“I’d love to eat something.”
“Shall we take my car? Your own will be quite safe here for an hour or two.”
“You know, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect—how you would react to my being there with your mother.”
Small had been steadily winding down since their encounter in the hospital lobby. Now, behind the wheel of his own car— a yellow Cadillac with an interior the same shade as his suit—he was becoming expansive. “Of course, Catherine speaks of you a great deal,” he went on, showing his store-bought teeth. “I don’t suppose she mentioned me, though.”
Father Walther admitted she hadn’t, suggesting that perhaps their friendship was so recent that she hadn’t had the chance.
“Actually, we met in June. We were both attending the same concert in Symphony Woods.”
“You live in Columbia?”
“Just outside. Near Ellicott City. Do you know where that is?”
Father Walther did indeed. His mother liked to attend Sunday Mass in Ellicott City. The liturgy in her own parish was too contemporary to suit her. There was also a bakery in Ellicott City that made the same kind of rolls and crumb cake they used to buy in their old parish in New Jersey. Loading up on white-mountain rolls when he visited had become almost as much of a ritual as attending Mass.
“I think your mother was a little concerned about how you might react to her having a...well, gentleman friend.”
“Why should I object?” Father Walther replied, realizing that if it had not been for his mother’s sudden illness, there was no telling how long she might have kept Sidney Small a secret.
“Well, I suppose she might have worried how you would react to her taking an interest in a man who was...well, not your father.”
“My mother has a right to lead her own life, Mr. Small.”
“’Sid’, please.”
“Naturally, I’m concerned about her. But I can’t dictate who she chooses for her friends. I can only hope they have her best interests at heart.”
“That’s just what I hoped you would say, Father. And let me tell you, you can rest assured,” he said, removing one hand from the steering wheel and extending it toward the priest’s knee before thinking better of the gesture, “I have nothing but your mother’s best interests at heart.”
The restaurant Small had in mind was one of those baroque eateries Father Walther was already familiar with from Bergen County: dark interior, heavy furniture and a salad bar loaded with everything from chick peas to shrimp.
“Will this be alright?” Small asked as he opened a menu with a wing span the width of the table. “I actually prefer the ethnic restaurants in Baltimore, as does you mother. But I figured if you didn’t have any supper yet you wouldn’t want to travel that far.”
Father Walther ordered chopped steak. Small ordered fish. “Have to watch my cholesterol.”
The priest declined to order a cocktail and, even though he encouraged his dinner partner to go ahead and have one, Small also declined. But when his fish arrived he asked the waitress to bring him a glass of white wine. “For the digestion.”
Sidney Small was not a type familiar to the social circles Father Walther moved in. He could not imagine any of his parishioners going around in a cream-colored linen suit or a Panama hat. The men of the K of C were strictly Banlon types. His own father had never worn a tie unless he was going to work or to church and did not, to the best of his son’s knowledge, own a single colored shirt. Father Walther also assumed that Small was Jewish. He didn’t know what to make of that. The only Jews he knew were tradesmen. There had been no Jews in the town where he grew up.
“Are you...busy in the summer?” his dinner companion asked.
“It lets up. School’s out. People go on vacation.”
“I almost forgot, you’re on vacation yourself. Do you usually spend it in the Catskills?”
“Usually. This year things were...disrupted.”
Small frowned, perhaps regretting the phone call that had summoned the priest down to Maryland in the first place. But then his brow relaxed.
“Your mother said you had some sort of car trouble. On the Turnpike, wasn’t it?”
Father Walther described his misfortunes with the Ford. Small listened intently, shaking his head in amazement.
“How dreadful. And you had to leave it there? Just junk it?”
“There didn’t seem to be anything else I could do.”
“How did you manage to get down here?”
Father Walther explained the arrangement he had made with the dealer in his parish.
“Will he give you a good deal, do you think? Can you trust the man? The reason I ask,” Small continued, his toothy smile replaced by a businesslike manner which suggested a very different person from the affable retiree he had been playing thus far, “I have a friend in the District who sells the sort of car you might be interested in. I mean,” he added, his teeth appearing again like stars in a changeable sky, “I presume you don’t want to be driving around in a pink Caddy.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and produced a business card that he handed across the table just as the waitress arrived with their dinners. The card read, “DC Motors. Shel Simon.”
“I guess you noticed my dealer’s plates,” Small said, inserting a big white napkin into the collar of his shirt. It was the same way the Monsignor ate. “Shelly will give you a good deal if you tell him I sent you. Better yet, let me give him a call in the morning.”
“There’s no need to go to any trouble.”
