The Jew's Wife & Other Stories

by Thomas J. Hubschman

  He had promised himself never again to hitchhike, but by now felt an old hand at it. He had learned how to establish eye contact with the driver of an oncoming vehicle and maintain it until the car or truck passed by, adding a personal appeal to the boldly extended thumb. He could even see the flicker of guilt on a driver’s face when he or she failed to slow down.

  His first ride, an unemployed schoolteacher, took him as far as Manasquan. He had trouble, though, getting a second ride, apparently because people were reluctant to pick up a hitchhiker inside town limits. He also had to be on the lookout for police. He didn’t want to spend a day in jail or, worse, have them contact his parish. But despite the hot sun beating down, he felt better than he did before he had set out. His mind was clear now about what had happened. He had been a victim of circumstances: first, Charlie’s deception about his divorce, then his producing a second houseguest and leaving them alone together, ending with the woman climbing into his bed.

  But then, like a dream suddenly remembered, he recalled Rosalie’s soft cheek against his chest and the trembling of her small hand in his own. The recollection was too stark to be imagined, too preposterous to be real. His heart began to beat hard with embarrassment, but also with something else—a kind of exaltation he hadn’t felt since he was a young priest in the thrall of his first consecrations.

  A tan SUVpulled up.

  “How far you going?”

  “New York.”

  “I’ll take you as far as Asbury.” He got in and the driver, a short-haired man in his early twenties, told him to roll up the window he had just lowered because the car was air-conditioned. “You’re lucky today’s my day off.” He reached into his shirt pocket and flipped open a plastic identification wallet. The priest glimpsed what looked like a high school photograph and silver badge. “You could get thirty days for hitchhiking on city streets.”

  “I’m much obliged.”

  “I can’t be bothered going to court today,” the young man went on self-importantly. “Otherwise you could find your ass in jail.” He punctuated his remark with a big, not altogether friendly grin. “Live in the Big Apple?”

  “Northern New Jersey. My car broke down. I stayed overnight with a friend.”

  “That so? What’s the matter with your friend, he couldn’t give you a lift?”

  “His mother took ill in Philadelphia.”

  “Uh huh. And then your car broke down.”

  “No, that happened earlier.” He hastily recounted his engine failure on the Turnpike and, in a general way, how he ended up at the shore. As he spoke he kept his eyes fixed on the highway’s white center line. “Believe it or not, I’m a Catholic priest.”

  The young man regarded him as if he had just announced he was a federal agent.

  “The friend I mentioned owns a summer house down this way. Instead of going back to my parish, I decided to spend a few days with him and his wife.”

  The cop took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one without taking more than one hand off the wheel. Blue smoke filled the vehicle.

  “I got a brother-in-law’s a priest,” he said then. “Ever hear of Father Rosa?”

  “Gus Rosa? Saint Mary’s, Oradell?”

  “Paul. Jersey City.”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t know him.”

  They didn’t speak for the next half mile.

  “I was supposed to be a priest myself,” the young man said, palming the steering wheel and shaking his head. “Me and Tommy Miller. Tommy even went in the seminary for a couple years. But I knew right away that life wasn’t for me.”

  There was a pause. Father Walther decided he was supposed to ask why not.

  The cop grinned like a mischievous schoolboy. “Girls.” He blushed pink. “Couldn’t keep my hands off them.”

  “How about your friend?”

  “Tommy?” He stared hard at the road ahead, then took a long drag on his cigarette. “Got killed in I-raq.”

  The car suddenly came to a stop. For a moment the priest was afraid the driver had decided his passenger was an imposter and was going to arrest him. There were no buildings nearby, just highway and scrub brush. He could make a break into the woods that began just a few yards from the road’s shoulder. It was crazy to think such an idea, but the prospect of going to jail even for a few hours was suddenly unbearable. If he did run, the cop might shoot him. He wasn’t afraid of getting shot, he decided, but he balked at the sin of inviting damage to his body.

  “You can catch a bus to New York right here,” the policeman said, pointing to a metal sign—the same white and black circle under which as a boy young Richard and his mother used to wait for the 82 bus to Hackensack. It depicted the silhouette of a slim 1940s woman, her foot on the first step of a waiting bus. The pole was rusted and bent where something had run into it. “You know, when I picked you up I had half a mind to turn you in. But then you told me about being a priest. Well, I’m not saying I’m convinced—although you passed the little test I gave you: I don’t have no brother-in-law a priest—my wife’s a Presbyterian. Still and all, you seem like a pretty decent guy,” he went on sententiously. “You get to be a pretty good judge of character in my job. So, I’m gonna give you a piece of free advice.

  “I figure you must be in some kind of trouble or you wouldn’t be out standing on a highway. I don’t know what your problem is—alcohol, drugs, whatever—and, to tell you the truth, I don’t care. I’m just giving you a friendly warning that you’d better get yourself some help before you land in some real trouble. I happen to know they got special places for priests to dry out or kick their habits. Like I said,” he concluded with a deep drag on his cigarette, “in my job you get to learn a lot about human nature.

