The refreshments had largely been laid out before the family left the house with the ashes in their stout Chinese urn—a handsome eighteenth-century vase which Charlotte had found, at Mabry’s request, in a SoHo shop; and which she and he had sealed with molten wax the night before. So when they all re-convened at the house, there was little work for anyone; but with no prior coaching, the younger inhabitants—Charlotte, Malc, and Marcus—pitched in with calm pleasure, replenishing plates and glasses and keeping up a quiet dishwashing concern back in the kitchen (Gwyn had brought a thousand dishes and bowls that had been her mother’s). That left the four older people to talk in the living room and out on the porch. The whole day was warm; and even as dusk began to gather, the porch was fine (with Marcus’s daughter Master running safely and silently among them).
That was where Mabry and Vance talked alone for the last twenty minutes before Vance realized he should get on the road now or plan to sleep a few hours in the swing. Soaked as he was, though, he managed to warn Mabry of an oncoming danger which he himself—Vance—had suffered not all that long ago. In a great many looping and slow-timed paragraphs, and despite the existence of his wife Betty Ann, it came to this—Both your parents are finally gone (and gone forever), you’re as alone as any old turtle in the depths of a cold pond, don’t go crazy now the way I have and turn yourself into something no two other creatures can manage to stand beside. When Mabry had thanked him for the useful alert, walked him to the car, and got him safely seated and belted in, it turned out Vance had one last thing. He reached his left arm out of the window, took Mabry’s wrist, and held it as tight as he’d held him that day in the camp swimming pool. “Son, you don’t ever plan to live in that goddamned hell hole called New York again?” When Mabry smiled but didn’t respond, Vance said “Answer me.”
Mabry said “It’s been my home a long time now.”
Vance forged ahead. “Don’t you hear me? It’s ruined—stove up and drowning, as of two weeks ago today. I was talking to Charlotte just now in the kitchen. She said if she wasn’t attached to that husky friend of hers, she’d be right down here in this old house. And Christ knows, she could fix it up now, couldn’t she?”
Mabry signed yes. Then he said what he hadn’t intended. “So could I, as I think you know. At least you know what Frances left me.”
“No I don’t.”
“In the pool hall twelve days ago, you told me you’d heard I was now well-heeled.”
Vance said “I don’t recall that but then I seldom even know what I mean, even once I say it. I must have been trying to cheer you up. You looked so damned sad. And son, you still do. Let an old friend tell you, you look in the worst shape I’ve ever seen you in. I won’t guess why, beyond the things I’ve already said; but I’m estimating you’re smart enough to know what a sane man would do at this hard point.”
Mabry said “Tell me.”
Vance said “I just have.”
Mabry said “All right. How likely are you, old underwater buddy, to be reliable all these years later?” He was partly joking, partly dead-earnest.
Vance cranked the engine, gunned it twice, turned on his radio (hillbilly music of the ancientest sort, the kind they’d both dodged steadily through their boyhoods—Homer Briarhopper and the Dixie Dudes, on fiddles so mean they could peel the last scrap of bleeding hide from a panther’s face with the panther near you, bearing the pain). Over the racket, Vance said “I never meant to tell you one single lie in my life, mine nor yours.” Again he reached for Mabry’s arm and again he pressed it. “I’ve missed you, buddy, and I trust to see you soon. If nobody else’ll guard your damned ass, just hope to find Vance. He’s right up the road.”
Mabry almost believed it, even as the car nearly ditched itself ten seconds later, a hundred yards onward. And he even felt the need of at least a few minutes alone, if he could steal the time.
But when he opened his bedroom door, Marcus was already there in the rocking chair, both eyes shut, though he still wore his jacket; and his necktie was knotted. Beyond him on the far bed lay young Master, exhausted from her play outside in a yard as safe as the sky and deep asleep but turned to face Mabry—a face no judge on Earth could find less than lovely and worth every act of human mercy the Law or life itself might afford. Yet Mabry was on the verge of quick anger to have had his room invaded, unasked, when Marcus opened a single eye and spoke out clearly. “We were waiting for you, sir.” He didn’t rise but he leaned far forward. “I’ve been guessing how hard on you these last days have been, especially today.”
Mabry sat on the edge of his bed. “Not as hard as I feared.”
“But you miss your dad already.” It didn’t seem to be a question. Had Marcus ever known a father, though? Neither he nor Audrey had mentioned one.
So Mabry told what seemed the truth. “I doubt I’ve had the time to tell how I’m going to feel. I’m not a child, you know.”
Marcus let that settle on the room’s warm air, then blared his eyes in calm amazement. “I doubt I understand you.”
Mabry laughed. “I’m a monster. I told you that before.” He craned his head and neck up and sideways. “Notice the scales—snake scales on my neck.”
At last Marcus grinned. “No you’re not. You’ve been too good to me.”
“Monsters have their personal favorites, don’t forget.”
“Apparently so.” Seated as he was, Marcus reached down and fastened a button on the jacket of his excellent blue suit.
Mabry thought he might be asking for attention to the suit, a recent purchase. He said “When you buy a suit that fine, it lasts you forever.”
Marcus said “Could we talk about something else?”
Mabry said “Shoot,” then heard how wrong that sounded.
But Marcus moved past it. “My mother said that when Father Kincaid passed, he was asking for her to get this house.”
So she’s already told him—well, natural enough. Mabry said “That’s correct, right down to the actual verb Pa used in his last few breaths. I was the only other person in the room; and the last words he ever said to me, very slow and clear, were ‘She gets a house.’ He had to mean Audrey, and this has to be the house.”
Marcus shook his head hard, as though it were drenched. Then he faced Mabry. “And you hope to stay in this room when you have to?” His face was as neutral as such an active face can be.
