Mom Meets Her Maker

by James Yaffe

  “Do you serve them? Or—” I didn’t go on.

  “Or do I con them? Swindle them out of their hard-earned pennies? That’s what you’re meaning to say, or am I wrong?” A tightness came into his voice, and he wasn’t smiling so genially anymore. “Well, why don’t you ask them what they think about that? Why don’t you find out their opinion of me? Trouble is, you’re not really much interested in their opinion, are you? When’s the last time you ever went out of your way to exchange a word with the kind of folks I’ve got in my congregation?”

  I fidgeted in spite of myself. The son of a bitch made me sick, but there was a certain truth in what he had just said.

  “You know what their lives are like?” he said. “You know what it is to have some kind of dead-end job you’ll never get out of for the rest of your life? Unless you get laid off, and then you can’t feed your kids. And them kids’ll never go to any fancy Eastern colleges, or any colleges at all more likely. And when you get to be old and sick, what’ve you got saved up that’ll keep life from being a burden on you? You got nothing.

  “Except you got Jesus Christ. You got the comfort of coming to His church and praying to Him, and knowing He’s looking out for you and is going to make everything up to you one of these days when He gives you your eternal reward.

  “That’s what I’m bringing to these people. And your kind, with your high-toned attitude and manners, what’re you bringing them that’s better? All you want to do is take away the comfort and hope and glory that they’re holding onto. So what call you got to look down on me?”

  Before I could respond to this, his voice became genial again. “Don’t you get me wrong though. I don’t hold it against you. You been brought up with this prejudice against people in my line of work, on account of those big-time preachers on TV—those Bakkers and Swaggarts and all. You see them people on TV, and you read in the papers about all the money they’re pulling in and all the bad things they’re doing, and you get me mixed up with them. You call me ‘Hypocrite!’ same as you call them. Now don’t you tell me not.”

  I couldn’t tell him, because in fact I had applied just that word to him a few minutes ago.

  “Hypocrite!” He laughed heartily. “It’s kind of a joke you come right down to it. You see any of that big TV money coming my way? I minister to the poor, and I’m one of them!”

  He stopped laughing and put on the serious look again. “That’s all right though, I don’t hanker after any of them materialistic things. Those are the false idols of the modern world. Family and kiddies, that’s where the real riches come. I got Gabe, my only child, and his lovely wife, Patti Mae, and their five beautiful kiddies—they’re always up to something, them grandkids of mine. And my lovely wife Ruthie of thirty-three years, that’s my whole life, outside of the Lord. Here, this is my little family, you take a look now!”

  He waved at a couple of framed photographs on his desk. In one of them he had his arm around the waist of a thin pale woman, taller than he; he was grinning at her from ear to ear, and she was trying to grin back but not making a good job of it. In the other photograph, pudgy Gabe Candy and an overweight young woman were surrounded by kids; Gabe looked as if he wished he could escape from the picture.

  “Now you can’t deny that’s some family!” Candy said. “You got any family of your own, Dave?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Anyways, you can see how I’m brimming over with sympathy for that old couple, them Meyers. It’s terrible what it does to a family when one of the kids is in trouble.”

  “You could help the old couple by withdrawing your charges against their son.”

  Candy gave a sigh. “Don’t I wish I could do that! But that’s a matter of the law now. It’s right there in the Good Book. Render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Billy Graham and Pat Robertson and them others that’re on TV, you wouldn’t catch them going against the good book.”

  I looked into his smile for awhile, then I got to my feet. “I won’t take up any more of your time,” I said.

  “You take care now,” he said. “I worry about you people.”

  I tightened up. “What people?”

  “You Jewish people. You’re the most spiritual God-fearing people that ever lived. You started it all. You’re forever blessed. Why do you want to curse yourselves and head straight into damnation by turning your face away from His truth?”

