Rosalie observed him closely for a moment, then said, “That story is real to you. You actually believe it.”
“Yes, I believe it. Of course.”
“That’s remarkable.”
“Yes. It is.”
“I mean, you’re remarkable.”
“Me? No, I’m not remarkable. I’m ordinary,” he said, contemplating the beer left in his glass. “Very ordinary.”
When they got back to the house she invited him to join her for a swim. But the combination of sun and alcohol had given him a headache. He decided to lie down, then finish his office before Charlie and Sylvia returned.
He fell asleep. When he awoke his headache was gone but he felt like he was trying to break through the surface of a sea of molasses. He forced himself to sit up. His head cleared gradually, but his heart was pounding like he had just sprinted up a long flight of stairs. He got up and splashed cold water on his face. Still in his stocking feet, he headed down to the living room. Someone had closed the curtains of the glass doors leading to the balcony, apparently to keep out the sun. Rosalie was not in the living room or the adjoining kitchen. There was no sign of his hosts. He put some water on to boil.
The electric coil heated slowly. He returned to the living room, feeling better now that he was up and about. The air conditioning also helped—he had left a window open in the bedroom when he lay down. He started toward the balcony to open the heavy curtain, since the sun was now well to the west. The drawstrings were located all the way to the right where the curtains had not completely closed, letting a thin strip of daylight in. He reached for the cord, but hesitated when he saw that someone was on the balcony. It was Rosalie, of course, sunbathing on a lounge chair. Her eyes were closed. A book lay face-down on her bare stomach.
By the time he had taken all this in he had decided to leave the curtains be so as not to disturb her. But then he noticed that the bottom half of her bathing suit was undone. An unbroken line of flesh, pale where the tie had secured it, extended from her ribcage all the way to her thigh. He assumed the suit had opened accidentally until he saw that her left hand lay beneath the fabric. As he watched, her fingers arched, causing the material to ride downward. He had never before seen a woman’s pubic hair. Then he realized that her fingers were not just idling there but were depressing the flesh and moving it up and down. He looked at her face. The expression on it was absurdly like a communicant’s waiting for the host to be placed on her tongue.
He returned to the kitchen where the water he had put up was coming to a boil. He poured it into a cup, spilling some onto the stovetop. He spilled some more before he reached the living room, and again on the heavily carpeted stairs as he made his way back upstairs.
“Feel better?” she asked. She had changed out of her bathing suit into a blouse and wrap-around skirt. Something was sizzling on the stove. She reached on tiptoe into the cabinet above the sink.
“Much better. Can I help?”
But she had located the spice she wanted and began shaking it over the simmering saucepan. When she had finished seasoning the sauce she took a bowl of large white mushrooms out of the refrigerator and put them down on the dining table. “You can start with these.” She showed him what to do, then returned to the saucepan. He hadn’t helped someone prepare a meal—at least not one as elaborate as Rosalie was about—since he had peeled potatoes for his mother’s stews. Margaret certainly wasn’t about to let him into her own kitchen. In any case, Margaret wouldn’t know a mushroom from a zucchini.
“Why are you smiling?”
He shared the image he had of peeling mushrooms in his rectory kitchen, then went on to describe his housekeeper’s fondness for blue along with some of her other quirks. What he had witnessed on the balcony a short while ago now seemed like a bizarre dream.
“It sounds like your Margaret runs the place like a drill sergeant.”
“I guess you could say she takes her job seriously.”
She added something to the skillet, causing it to sizzle in protest.
“You don’t mind, her running your life like that?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say she runs our lives. Margaret’s pretty typical as housekeepers go—actually a good deal better than some,” he added, recalling the woman who had kept house in his first parish, a harridan who used to complain that he changed his underwear too often.
“I can’t imagine letting someone decide what color curtains I can have or choosing the food I’ll eat.”
“You adjust,” he said, although he had never gotten used to pot roast twice a week or to Margaret’s insistence on putting his socks in the third drawer of his dresser instead of in the top drawer where his mother had always kept them. “She has our best interests at heart.”
Rosalie stirred the concoction on the stove, then laid the wooden spoon down and dried her hands on the apron she was wearing.
“Will Charlie and Sylvia be back for dinner?” he asked.
“They called while you were napping. They’ve decided to stay over and drive back in the morning.” She placed a gleaming copper cover on the bubbling skillet. Then she picked up the cooking spoon, inserted it into the skillet, and drew it out steaming. “Something about his mother. Nothing serious,” she added with sauce in her mouth, as if Mrs. Weeks’ condition were the only matter that might concern the priest.
“But what about...?” Playing a round of golf with an attractive stranger was one thing; spending a night alone in the same house with her quite another. Nothing would happen, but the situation looked bad. A priest had to be concerned with appearance as well as reality.
“I’ll see that we don’t starve,” she said. “I may not be up to Margaret’s high standards, but I’m no slouch.”
He raised the corners of his mouth weakly.
“By the way, I hope you like manicotti.”
