The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  “Adequate, yes. She’s an interesting cook.” Tasker had always been a man who could easily engulf ten thousand calories any day—on their rare family vacations—and never gain an ounce. Other times, he’d never seemed to care what he ate.

  Mabry said “So what did yall eat tonight?” Yall, as the second-person plural pronoun, was almost the only vestige of his native tongue that Mabry still clung to, after years in the north.

  “She’s brought in a five-foot shelf of cookbooks from around the world. We’re working our way, by degrees, round the globe.”

  Since the most exotic foods of Mabry’s childhood had come from his mother’s inherited copy of The First Ladies’ Table—say, Dolly Madison’s fricasseed chicken with boiled stuffed turnips—this was interesting news: a dining tour through the entire planet, presided over by a woman whose family his own forebears had used like a rag? Mabry said “How on Earth did you find her?”

  Tasker said “She found me—unless the Holy Ghost called a cab and poured her in it. She heard how Nelson walked out on me; and she turned up, bag and baggage, two minutes before I started howling.”

  Mabry understood his father’s tendency to endless hyperbole. It frequently cast an amusing light on whether or not the Reverend Kincaid believed a word of the lifetime’s theology he showered on hapless congregations. But for now, Mabry let the Holy Ghost ride. Another question mattered more. “Have you got that leaking roof fixed yet?” Back in the spring, when Tasker retired from substitute priesthood and—out of the blue—announced he was moving back to the home place alone, a distant cousin phoned Mabry and warned him the roof “poured water like Niagara.”

  But all Tasker would ever admit when Mabry inquired was what he said now. “Those Mexican boys say they’ll fix it tomorrow—or someday soon. I’m mainly dry. I can still dodge water.” Then, as if he were dredging an admittedly feeble memory, he found this to ask—“Those strange pains of yours, son: they with you still?”

  Mabry could barely recall ever telling his father about the strangeness that had worried him in the past few months, and he knew he hadn’t told Charlotte yet, so was this just coincidence or some brand of blood-kin telepathy? Whatever, this man was the only human being left who could rightly call him son; and all the long day’s fatigue and horror poured in behind the word. “Pa, they think it may be multiple sclerosis. Wouldn’t that be a pisser?”

  Tasker took an audible long dry breath. “Oh Jesus, that would be—the whole waterworks. Darling boy, who is they?”

  Mabry said “I’ve seen my personal physician and the two neurologists he recommended. They say it may take another few weeks, or even months, for a final diagnosis.” In his father’s next pause, Mabry took another slow look around him. This Canadian kitchen, that had just now seemed his prison, might be a place he’d beg to stay in forever. Nobody here could revel in his plight—no one he’d hurt or cheated on. He could stay here and slowly freeze in each joint, and no one would feel either pity or blame.

  Tasker said “You better come down here, to Duke or Chapel Hill, and get more opinions. They’re both hospitals with world-class care. Or so I read.”

  “I’ve thought of that—thanks. But I’ve got so much to do in the city right now; and if it’s M.S., it’s incurable anyhow.”

  Then Tasker said the most surprising thing of all. “You in need of any cash?”

  Mabry knew his father had precious little cash—a minuscule pension, the pitiful savings from more than a decade of fill-in services at pastorless churches, plus Social Security. In fact he even returned the occasional check Mabry tried to send, or he mentioned the charity to which they’d been forwarded. Was he sliding back now to those college-boy days, thinking his feckless son was broke? Anyhow, Mabry said “A world of thanks, sir. I’ll tell you when I am.”

  Tasker said “I can sell what I’ve got. This house is a treasure.”

  Gently, Mabry said “Oh stop.” The place was a hundred and twenty-odd years old, a likable one-story late Victorian but hardly a treasure to anyone who hadn’t been born or reared there (and several of them had fled it like the cholera). When Tasker didn’t speak, Mabry had to say “All I’m concerned for, here and now, is that you get the care you need and can handle in that no-doubt-lovable but rickety building.”

  A silence spread down both ends of the call till Tasker broke it. “You’ll be the first to know, boy, when they find my cold corpse.” Then without another word, the old voice burst into the finest laughter Mabry knew.

