The Jew's Wife & Other Stories

by Thomas J. Hubschman

  “Maybe. But first, has the place been running smoothly?”

  The heavy brows rose again. The corners of his mouth dropped.

  “The contractor finished painting the school. I would say it has been quiet.”

  “No problems from our leader?” Father Walther tried to smile but felt his spirits sink in the face of the other man’s determined gravity.

  “He’s been away from the rectory most of the time.”

  “Really? Where?” If the Monsignor was away from the rectory, he was using his car. That would mean there was no vehicle available but Father George’s own beat-up Chevy. “He hasn’t been doing the driving, I hope?”

  Father George shook his head. “John drives him.” John was the church sexton. “You’ll be going away again, Father?”

  “I thought I was.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” Father Walther replied sharply. Then he added more gently, “I mean, no, thank you, Father.”

  The only alternative left him was Margaret’s Dodge-Plymouth dealer. He would have to buy a new car in any case, much as he hated to cooperate with her machinations. He had asked the mechanic in South Jersey to mail the Ford’s license plates to the rectory, but they hadn’t arrived yet. Even if he bought another car immediately, he would still have to wait for the plates. So, on Monday morning he presented Margaret’s Mr. Lowry with a proposition: he would rent for a week the car she had selected for him, with an option to buy. Lowry didn’t like the idea, but the curate was happy for once to be turning the tables on one of the tradesmen who preyed on clergyman like himself. Lowry made him promise not to tell anyone about their arrangement. If everyone to whom he tried to sell a car demanded a week’s trial, he would go out of business. Father Walther did not point out to him what such an admission said about the reliability of his product. But he thanked the man in such a way as to make it clear that they understood each other. When they closed the deal with a handshake, Lowry was sweating like a glass of cold beer.

  Before leaving the rectory he called his mother. She had had a grand time in the mountains, she said, until she just seemed to run out of gas. He told her to get one of her neighbors to look after her for a day or two. God knew she looked after them enough. But she said she wasn’t as badly off as all that. She was looking forward to seeing him on Thursday.

  The weather continued hot but dry. As he headed up the parkway skirting the edge of the Hudson Palisades, the windows of the blue Plymouth open wide, he felt a delicious sense of freedom. He even sang, his voice disappearing into the swift wind. He had finally gotten away from Margaret’s dank parlor, away from the senile Monsignor, and away too from the emotional morass of the past week. Thursday he would do his duty by his mother, but until then his time was his own.

  His destination was a resort at the southern end of the Catskills. A number of priests frequented it, enough to guarantee a threesome at the first tee on any given morning. The laity who stayed there were older couples and widows. Not the liveliest of crowds, but when a priest went on vacation he wasn’t looking for a fast singles scene.

  He made good time, arriving + for a late lunch. The desk clerk, an old man who had spent his entire life at the resort, made a fuss over him. Of course they had a room. He could stay as long as he liked. The priest unpacked quickly, eager to get back to the dining room. Meals were served only within certain specified hours, and he wasn’t sure if even a priest would be given special consideration.

  On his way through the lobby he ran into the manager, a man not much older than himself. He insisted on asking after the Monsignor, recalling the old man’s younger years when the manager himself was just a boy. These recollections put him in mind of his father, the previous manager, setting off still another string of reminiscences. Father Walther’s stomach was growling. The man was a familiar type, likeable enough—the garrulous Irishman, ideally and equally suited to hotel work, bartending and the funeral business. He might even have enjoyed listening to the man’s blather were it not that he had had no solid food on his stomach for six hours. When he finally managed to disengage himself, the girl who came to take his order told him there was nothing left of the roast beef au jus advertised in the lobby. He had to settle for a cold sandwich.

  A cup of coffee, though, restored his spirits. He took a walk around the grounds, nodding to the old ladies who greeted him as coyly as if he were a rich widower. There were more of them on the golf course, foolish virgins in duck-billed hats. It was too early in the day for his own game.

  There was a time not so long ago when he enjoyed squiring a bunch of old dolls around a golf course or into New York for a show. Now it would be a chore. When he was younger he endured them in his confessional for as much as half an hour at a time. In those days he also jumped eagerly out of bed for a sick call, not even minding the many false alarms the elderly put out during their long dyings. Nowadays he winced when he heard the rectory doorbell ring, and found himself hoping the call in the middle of the night would be for a car accident, whose victims were usually dead or unconscious when he arrived.

  There was a message waiting when he returned to the hotel.

  “I hadn’t hung up the phone two minutes, Father, when I seen you coming through the door,” the old clerk told him, turning to fish a slip of paper from the pigeonholes behind the desk. “Here it is.”

  Father Walther read the shaky but precise writing: “Mr. Small,” followed by a phone number with a Maryland area code.

  “That’s all? No message?”

  “That’s it. Just to call him.”

  “Did he say what it was about?”

  “Nope. Nothing else, Father.”

  “Alright. Thank you.”

  “Care to use the desk phone, Father?”

  “No, I’ll call from my room.”