  “Now listen—”

  “Now, now, no call for you to get hot under the collar, hear? I wasn’t meaning to offend you. What I always say is, God’s been patient with you for two thousand years, and He’ll go on being patient for as long as it takes. So I reckon I can be patient too.” He laughed and held out his hand. “Thanks again for dropping by.”

  I didn’t shake his hand. I nodded and muttered my goodbyes and went to the door. And then, suddenly, Mom’s voice was echoing in my ears, and I turned and said, “One last question. What time do you and Mrs. Candy ordinarily go to bed at night?”

  The sheer asininity of this question shocked him into answering it. “We go to bed nine-thirty, been doing it for thirty-three years. When you’re doing the Lord’s work, you want to get an early start. Now you just wait a second, what’s the point of—”

  I went through the door fast, shutting it behind me.

  As I crossed the long reception room, heading for the fresh air outside, the Reverend Chuck Candy’s voice throbbed after me from the TV screen: “Brothers and sisters, you know why you should read your Bible? Because that’s where God gives you His previews of the Paradise that’s waiting for you in the Eternal World. Like them previews you see in the movie theatre, telling you what the next show is going to be like. Only all the shows Jesus is planning for you, if you only believe in Him, is Academy Award winners—”

  * * *

  The office clock read a few minutes after ten when I got back, but I still had an urge for something strong to drink.

  This doesn’t happen to me often. The bottle of Scotch in my desk had been there for two years and was still almost half full. I gulped down a finger of the stuff like medicine. That’s what whiskey tastes like to me, the kind of medicine that’s so obnoxious you know it must be good for you.

  It did the job, and I got down to work. My first duty was to report on my morning to Ann, but Mabel Gibson told me she was in court and probably wouldn’t be back in the office for the rest of the afternoon. So I moved on to my second duty. I called Mom at her house.

  There was a lot of noise on the line. “Maybe I better try again,” I yelled. “Something’s wrong with this connection!”

  “It isn’t the connection,” I heard her yelling back at me. “It’s my soap opera, it keeps my mind busy while I’m polishing the silver. Give me a minute so I can find out if that nice young doctor is the father of her baby or he isn’t.”

  After the noise cleared up, I told Mom about my morning, trying as always to leave out absolutely nothing, no matter how inconsequential it seemed. I had learned on plenty of occasions in the past that for Mom inconsequential didn’t exist.

  When I got to Candy’s answer to Mom’s mysterious question—the information that he and his wife went to bed by half past nine at night—Mom gave a sigh of satisfaction. “It’s always nice, isn’t it, when what you expected turns out to be true?”

  “What’s turned out to be true?”

  “You should look for the real estate agent, that’s what. Call up Abe and Sarah Meyer and ask them. But this you naturally figured out already for yourself.”

  This is one of Mom’s favorite little games. Whenever she says, in her offhand voice, that I naturally figured out something for myself, what she means is that I couldn’t have figured it out in a million years and she’ll have to explain it to me.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “It’s exactly like the Birnbaums that lived upstairs from us in the Bronx. A couple of know-it-alls! They read a psychology book, they told everybody in the building
how to bring up their babies. When your baby starts crying in the middle of the night, they told us, it’s bad for its psychology you should lie there and hope it’ll go to sleep again. Get up right away, no matter how late it is, and put the baby in your lap and stick food in its mouth. And then this Mrs. Birnbaum finally has a baby of her own, and the first time it wakes up crying at night she and her husband lie in bed ’til it finally shuts up.”

  “What’s the point, Mom?”

  “The point is, you can tell people how they should make sacrifices for their high ideals, but maybe you feel different when you’re the one has to do the sacrificing.”

  “But what’s that got to do with Mr. and Mrs. Candy?”

  “This Candy and his wife are early go-to-bedders, their usual time is nine-thirty. Suddenly, a month ago, they put music on loudspeakers, and that music plays as loud as it can ’til one o’clock every morning. You follow me? It isn’t only Abe and Sarah Meyer that are losing their sleep from that music. It’s Candy and his wife too.”

