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

  “About the same,” said Father Otto, and helped himself to the strawberry preserves. He praised the brand, Smucker’s. He said he preferred strawberry to red raspberry, and red to black raspberry, as a rule, and didn’t care for the monastery stuff, as the nuns skimped on the natural ingredients. “And make too much plum.”

  “That so?” said Joe. He’d heard it all before. As a rule, he didn’t sit with Father Otto at breakfast.

  “My, but those were fine berries,” said Father Otto, referring, as he had before, to some strawberries no longer grown at the monastery. “Small, yes, but with a most delicate flavor. And then Brother, he went and dug ’em out.”

  “Brother Gardener?” said Joe, as if in some doubt.

  Father Otto, carried away by anger, could only reply by nodding.

  “More toast, Father?”

  “All right.” Father Otto helped himself to more preserves. He kept getting ahead of himself—always more preserves than toast.

  Joe produced another slice from the kitchen, and also the coffeepot. “Warm that up for you?”

  “All right.” But first Father Otto drained his cup. “You make good coffee here.”

  Joe poured, sat down again, considering what he had to say. (On his last trip to the kitchen, he had removed his apron as a hint to Father Otto that the dining room was closing.) “Father, I was thinking”—and Joe had been thinking, for the past month, ever since Bill moved in—“you could go back on the one-thirty bus.”

  Father Otto, who ordinarily returned to the monastery on the six-thirty bus, gazed away, masticating, sheeplike. He seemed to be saying that there ought to be a reason for such a drastic and sudden change in his routine.

  “Know you want to get back as soon as possible,” Joe said. Monks, he’d often been told (by monks), are never very happy away from their monastery. Between them and their real estate, there is a body-and-soul relationship, a strange bond. Monks are the homeowners, the solid citizens, of the ecclesiastical establishment. Other varieties of religious, and even secular priests like Joe—although he’d built a school, a convent, and now a rectory—are hoboes by comparison. That was certainly the impression you got if you spent any time with monks. So, really, what Joe was suggesting—that Father Otto return to his monastery a few hours earlier than usual—wasn’t so bad, was it? “Of course, it’s up to you, Father.”

  Father Otto folded his napkin, though it was headed for the laundry, and then he rolled it. He seemed to be looking for his napkin ring, and then he seemed to remember it was at the monastery. “All right,” he said.

  Bill barged in, saying, “That was Potter on the phone. Looks like there’ll be one more, Father.”

  Seeing that he had no choice, Joe informed Father Otto that a couple of Bill’s friends—classmates—were coming to dinner, and that Mrs Pelissier, the housekeeper, would report at three. “She’s been having car trouble,” he added, hoping, he guessed, to change the subject, but it was no good.

  “Who else is coming?” Father Otto said to Bill.

  “Name’s Conklin. Classmate. Ex-classmate.”

  Joe didn’t like the sound of it. “Dropout?”

  Bill observed a moment of silence. “None of us knew why Conk left. I don’t think Conk did—at the time.”

  “That’s often the case, Bill. It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” said Father Otto, looking at Joe.

  “Who said it was?” Joe inquired, and then continued with Bill. “So now he’s married. Right?”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  Joe waited for clarification.

  “I guess he thinks about it,” Bill said.

  Father Otto nodded. “We all do.”

  “That so?” said Joe.

  Father Otto nodded. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “That so?” said Joe.

  “Is it all right, then?” Bill said.

  Joe looked at Bill intently. “Is what all right?”

  “For Conk to come? He’s a pretty lonely guy.”

  Father Otto was nodding away, apparently giving his permission.

  “It’s your party,” Joe said, and rose from the table in an energetic manner, as a hint to Father Otto. “I’d ask you to stay for it, Father. Or Bill would—it’s his party. But we plan to sit down—or stand up, it’s buffet—around five. You’d have to eat and run.” And somebody—Joe—would have to drive Father Otto to the bus.

  “But stay if you like,” Bill said.

  “All right,” said Father Otto.

