The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  Basmati rice (which, in its native Indian dialect, means joyfulness rice—a splendid prospect surely!)

  Your ice cream in my new machine (maybe coconut or something at least vaguely Antipodean—mango?)

  Espresso

  And I’ll be grateful if you’d join me at the table, Miles.

  Though Mabry had never been a poetry scholar, he noted the interesting arrangement of pronouns—Baxter’s initial and final you and, in between, a single my with a concluding me. Could four of his words be any more than random in selection; but as a good lawyer, wasn’t Baxter an eagle-eyed guard of his words? When Mabry returned it, smiling, to Miles he said “Reads like a poem.”

  Miles gave the card another long study, then slid it back into its envelope—no comment on the poem suggestion; but he did hold the envelope up before him. “I put it in this for safekeeping. Could just be his last words to me.”

  Mabry said “What happened to Carlos?” Carlos had been the Filipino cook.

  “Carlos moved on, about a month ago, more or less extra baggage.”

  “Are you a cook as well?”

  “I cooked in the army, yes—the officers’ mess. So I took on the kitchen work for Mr. Sample. I had the time really.”

  Mabry had noticed, on a couple of dinners at Baxter’s, how old-world meticulous he was with his small staff—who did what and in what uniform, at what precise moment of the evening. Surely now he could ask the last question raised by the memo card. “Did you often dine with him?”

  Miles nearly leapt across the brief space with his answer. “Oh bleeding Christ, no!—sorry, sir, I was Catholic. Lord, no. I’d never shared so much as dry toast with Mr. Sample. This would have been the first time we so much as sat down together.” His gray eyes were puzzled, but he launched a quick smile.

  Mabry smiled too. “So you’re waiting for that dinner still?” By then it was nearly six-thirty. “We could move a few yards south and eat right here.”

  If the invitation surprised Miles, he kept his calm, though at once he got to his feet and waited for Mabry to lead them into the dining room.

  By the time they were served the towering wedges of profoundly dark chocolate cake and cups of real coffee, they’d gone through virtually every subject they could possibly have shared. What hadn’t been mentioned was the picture from Paris. Did Miles know of it and of Mabry’s errand to bring it back? In any case, Mabry chose not to mention it. He said “Can a lawyer as careful as Baxter have kept the only copy of his will in his office?”

  With peculiar assurance Miles said “Oh no. There’s got to be a copy in the clerk of court’s office in whichever county he filed it in, however long ago; or so Edna says—Edna’s the clean-up and laundry maid.”

  Has this lad got expectations then? What has Baxter told him? Mabry said “He was from rural Indiana, right?”

  “Right, a Hoosier I think he called himself.”

  Baxter had worked relentlessly to iron the Hoosier out of his bones, though he took some pride in sharing his native state with James Dean. What then if the will proved to be hiding in a small Indiana county seat; and what if it had a very late codicil that mentioned Adger’s picture? Nothing to do but wait and see. Chances were likely, maybe, that the picture was nothing more arresting than two layers of work by a boy from Charleston, painting in Auvers on the afternoon Van Gogh shot himself. The underlayer is a long stretch better, though, than the building on top. And while he was fully involved with dessert, Mabry recalled the claim in Philip’s note that the building portrayed was the château behind which Van Gogh shot himself. That’ll be easy enough to check. Didn’t Van Gogh likewise paint the château?

  Miles went on in his fragile assurance. “I believe what’s needed is for the executor of Mr. Sample’s estate to take a certificate of death to the relevant courthouse and read the original copy of the will. Mr. Kincaid, I was wondering if you might be the executor?”

  It ambushed Mabry in the speculations that shamed him now. “Absolutely not.” A little too fervent. “If there’s truly no family, what friends did Baxter have in New York or anywhere else?”

  Miles reminded him one more time that he knew of nobody, that no one had phoned or made contact of any sort. And only then, on his second cup of coffee, did he say “I’m hoping you can help me then, sir. Any help could make it possible for me to stay on in the States.”

