“Married? Sure.” Charlie suddenly regarded him with shock. “You don’t think I’d invite you down here—I mean, you a priest and all…?”
Father Walther realized he should have sensed something was up when Margaret told him his old friend had telephoned. Charlie had never been one for purely social calls. Even those star parties of their adolescence were only forums for the latest crisis in his intellectual or love life. But that particular evening several years back when Charlie had dropped by his rectory the curate had just finished putting in a couple hours in a stuffy confession box and hadn’t been in a mood to inquire too curiously about his friend’s marital state.
“So, now you’re starting over.”
“That’s right.” They had reached the stretch of beach opposite Charlie’s house. The toddler and mother were gone. “Although I guess I prefer to see it as something more original. Look here,” he added, paying no mind to the icy water lapping at his ankles, “you haven’t said you don’t approve. But you’re wearing the same sanctimonious look you used to put on when we were kids. I know it’s your job to represent the church’s position. But I’m not talking to you as a priest, man.”
Charlie’s impatience came as less of a surprise than did his accusation of sanctimoniousness. It had never occurred to young Richard Walther that his adolescent homilies were resented or, worse, not taken seriously.
“I can’t believe one thing with my collar on and another when it’s off. I am your friend, Charlie. But I’m still a priest. I can’t change that.”
The waves broke noisily beside them, angry like the flush on Charlie’s face. He had never liked the answers Richard had given him, whether about extraterrestrials (redeemed or prelapsarian?) or sexual morality. He had always insisted on a rational explanation based purely on empirical evidence. But there was never anything logical about his own emotions. The young priest-to-be once watched him pound a dead log to pulp with a tire iron during a fit of frustration brought on by Richard’s insistence that there was indeed a hell. Charlie was one of those who thought Vatican II had rewritten canon law to conform with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. As it turned out, he had plenty of company in that view, even among clergy.
Father Walther had hoped to turn this conversation in a direction very different from the one it had taken. He had hoped to step out of his clerical persona, to become just an ordinary man taking a walk with an old friend. But that was not to be. The world seemed conspiring to keep him in a roman collar, even when he was more than willing to trade it for a sport shirt.
The tide was coming in. The eastern horizon was dusty purple. A tanker’s silhouette seemed painted there.
“Look, I didn’t mean to fly off the handle. I understand you can’t say what I did was right. Okay. But I don’t want this to make any difference about your staying on. I promise not to bring the subject up again.”
The priest regarded him without rancor. Charlie’s apologies had always been endearing, no matter how outrageous his behavior.
“You bring up any subject you please. We don’t have to agree about everything. God knows we never did in the past. Do you remember all those times you froze my ass off just so you could look at the moons of Mercury?”
“Mercury doesn’t have any moons, Richie. But just wait till it’s dark. With my new reflector I can show you stars millions of light-years away.”
“Do little green men live there?”
“Probably. Statistically, it’s almost a certainty.”
“You used to be more definitive.”
By now they were crossing the last dune between the house and the beach. Sylvia waved to them from the second-story balcony where she had set up a charcoal grill. Charlie waved back. So did Father Walther.
As they climbed the narrow wooden staircase, they were both laughing about their attempts to draw Frank Willet into their religious and astronomical debates.
“What’s Frank doing now?” Charlie asked.
“Accounting, the last I heard. He lives near the Water Gap. But that information is eight or nine years old.” It was hard to believe a decade had passed without his seeing someone with whom he had shared the entire first half of his life. “We should have a reunion. You and me, Frank, Tommy Giordano, John McCoy. We could make a night of it.” They entered the kitchen, where Sylvia was boiling water in a spaghetti pot. He winked at the new Mrs. Weeks. It was strictly a clerical wink, an ocular nudge in the ribs, meant to offer reassurance. He felt sorry for her. She had to have been going through hell earlier.
Then Charlie said, “Richie, I’d like you to meet Rosalie Sykes.”