  He shifted back into drive. “There’ll be a bus along in a while. Say a prayer for me.”

  Two hours later he was looking out the window of a bus bound for New York City. The sunny morning had turned gray. As the bus sped across the flats approaching the Lincoln Tunnel, he recognized some of that grayness as the back side of the Hudson Palisades. The drab landscape, relieved only by a bicycle assembly plant and a discount clothing outlet, had a decidedly behind-the-scenes look. A raucous motel sign heralded the impending metropolis.

  A pale fat man was asleep in the seat beside him. He had gotten on somewhere north of Asbury Park, inquired if the seat beside the priest was taken, and fell immediately asleep. Now his head rested almost on the priest’s shoulder. His face looked like dough that had settled to one side. His mouth formed a perfect “O”.

  An old lady across the aisle who looked absurdly like his mother had told him the bus was traveling express. He had a notion that she not only knew he was a priest but was aware of everything that had happened to him in the past week. He had pretended to nap in order to avoid her attentions. But he soon found himself dozing off for real. Now, inexplicably, she was gone and he was wondering if it was possible he had only imagined her. The idea that his sanity might be abandoning him did not disturb him the way it might have a few days ago. He even felt something like bemusement that experience, which had always made some sort of immediate sense—suffering as a divine test or means to increased grace, joy as a revelation of that grace—had suddenly become enigmatic. Could reality, after all, be so fickle?

  He hadn’t been to New York in months, not since he took the Rosary Society to a Broadway musical during the Christmas holiday. They had chartered a bus and made a day of it, eating out at one of the tourist traps near Times Square. Prior to that excursion he hadn’t ventured into Manhattan for almost a year. Most of his parish lived the same provincial existence.

  The Port Authority terminal had changed considerably from the way it had looked when his mother used to take him into New York for new school clothes or to window-shop and meet his father for dinner. The terminal building itself looked newer and, paradoxically, bigger. The bus let him off on a semi-enclosed deck rank with the odor of exhaust fumes. He would not have known
his way out except by following the other passengers. Once on the mezzanine, though, he recognized the long banks of escalators extending up from the main concourse below. He stood staring down at the flow of travelers until a policeman or security guard—it was hard to tell which—took note of him, and he thought it best to move on.

  He decided to put a call through to his confessor. Bill Lapchek was an easygoing sort, cursory in the confessional—perhaps too cursory, almost as if he were...well, bored when his younger colleague confessed to letting his attention wander during mass or when he was hearing confessions. Lapchek had suffered a breakdown a few years back. Father Walther had assumed the man’s restlessness was a consequence. But as he stood waiting for his call to go through to New Jersey, he suddenly realized he had never really believed Lapchek behaved the way he did because of a nervous collapse—or at least not merely because of it. The man had been ill at ease right from the start of their relationship. The signs had all been there—the nervous fingering of his brow; his pat, almost glib responses to requests for guidance. Yet he had preferred to see Lapchek as someone with a purely physical disorder, as if a nervous breakdown were in the same category as a broken leg or a case of angina.

  An unfamiliar voice finally answered the rectory phone and told him Father Lapchek was not in. Father Walther didn’t enquire when he would be back or ask to leave a message.

  He found himself on Eighth Avenue. He began walking south past some noisy street work and klatches of dark men loitering in front of discount stores and cheap bars.

  Why had he not seen through Lapchek before? For two years he had adopted the official diocesan fiction about the man, never allowing himself to suspect that Lapchek’s crisis might be one of faith rather than psyche. Was it because he had just felt his own sanity shaken that he was able to see the man for who he was? At the time, he had considered his choice of Lapchek to be his spiritual counselor as partially an act of charity: his previous confessor had been transferred to a parish too far away for him to easily get to; Lapchek had just recently returned from a convalescent home. But maybe he had had another, less conscious motive. Perhaps he had unconsciously sensed the man was not up to anything more rigorous than going through the motions and would not confront his younger colleague with any hard questions about his own spiritual doubts.

  He kept an eye out for a church as he continued south past topless bars and rundown electronics stores. His father used to confess on his lunch break, but that had been in the Wall Street area, much farther downtown. He looked for a clock to corroborate what his wristwatch indicated: 11:30. It seemed as if much more than half a day had passed since he had awakened in Charlie Weeks’ guestroom.

  He turned east on Fifteenth Street and found himself in a new world. Gone were the knots of young blacks and Latinos drinking out of paper bags. Facing him was a residential corridor of handsome townhouses. The largely deserted sidewalks were dotted with young trees. A well-dressed woman—from the back she could have been a millionairess or a whore—was walking one of those small artificial-looking dogs he associated with movie stars. An expensive bag was slung low from her shoulder, the same arm with which she held the animal’s leash. In her other hand she carried something that looked like a plastic toy. As he approached she reached down and scooped up the animal’s feces with it. Then she glanced up, looked the priest over boldly, and smiled. The dog, meanwhile, had become lighthearted and was scampering at the end of his leash. She deposited the feces in a nearby trash can, then turned and smiled again. It was more than a neighborly grin. She was fifteen years his junior. They were in a part of the world proverbial for violent crime. Yet she was smiling in a way, were he a different sort of man, he might feel encouraged to approach her. She certainly couldn’t expect that shrunken quadruped to protect her.

