The Jew's Wife & Other Stories Page 4

  He asked her to turn the pickup around and drive him back to the main road. She started up the engine, but didn’t bother to close her shirt.

  “Can’t turn around, mister,” she said, backing out at almost the same speed she had driven in. “Even a drunk priest could see that.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Anne-Marie wanted to drive him as far as 537, but he insisted she let him out as soon as they reached the end of the dirt road.

  “Sorry you feel this way,” she said. “We could’ve had a good time.” He pulled his bag out of the pickup and slammed the door. He couldn’t have felt more relieved if he had just escaped a burning building. “If you’re ever in these parts again and feel like copping some pussy, look me up. No offense, Reverend, but I’d say it’d do you a world of good.”

  Despite an approaching vehicle in the southbound lane, she made a wide U-turn and leaned on her horn. He didn’t turn to watch her drive off. As it was, his legs felt barely able to support him, and the rest of his body was still quaking.

  He resumed walking north along the shoulder of the road. Although only half full, his valise now seemed filled with stones. He had no idea how far it was to 537. He wondered if he shouldn’t just hitch back to the general store, where he might still make a connection to Philadelphia. But the prospect of confronting that mendacious old man made his blood race angrily (despite Anne-Marie’s advances, he did not doubt anything she had told him.) He had been made enough of a fool for one day.

  He heard a vehicle approaching. He stuck out his thumb, unable for the glare to make out whether it was truck or car until it was almost upon him. When he recognized the same gray pickup he had just escaped from, the contents of his stomach vulcanized.

  She flew by like a phantom, a big grin on her face, her horn sounding a brash tattoo.

  When she was out of sight he sat down on the road’s shoulder. He had not felt this ill since his childhood. Only, now there was no one to lay cool cloths on his brow and give him cola to sip. Feeling so sick in a strange part of the world, alone, with no one to care if he lived or died, was like a bad dream come true.

  He heard the distant whine of another engine, this time from the south. He strained to see through the highway heat and the fog of his nausea. It was a pickup alright, a gray one. He searched for a break in the dense undergrowth behind him, but was met with a solid wall of green. With the road all to itself, the pickup was moving slowly this time, no doubt to better ridicule him. Its deliberately sluggish approach seemed crueler than any abuse she was planning to direct at him. Anger replaced his shame. He stood up and raised a clenched fist at the loathsome vehicle.

  “Damn you!” he yelled as the pickup puttered by, a thin old man at the wheel. He regarded the angry priest as if he were the Angel of Death, and urged his wheezing machine to a greater effort.

  After his nausea passed, his head began to throb. He estimated he had walked a mile from where Anne-Marie had let him off. It seemed he should have reached the intersection of 537, but there was only more of the same underused two-lane ahead. Had that man in the general store given him false directions?

  The few cars and trucks on the road showed an obvious reluctance to take him aboard—the result, he supposed, of his appearance. Finally a car stopped. It was an antique, a ‘48 or ‘49 Mercury, driven by a youth whose long brown hair was tied back in a ponytail. He looked sober enough, but the priest had begun to doubt his own ability to judge character. The radio was playing loud rock music.

  “Where you headed?” the youngster shouted. Father Walther started to shout back an answer, then realized he didn’t have the strength. The boy lowered the radio.

  “My car broke down on the Turnpike. I’m a Catholic priest. I’m also not feeling well. I’m not looking for alcohol, drugs, or sex. I appreciate your stopping and I realize this is your car, not mine, but I just can’t tolerate any loud noise at the moment.”

  The youth stared at him for several seconds. Then he turned off the radio altogether.

  He tried to doze, but the aches in his head and stomach kept him awake. His lip was trembling like an old man’s. When he closed his eyes the lids refused to stay shut. He felt he should throw in the towel and go home. But he didn’t have the energy to make even that decision. He told himself his condition was just the result of a series of unfortunate incidents, starting with his breakdown on the Turnpike. But he didn’t feel any better for these thoughts.