A young woman in a two-piece bathing suit—she looked at first like a teenager, but he quickly advanced that estimate by several years—was sitting near the glass doors leading out to the terrace. She was slim, with brown hair the same shade as Sylvia’s, but better cared-for. Her skin showed the deep tan of a sun-worshipper. The glare from the glass doors, closed for the sake of the air-conditioning, prevented him from seeing her face clearly, but it seemed pretty in a way Sylvia’s was not.
“Hi,” he replied to her indifferent greeting. “Do you live in the neighborhood?” He wasn’t sure if “neighborhood” was the correct way to describe the scattering of custom-built homes between the highway and beach, but experience had taught him that when he met someone for the first time it wasn’t so much what he said as that he did in fact say something. People looked to a priest to get the conversational ball rolling. But the young woman merely stared back at him as if he had made a bizarre, even indecent suggestion.
“Rosalie’s my cousin,” Sylvia told him. “She’s staying with us for a few days. She was up on the deck when you got here.”
He felt a twinge of the same resentment he had felt when Charlie told him of his divorce and remarriage. He didn’t mind sharing the place with another houseguest (however anti-social this one seemed), but why couldn’t Charlie have said something about someone else staying over? There wasn’t even a proper place for her to sleep unless there was a third bedroom tucked away somewhere. He wondered how many other surprises Charlie had in store.
A table was set up next to the terrace doors to catch the evening breeze. Charlie sat at one end, leaving the priest and Rosalie to face each other. Sylvia was seeing to the corn. The sky was already dark at the horizon. There hadn’t been much of a horizon to see at Fords Pointe. The town of Seaside obscured it to the east, and a scrub forest blocked the western view.
Rosalie had changed to shorts and a halter top. She had also pinned her hair up more securely. A pair of gold loops dangled from her ears. Her complexion had the glow of a woman who spent a lot of time out of doors in all seasons of the year.
“My, my,” she remarked as Sylvia lit two long white candles.
“We like to put on airs every now and then,” the hostess said, blowing out the wooden kitchen match. “I only hope the wind doesn’t put them out. You don’t mind, do you?” she added incongruously.
Father Walther realized it was to him she had addressed the question.
“As long as they’re not blessed.”
“The wine,” Charlie snapped. “It’s not still in the freezer?”
The refrigerator door hissed open. Bottles clinked together.
“How often can you get away, Father?” Rosalie asked.
“’Richie’,” he insisted. “In fact,” he said, turning halfway toward the kitchen where Sylvia was scalding herself with corn water, “I wish everyone would try to forget I’m a priest. After all, we don’t defer to Charlie here because he subscribes to the engineering persuasion.”
“No reason you shouldn’t,” Charlie replied, struggling with a cork that had come apart in the bottle. “Without us engineers you’d all still be in caves.”
“Really?”
“Damn straight,” he said, digging at the stuck cork with a knife. The phrase had been his favorite twenty years ago.
“You don’t mean to imply that if
it were up to Father Richie here we still would be living in caves?”
“God-damn cork.”
Father Walther regarded the woman carefully. This conversational mood was certainly preferable to her earlier sulk, just as her present attire was more appropriate to mixed company. But there was still an edge to her that he couldn’t fathom.
“Just ‘Richie’ will do,” he reiterated. “Or ‘Richard,’ if you prefer.”
Her eyes met his directly for the first time. They looked sea-green in the candlelight.
“And if I don’t—prefer, I mean, to forget you’re a priest?”
The wine was good—surprisingly so, since he had never known Charlie to drink anything but beer, and that with a total lack of discrimination. The breeze did blow out the candles, but Sylvia doggedly relit them as if electricity had not yet been invented. By the time they reached dessert, the wind had died. The surf pounded emphatically.
“Cigar?” Charlie asked, producing a boxful. “Can’t give you lung cancer. Only lip- and mouth-.”
Father Walther accepted one.
“You haven’t answered my question,” Rosalie reminded as he blew smoke into a current of air. He was enjoying the glow of the wine and good food, marveling at the abrupt changes of fortune he had been subject to in the last few days. What would these people make of his bizarre experiences as a hitchhiker, of his nostalgic whim to revisit his adolescent haunt? But the sardonic sparkle in Rosalie’s eyes brought him back to the present.
