by J.F. Powers
“Just since I retired.” Mr Zimmerman said he wished now he’d retired sooner, and had started reading and writing sooner. “But I’ve still got some good years left.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“Well, we’d better be getting back.” Mr Zimmerman carried the carbon copy into the other room.
Father Urban stood up and moved over to a large screened-in window. The trees, with their crisp green needles, were beautiful, and somewhere a bird was singing. “Nice here, Mr Zimmerman.”
“I have to have a lot of quiet,” said Mr Zimmerman, from the other room. He came out of it with more carbon copies—a great many more. “You may want to take a look at these. And maybe we’d better bring this along, too.”
So, with Mr Zimmerman carrying the carbon copies, and Father Urban carrying the heavy scrapbook, they returned to the chairs and the lake. Mrs Zimmerman was there and brought Father Urban, over his good-natured protests, another bumper of Icy-ade.
Before Father Urban had got around to the carbon copies, which lay on the grass by his chair, two couples arrived who looked a lot like the Zimmermans. They came from cottages near by, and bearing food by which Father Urban later remembered them, since their names didn’t register with him. A few minutes later, a man and a dog approached from the other direction—“Oh, oh,” said somebody. The man and the dog passed on up the beach, the man waving but not as though he expected much response. There was none. Soon the man and the dog returned, and this time they walked up to the chairs. The man was about Father Urban’s age but not in his condition. The dog was an aged Airedale, a breed you seldom saw nowadays, and was the color of dark chocolate that had melted and hardened and lightened. Both man and dog were greeted by the Zimmermans and their friends—Father Urban sensed it was because there was nothing else to do—and the dog came off a little better than the man. When they’d passed by before, Father Urban had felt the man’s eye on him, picking him out, and now the man made straight for him. After they were introduced to each other, the man stayed with him.
“St Clement’s Hill,” he said. His name was Studley and he smelled of beer. “Isn’t that where they have this new golf course?”
“Yes, we do.”
“You have an air strip, too, don’t you?”
Father Urban smiled. “No, I’m afraid not.”
“Don’t you have some kind of tie-in with Flying Farmers?”
“No.”
“No air strip?”
Father Urban just looked at him.
“Somebody said you did,” said Mr Studley, not weakening.
Father Urban gazed away for a moment. All around him people were drinking from tinkling tankards, including Mr and Mrs Zimmerman who, it seemed, hadn’t wanted to get too early a start. “No,” said Father Urban, coming back to Mr Studley, who still appeared skeptical. “Not that I know of, and I was there yesterday.”
Mr Studley laughed. He could have used a bra under his knit sport shirt. “Well, I’ll take your word for it. Say, I hope you won’t mind if I don’t call you ‘Father.’”
Not everybody had been listening before. Now everybody was—and scarcely a tinkle was heard from the tankards.
“That’s entirely up to you, Mr Studley,” said Father Urban.
“I’m not a Catholic myself. I’m not much of anything, as a matter of fact. But you know what it says in the Good Book. ‘Call no man thy father.’”
“Yes. Well, it’s O.K. with me.”
“I like your style, sir. You’re not from around here, I’d guess.”
“For many years I traveled out of Chicago,” Father Urban said. “But I’m proud to call Minnesota my home now, Mr Studley.”
This appeared to make little or no difference to Mr Studley, but then Father Urban hadn’t been talking to him so much as to the others—and they’d liked it fine.
“I see you don’t wear the collar, Mr Urban.”
Father Urban could do without the “Father,” but that didn’t mean he’d take “Mister.” Nothing was better than that. “Up in the car,” he said slowly, “with my coat.”
“How’s Myra, Grover?” said the woman who’d brought the shortcake. Her husband had carried the strawberries, still in their boxes.
“Still in Cleveland,” said Mr Studley, not paying much attention to the question. He was gazing up toward the cottage. “Say, I’d like to have a look at that,” he said.
“The car? Why, yes,” said Father Urban. Immediately, he moved off with Mr Studley and the dog, thinking he was doing everybody a favor.