  When he opened his eyes again he seemed to be in a pine forest. By the light, he judged it was late afternoon. The radio was still turned off.

  “Where are we?”

  “Lebanon State Forest.” The name meant nothing. “Halfway to your destination.”

  He pulled himself up straight on the seat. Unlike contemporary car seats, it was of a piece from one door to the other, covered by a worn plastic weave. The car was a good forty years older than his Ford, yet it was still on the road, while the Ford was pushing up daisies in a junkyard.

  “You must know how to take care of automobiles,” he offered to make up for his earlier rudeness.

  “Some. It’s kind of a hobby. Keeps me out of trouble,” the youngster added with a first-prize grin. “Where exactly are you headed, Father? I mean, the shore’s a pretty long stretch of real estate.”

  He hadn’t given any thought to his precise destination. He had presumed he would make that decision when he reached a bus depot.

  “I could let you off in Toms River.”

  “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  “No trouble, Father. Just say the word.”

  “Toms River would be fine. Thank you very much.”

  “Like I said, Father, no trouble.”

  It seemed strange being addressed as a priest again. It made the last two days seem like an illusion. He had not realized how much his idea of himself was conditioned by the way other people saw him. All he had noticed was how much of ordinary life he was denied because of his roman collar. But now that same clerical identity seemed like a warm coat on a cold day, a haven from a troubled, confusing world. Yet even as he welcomed its comfort he sensed that something was wrong. The coat didn’t fit the way it used to. The haven was no longer invulnerable. And the smell of vomit that clung to his shirt insisted that the past two days had not been an hallucination.

  When they reached Toms River the youth saw his passenger safely to the bus stop.

  “Be sure you flag him down, Father. Those drivers don’t stop unless you practically throw yourself under their wheels.”

  “I will. And thanks. Where are you headed now?”

  “Back to Mount Holly. Ma will have supper ready.”

  Father Walther wasn’t sure exactly where Mount Holly was, but it seemed to him it was not far from where the young man had picked him up. If so, the boy had driven clear across the state.

  “God bless you, son.”

  His first order of business was to find a place to spend the night. In the morning he would get a bus to Point Pleasant, or he could head south toward Atlantic City and Cape May. One thing he would not do again was hitchhike, so he had to plan his next move carefully.

  He hadn’t been in Toms River since those adolescent summers he had spent at a nearby summer community, but he remembered there was a diner not far from the bus stop where the young man had let him off. He used its rest room to wash up and change his shirt. Then he ordered soup and soft-boiled eggs for his mending stomach. The waitress brought him a second cup of coffee unasked.

  “Anything else, honey?”

  “No thanks,” he said. Then, “Yes. Are you familiar with a development called Fords Pointe?”

  The woman glanced down at his black serge pants and dark valise. Her neighborly smile weakened. She set some dinnerware in front of a customer who had just walked in, then nodded toward the cashier. “Better ask Mr. Coleman.”

  He presented his bill to a heavy-set man behind the register. He rang up the bill and carefully counted out
the change. Then he said, “Two blocks to your left”—he pointed south—“Benny’s Car Service.”

  The priest thanked him, then turned back to the waitress, but she was engaged in conversation with the new customer. He was a block away from the luncheonette before he realized he had forgotten to leave her a tip.

  He had no special reason to visit Fords Pointe. He just thought it might be nice to pass by the Willets’ old bungalow before checking into a motel. It would be a kind of sentimental journey. Besides, the more he thought about it, the less he felt like sitting on a hot beach. For him the Jersey Shore meant this short stretch of land between Lakewood and Forked River. It included the narrow peninsula across the bay and a patch of woodland to the west. He and Frank used to water-ski in the bay, crossed it in the Willets’ fourteen-foot inboard to visit the boardwalk at Seaside, and ventured into the mosquito-ridden Pine Barrens to explore abandoned houses.