Any day before now, that might have angered Mabry—an assault on his actual property; it was his house still. Today, though, it might be an easy chance upward. “I’d hope to repair the whole house, yes, and stay in this room when I come on visits. Then if my illness leaves me helpless someday—it may or may not—I could dream this house would still be a place where I could get care. I’d be a paying guest of course.” The progress of those three plain sentences—they felt nonetheless like the densest argument Socrates, Plato, or St. Paul himself had laid on a listener—had drawn a smile to his lips. “—As long as I have a cent to my name.”
Marcus’s face had the calmest gravity possible in a man still so young. He said “And what then?” Next, he was almost trying to smile.
It had been three days since Mabry underwent any signs of whatever had harrowed his body in the past two months. Maybe now he was free. Maybe his father’s passing (in Marcus’s ongoing effort to dodge the word death) had somehow carried his son’s sickness with him. Not a chance on Earth. Get real again, boy. Taking the remains of his latest smile with him, Mabry got to his feet and walked toward the mantel. No trouble with his legs, no audible jangling. And his vision was clear.
He went to the center, took up Philip’s picture (first reaching for the envelope on the back again) and walked toward Marcus. Marc also stood but Mabry said “Please sit back a minute.” Then he said “I don’t think this is too dusty for your perfect suit.” He wasn’t mocking the young man, who was slightly tense; but he took real care as he handed Marcus both the picture and the small envelope. “If you read the note first, I t
hink you’ll enjoy it.”
Marcus must have read it through two or three times before he looked up. “I had no idea you got this too—same time as the picture?”
Mabry said “Yes, but of course I wasn’t the one that got it. It belongs to the man who hired me to loop through Paris and collect it.”
“You figure he’s dead, though?”
“All but certainly.”
“So it’s yours forever now.” Marcus rubbed a clean hand across the muddy face of the canvas. Then he grinned up at Mabry, who was still standing near. “It’s kind of an ugly sucker, ain’t it?”
Mabry laughed and sat back on the foot of his bed. “Young Philip was surely no Vincent, was he?”
Marcus waited a good while, staring at the surface as though it would yield some useful fact. Then he said “But he knew poor Vincent Van Gogh—think about that!”
Mabry nodded. “So it seems. I doubt he’s lying. He had nothing to gain by saying what he does on the back of a picture he had to know would lie in a cellar or be flung in a furnace.” He pointed to the note in Marcus’s lap.
Marcus said “Course not.”
Then Mabry had to say what came upon him as a potent demand. “Marc, you must know this—that picture’s not mine now and may never be.”
Marcus looked rightly puzzled.
“Even if Baxter Sample is dead deep under those ruins, there may yet be some distant relation who’ll eventually rise up to claim his things. He may have left a will. None’s been found yet but that doesn’t mean there’s not one somewhere. He was a fine lawyer, never forget.”
Marcus said “Then all the more reason to think he died with no arrangements. Don’t they say the cobbler’s children always lack shoes?”
It seemed a strange claim, if proverbial, till Mabry thought it through. Then it had its own strength. When he looked back to Marcus, the clean hand was stroking the surface again. Mabry had to say “Careful. No matter how clean any human hand is, it’s got its own oils.”
Marcus lifted his hand but continued to stare. “Mr. Van Gogh is bound to have touched this—don’t you think?”
Mabry said “What makes you feel that?”
Still not looking up, Marcus said “Oh, just my sappy old soul, I guess. I want to believe it.”
Mabry said “Me too. It’s likely what made me take up my job—all the graduate work I had to do, all the absolute silent lonely time I spend on one small canvas even now, more than twenty years into a career.”
Marcus stood, walked over, and laid the picture by Mabry on the bed, then returned to his rocker. When he spoke, he slid into a black minstrel comic voice. “Boss man, I sho hopes it’s yours someday.”
Mabry took the same voice—“Thank you, Rastus”—then knew their volume might well wake Master from the sleep she needed. He returned to his own voice and spoke very softly. “I can hope it will be mine for some brief day and, after that, yours. I can hope for it all.” He stood from the actual iron bed, took Philip Adger’s picture, and moved toward the mantel—his eyes swam fiercely with wild gold spikes of light and a deep seizing darkness—but he managed to set the frame in its place, this time on the left edge with Marcus’s portrait of the two of them four feet to the right. In their dark blue world, they looked even better than they had last week when Marcus produced the picture, a welcome surprise.
His eyes were still beaming, swimming, flaring; but Mabry turned then slowly toward the door, laid a hand on Marcus’s shoulder as he passed, and headed for the kitchen, through a house he had owned for a few hours only (in fact had never owned, since the deed was still in his father’s name). He was aiming to see mainly Audrey and Charlotte and Gwyneth Williams, the friends he’d likely need even more than the young Marcus Thornton whom he’d just now left alone with a child as lovely as daylight and a picture that might prove hopeful down the road or might be no more than what it seemed to some people now—a dim souvenir of a lone American boy’s hard afternoon by his easel in a field in France, long years ago, when a painter who’d been mildly kind to the boy had excused himself, walked straight on past the house the boy was trying to paint on a cast-off canvas and shot himself, then staggered back to his room above the café near where the boy’s own prosperous parents had rented rooms and died with a loving younger brother beside him only two days later, having sold one painting in his solitary life.
Reynolds Price
Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is now James B. Duke Professor of English. Fifty of his short stories, ranging from his first work in the early 1950s to the early 1990s, were published in his Collected Stories in 1993. His first novel, A Long and Happy Life, was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award. His sixth novel, Kate Vaiden, was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest’s Son is his fourteenth. Six of the novels take their places in separate trilogies concerned with two families—the Mustians of eastern North Carolina and the Mayfields of eastern Carolina and the mountains of Virginia. Among his thirty-six volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; his work has been translated into seventeen languages.
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