The Jew's Wife & Other Stories Read online

  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.r />
  “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.