  Who the devil was Mr. Small? he wondered as he dialed his mother’s area code. If the call was about her, God forbid, it would be the building manager who would make it. But the manager’s name was Grupo.

  “Mr. Small,” an elderly voice wheezed after just one ring.

  “This is Father Walther. You left a message for me to call?”

  More heavy breathing at the other end of the line. Nerves or emphysema?

  “Yes, Father Walther. I’m so glad you called.”

  “Is it about my mother, Mr. Small?”

  More wheezes. He found himself hoping it was emphysema.

  “Yes, yes. I’m afraid it is.”

  He felt the blood drain from his head just as it used to after the long fast required before Vatican II. He pulled a chair toward the telephone and sat down.

  “Is it serious?” he asked.

  “We don’t know yet. She’s being examined.”

  “In the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you there yourself?”

  “Yes. I’m just down the hall from her room. At a pay phone.”

  Still short of breath, he explained that his mother had passed out in her apartment while washing dishes. She had not answered his knock, so he had fetched the building manager. He knew that Katherine—Mrs. Walther—had not been feeling up to par and he was afraid that something like this might happen.

  “I’m very grateful to you, Mr. Small. Has there been a diagnosis yet?”

  “Not yet, Father.”

  He asked which hospital she was in. He was not happy to learn it was the municipal where emergency cases were routinely brought. The one time his mother was previously hospitalized she had gone into a Catholic facility in Baltimore.

  He thanked Small again and told him that he would start for Maryland immediately.

  It would take an extra two hours to reach Maryland from the Catskills. After he had already been on the road that long he was no further south than Camden, not far from where his Ford had given up the ghost. He thought he could recognize the same configuration of low-rolling hills to the west. He even thought he spotted the water tower visible
from the mechanic’s back porch. He recalled Martha’s bitter account of her son’s death and wondered again at the elaborate subterfuge she and her husband had invented to keep the truth from the world. He could see her defiant look, her eyes bright and hard as if issuing an indictment to whoever or whatever it was that had taken her boy from her. It was hardly a Christian attitude—“I wanted him more!” Why did it still seem so admirable?

  He had certainly not felt a similar sense of rebellion, not even at his father’s death, and doubted he would when his mother was taken from him. He had even prayed for his father’s passing, not just to release the man from his pain but for his mother’s sake. But he had been of two minds about that prayer. His sense as a Christian and a priest told him death was a good thing, especially when one was well-prepared and in the company of loved ones. But another voice whispered that acceptance, the low-voiced assurances in the corridors of the hospital and later in the funeral parlor that his father’s dying was “for the best,” was a travesty, an offense against something more human and fundamental. That part of him didn’t want to hear about eternal bliss and the soul’s just reward. That part of him just wanted his father back.

  He wept when he first saw the man laid out in his coffin, but the tears were quickly finished and never returned. He wondered, though, would he have that kind of control when his mother was taken from him? If bishops broke down, would he be given the grace to bear it?

  When he reached the Maryland state line, he called the hospital’s general information number. The nurse he spoke with said his mother was resting comfortably. That sounded a lot better than the possibilities Mr. Small’s account had suggested. He stopped to get something to eat and took an extra cup of coffee along for the last leg of the journey. He couldn’t help thinking that if only the Ford had held out just a few more hours, everything else—his mother’s illness, his awful experiences hitchhiking, the events at Charlie Weeks’—might never have happened.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The hospital’s sprawling lawn and long circular driver reminded him of the retreat house on Staten Island. But the building itself was white rather than the dark English stone the former novitiate was made of. He parked his car in the neatly-lined lot (pay-as-you-leave) and entered the lobby through revolving doors that responded to the lightest touch.

  It was not quite visiting hours, but when they saw his roman collar the nurses made no objection to his being on the floor. One of them even accompanied him down the hall, reminding him by her accent of the distance he had covered that afternoon. When he reached the room, he thought at first she must have made a mistake, because the elderly figure asleep in there was clearly not his mother. Then he saw that the room was divided by a gray curtain. When he stepped cautiously around it he found a luxuriantly white-haired stranger seated on the other side. The woman lying there was indeed his mother, however pale, the lines of her face radically rearranged—from illness, he thought at first, then realized that he was just not used to seeing her on her back.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  He started to approach her from the curtain side of the bed, but that proved awkward, so he had to squeeze past her elderly visitor whose chair was nearly flush against the wall. When he reached the head of the bed he kissed her. She didn’t move.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Her mouth inclined upward. The white hospital gown lay flat against her chest where the bed sheet had been neatly turned down. Her eyes moved toward the man beside her. When she finally spoke her voice was weak and hoarse. The rasp was startling, but not as much as the fact that her hand was securely in the grasp of her white-haired visitor.

  Up close, the man’s face seemed less ancient than it had when Father Walther first entered the room. There were plenty of lines on it, but the skin was weathered and tanned in a way that he realized must seem handsome to a woman his mother’s age.

  “Sidney, this is my son.”