  The gravity of the young man’s face and voice jogged two words loose in Mabry’s head. “Terre Haute—Terre Haute, Indiana. As I’m sure you know, it means High Ground in French. Baxter was born and raised there, not in the country. I only just remembered.”

  Before either one of them could think what those two words might mean in Miles’s future, or to Philip Adger’s picture, a voice was at Mabry’s elbow. It was Eddie, the ever-laughing and likewise long-term bellman from Cuba. “Mr. Kincaid, your daughter’s been trying to reach you. Would you phone her at home?”

  Mabry asked Miles to wait while he went to the lobby phone, but Miles produced his own cell phone and offered that.

  In a corner of the lobby, Mabry managed the new device with remarkable ease (his debut on a cell phone); and before Charlotte answered, he had another spell of blindness. First, he was struck with double vision in both eyes. Then the left eye was entirely black for half a minute while the right eye cleared. Then both eyes began to clear. Since he’d had no trouble for three days, it hit him hard. Meanwhile, Charlotte answered calmly and Mabry tried hard to conceal his scare while he heard her out.

  Apparently Malcolm had just phoned toward the end of her workday at the disaster site and said that if Charlotte and Mabry could join her down there by nine o’clock, a policeman friend might let them through a side barricade and on down to Mabry’s street.

  The blind eye cleared in the midst of her offer, so he didn’t mention any trouble.

  And Charlotte said she’d get a cab and pick him up in front of the hotel in half an hour.

  On his way back to the table, though, Mabry feared another recurrence in his eyes downtown with the two young women—not that he doubted their competence to get him back to his own space here or the nearest hospital. He surprised himself, though, as he handed Miles’s phone back to him. “How about a quick ride downtown with me and my daughter to check on my loft? Her partner thinks she may have a way to get us through.” When Miles accepted, with almost stunned readiness, Mabry even went a step further. “For God’s sake don’t breathe a word of this; but Miles, I’m having trouble with my vision—brief spells of blindness. They could be symptoms of something bad. I’m seeing my doctor later this week, but I’ve barely mentioned the blindness to my daughter, so please keep my secret.”

  When Miles said “Right. If you feel the least patch of trouble while we’re down there, just give me a sign and I’ll stay near.”

  Good soldierly response. So that’s why I asked him. Till then, Mabry hadn’t quite understood his offer. They headed upstairs, fast, to use the john and to fetch Mabry’s coat. It was raining by then.

  In the cab Charlotte was almost invisible—all-black clothes, her long dark hair unbound and loose now at each side of her face. Yet the powerful hint of a beauty directly derived from her mother again reached Mabry in the dark. She showed no surprise or resentment at Miles’s unexpected presence but kissed her father and gave the driver an address he balked at (oddly he appeared to be an American).

  “Miss, you know I can’t take you down there.”

  She said “But you can—” Then she changed course. “Let us off at the corner of Canal Street then.”

  When he still looked unconvinced, she said “Relax, I’m the mayor’s bastard daughter; but he loves me a lot.”

  Mabry was proud to know her. He leaned back, shut both eyes—between a resourceful daughter and a strong young man—and rode where they took him. And before they were five blocks south of the public library, its recumbent lions supremely unaware that their home had been stormed, he was actually dozing. Wh
en he woke, Charlotte was out of the cab, waiting beside it; and Miles was beside him, paying the driver.

  Ambushed as Mabry had been by the sleep (he hadn’t felt tired), when he left the cab he seemed in reasonably good working order. He could see that Charlotte had pushed on well ahead and beckoned to Malc, who was standing just outside a long brown trailer. So when Charlotte came back toward him with Malcolm in tow, he could meet Malc pleasantly and introduce Miles. Then he lowered his voice to ask if Malc’s friend, the helpful policeman, would have any problem with Miles’s presence.