  Joe and Father Otto were watching the Twins game and drinking beer in the pastor’s study when Bill brought in his friends and introduced them. The heavy one wearing a collar, which showed that he, or his pastor, was still holding the line, was Hennessy. The exhibitionist in the faded Brahms T-shirt was Potter. And the other one, the one with the mustache, a nasty affair, was Conklin.

  “What’s the score?” Bill asked, as if he cared.

  “Four to one,” Joe said.

  “Twins?”

  “No.”

  Potter and Conklin moved off to case the bookshelves, and Father Otto joined them, but Hennessy stood by, attending to the conversation.

  “What inning?” Bill asked.

  “Seventh.”

  “Who’s pitching?”

  Joe took a step toward the television set.

  “Leave it on,” Bill said. “We’re going to my room for a drink.”

  Bill and his friends then departed, Hennessy murmuring, “See you later.”

  “Fine young men,” said Father Otto.

  “Uh-huh,” Joe said. “Split a bottle, Father?”

  “All right.”

  Joe carried the empties into the kitchen. “Everything O.K. in here?” he said to Mrs P., and opened the refrigerator—always an embarrassing act for him, even when alone. He had cut down on snacking, though, had suffered less from “night hunger” since Bill moved in.

  “Sure you want to eat in the study, Father?”

  “It’s Bill’s party,” Joe said, although he felt as Mrs P. did about eating in the study.

  “He’s lucky he’s got you for a pastor, Father.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Joe said, but didn’t argue the point. He returned to the study and poured half of the beer—more than half—into Father Otto’s glass. “Hey. How’d that man get on second?”

  Father Otto observed the television screen closely and nodded, as if to say yes, Joe was right, there was a man on second.

  “The official scorer has ruled it a single and an error, not a double,” said the announcer.

  “Who made the error?” Joe said, more to the announcer than to Father Otto.

  “According to our records, that’s the first error Tony’s made this season,” said the announcer.

  Father Otto got up and, as was his habit from time to time, left the room.

  After a bit, Joe went to see if anything was wrong, but Father Otto, who used the lavatory off the guest room, wasn’t there. Then, listening in the hallway, Joe heard the old monk’s voice among the others in Bill’s room, and returned to the study. Sitting there alone, finishing off Father Otto’s beer, Joe asked himself, What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, really, he told himself. The curate was entertaining in his room so as not to interfere with the game, the visiting priest was a fair-weather fan, if that, and so, really, nothing was wrong—it meant nothing, nothing personal that the pastor sat alone. He didn’t like it, though.

  One of the best things about the priesthood, Joe had been told in the seminary, is other priests—“priestly fellowship.” The words had sounded corny at the time, but Joe had believed in the idea behind them and he still did. For years, though, he hadn’t had room in his life for those who should now be his intimates—two of his classmates had died, and others seemed equally remote. Pursuing his building program as he had, he had been forced to associate almost exclusively with the laity, and now, at forty-four, he found he wanted more from life. And for some reason he wasn??
?t finding as much priestly fellowship as he’d hoped to find where he kept looking for it—under his own roof.

  Despite the age gap, Joe had tried hard with Father Otto. In the beginning, there had been pro football games (spoiled by Father Otto’s totally uninformed comments and rather amused attitude), drives into the countryside to see the autumn foliage (“You should see it at the monastery”), visits to new churches of all denominations, since Joe would have to build a new church someday (visits discontinued because Father Otto wasn’t, as he put it, terribly interested in new churches, or, for that matter, old ones, and disliked the bucket seats in Joe’s car). Now, as a rule, they spent Sunday afternoon at home, in the pastor’s study, sent out for seafood dinners, which Father Otto seemed to look forward to, and watched television, which the monk didn’t have in his cell in the monastery. This was all right when there was something on, by which Joe meant major sports, not water-skiing, and also things like Meet the Press and Face the Nation, but Father Otto wasn’t so discriminating—he enjoyed quiz programs and government propaganda. At such times, Joe would go downstairs to his office to read, or slip into his bedroom for a nap. All in all, not an ideal situation.