  It had been so long since he actually heard it that the boy—a man fifty-three years old—sat a long minute more, better than calm at the end of this nightmare, and longed to see the father who’d deviled his mind from the age of six onward: a thoughtful good man, still propped more or less upright on various items of a faith (that Mabry couldn’t share) and never relenting in the drive to save this helpless son, this child who was all Tasker Kincaid had to leave to a world of demons, cutthroats, and simpletons, ready to kill in the name of God.

  When the Wilkinses came to the kitchen to see if Mabry had further needs before bedtime, he thanked them and said that—with their permission—he might sit up awhile longer. He was hopelessly jet-lagged. Kind as they’d been throughout the day, it had got embarrassing by now—the extent to which they’d begun receding into the carpet, yielding their home (like so many kind locals in the crisis) to this tall American as if he owned it and they were only the overnight gypsies. And here they were, as early as ten o’clock, turning in like two aging sitters of a giant distressed baby they couldn’t outlast.

  Mabry was on the verge of saying “Look here, I can try the yellow pages one more time for a motel room.” But Agnes Wilkins was in the act of setting beside him a plate of cheese biscuits so rich they were already oiling the lacey doily beneath them.

  So, touched, Mabry thanked them with a quasi-formal bow. Then for another silent hour, he sat back down and wrote thank-you letters to friends in Rome—two museum conservators of staggering skill, who always shared their knowledge with him as open-handedly as desert saints, and an even more dazzlingly gifted forger of Greek and Etruscan marbles and bronzes (an art that Mabry genuinely envied but had never quite attempted). Old as he was, those three colleagues still taught Mabry more on each short visit than all his American teachers had managed in the three decades of work behind him.

  When he sealed the letters, he opened Tim Wilkins’s rye again, then paused to consult the health of his brain and his actual vision. Though he drank so seldom, he’d inherited Tasker’s cast-iron head for spirits; so he poured another shot. Then he took his journal and began to bring it up to date. At half past eleven, he’d almost finished describing the telephone talk with his father when his hand quit on him. As surely as if a crucial motor nerve had severed, the fingers of his right hand wouldn’t make more words to describe Tasker’s prankish good sense or to sketch the outlines of what seemed a promising mystery—Audrey Thornton, the new strong woman in the family. Surely it was understandable fatigue. But he looked beyond him to the wall to check his eyes. He could read the text of the stitched motto on the yellowing sampler—You Are The Cause Of Everything. His eyes were working then. But, Lord, was this the chosen message of some long-dead Presbyterian maiden with too much needlework time on her hands? He noticed that both his feet had started the awful tingle that would only increase till he slept.

  At last the right hand moved on its own, so he turned to his journal; and instead of describing the end of his conversation with Tasker, his hand wrote quickly what (for whatever reason) demanded recording—in a compact italic script with exaggerated care for spacing and straightness—An Inventory of Loss and Failure. Then it made the list.

  —Frances Kenyon Kincaid dies, medulloblastoma

  —Mabry K. commences neuro weirdness

  —MK likely to inherit disastrous funds from FKK

  —MK rejects Tasker K

  —Charlotte K likely to reject MK

  —New
York assaulted by Allah

  —MK’s loft rightly stove-in

  The hand paused there, then returned to the list and made the child’s symbol for rays of light around two words—straight lines emitted by the words disastrous and rightly. Only then did Mabry’s sense of control begin to return. He laughed a little. Now the words were like something in one of his junior-high-school notebooks—love or peace with garlands and flowers and kissing doves. Still he wondered what the rays meant. Were they only, at the end of this hard day, a switch-back to the corny codes of his boyhood?

  Before he could think, a whisper spooked him. “Mr. Kincaid, may I bother you?”

  It was Leah Wilkins, the daughter of the house, sixteen years old and even better looking now than she’d been at dinner. She was in a dark burgundy bathrobe, holding a hushing finger to her lips. But her straight ash-blond hair and the pale blue eyes were no bother at all.