  “Yes, I follow that. But what—”

  “What I’m asking is, why? That these people should suddenly change their sleeping habits, which are always the hardest habits for people to change, on account of they love Christmas so much—this you’ll get me to believe on the day you introduce me to the toothpaste fairy! The explanation that pops right away into my head is, they’re deliberately making a megillah next door so they can drive the Meyers crazy. For some reason they want the Meyers should sell their house and move out.”

  “How does a real estate agent come into it?”

  “I’m saying to myself, there must be easier ways to get people to sell their house—like, for instance, making them an offer to buy it from them. What the Candys are doing is only what you do when you tried the easy way already and it didn’t work. So that’s why I’m suggesting to you, call up Abe and Sarah and ask them has there been some real estate agent, a month ago maybe, that made them an offer on their house? And if there was, you should find out from this agent who’s behind the offer. And afterwards call me back. I’m curious.”

  I promised her I’d do that and started thanking her for the lead, but she interrupted me.

  “You’ll excuse me,” she said, “I have to get back to that nice young doctor and this no-good girl she’s trying to blackmail him into marrying her. Between you and me, it’s obvious the baby isn’t his. Already I’ve noticed three logical clues—”

  * * *

  As soon as Mom hung up, I called the Meyers. Abe was home, and I put my question to him.

  “Now you mention it,” he said, “some real estate fellow called me last month, he said a buyer was interested. His offer was pretty good, and he called me back three or four times, and every time it got better. I had a lot of trouble making him understand we didn’t want to sell this place at any price. We bought it for retiring into, and we love it, and we’ve been hoping some day we could pass it down to our boy. Our girl has a house for herself already, and a husband that can afford it, but Roger has no place he can call his own.”

  “What’s this real estate agent’s name?”

  “I hope I can remember. All the names out here, to tell you the truth, they sound the same to me. It was one of those Mac names. You know what I mean? MacMahon. MacArthur. Douglas MacArthur? No, that it couldn’t be, could it? MacDonald? Wait a second, it’s coming to me. McKee. Dwayne McKee.

  “I remember it clearly now, because back in New York did you ever run across anybody with a name like Dwayne?”

  As soon as Abe was off the line, I looked up Dwayne McKee in the phone book. He was there, identified as a realtor, which by some in this section of the country is considered to be the highest calling a human being can aspire to. I thought about getting him on the phone and making an appointment for after lunch, but then I decided to drop in on him right away, without any warning; sometimes you can accomplish a lot that way.

  McKee’s offices were in a little white house wedged between a five-story office building and a warehouse. Mesa Grande is full of blocks like that, where half a dozen different levels of history push and jostle against each other. Nobody ever wins, as far as I can tell, but through the years all the combatants are showing the wear and tear.

  A Christmas wreath was hanging from a nail on the front door, leading to McKee’s waiting room, and another wreath was on the door to his private office. They were small genteel wreaths; they didn’t shout out “Merry Christmas!” at you in loud vulgar tones, they whispered it discreetly.

  That’s how Dwayne McKee operated too. In Mesa Grande male real estate agents run to loudness and heartiness (female agents run to loudness and gushiness); they emphasize their points with their fists, and they do a good deal of clumping around. But McKee was soft-voiced and pussyfooting, with a habit of weighing every word before he let go of it. He could have been an accountant, or a college professor.

  “Mr. McKee,” I began, “you recently made an offer to Mr. Abraham Meyer to buy his house in the Fairhaven district. On whose behalf were you acting?”

  McKee fiddled with a paperweight on his desk blotter and gave his throat a few gentle clearings. “I’m not sure it would be ethical for me to give you that information. It’s always been my policy to respect my clients’ wishes for confidentiality.”