  “We spoke on the phone,” Small replied, offering his left, free hand. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, Father.”

  It was hard to believe this was the same confused and frightened old man who had summoned him earlier that afternoon. He did his best to return the man’s smile, but refused to let him give up his chair, although the offer was clearly made for form’s sake because the dark, heavily creased hand did not for a second let go of his mother’s.

  “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Small.”

  “Sid,” the man replied with a glance at Mrs. Walther, “please.”

  For the second time Father Walther asked his mother how she felt. Small pointed to his own throat and volunteered that earlier she had had some tubes in her.

  “Have the doctors made a diagnosis?”

  “They think it may have been some sort of transitory phenomenon.” The man’s carefully modulated voice might have belonged to someone decades younger. “Perhaps a temporary lack of blood to the brain,” he added as if such an event were of no great moment.

  “Did they say how long they want to keep her?”

  Father Walther wanted to remind the old fellow of the wild panic he had communicated earlier that day. Did the man think he would have interrupted an already much-delayed vacation and drive three hundred miles non-stop if he thought his mother had merely experienced a bit of lightheadedness?

  “A couple days,” Small replied, toning down his grin when he noticed the priest’s severe expression. “I think they want to run some tests. Just to make sure.”

  His mother was wearing a sheepish grin entirely inappropriate to her age. Her short hair had an unaccustomed tint. It had never occurred to him that she might dye her hair. He knew plenty of older women did, as was evident at any meeting of the Rosary Society. He found nothing shocking about the practice there, although some of the shades they came up with—gunmetal blue, sunset pink—seemed a bit much. But somehow the idea that his mother had altered the dusty white he had assumed to be her natural color seemed tantamount to his learning that she wore artificial breasts.

  “Will you be staying at my place, Richard?” she said with difficulty.

  “Unless that would be awkward, Mother.”

  He didn’t know what policy the housing project’s management had about guests sleeping over in the absence of the legal tenant. But under the circumstances he couldn’t imagine anyone objecting.

  Small abruptly rose from his seat.

  “I think you should rest now, Katherine.”

  She swallowed with difficulty, then nodded up at his bronze face. Father Walther could not recall her ever responding to a suggestion of his father’s with such equanimity.

  “Perhaps we should leave her, Father.”

  But he was not about to be dismissed from his mother’s bedside by someone he had never laid eyes on until that afternoon. When Small realized that the priest intended to stay, he reached for a white Panama hat on the window sill. Then he took the patient’s hand and squeezed it.

  After he had gone Father Walther said, “I just wanted to ask if there was anything you wanted me to take care of—at the apartment.”

  His mother smiled, not the tired but contented smile she had managed for Sidney Small, but a fatigued, impatient grimace.

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Well,” he said, reaching for her hand as if he were on a routine sick call, “perhaps you should rest.”

  He waited a few moments for a response that never came, then he kissed her forehead again. Her eyes were half closed. Partway to the door he turned and saw that she was already asleep.

  He made a mental note to call her doctor. But despite the absence of a diagnosis, he was less concerned than he had been when he first arrived at the hospital. All he had had to go on then was Sidney Small’s nervous account of her collapse and hospitalization, plus the nursing staff’s cryptic assurances on the phone. The presence of a man at her bedside, holding her hand, was another matter entirely. He had assumed that Small was a neighbor, one of the couple hundred old
people who shared the senior citizen’s project. But he had never come upon anyone like Sidney Small in the corridors of that building. The men he had seen there—what few males there were in contrast to the abundance of elderly females—were decrepit by comparison. The healthier ones hung out in the lobby. His mother had never shown anything but contempt for them. She said they were just a bunch of old geezers and if she were looking for male companionship, which she was not, she would hardly do so among their like.

  He considered his mother to be still an attractive woman, but he had not sensed the need for a man in her life. Indeed, she had seemed remarkably self-sufficient. Once she got over the loss of his father she seemed to adjust well to the role of single older woman, devoting herself to her fellow tenants and to the activities of her parish. But it was neither a proudly independent woman nor a woman disinterested in the attentions of the opposite sex that he had just visited. The person in that hospital room was not, in fact, one he totally recognized. He could not help but wonder how much of her transformation was due to illness and how much to her richly tanned friend.

  As he exited the hospital elevator he was still mulling over Sidney Small’s presence when, like the thought made flesh, the man suddenly materialized.

  “Hello, Father,” he said, rising from a clutch of beige chairs near a bank of artificial ferns in the hospital lobby. He looked almost theatrical in his cream-colored suit and brown-and-white shoes. His dark tan and thick mane of white hair completed the illusion of the Southern country gentleman.

  He shifted his Panama hat from one hand to the other and took a tentative step forward.

  “I thought we might have a little chat,” he said. “About your mother.”

  His perfect teeth gleamed appealingly, but the priest sensed a flaw in the confidence he had exhibited earlier.

  “Of course,” Father Walther replied, eyeing the beige furniture.

  “I know a nice restaurant not far from here. I don’t know if you’ve had supper yet...”