone had to help the loser.
“We’ve been at it long enough, Mrs Stoner,” he said, seeing her assembling the cards for another round.
“Had enough, huh!”
Father Firman grumbled something.
“No?”
“Yes.”
She pulled the table away and left it against the wall for the next time. She went out of the study carrying the socks, content and clucking. He closed his eyes after her and began to get under way in the rocking chair, the nightly trip to nowhere. He could hear her brewing a cup of tea in the kitchen and conversing with the cat. She made her way up the stairs, carrying the tea, followed by the cat, purring.
He waited, rocking out to sea, until she would be sure to be through in the bathroom. Then he got up and locked the front door (she looked after the back door) and loosened his collar going upstairs.
In the bathroom he mixed a glass of antiseptic, always afraid of pyorrhea, and gargled to ward off pharyngitis.
When he turned on the light in his room, the moths and beetles began to batter against the screens, the lighter insects humming . . .
Yes, and she had the guest room. How did she come to get that? Why wasn’t she in the back room, in her proper place? He knew, if he cared to remember. The screen in the back room—it let in mosquitoes, and if it didn’t do that she’d love to sleep ba
ck there, Father, looking out at the steeple and the blessed cross on top, Father, if it just weren’t for the screen, Father. Very well, Mrs Stoner, I’ll get it fixed or fix it myself. Oh, could you now, Father? I could, Mrs Stoner, and I will. In the meantime you take the guest room. Yes, Father, and thank you, Father, the house ringing with amenities then. Years ago, all that. She was a pie-faced girl then, not really a girl perhaps, but not too old to marry again. But she never had. In fact, he could not remember that she had even tried for a husband since coming to the rectory, but, of course, he could be wrong, not knowing how they went about it. God! God save us! Had she got her wires crossed and mistaken him all these years for that? That! Him! Suffering God! No. That was going too far. That was getting morbid. No. He must not think of that again, ever. No.
But just the same she had got the guest room and she had it yet. Well, did it matter? Nobody ever came to see him anymore, nobody to stay overnight anyway, nobody to stay very long . . . not anymore. He knew how they laughed at him. He had heard Frank humming all right—before he saw how serious and sad the situation was and took pity—humming, “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” But then they’d always laughed at him for something—for not being an athlete, for wearing glasses, for having kidney trouble . . . and mail coming addressed to Rev. and Mrs Stoner.
Removing his shirt, he bent over the table to read the volume left open from last night. He read, translating easily, “Eisdem licet cum illis . . . Clerics are allowed to reside only with women about whom there can be no suspicion, either because of a natural bond (as mother, sister, aunt) or of advanced age, combined in both cases with good repute.”
Last night he had read it, and many nights before, each time as though this time to find what was missing, to find what obviously was not in the paragraph, his problem considered, a way out. She was not mother, not sister, not aunt, and advanced age was a relative term (why, she was younger than he was) and so, eureka, she did not meet the letter of the law—but, alas, how she fulfilled the spirit! And besides it would be a slimy way of handling it after all her years of service. He could not afford to pension her off, either.