  Mabry whispered “By all means” and cleared a space for her.

  She went to the refrigerator first, found a Coke, and asked what Mabry wanted.

  He flourished his glass of rye.

  And Leah frowned before she managed to suppress her regret at one more imbibing adult. Then she silently refused the space he’d cleared. She stood in the midst of the room, a good ten feet from the overnight American. “I’m desperate to sleep. See, I’ve got an exam tomorrow at school. But after all this tragic stuff today, I’m wide awake.”

  No doubt he’d heard the word tragic fifty times since leaving his room in Paris before dawn. Coming from this lovely child, though, it had the instant weight of a verdict without appeal. He’d weigh it further once she left the room. For now he said “And the caffeine in that Coke will guarantee you’re wide awake till your teacher hands out the dreaded exam. Then you’ll plop right over.” He let his head fall forward on the table, then felt as silly as he no doubt looked. So when Leah still resisted a chair, he lured her gently. “What’s the exam? Maybe I can help.”

  Quickly her face assumed the solemn gravity that haunts the border between late childhood and what it hears from the land ahead—the high notes of hope for the long onward life and the harsher chords that promise sure failure. Then she nodded, almost fiercely. “You could absolutely save my neck! It’s in studio art—you remember I mentioned art was my thing. Tomorrow we have to draw a brilliant still life in an hour-long class.”

  Had she mentioned art? Mabry anyhow said he remembered and got to his feet. “You sit down here. I can show you something right down your line, for better or worse.” His bedroom opened off the far kitchen wall. He ducked in there and came right back with the package that had maybe fueled his peace all day.

  By the time he returned, Leah had sat and laid both hands—palm down—on the table. When Mabry stood in his former place to open the package, she actually whispered “If we don’t make a lot less noise, the two of us’ll be pitched out in the night. Beyond a certain point, my dad’s a major dragon.”

  Mabry said “He trusts me, darling—he gave me this entire bottle of whiskey.” Before it had fully sounded in the room, he knew the darling was likely wrong, this far north anyhow. And it did strike a definite silence around them. Within three seconds they’d both gone quieter than Leah could have hoped as Mabry peeled off layers of paper and tissue from the mystery object. At last he held the canvas in its heavy frame, maybe eighteen by twenty. He’d never seen it till now and had heard very little about it from his client, who was maybe dead—almost surely, if he’d gone to work as early as usual this morning.

  Nothing to do now but hold the picture at arm’s length before him, with Leah to his right. Its age was immediately clear to see, especially at the top and sides where a wide matting liner invaded the image. Especially there the linen itself was almost uniformly discolored and splotched. Mabry stared for so long that Leah finally stood again, came round and looked with him. A good deal of surface was almost the color of bitter chocolate, and Mabry’s fingers were stroking the surface, uneven as a child’s flour-and-water relief map of a country with low hills and crooked valleys, all exposed to floods and lava flows.

  At last Leah said “Is it a picture?”

  He said “It’s meant to be a picture of the château at Auvers near Paris. Or so we were told. But sorry, I’m afraid it’s no art lesson. My client heard it was a picture, a charming one at that.” Mabry sat and went on feeling the canvas, even sniffing it in spots.

  Leah was standing behind him now. “You work for a museum?”

  “Not regularly, no. I’m a private conservator—the gent you hire, if you’re rich enough to have a collection of your own or are in a hot rush to get your great-grandmother’s awful portrait cleaned before your pregnant daughter’s wedding, just to show off your few blameless ancestors to the reception guests.”

  By then Leah was closing the door between the kitchen and the rest of the house.

  Mabry said a quick “Don’t—” but his hand had just found an envelope tucked between the canvas and the frame on the under-side. It was the size that mostly accompanies gifts of flowers, big baskets of roses. He couldn’t suppress a conspiratorial “Ah-ha!” and that brought Leah back to her seat.

  With the same slow care which had marked his inventory of loss and failure, Mabry opened the envelope and drew out a stiff card folded once on itself. It was crowded, both sides, with a message in a tiny script so eccentric it might have been beamed down from deep outer space. For whatever reason, he leaned back and looked toward the ceiling with shut eyes.