It was damned inconsiderate of Charlie to leave him in this fix. One couldn’t anticipate emergencies, but Charlie hadn’t bothered to mention the trip to Philadelphia until he was practically on his way out the door. Charlie should know better. There was a time when the same woman he had gone to visit today would have throttled him if he had left two young people alone in their house in Morristown. She once caught Charlie there with a girl and demanded, successfully, that he never see her again. (Richard had thought her reaction excessive.) Today’s emergency had better be nothing short of life and death.
“Not like that,” Rosalie said, reversing the positions of the forks and knives he had just arranged on place mats. “Didn’t your mother teach you how to set a table?”
Of what value was knowledge of place settings, unless one expected to become a Jesuit? His mother did teach him how to iron handkerchiefs and shirts. She also taught him how to darn a pair of socks and sew on a button. Of these skills, only the latter proved of any use; and Margaret would deny him even that small expression of self-sufficiency if she suspected what he was up to on long winter evenings.
The same candles were lit that had graced last night’s table. Rosalie removed her apron and brought in a platter of manicotti topped with red sauce. She sat down, but immediately got up. A few moments later she returned with a bottle of Chianti.
“Where did you get that?”
“I ran down to the village when you were napping. Care to do the honors?” She handed him the straw-sheathed bottle and a chrome corkscrew. He removed the cork without difficulty and poured a full glass for her, much less for himself.
The manicotti was good, as was the salad, where some of the mushrooms he had peeled turned up to advantage. The conversation was relaxed. They discussed politics, golf, education, but not religion. After dinner they agreed to a walk on the beach. By now he realized he had misjudged the woman. He had often noticed that some people wore two faces, one for third parties—Rosalie’s sulking or needling facade—and another which they only showed in private. He found such behavior odd, even schizoid, but common.
“Have you known Charlie lon
g?” she asked as they strolled toward the amber glow of a town to the south.
“Since high school. Almost twenty years.”
“Then, you knew his first wife.”
“No, I didn’t. Charlie and I were out of touch for a while. Did you know her?”
“Sure. We were good friends.” She turned toward him, her face barely visible. “She was a nurse at the hospital where I used to work. In Boonton. Do you know where that is?”
“Vaguely.
“I was in their wedding.”
He would have thought someone who had served as bridesmaid for one woman would feel out of place in the house of the second wife, cousin or not.
“Actually, I introduced Charlie to Sylvia. At about the time he was filing his papers against Nancy. Sylvia was a real wimp in those days, afraid of her own shadow. I knew she and Charlie would hit it off after what he’d been through with Nancy. Of course, I had no idea he would end up marrying her.”
“They didn’t get along—Charlie and his first wife?”
She laughed.
“Fought like cats. Nancy and I still keep in touch. No hard feelings. If she bears any grudge, it’s toward Charlie’s mother.”
“I can imagine.”
“You met Mrs. Weeks? Well, then you know what she’s like. Needless to say, she wasn’t thrilled about either the divorce or Charlie’s remarrying. But you’d never know it today. She’s crazy about Sylvia. Took to her like she was a new daughter. All she talks about is when they’re going to give her a grandchild. Drives Charlie up the wall. That was why he was so keyed up this morning.”
“Charlie doesn’t want children?”
“No way. Sylvia told me he made her agree not to have any, before they got married. Of course, Sylvia would like nothing better than to get pregnant. She doesn’t have many years left. But she’s so crazy about Charlie she’ll do whatever he wants.”
“Unlike his first wife.”
“Exactly.” She turned toward him. “I don’t know why I’m repeating all this. Ordinarily I don’t gossip.”
They walked in silence for a while. He looked up and saw a break in the overcast. A star darted in and out of view. When he looked down again he thought he could see its reflection on the waves.
“Did you always want to be a priest?”
“As far back as I can recall. My mother says I used to imitate the priest when they took me to Sunday mass. I couldn’t have been more than two or three at the time. The sermons seemed to have a special effect on me. Back in those days there was a lot of thunder and lightening in the pulpit. The church has changed a great deal in my lifetime. Mostly for the better.”
“Do you miss those captive audiences, the ones the old-timers used to harangue when you were just a babe in arms?”
“Not really.” He stopped to look at the lights of a freighter. His own monsignor had been one of those harum-scarum types until senility put a damper on his righteousness.
As if following his thoughts, she asked, “What would your pastor say if he saw you now?”
“Bust a gut, probably. Then again, his mind is so far gone he might not recognize me.”
“How can you work under someone like that?”
“It’s not easy. Still, I get to handle more responsibility than the ordinary assistant pastor.”
“You like that.”
“Yes,” he admitted, “I do.”
“Maybe some day you’ll have a parish of your own.”
He turned to read her expression, but by now she was just a slim silhouette.
“I’ve never been in the least bit religious,” she went on. “I don’t suppose I should say this, you being a priest, but I don’t think I believe in God. I’m not even sure what God is supposed to be,” she said, as if confessing to never having understood the operation of a simple arithmetic function.
“I think that’s how it is for most people, including orthodox Christians.”
“But not for you. To you God is the man who loved Lazarus’ sister. Do you believe he died and rose from the dead?”