  Malcolm sized Miles up. Of the four of them, he was way the tallest (Malc was second). She was also dressed right—a severe black suit, a small silver brooch, her hair caught back in a dark green band—and her face was almost beautiful here, almost a mirror reflection of Charlotte, though refusing to relent now. She finally smiled. “If you scrunch up, Miles, and look a head shorter, I think you’ll be fine.” She took them all in tow, as though deciding how likely they each were to pass through a barricade; and almost every barricade restrained small clutches of the big-eyed forlorn, the families or friends of missing men and women with unbearably naked signs of their grief—handmade posters with smiling photographs of a single missing man or woman (thank God, no children), occasional hand-lettered pleas for the slightest trace of hope: Beatrice Hillman, last heard from at 8:36 a.m. on Tuesday, 9/11. We know she’s alive but may be confused. There was almost no talk, a whisper or two, a wistful smile as though any larger expressions of sadness or joy were being restrained for the dreamed-of meeting with whoever was lost.

  At last Malcolm led them to a silent corner. “We can’t get really near the chaos tonight, especially in this rain. You want to get a little closer, though, before we try to reach Mabry’s place?”

  Nobody said no.

  The laminated photo ID, which was round Malcolm’s neck, got them to the far west rim of the site—or a hundred yards short. They couldn’t see more of the chaos than the tops of a wilderness of twisted metal under golden spotlights; but they were stunned by the huge fresh emptiness, the literal tall wide vacuum where the Towers had risen.

  Mabry had to say “Christ!”

  Miles said “Who else?”

  Charlotte said “You might want to think of the Demon.”

  Yet the mild but steady drizzle on their heads and the chill air stacked around them like granite carefully sheared for buildings that would never rise were surely the perfect surroundings to close on four hapless guests of a giant absence that marked the scene of horrendous harm barely more than a week ago. Each of them—Malc, Charlotte, Mabry, Miles—felt something similar. For all the horror, though, they also felt the uncanny beauty of the light on the mist. Any sane creature might have felt itself in a space containing the lingering minds of thousands of other actual creatures—human beings—who died in fear and agony but were oddly peaceful now, this soon, this endlessly.

  Farther south, Mabry’s home block was lit only at the corners—no sign of even candles or lanterns in any windows—and the street and the sidewalks were silted way over Miles’s ankle boots when he ventured a short way toward where Mabry pointed.

  Mabry called him back. “Don’t ruin your boots, Miles. The building’s there. I can see that at least. What I need to do now is come back down here in daylight as soon as they’ll let me come.”

  Malcolm said “I think I could get you through tomorrow.”

  Charlotte looked to her father. “But will Fredo be here?”

  Mabry said “I’ve tried to phone Fredo a thousand times in the past week. His phone seems to ring but nobody answers. He lives with his mother, or so he always claims. I’ve seen her more than once, and frankly she’s gorgeous.”

  Malc said “All the phones down here ring for some reason. They’ve never sounded dead, though most of them have been. But they’re coming on slowly like everything else.”

  Having seen the dust around Miles’s boots, Mabry decided he’d move no farther than where he stood. But he looked in the general direction of his door. Assuming it was there at all, it would be a wide gray door with a tattered bumper sticker some tenant had posted years ago—Warning! I brake for hallucinations! And funny as it still seemed, he told himself he’d never enter that door again nor climb those stairs to the loft he’d known for four years—mainly good times. Apart from the scary symptoms that had chopped in on him these past few weeks, he couldn’t think why he felt so exhausted and unshakably grim. Was it simply that death hung enormous above him or, suddenly now, in actual human thousands, at his feet? Was his country’s inevitable doom somehow inscribed around him in the air they were breathing?

  And did Charlotte sense the same presence? She took her father by the left arm anyhow and whispered toward him. “Who is Miles and why is he with us?” Miles and Malcolm were ten yards beyond them in the midst of the empty street. From the moment they’d met, they’d taken to each other and were slowly trying to figure why.

  Mabry said “Miles Watson is the butler for Baxter Sample—remember him?” He’d taken his daughter to Baxter’s once when she first moved to town.

  “Oh God, yes. Didn’t Baxter work in the World Trade Center?”

  Mabry said “He did, every day, and Miles is fairly sure he’s dead. Anyhow when I spoke with Miles on the phone today, he sounded so sad that I asked him to join me for a drink at the hotel; and then you called so I couldn’t quite leave him in the lurch with nothing but a slab of chocolate cake for company.”