After walking around the car a couple of times, and feeling it here and there, Mr Studley opened the door on the driver’s side.
“Go ahead. Get in,” said Father Urban. He knew how Mr Studley felt.
“Sure you don’t mind?” said Mr Studley, getting in. He settled himself into the leather. “Gee, wish I had a chair like this.”
Father Urban smiled. He knew what Mr Studley meant. The leather was very kind to a man.
“Oh, oh,” said Mr Studley, looking at the dog. “Now he wants in.”
Father Urban laughed.
“Would you mind?” said Mr Studley.
Father Urban looked at the dog. It really did want to get in, and so Father Urban removed his coat, rabat, and collar from the other seat.
“Sure you don’t mind?” said Mr Studley, reaching over and opening the door for the dog.
“Not a-tall.”
Wrong as they were for it, Mr Studley and the dog, whose name was Frank, looked right at home in the car. “What’d it cost you?” said Mr Studley.
“Oh, it’s not mine. I’m just using it.”
“Do you take a drink?” said Mr Studley.
“Sometimes.”
“C’mon over to my place, and I’ll make you a real drink. I’m right over here.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“C’mon. I’d like you to see my place,” said Mr Studley, as though it were little enough to ask.
“Well, I might do that,” said Father Urban. He was thinking he’d be doing everybody a bigger favor if he got Mr Studley back to his place. Probably there were others who wanted to have a look at the car, and perhaps talk to Father Urban, but wouldn’t feel free to do so with Mr Studley around. They’d all more or less gone underground when he appeared among them.
“My place,” said Mr Studley, when they came to it—a place much like the Zimmermans’—but they went on past it, down to the lake. “Here’s what I wanted you to see,” Mr Studley said, “and if you’re the man I think you are, you won’t laugh.”
Father Urban didn’t laugh when, after some difficulty, Mr Studley opened up a garage-like affair, opened it up to the sky, and said, “My plane.”
Mr Studley’s plane was a World War I four-winged machine, bright red, with a number of heraldic devices painted on it: dice which had come up seven; the ace of spades; the leg of a female, ending in a high-heeled shoe; and a mustachioed man in a high silk hat on the band of which appeared the words “SIR SATAN.”
“You were in the First War?” Father Urban asked.
“I would’ve been if it’d lasted another month.”
Father Urban, inspecting the plane’s rear end, noted a Civil Defense sticker. “In working order?”
“It very soon could be.”
“You’d push it down to the water—is that it?”
“That’s right. Those are the floats you see over there.”
“And you’d just attach those?”
“That’s right. I know all about it.”
“What’s your business, Mr Studley?”
“I’m retired, unless, of course . . .”
“Of course.”
Mr Studley climbed into the front cockpit. He put on a helmet and lowered the goggles. “Seems a long time ago,” he said. “C’mon up.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“C’mon. I was in yours.”
It took Father Urban a moment or two to
understand what Mr Studley meant. “All right.” When Father Urban started to get into the plane, though, the dog growled.
“Frank!” yelled Mr Studley, and Frank laid off.
Father Urban found another helmet-and-goggles in the rear cockpit, but he didn’t put them on. They smelled strongly of Frank, as did the whole rear cockpit, and Father Urban very soon left it.
“Now you have to sign my guest book,” said Mr Studley, when he touched down.
Father Urban, tempted to sign himself “Father,” wrote “Rev.” and hoped that was all right.
“Now I’ll show you something,” said Mr Studley. “Here, here, here,” he said, pointing to other names in the guest book. “And over here. And here. All priests like yourself.”
“You met them over at Zimmerman’s?”
“Not all of ’em. Now how about that drink?”
“No, I don’t think so. Thanks.”
“Well, you don’t mind if I have one, do you?”
“Not a-tall. Go right ahead. But I have to get back.”
“I’ll walk you back.”
“No, that’s all right. Hadn’t you better close that?” The door of the hangar rolled up and back in such a way that the plane was exposed to the sky. “It could rain.”