  With Bill, Joe had tried harder, since so much more was at stake—the pastor-curate relationship. It had begun badly. Bill, reporting for duty on his first day, a Saturday, had barely made it in time for afternoon confessions, had dined out the next day without giving sufficient notice, had come in late that night, and had to be summoned to the office area the next morning. (Evidently, he’d thought that a priest just sat around in his room waiting for something to turn up.) And he’d been ordained without even a hunt-and-peck command of typing—a great blow to Joe, who’d said that a man who couldn’t type was as ill-equipped for modern parish life as a man who couldn’t drive, and Bill had laughed. A very bad time in the relationship.

  Joe was still carrying the work load he had carried before, doing all the parish accounts and correspondence and trying to find jobs that Bill could do—quite a job itself. The future looked better, though, with Bill going ahead in his typing, using the text and records provided by Joe and his own phonograph, which, at first, at the end of each day, he’d lugged up to his room to play folk and protest songs on but now, thank God, left in his office. Bill was sweating it out now, yes, but so was Joe, and really Bill couldn’t complain. It wasn’t all business in the office area. With the connecting door open, they could carry on conversations desk to desk, and if the flow was rather more one way than the other, that was because there was so much that Bill didn’t know about procedure and policy, about the local community, about the world in general. Here, too, Joe tried to help Bill, working from a dozen or so periodicals that crossed his desk, passing them on with some articles marked “Read” or “Skip.” It was all right if Bill read the recommended matter during office hours as long as his typing and filing didn’t suffer. Sometimes, too, Joe would drop in on Bill and smoke a baby cigar with him (wanted to get Bill off cigarettes), and two or three times a week, an hour before closing time, Joe would put on his hat and say, in the gruff voice he affected when he was about to be more than ordinarily decent, “Knock it off.” Bill would then cover his typewriter (Joe was strict about that), and they’d go off in Joe’s car, the radio playing for Bill. They had visited a number of rectories on business that could’ve been handled by telephone simply because Joe liked being seen with his curate. At least once a week, after what might have started out as a routine stop at the hospital or the garage (Joe’s car was a lemon), they’d dined out in style, and gone on to box seats at the stadium. They had attended a half-dozen games before Joe really accepted the fact that Bill wasn’t terribly interested in baseball. At Bill’s suggestion, they had taken in a couple of lousy foreign movies. But mostly they spent their evenings at home, in the pastor’s study, pastor in his chair, his Barcalounger, feet up, curate in attendance, with cigars and drinks (served from the bathroom, where the liquor was kept in the same drawer with the shoe polish and thus kept in its place), TV if wanted, and good talk.

  Well, fairly good talk.

  Little interest was shown when Joe spoke of the remarkable personalities who had flourished at the seminary during his era, and likewise when Bill spoke of his recent trials there—of piddling causes that already sounded like ancient history. Bill could say the usual things about the late Pope John, and about the present Pope, but he couldn’t discuss Frank Sinatra (“the Guv’nor”) or Senator Dirksen, and he hadn’t even heard of people like Fishbait Miller and Nancy Dickerson. Large, fertile areas of conversation—Capitol Hill, show business, sports—had therefore been abandoned. But what made the likeliest subjects impossible—the difference between Joe and Bill—was what kept them going when they got onto religion.

  Bill talked up the changes in the liturgy, the vernacular, lay participation, ecumenism, and so on, and Joe didn’t. Bill claimed that religion had hit bottom in our time and had no place to go but up, and Joe questioned both statements. Bill said that religion (though not perhaps as we know it) was the coming thing, and that the clergy (though not perhaps as we know them) were the coming men. “Fuzzy thinking, Pollyanna stuff,” said Joe, and advised Bill to stop reading Teilhard de Chardin and other unpronounceables. So Bill was inclined to be bullish, and Joe bearish, about the future.