“Yes. The crucifixion was his most important act.”
“To die?”
“For a reason.”
“Then, why hasn’t everything gotten better? Why do people go on killing each other and babies starve?”
He hesitated, then said, “He didn’t come to rid the world of suffering. He came to redeem it.”
“But surely he could have done better than that. With all the pain and deprivation in the world, surely God Almighty could have done more than say, ‘It’s alright, your sins are forgiven’.”
He hesitated again. Suffering, except as expiation, was a question even theologians couldn’t resolve.
“Evil is a mystery—physical evil, I mean. Christ came to relieve the moral kind.”
“And left us in the same mess. I’m sorry, but I can’t see how the world is better off because your Jesus visited this planet.”
The questions she was raising were familiar enough, but he seemed to be hearing them for the first time. In fact, with her he felt as if he were still a young priest just starting out instead of a middle-aged curate at the end of his spiritual tether. “You could say it’s a question of hope. Without Christ we have no hope of being saved.”
“From hellfire?”
“Yes, but from ourselves too. From our worst selves—our petty selfish selves. That’s all sin really is—selfishness—putting ourselves before God and our fellow man and woman.”
“Your Jesus keeps us from doing that?”
“Hardly. He just gives us hope, that maybe tomorrow we won’t be as selfish as we are today. And in the meantime he comforts us with forgiveness, tells us it’s okay we haven’t done so well and not to worry about how we’ve failed, just to concentrate on doing better.”
He had never articulated his belief in words like these. Ever since childhood he had made repeated, even heartfelt acts of faith in the church’s doctrines, and his devotions sometimes had been fervent as well. But more recently the joy had gone out of his faith, a consequence, he had rationalized, of the aging process. He had resolved that what he no longer intensely felt he would appreciate better intellectually; what had become doctrinal cliché he would redeem by hard work. But tonight, walking with this agnostic, he discovered that the core of his faith was reducible to a simplicity that transcended the boundaries of any particular religious denomination.
“The part about selfishness and hope is nice,” she said. “But could we head home now? I’m getting cold.”
When they got back to the house Rosalie slung a sleeping bag over her shoulder and headed up to the deck without making an issue over his declining to share the night breezes there. He bid her good night and sat down in the living room to finish his office. By the time he concluded the day’s reading his eyes were already half shut.
When he opened them in bed sometime later, he had no idea what had caused him to awaken. He had not been dreaming, at least not about anything that might startle him into consciousness. He lay on his side, facing the bedroom window. At first he thought it must be near dawn, because a bluish light showed between the break of the dark curtains. Then he remembered that the moon had risen late in a clearing sky. He turned onto his back. As he did so his shoulder touched something smooth. He lay absolutely still, allowing his mind to sort through itself for an explanation.
“It’s me,” a familiar but misplaced voice whispered. He was too frightened to reply, or even move, as frightened as he had been as a child of the dark—only, now something really had come out of it. There was a scent he associated with mass. “Hold me.” Cool fingers found his own and locked into them. He tried to free himself, but she held tight. “Please. I had a terrible nightmare.” Her body trembled against his own. “Just for a minute. I’m such a baby about nightmares.”
When he awoke the next morning the room was ablaze with light, as if the morning sun were hovering just outside the window. What had happened during the ni
ght seemed all too real. He had allowed the woman to lie beside him. She had even fallen asleep there. He had lain motionless, listening to her breathing. Her mouth made a wet spot on his pajama top.
But she had either returned to the deck again or had awakened before him and was downstairs brewing morning coffee. He lingered beneath the bedclothes, trying to make sense of the queer feeling he had, until he realized that his failure to appear might cause her to return to his bedroom. He got up and dressed quickly.
She was gone. A brief note said that she was returning home. In a postscript she added that Charlie and Sylvia would be back by early afternoon. A pot of fresh coffee was still hot on the stove.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was not like him to run off with no more of an apology than the note he had left, just as Rosalie had done. But this was not an ordinary morning. After reading her own message at first he felt relieved. There would be no awkward confrontation over breakfast, no embarrassing apologies. But as he poured himself a cup of her good coffee, relief turned to irritation. Everyone seemed to be doing as he or she pleased. He carried the coffee along with his office out onto the balcony, but the bright sun made reading impossible. Back inside, the house seemed unnaturally quiet. He turned on a radio, turned it off, fixed himself a second cup of coffee. But it was no use. He was becoming increasingly restless. It was then that he decided to leave. The sun was not yet high in the sky, but to avoid running into Charlie and Sylvia in case they returned sooner than expected he hiked half a mile south before he set his suitcase down on the highway and stuck out his thumb.
The note he left said that he had been called back to his parish. He regretted that untruth as he nervously scanned the deserted road. At the time it seemed merely a white lie, since he had assumed he would indeed return to Holy Name. But now the prospect of putting up with Margaret, even for a couple hours, seemed nothing short of appalling. He considered heading for his mother’s instead, but she would only just be back from her vacation and would need a couple days respite.
The Jew's Wife & Other Stories Page 8