The Jew's Wife & Other Stories Page 3

  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 wr
ist. 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.

  “But you drank wine with me! Priests ain’t supposed to get skunked on cheap booze, either.”

  Now he realized what had seemed so familiar about his lightheadedness: it was the same giddy feeling he got when he drank consecrated wine on an empty stomach.

  “I guess you’re one of them alkie priests I heard about.”