  So Leah slipped the card from his fingers and whispered “May I?” When Mabry nodded, she read out softly but with perfect eyes—

  “This small treasure was painted by a twelve-year-old American, a native of Charleston, South Carolina, with M. Vincent van Gogh beside him on the evening of 27 July 1890. The picture shows the château on the edge of Auvers-sur-Oise. In the field behind the mansion, M. Vincent suffered by his own hand while the boy, unaware, continued this image which sadness prevented his ever completing. The boy’s name was Philip Adger, who—at the age of seventy-two, and sixty years after M. Vincent’s necessary death—signs his name. What he says is the plain truth, though precious.

  Philip Adger, 29 July 1950.”

  When Leah finished, Mabry was still facing upward, his eyes still shut. Now he suddenly rocked his chair back down, looked to the girl and almost whispered “Surely you just invented that.”

  As suddenly, her sense of insult flared; and her eyes and cheeks went ten degrees hotter. “I didn’t. It’s all right here in plain English.” She held the card toward him, absolute proof.

  The ring on her forefinger caught the overhead light, and the sight of it hooked in Mabry’s heart with more pain than anything earlier today. Why? Then the answer all but floored him. He’d given Frances, his now-dead wife, a literally identical ring the first evening they spent together—an inexpensive replica of a ring the Queen of England had worn at her coronation in 1952. He’d found it at a flea market in Key West two days after meeting Frances there, and he’d bargained the dealer down from twenty dollars to a little over ten. That evening, Frances joined him as promised for the sunset on Mallory Pier; and as the surrounding hippies burst into applause for the sinking sun, Mabry reached for her hand and found that the ring would only fit her right forefinger—her hands were that small from the start. Too small, he might have guessed, for the several huge handfuls he’d prove to be in the years before his repeated sad cheating forced her to ask him to set her free.

  He wouldn’t tell Leah that story now. It might do him in. So he smiled and took the card from her. When he’d studied it a moment, he said “Wonder why he wrote this in English, after sixty years in France? Who did he think could ever read it?”

  Leah’s curiosity was calming her. “God, Mr. Kincaid, what is this?”

  Mabry said “I didn’t know we had that note. But it more or less describes what my client thought he was buying—for a song, not more than five hundr
ed dollars.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “His name’s a little funny—Baxter P. Sample, Esquire. I should likely say was, unless he slept later than usual this morning.”

  Leah said, with a child’s indifferent candor, “Did he die today?”

  Mabry held out his hand for the envelope; and Leah returned it, almost reluctantly. Only then, somehow, could he answer her question. “Baxter had his office in the World Trade Center. I honestly don’t know which Tower. The second plane hit just after nine, and the first Tower fell just after ten. Unless he answers his home phone in the next few days, I’ll have to wait for a list of the missing. To the best of my knowledge, he had no family. And he made no bones about being a gay man who didn’t need a partner and whose parents were dead. I’m almost sure he was an only child too. He seemed to crave loneliness, in his after hours—just him and his pictures and a few absolutely first-class Greek marbles and vases, madly pornographic vases!”

  Luckily, the girl ignored his pornographic. She said “Oh no, it’ll take days, won’t it?—just finding all the bodies?”

  Mabry nodded, suddenly sadder than he thought he’d be for a man he’d found even more reptilian than the average lawyer—a reptile, though, who paid his bills almost before you sent them. “They won’t find many bodies. That many thousand gallons of jet fuel has cremated almost everybody who didn’t start running at the first explosion. And Leah, what started today won’t end before you die of old age.” When he looked up at her, he saw how hard his last sentence struck her—like a hand on her teeth. He took a new tack. “So far I’ve restored Mr. Sample’s smashed ceramic Tang horse. I only just mounted his very nice Rembrandt drawing of a boat on a river. And I cleaned his small Degas head of a baby boy—you hardly think of Degas and babies, much less baby boys. He heard I was spending some recent time in Rome and hired me to loop through Paris just yesterday and pick this up from a small hotel he discovered on his last trip.”