  “I’m no lawyer,” I said, “but I think I know what my boss would say to you about that. Under the law a defendant in a criminal case is entitled to bring out in open court all facts which might be relevant to his defense. People in possession of such facts have to testify to them under oath, unless the law allows them some specially privileged status. That means psychiatrists and priests, and lawyers whose clients have conferred with them on a professional basis. I’ve never heard that real estate agents are included on the list. The confidentiality between a real estate agent and his client may be sacred in the eyes of the Board of Realtors, but not in the eyes of the law.”

  “But if I feel a certain moral obligation—”

  “My boss’ advice, I think, would be to suppress it. Tell us what you know right now, and sign a deposition, because maybe you’ll have to testify at the trial or maybe you won’t. But if you don’t tell us what you know, I guarantee you my boss will slap you with a subpoena and you’ll stand up in court and tell the whole world what you’re now refusing to tell to me only. Or if you don’t, you’ll go to jail.”

  I said all this in a nice, easy friendly tone of voice, not trying to pressure him or argue with him but simply giving him information.

  It was enough for McKee. He came out with the whole story. Yes, he had been commissioned by a client to make an offer for the Meyers’ house, and that client was the Reverend Chuck Candy himself. Furthermore, this wasn’t the only such job he’d ever done for Candy. At the same time as he was making an offer to the Meyers, he made offers to five other families in the neighborhood. The rest of them all agreed to sell. As of a month ago Chuck Candy was the owner of their houses.

  That, he added, was a matter of public record, in the Office of Deeds and Titles, but Candy had made a point of it with the people he bought from that they shouldn’t tell anybody about the transaction.

  The Meyers wouldn’t sell, though. McKee went as high as he was empowered to go, without success, so finally, in the middle of November, Candy told him to forget the whole thing. “I’ll take care of it myself,” he said. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  He didn’t explain to McKee what he meant by that. All he said was that he didn’t think it would be more than a few weeks before old Meyer was calling McKee up and asking if his client still wanted to buy the house. At which point McKee was instructed to offer exactly half of what the very first offer had been.

  Then I asked McKee the obvious question. “Why did Candy want the Meyer house and all that other property in the neighborhood?”

  “Well, he’s never taken me into his confidence. But if I were going to make an educated guess—in the cours
e of practicing this profession, one occasionally hears rumors, bits and pieces of real estate news about various deals that might be developing behind the scenes or under the table. Well, a recent rumor I’ve heard is that a large corporation from the East is planning to build a string of shopping centers in the Southwest, one of which is to be located here in Mesa Grande. In the Fairhaven section, as a matter of fact, where the Reverend Candy and the Meyers live. Now if the Reverend Candy managed to hear that rumor too—and if it occurred to him to buy up property in that area before this Eastern corporation got started— Nothing really wrong about it, of course. I’m sure he intends to use the money for his church, not for himself personally. He’s a sincere man of God—”

  “You belong to his church, Mr. McKee?”

  “Oh no. I’m First Presbyterian. Same as my father and his father before him. The Reverend Candy’s church is more appealing to people with less stable, less solid— Well, it takes all kinds, and we’re all equal in the eyes of our Father, aren’t we?”

  I dictated an official deposition, with all this information in it, to McKee’s secretary, and McKee signed it, and the secretary and I signed it as witnesses.

  I left McKee’s office an hour after I had arrived. The front door wreath seemed to be gazing at me reproachfully: how could I behave myself so boorishly at this time of year, while the whole world is praying for peace and good will to men? Pushy and aggressive, just like all of them.

  * * *

  I had promised to call Mom back, to satisfy her curiosity, so as soon as I was in my office again I did.

  And I couldn’t keep the self-satisfaction out of my voice. “Do you realize what a terrific break this is?” I said. “Candy himself made an offer to buy the Meyers’ place! Wait till Ann throws that at him on the witness stand. It not only proves he’s been trying to provoke the Meyers so they’d move out of the neighborhood, it also makes the whole business with the gun look fishy. I’ll bet the assault charge never gets past the preliminary hearing.”