“How often do you have a chance to get away—from your congregation, or whatever you call it?”
He rolled the ash of his cigar on the edge of an ashtray.
“Two weeks in the summer and a couple days at Christmas. I’m not sure I think of it as ‘getting away,’ though God knows I need some time off by the time August rolls around. Being a curate isn’t back-breaking work, like digging ditches or...engineering,” he added with a grin, “but it takes its toll.”
“Nothing back-breaking about engineering,” Charlie said, examining the shaft of his cigar. “Boring, yes.”
Father Walther regarded him curiously. He had presumed Charlie was happy in his profession if for no other reason than because it afforded him unlimited opportunity to play with slide rules—or whatever they used nowadays.
“How do you think of it?” Rosalie persisted.
Charlie reached for what was left of the wine. Father Walther covered his glass to indicate he had had enough.
Rosalie allowed the host to refill her own.
“Maybe I’m just quibbling,” he said.
Her eyes hardened. Her smile took on a chill. “Not at all. I’m curious to know how you see your profession. Do you consider it a form of, say, social work?”
“Well, no.... Although there are elements of social work about it,” he added with a smile for his hosts, who looked benumbed by the subject. “What I mean is, it’s primarily spiritual—a ministry to the soul as opposed to, say, a doctor’s ministering to the body. It’s...I’m sorry, but I don’t know if you’re Catholic or not. Not that it matters. I just don’t know if you’re familiar with the terms...”
“Try me.”
There was mischief in her eyes. A mocking grin twitched at the corners of her mouth, which looked very red in the candlelight. He was beginning to sound pompous even to himself, but he seemed incapable of talking any other way.
“Well, we work through the sacraments: Penance, or confession. The Eucharist. Baptism. A social worker, from what I know, deals more with the more temporal needs of his patient.” He reached for his wine glass, which he realized too late he had declined to have refilled. “When it comes right down to it, most of what I do is routine, like any other job. “What,” he asked, his usually pliable smile refusing to bend, “is your own line of work?”
Rosalie regarded him with amusement.
“I’m a hospital administrator.”
He had dealt with priest-baiters before. Usually they were lapsed Catholics trying to salve guilty consciences. When they were allowed to vent their anger they usually ended by asking to have their confessions heard, claiming that he was not like the rest of the clergy, and if only other priests were as liberal-minded... But they never relented when there was an audience present. It all seemed to boil down to some trauma in their religious upbringing—too much emphasis on the church’s unique path to salvation; too much harping about masturbation just when their bodies were becoming sexual furnaces. And it was reassurance they needed that they would not again be humiliated before they could agree again to accept even a modicum of the church’s authority. Privately, though, a bit of patience went a long way toward reaching the lost soul that hadn’t known a real home since it had turned its back on the faith.
Rosalie showed signs of being one of these fallen-away Catholics, he decided as the conversation turned to other topics. She had been disillusioned by men or by sex or by both, but not disillusioned enough not to still feel nostalgic about old-fashioned values. If she was indeed an ex-Catholic she was also probably resentful about assenting to a morality she saw largely as the concoction of celibate males.
Sylvia suggested a walk on the beach. By now the narrow boardwalk, obscured by sand during the day, was totally invisible. Charlie had to lead the way with a flashlight. The only other illumination was from a neighbor’s living room. This was midweek, Father Walther reminded himself. Even Fords Pointe had been deserted on weekdays.
They were not alone. Someone was surf-casting just inside the breakers, his high boots glistening like shark fins. Someone else was running a dog. “There’s the Milky Way,” Charlie announced, arching his neck and pointing. Father Walther looked up at the riot of stars. He had forgotten how full the sky looked when there was no city glare. A band of faint whiteness indicated Charlie’s Milky Way.