“Think so?” Mr Studley gazed up at the sky. “Oh hell, let it go. And I’ll walk you back. I took you away from ’em, so I’ll take you back to ’em. They all hate me. Even the women. Did anybody say anything?”
“No,” said Father Urban.
When he arrived back at the chairs with Mr Studley (“Hell, what’s wrong with sitting on the grass?”), conversation dropped off to practically nothing. Once again Mrs Zimmerman tried to bring Father Urban a tankard of Icy-ade (Mr Studley wasn’t even approached on the subject), but this time Father Urban was firm with her, in a nice way. Then she brought him the guest book which, however, he didn’t sign, since Mrs Zimmerman said, “Maybe you’d like to write more than just your name. Will you stay and eat?” Father Urban had thought eating was included in his invitation, but, seeing a chance to get his schedule back into a fluid state, which was how he preferred it, he said, “Well, I don’t know about that.” “There’s plenty.” “Well, we’ll see, Mrs Zimmerman.”
Despite the presence of Mr Studley, conversation was picking up, continuing, it seemed, on the same lines as earlier. It had to do with that morning’s gospel.
The gospel had dealt with the steward who called his master’s debtors together, and, writing off fifty barrels of oil here, and twenty quarters of wheat there, since he knew he’d soon be out of work and in need of friends, had, oddly enough, won the praise of his rich master. A difficult text, Luke XVI, 1–9, and for some years now, when the Sunday for it rolled around, Father Urban had read it, yes, but had cut back to I Paralipomenon in the Old Testament where you got substantially the same idea (the advisability of using our present situation as a preparation for our next one) in a much more acceptable form. Father Urban’s sermon on the financing of the temple—“And they gave for the works of the house of the Lord: of gold, five thousand talents, and ten thousand solids: of silver, ten thousand talents: and of brass, eighteen thousand talents: and of iron, a hundred thousand talents,” and so on—was one of his better jobs.
At first, listening to Mr Zimmerman and the other two men—to whom their wives were listening—Father Urban had thought they were talking about him and his sermon. They were not. Nobody, in fact, had mentioned Father Urban’s sermon. The truth was Mr Zimmerman hadn’t mentioned it when he issued the invitation to the picnic. There was now some doubt in Father Urban’s mind that the one had led to the other. Mr Zimmerman, like many before him, was worried about Luke XVI, 1–9.
“Say you’re a rich man,” he said to the man whose wife had brought the potato salad, “and I’m just somebody that works for you at the lumberyard, but I’m in your bookkeeping department, and I go around to various people that owe you and your firm money and I discount this bill so much and that one so much—I don’t get it.”
“Our Lord,” said Father Urban, “isn’t commending the steward for cooking the books, or even condoning this. You’ll note this man is called ‘the unjust steward.’”
“Yes, I know . . .” said Mr Zimmerman, but he still didn’t like it.
“And I think you’ll find ‘unjust’ means ‘inaccurate,’” said Mr Studley. “There’s a difference, you know.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Father Urban. “I know there’s a difference, yes.” Where they were now, Father Urban didn’t know. Mr Studley not only made it seem that he and Father Urban were together but that he, Mr Studley, was, of the two of them, the sounder man.
Mr Studley yanked up a nice handful of Mr Zimmerman’s grass and threw it away. “Look at it the right way or not at all,” he said. “You people are always looking at things from your own viewpoint. You’ll never get it that way, I can tell you. Look at it from the employee’s viewpoint. Christ was always on the side of the employee—the little guy. That’s what Christianity means. That’s what all your great religions mean. That’s why we fought two major wars. Ask him,” said Mr Studley, referring to Father Urban.
But before Father Urban could clarify Mr Studley’s thought, he had to clarify his own, and before he was able to do this, Mr Studley was on again, pulling grass. “Zim, if this rich man could look at it like that, why can’t you? It’s not costing you.” And with that, Mr Studley lay back on the grass and shut his eyes. “O.K., Zim,” he said, when Mr Zimmerman started to say something. Mr Zimmerman started again.