  As for the present, the immediate present, Joe could understand how Bill might be unhappy in his work, considering the satisfactions there were, or were said to be, in the priesthood, which, unfortunately, was not what it was cracked up to be in the seminary and not what you chose to make it. If Bill had expected to labor in certain parts of the vineyard, and not in others—in the slums, and not in the suburbs—he should have said so years ago and saved the diocese the expense of educating him. And if Bill felt, as he said, thwarted and useless where he was—well, that was exactly how men in slum parishes felt. The truth was Bill had got what he wanted—a tough assignment—without the romantic props that went with a slum parish: bums, pigeons, and so on. Naturally, after living in the rarefied atmosphere of the seminary, Bill was finding it hard to adjust to reality. A slight case of the bends. That was all. Or was it?

  Sometimes, late at night, Joe would call Bill an apostolic snob—accuse him of looking down his nose at the parishioners just because they weren’t derelicts or great sinners—and sometimes, late at night, Joe would call Bill a dreamer. In that connection, Joe had noticed that Bill had a faraway look in his eyes, and that Bill had a head like a violin. Dreamers hadn’t been so common in the Church back when he’d been one himself, hadn’t constituted a working majority then, Joe was saying one night, when a picture of Rudolf Hess appeared on television and Joe noticed that Hess had a head like a violin. Joe was beginning to develop his thesis, saying the fact that Hess had flown to Scotland in the hope of stopping the war, a war that still had years to run, certainly proved that he was a dreamer, when Bill interrupted: “The fact that you’ve got a head like a banjo, Father—what’s that prove?” Well, Joe had tried not to show it, had smiled, but he had been hurt—a very bad moment in the relationship.

  On the whole, though, they were getting along. There were nights, yes, when Bill had to be called more than once before he came out of his room, before he left off strumming his Spanish guitar, listening to FM, or talking to his friends on the phone. There were nights, too, when Bill returned to his room earlier than Joe would have liked, when Joe had maybe had one too many . . . The truth was these weren’t the nights that Joe had looked forward to during his years as a pastor without a curate, and during his years as a curate with a pastor who avoided him . . . and still they weren’t bad nights, by rectory standards these days. There had been some fairly good talk—arguments, really, ending sometimes with one man making a final point outside the other man’s door, or, after they’d both gone to bed, over the phone. “Bill? Joe.” And there had been moments, a few, when the manifest differences of age, position, and opinion between pastor and curate had just
disappeared, when Joe and Bill had entered that rather exalted and somewhat relaxed state, induced in part perhaps by drink, that Joe recognized as priestly fellowship.

  At one such moment, feeling content but wondering if he couldn’t do better, Joe had invited Bill to have a friend or two in for a meal sometime.

  “Should I call the others, Father?” said Mrs P., sounding apprehensive, for the others were getting kind of loud in Bill’s room.

  “I’ll do it,” Joe said, but when he saw himself knocking at Bill’s door, looking in on a scene he’d been more or less excluded from, he phoned over. “Bill?” Either Bill or Father Otto should’ve answered the phone—possibly Hennessy or Potter, but not Conklin.

  They arrived in the study like conventioneers, some carrying glasses, and immediately formed a circle that did not include Joe. He came between them, mentioning Father Otto’s bus, and bumped them over to the food. Then he went and stood at the other end of the table, by the wine—ready to pour, hoping to get into conversation with someone. Father Otto was first in line. “Just like the monastery,” Joe said, referring to the nice display of food on Father Otto’s plate.

  “Yes,” said Father Otto, who’d been saying (to Hennessy) that some days were somewhat better than others to visit the monastery if one intended to eat there. “We have a cafeteria now.”

  “Wine, Father?”

  “What kind is it?”

  Joe, speaking through his nose, named the wine.

  “On second thought, no,” said Father Otto, and moved off with his plate, which he carefully held in both hands but in a sloping manner.

  Hennessy was next, and he also refused wine. But he complimented Joe on his building program, calling the new rectory “a crackerjack,” which suggested to Joe that the works of Father Finn—Tom Playfair, Claude Lightfoot, and the rest—were still being read and might have figured in Hennessy’s vocation, as they had in his own.