  That reminded Charlotte. “Did yall finish eating?”

  “All but dessert. You forestalled that.” Mabry was smiling, though.

  “Then it’ll be my treat right now.” She hadn’t eaten since a lunchtime salad with a few nuts and seeds.

  Miles plainly heard her. Still in the street, he said “Where the hell would we find a café or a bar in this devastation?”

  Malc had heard the problem. She took Miles by the elbow like a suddenly blindfolded child. “There’s one secret place.”

  So they all followed her.

  Its frail light came out to meet them through what was now a denser drizzle. And they were no sooner inside the red door than Mabry declared the inescapable. “It’s an Irish bar.” And so it all but was. Surely no more than four blocks from his loft, and in a stretch of office buildings unbroken by other shops or restaurants, it was a long dark room—an almost scarily low ceiling with bulky dark beams—and no more than six or eight humans at the bar and in the three booths. Is it real, though, or am I off in some fast dream?

  But Malc and Miles were already waving him and Charlotte toward them from a table at the back, by a well-banked fireplace; and the smiling barman said, as they passed, “The girl will attend to your needs in a moment.” My needs? Then how many years has the poor child got to haul them out to me?

  Still the girl appeared and, far from sounding like the Rose of Tralee, she had a broad stripe of New Jersey down her voice—low-pitched and friendly but, still, north Jersey. Her eyes were so dark blue that they looked almost entirely black from across the table; but when she reached Mabry, took his order for a single-malt whiskey, and heard him tell her “You’re an answer to prayer,” a smile escaped across the distance she’d attempted between them; and it made her an actual rewarding beauty near the end of a day he was feeling more than ready to finish.

  All the same, in the next half hour they’d worked through several strands of interesting talk—Mabry’s trip came first (both the European and Carolina sections, though with little reference to Tasker’s hardness). It was plainly the subject that would let them avoid the obsessions of what was already known as 9/11. Charlotte and Miles both chimed in with travel tales of their own—a trip to Scotland that Charlotte had made in the wake of her mother’s death and Miles’s account of how he came from the deep outback of rural Australia through four years of army to upscale New York in under six months. When Malc asked about his job, he gave her the simplest possible story of his work for
Baxter Sample, Baxter’s disappearance, and the mysteries that had swarmed him in the past seven days.

  The fact that Miles could still navigate his story with a likable dignity and candor and, yet, somehow spark a good deal of laughter at unexpected junctures was a help to them all. When he’d finally exhausted his stock of recent memory, though, they were silent for longer than they’d been since arriving in The Children’s Pony. That was the welcome name of the bar, though it somehow offered the unreal promise which they all felt in silence—that this was a haven that wouldn’t be here at all, not the slightest trace, if they came back tomorrow.

  Actually, it was Malcolm’s turn to talk; and she didn’t much want to. Her work was appalling and she’d had a long day. But neither Mabry nor Miles was clear on what she did down here, so she felt some pressure to fill them in. It was Miles’s forthright stare that started her. She faced him and said “Last Thursday I volunteered for what still seems an unimaginable job. When the diggers find what we’re forced to call remains—identifiable remains, however partial—then I’m one of the staff who sits in that trailer you saw and, only three or four times a day so far, phones the survivors and asks if they’d like to collect their kin. Generally they don’t force me to say that what we’ve got are just pieces of their kin; but when we do, that’s the truly hard part. They mostly just say yes and come on down. If the ones I’ve spoken with show up at the site, then I have the task of meeting with them, trying to answer any questions they have, and offering whatever help I can manage to provide.”

  Mabry realized how selfish he’d been with Charlotte last night in asking so little about Malc’s work. He’d even nearly forgot the fact that she had some sort of religious degree she’d laid aside to pursue her usual substitute teaching in ghetto schools that demanded her visible strength and force. He said to her now “You must be overwhelmed with families. How big is your staff?”

  Malc took a long swallow of her gin and water; and when she could finally speak, she choked. Then at last she laughed. “Me and generally one or two others.”