  He recognized very little of the stretch of US 9 south of Toms River. Twenty years ago there was just a boat store and motel court. That was before the rise of fast-food chains and the rest of plastic America. But when the cab turned down the only paved road giving entry and exit to the Pointe, he saw the same year-round houses among the pines bordering the road, permanent residents who resented the annual influx of summer people. Old, heavily screened dwellings, the heavy mesh that still enclosed them was testimony to the abiding imminence of the mosquito. When the cab reached the Pointe, a series of man-made lagoons laid out perpendicular to the bay, he told the driver to make the second left.

  The bungalows were cheap functional affairs, little more than concrete slabs with room dividers and a roof. Some owners added porches, grass (which did not fare well), and TV antennas to pick up Philadelphia stations. But most, like the Willets, were content to put all their efforts into their bulkheads and boat landings. A good bulkhead kept in proper repair—a never-ending battle against erosion—insured the preservation of the real estate and made possible a secure landing. Boats, after all, were the reason for buying into a place like Fords Pointe. Everyone fished—all the men, at least; he could not recall seeing a woman on any fishing expedition. Even those who could not afford a boat tried their luck in the lagoon for eels and small blue-back crabs.

  The cab passed the Willets’—at least, what used to be the Willets’; Frank Willet, Sr., died several years ago and his widow might have sold the property. There was no sign of life, but this was mid-week when only vacationers and retirees could afford to be at their summer homes. The cab continued to the end of the block, made a U-turn, and headed back past the same row of houses. It passed the Willets’ a second time, but he did not ask the driver to slow down.

  He had thought he would enjoy visiting the site of his adolescent summers. But, even allowing for the wear and tear of time, this was not the happy place he held in his memory. It was not the landscape that had changed—the years had worked more of a change on him than it had on the Pointe. The effect, though, was the same as if he had found the bungalows leveled and the lagoons filled in. He should have headed for his usual haunt in the Catskills. His lack of a car would not have put him at a disadvantage. People befriended a priest, especially one on vacation, the way they took to a friendly dog.

  A married man, divorced by the time Father Walther made his acquaintance, once recounted to him how he still returned to the block where he and his family used to live. What he found each time he went back was a grotesque, more desolate than if he had found the place abandoned or burned to the ground. Destruction, in fact, would have seemed appropriate. But the house looked the same and the sycamore his son used to play under hadn’t changed a leaf. By then the place was occupied by strangers, yet something still drew the man there—an otherwise positive, optimistic fellow. “It called to me, Father,” he said, his cheerful manner scarcely altered by the telling of his chilling tale. To see him in action on a Sunday morning, tirelessly wielding a collection basket, winking at a child on a parishioner’s lap or nodding at a familiar face, you would have thought he never had a care in the world.

  Father Walther did not believe he felt the same as that man did when he stood contemplating his lost home. But he did have a nagging sense of abandonment. Brooding on the past was never a good idea. He did not, after all, regret anything. Why, then, this empty feeling? he wondered as he lay staring at the cracked ceiling of the first motel he had come upon after the cab left Ford’s Pointe. The room smelled all too familiar—a blend of institutional linen and the damp odor of buildings near salt water. Every rectory he had ever been in smelled the same way. His parents’ house never smelled like this. Nor did anyone else’s, as best he could remember. Some smelled of garlic, cabbage or dead cigarettes, but those odors, however unpleasant, were the kind real people created. A rectory’s smell was anonymous. Next year he would vacation further from home, not here in New Jersey where nothing was any longer what it seemed, but someplace he had never been before—Maine, or the Carolinas.

  In the morning he inquired at the check-in desk where the nearest Catholic church was located. The Willets used to attend one in Forked River, but he knew there had to be one closer by. He was right. He called the car service, but after a dozen rings there was still no answer. He checked his watch (he no longer needed an alarm clock to wake up): 6:30. Was it possible they weren’t open? He rang the desk again, but the sleepy clerk told him there was only one car service.