“If somebody in bookkeeping tried something like that on me, I’d prosecute. I’d have to—or set a bad example. See what I mean? That’s my point,” he said, looking to his two friends for support.
“I’ll grant it’s a difficult text,” said Father Urban. “But rightly understood . . .” he said, and let it go at that. Father Urban had some ideas of his own about this text. Our Lord, in Father Urban’s opinion, had been dealing with some pretty rough customers out there in the Middle East, the kind of people who wouldn’t have been at all distressed by the steward’s conduct—either that or people had been a whole lot brighter in biblical times, able to grasp a distinction then. It had even entered Father Urban’s mind that Our Lord, who, after all, knew what people were like, may have been a little tired on the day he spoke this parable. Sometimes, too, when you were trying to get through to a cold congregation, it was a case of any port in a storm. You’d say things that wouldn’t stand up very well in print.
The man whose wife had brought the shortcake said, “Father Tom just skips it. ‘Every year,’ he says, ‘I come to it and I just skip it. It does more harm than good,’ he says. ‘So I just skip it.’”
“Who’s Father Tom?” said Father Urban.
“I think I’ve met him,” said Mr Studley, from his prone position.
“Our pastor. He just skips it,” said Mr Shortcake.
“What about the fella that’s going along with the other fella?” said Mr Zimmerman. “He’s just as bad as the other fella.”
“Too bad Father Prosperus isn’t here. He’d be able to tell us a thing or two, I’ll bet.” This from Mrs Potato Salad.
“I guess he could at that,” said Mrs Zimmerman.
“Who’s Father Prosperus?” said Father Urban.
“Our son,” said Mrs Zimmerman.
“Your son’s a priest?”
“Yes, he’s a Dolomite father,” said Mrs Zimmerman.
“At St Ludwig’s?”
“No, at St Hedwig’s. He’s chaplain there.”
That did it for Father Urban. There hadn’t been much reason before to hope that Mr Zimmerman would make a benefactor for the Order of St Clement. Now there was none.
Mr Studley suddenly sat up and said, “C’mon over to my place, and I’ll make you a real drink.”
“No, thanks,” said Father Urban. “But I don’t mind if you have one.”
“Maybe later,�
�� said Mr Studley, and lay down again, this time with a piece of his stomach showing.
All around Father Urban the discussion went on.
“Well now . . .” he said, trying, in a nice way, to end it, but nobody—nobody, with the possible exception of Mr Studley—was listening to him. Mrs Zimmerman was thoroughly involved now. Employed by Mr Zimmerman for many years as a stewardess, and hearing that she was soon to be let go, she had written off fifty percent of a debt owing to her master, a matter of fifty barrels, and naturally he was sore about it, and the party Mrs Zimmerman had accommodated—Mrs Shortcake—was also sore, saying nothing about her part in the deal. Others were in similar difficulties.
“I say . . .” said Father Urban, but nobody, unless Mr Studley, heard him. Father Urban glanced at the sky and signed the guest book with a flourish—just signed it. Then there was a tremendous clap of thunder, and the sky, which had been looking more and more like slate, shook, and the wind ran through the oaks, whipping up the green-gray backsides of leaves, and a dozen large raindrops hit the top of the picnic table all at the same time.
Mr Zimmerman ran to the picnic table for his scrapbook in which the carbon copies had been placed for safekeeping, fortunately. Mr Studley rose up in alarm and was last seen running down the beach, heading for his place. And Father Urban—crying, “I’d love to stay, but really I can’t,” to Mrs Zimmerman and the other women, who, of course, had run for the food on the picnic table—ran to the little Barracuda and raised its little fawn roof. But first he got rid of Frank, who had been sitting on his coat.
Halfway to Ostergothenburg, the rain let up, and then it stopped entirely. On the other side of town, on the highway leading home to the Hill, the Mellon came up behind the little Barracuda at the last stoplight and nudged it. There were girls in the Mellon now, Father Urban saw, and he also saw, as he hadn’t before, that the Mellon had no lower teeth—just a dark gap there.