  He continued east along Fifteenth Street. Halfway down the block an odd-looking building on the south side of the street interrupted the row of townhouses and low-rise apartment buildings. It was some kind of dirty stone or stucco, absurdly colonnaded like a squat Greek temple. A series of wide steps rose steeply to the main doors, all but hidden by the sooty columns. He thought at first it must be a bank. Only, a bank would have been cleaner. More than anything, it resembled a mausoleum. There were similar, though smaller, crypts in his parish cemetery that housed the well-to-do of the last century. But what was a mausoleum doing in Lower Manhattan?

  He had to let a garbage truck and then a procession of cars in its train pass before he could cross the street. It was only then he noticed the service board affixed to the building’s facade. Suburban churches rarely used announcement boards anymore—at least Catholic churches didn’t. But the white plastic lettering outside this one listed both mass and confession times, including a midday service and lunch-hour confession.

  A few steps further down the block, flush against the facade of the church, stood a modern school building. St. Francis used to play their football and basketball teams. Their students wore maroon uniforms crisscrossed by shiny black belts, making them look like pubescent staff officers from some East European dictatorship. He used to feel sorry for those boys. St. Francis’ own dress code consisted merely of a jacket and tie. The rival school’s teachers, Jesuits, were reputed to be strict, although not brutal like the faculty of some Brothers schools. It was rumored that if you confessed anything less serious than adultery to a Jesuit, he would dismiss you with little or no penance just to teach you the difference between real sin and an old maid’s scrupling.

  His watch told him it was just noon, the start of the confession hour, according to the sign outside the church. He had only confessed to a Jesuit once before, a missionary recently posted back from the orient. The man had been well up in his seventies, but energetic enough for two people and anything but the stereotypic intellectual. He had come to Holy Name to conduct a week-long mission. Each night at dinner he recounted tales worthy of The Arabian Nights: emperors, overlords, slave girls and of course martyrdom by the most excruciating tortures imaginable. He had spent ten years in a Communist prison, living on a few daily ounces of rice. But he spoke of his hardship the way a proud coach might recall a winning football team. He was, of course, a hero, but he did have a tendency to rattle on interminably, never giving either Father Walther or Father George (the Monsignor was usually half-asleep) a chance to ask a question.

  Even so, at the end of the mission he had asked the Jesuit to hear his confession. He had only the usual distractions to confess, but the old man listened attentively and delivered remarkably apt words of counsel, never once showing the overbearing, all-but-psychotic personality he had displayed at the dinner table. Father Walther found it hard to believe this was the same divine fool of the East who just that evening insisted on demonstrating how Chinese women used to have their feet bound, using—God help us—Margaret as a model.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  He confessed to the generic sin of impurity (he would go into detail later) adding that he was a priest. The fact that he was clergy did not make a sin any more or less grievous, but it put the offense into a different context. This was one time it was not possible to play the anonymous layman.

  “Do you love her?”

  “Father?”

  “Do you love the woman? I presume it was a female.”

  This was not a question he had anticipated. It was not even a question he would have considered relevant. And yet, to answer truthfully, how could he help but recall the way he had felt when Rosalie’s head was resting on his chest after she had fallen asleep like an exhausted child? Was that love?

  “Did you have any feeling for her, or was it just a sexual release?”

  “I don’t think sex had much to do with it.”

  Until now the Jesuit’s profile had been very close to the screen separating them, his head cocked to one side as if he were hard of hearing. Now he turned and faced forward toward the pews he could see through the confessional door, just as Father
Walther could when he heard confessions himself.

  “She knows you’re a priest, this woman?”

  “Yes. But she’s non-Catholic.”

  He waited to see if he should go on. The lack of response from the Jesuit confused him. “We were houseguests at a mutual friend’s. We had never met before. She became frightened after having a nightmare and asked if she could stay with me for a while.”

  He described their circumstances—the hosts’ trip to another city, the evening he and Rosalie spent together.

  The Jesuit sighed with impatience.

  “Were you a virgin when you entered the seminary, Father?”

  “Yes.”

  “And after? Was this your first time with a woman?”

  “Yes. But…”

  “Have you considered leaving the priesthood? Many have, you know.”

  Father Walther was too surprised by the question to reply.

  “Are you happy in your vocation?”

  “I have my ups and downs.”

  He waited, but the Jesuit said nothing. From the incline of his dim profile seen through the grille, he might have been asleep.

  “I’m not sure I’ve made clear exactly what happened, Father,” he began again.

  But the Jesuit seemed to have lost interest. “Say an Act of Contrition.” He began reciting the absolution. When he finished he leaned toward the grille and, out of the side of his mouth like a horseplayer giving a hot tip, whispered, “Say a prayer for me.”

  It wasn’t until he shot the slat closed and began hearing the confession of someone on the other side of the confessional that Father Walther realized the man hadn’t even bothered to give him a penance.