  He took a portable mass set out of his valise and set it up on the dresser: chalice, wafer, a small bottle of white wine, a stone containing a relic that turned any flat surface into a temporary altar. Dressed in a clean pair of khakis and T-shirt, he hung his purple stole around his neck and began the ceremony, making the altar boy’s responses for himself.

  He had not said mass since Sunday morning. Even when he was sick, he had never gone more than twenty-four hours without celebrating the sacrament. Mass set the tone for the rest of his day. Long before he was ordained, when still a child, he felt disoriented if he failed to attend early mass. More recently, mass had become a habit. Any activity, his confessor told him, even a sacred rite, could become routine. One had to guard against familiarity, just as marriage partners must not ever take one another for granted. Since those early days of his youth he had come to see the less glamorous side of a priest’s life—the chronic loneliness and bizarre neuroticisms the chosen of God sometimes suffered. Thus far he had escaped the worst of those afflictions, although for some time now he had been finding it difficult to get up for early mass and his attention, even during the more critical moments of the confessional, had a way of wandering. He prayed for grace. But God rarely seemed to move in straight lines and, as far as he could tell, he was no better off now than he was two or even three months ago.

  This morning he spoke each word deliberately, like someone newly ordained, or the boy who used to play-act the sacrifice on his mother’s vanity, pretending her bottles of scent were cruets of water and wine. But when he reached the consecration his eye was distracted by the image in the mirror behind the dresser. It was a long time since he had considered what he looked like when he was speaking the words of consecration—his body bent forward almost to a right angle, his lips carefully enunciating each word: “This ...is ...my ...body . . .” Gold wavelets reflected onto his face from inside the chalice, emphasizing the dark rings under his eyes. Once thick hair seemed grayer than he remembered it. “In like manner, He took the cup, blessed it, and gave it to them, saying . . .” He hunched over the chalice where a small amount of wine (even the smell could make him lightheaded) rocked back and forth. “...this ...is . . .”

  He hesitated. The face in the mirror also hesitated. He hadn’t forgotten the words; he could sooner forget his own name. The face in the mirror waited for him to resume, its blue-green eyes staring back at him. He knew they were his own eyes, just as the high-bridged nose and prominent cheekbones were no one else’s. But it was as if only the physical appearance of the face were his
, a simulacrum of the more substantial man he ought to have found there. Every morning he shaved this face and combed the thinning hair on its head. He took care not to mar his appearance with a razor nick or a delayed trip to the barber. He did not consider such care vanity, because he tended himself only in order to serve his God more perfectly. But despite the daily shaves, clipping of nose hairs and other ministrations of toilet, he had never seemed to confront the man in the mirror as he was doing now. However accurately they matched his own, the eyes staring back at him seemed empty and confused. Who was this middle-aged man who seemed so devoid of a wisdom he had taken for granted as his, if not by his merit, then by virtue of his calling? Martha’s eyes, though hard with Luciferian pride, seemed sage by comparison.

  “Is that you, Father?” his housekeeper said, having agreed gleefully to accept the charges.

  “The very same,” he replied, dropping into the bantering tone he always assumed with her. Innocent, a slave to work, and loyal as a spaniel, she thought him a wit. He had no such illusions about himself. Setting a light tone was just part of his job, like running the Rosary Society or Knights of the Altar. If his silly jokes amused her, what harm was done? “How’s tricks at Holy Name?”

  “Oh, you know how it is,” she said, managing by a coy twist of her voice to include him in her conspiracy against the pastor and co-curate. “Your mother called! She left a message. Wait. I wrote it down someplace.”

  He listened to her rifle through the memos on the telephone table in the rectory’s parlor. Even a hundred miles away, he could smell the room’s musty odor. He wished she would hurry up and find what she was looking for.

  “Here it is. ‘I’ll be staying on a few more days in the mountains. I hope his car is better.’”

  He was too shocked to reply. His annual visit was something they both cherished. How could she just decide to “stay on a few more days”?