Rosalie was also bent-necked for the view. She had taken off her sandals to go barefoot in the wet sand. She had declined a sweater for her halter top but had put a wrap-around skirt over her shorts. Sylvia was more interested in shells than celestial splendor.
“You are now looking at the heart of the galaxy,” Charlie declared as if he were a voice-over for a planetarium show.
“The heart of which galaxy?” Everything had always looked the same to Richard Walther—planets, stars, satellites. Except the sunlight and shadow on the mountain peaks of the moon.
“This galaxy, of course. Do you suppose you could see some other galaxy so plainly?”
Charlie’s tone was that of a petulant teacher with a slow student.
“You mean the Earth isn’t located at the middle of the galaxy?”
“Of course not. My God, Richie. Where have you been?” “Actually, we didn’t get all that much astronomy in the seminary.”
“I’ll say you didn’t. The Earth is on the galaxy’s outer rim. That’s why we can stand here and look into it.”
“If we were able to look in the opposite direction,” Rosalie asked, her voice sounding as disembodied as her silhouette, “could we see into the space between the galaxies?”
“Theoretically. But you’d have to look through sunlight—not the easiest thing to do.”
“Do you think there are creatures like us out there, wondering if anyone exists besides themselves?”
“No reason to suppose there aren’t.”
“Statistically,” Father Walther put in.
“That’s right. Anything wrong with statistics?”
“I only meant nothing is proven until some of those little green men show up in Paramus.”
“Still Richie the Skeptic.”
Father Walther was aware he was playing to Rosalie the way he sometimes played to school children, coyly soliciting their attention so he could illustrate the meaning of a Gospel parable or catechism response. “Isn’t skepticism a requisite of good science?”
Charlie shuffled his feet irritably.
“The laws of probability tell us thousands, maybe millions of stars in our galaxy
have planets capable of supporting life as we know it. That’s a scientific fact.”
“No, it’s a probability. I thought that’s what science is all about: distinguishing fact from hypothesis.”
They were reenacting an old scene, though of course Rosalie could not realize it. They used to spend entire nights arguing such matters. He waited now for the familiar retort. When Charlie replied angrily, “God damn it, Richie. Why can’t you just stick to your religious hocus-pocus?” he felt as pained as if his own blood had reprimanded him.
“I didn’t mean to make him angry,” he apologized to Sylvia after her husband had stormed off. “We used to argue all the time about these things.”
“It’s alright,” she said, her skirt full of jetsam she had been collecting while the others were contemplating the galaxy. Her full thighs were plainly exposed beneath her cache of shells and driftwood, but she was no more self-conscious than if she were wearing pants. “He’s been under a lot of pressure. Every now and then it shows. He’ll be himself again by the time we get back.”
Just as she predicted, when they returned to the house Charlie was tinkering with a telescope and humming contentedly.
“I want you to have a peak through this, Richie. Built it myself. Four-and-a-half-inch reflector. Electric drive. Makes the rings of Saturn look as close as the neighbor’s wash.”
Father Walther wasn’t sure if Charlie’s easy chatter was genuine. As he watched him adjust the gleaming silver instrument, he recalled other moments Charlie had flown off the handle—usually when he was having trouble with one of his girls. There had been a steady procession of them, although young Richard got to meet very few, partly because he rarely attended a school dance but also because most were recruited from Charlie’s neighborhood in Paterson or Morristown. Charlie had little use for the giggly maids who attended Catholic high schools near Saint Francis.
In those days Richard never took Charlie’s bouts of temper seriously, precisely because they were romantically induced. Romance was a phenomenon that the priest-to-be had experienced not at all and which at the age of sixteen he already viewed as an old man might look back on the emotional tempests of his youth. He had tried to be sympathetic, but the question of whether a particular girl was or was not in love with Charlie just didn’t measure up to the more serious matters of nuclear war and mass starvation, not to mention the perennial machinations of the devil. But tonight he felt more inclined to make allowances for the personal element in human experience. Few of us could keep his or her mind on the eternal questions all the time. Perhaps few of us should even try.
The Jew's Wife & Other Stories Page 6