“No trouble,” Small replied, happily forking some fish. “No trouble at all.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was after ten o’clock when Sidney Small dropped him off at the hospital parking lot. They had spoken very little about his mother. Indeed, they had had very little to say to each other on any subject. The man was agreeable enough, even charming in a crude, I-can-get-it-for-you-wholesale manner. But he was as different from the kind of person the priest’s father had been as any two men could possibly be. Where Small was flashy and overdressed, Carl Walther had always worn subdued, even drab colors and styles. Where Small tended toward the vain and demonstrative, the elder Walther had chosen reserve. It was true that Small seemed to have plenty of money, but Katherine Walther had never complained about not being rich. She used to tell her sons their poverty (the family was actually lower-middle-class) was a gift from God. What, then, was it about this man that she found so appealing?
Lost in these thoughts, Father Walther would have missed the exit for Burnham Wood if it had not been clearly marked.
The highway neatly bifurcated the planned city where his mother lived—actually a sprawling piece of suburbia built around a central mall. His brother had bought into the development when it was barely off the drawing board. The elder Walthers moved there five years later, not to the hi-rise where his mother now lived but to a three-room apartment in McCoy’s Corner. They stayed on when his brother was transferred to the Coast, having become used to the comforts of contemporary living. Two years later his father died and, unable to afford her old apartment on what was left of her husband’s pension, his mother moved into the senior citizens’ housing where she was eligible for a government-subsidized rent.
He stepped into one of the two elevators standing open and empty in the lobby and rode up to the ninth floor alone. A big floor-to-ceiling window provided the only break in a monotonous stretch of long corridor. He stopped to look out at the scattering of lights below. A dark patch in the landscape indicated a horse farm that his mother used to make a great deal of when she first moved in. She had enjoyed watching the colts gamboling in the big field or, in hot weather, nuzzling their mothers near the side of a stream. She never mentioned the horses anymore, and in the dark he had no way of knowing if they were still there. The lights of a jetliner angled suddenly down from the starless sky, making its approach to Dulles International. Thanks to the thick plate glass, it moved as silently as the
toy cars speeding through the darkened fields.
He finished his office and made a cup of tea. There was no milk, so he had to make do with a vegetable creamer. He found some cookies to go with the tea, then turned on the television and sat down in the apartment’s only armchair, a leftover from his father’s retirement. As he waited for a series of commercials to end, he noted a new convertible sofa. The rest of the furniture was all familiar—an oak folding table his brother had refinished years ago; the seascape on the wall behind the sofa; and the television itself, a color set his parents bought shortly after moving to Maryland. There were new arrangements of plastic flowers, looking remarkably lifelike. Near the glass doors leading out to a terrace his mother never used because of her hay fever was a row of artificial-looking but apparently genuine potted plants. He decided he would sleep on the sofa, although he would not bother to open it as his mother would have insisted.
A popular comedian was substituting for the late-night talk show’s regular host. He endured the inane repartee until the commercial break, then turned it off and started to undress.
The brash ring of the telephone was as unexpected as a fire alarm. His mother apparently kept it turned up to full volume. He rushed to prevent its waking the rest of the building.
“Is that you, Father? I’ve been trying to reach you all evening.”
“Hello, Margaret. I was at the hospital.”
“That’s what I figured. But I knew visiting hours end around eight-thirty. So when I still couldn’t reach you at ten I began to worry. She isn’t in intensive care, is she?”
“No, no. She seems fine. They’re going to run some tests tomorrow, but I think she just overdid it.”
“Thanks be to God. I was worried sick when I heard the news from Father George.”
“I was pretty upset myself for a while.”
“And then I called and got no answer. So I thought to myself, ‘Where could Father be? He’s surely not out gallivanting, with his mother lying sick in the hospital.’”
“No,” he replied with a forced laugh, “not much chance of that.”
“So, then I thought to myself, ‘Dear Lord, I hope she hasn’t taken a turn for the worse and they’ve moved her to intensive care.’ I know they allow visitors at all hours in the intensive care unit. Wasn’t I with my own mother two days straight before she died?”
“Nothing like that, Margaret. I just went out to get a bite to eat.”
“Well,” she said, taking a deep breath, “you don’t know what a relief it is to hear that.”
“I appreciate your concern, Margaret. I should have called the rectory.”
“You had more important concerns on your mind, Father.”
“How are things back at the ranch?”
“Much the same. Father George is at sixes and sevens, but I suppose he’ll manage. And of course the Old One is his usual grouchy self.... Wait. You did get a call,” she said as if it were something that had slipped her mind. “From that same person.”
“Which person is that, Margaret?”
“That Miss Sykes. Or is it Mrs. Sykes??”
“Did she leave a message?”
“No, she didn’t. She just said to tell you she called. I told her you probably wouldn’t be back for several days.”
“Were there any other calls?”
“No, just that one, Father. She sounded disappointed when I said you were away.”
“She’s the relation of an old school friend. I’m sure if it were anything important she would have left a message.”
“I suppose. What shall I say if she calls back?”
This was the question he had been waiting for. He knew his reputation as a priest, at least in Margaret’s eyes, was on the line, and who knew where the tale would end if his housekeeper began to entertain doubts about him?
“Just ask her to leave a message. I hardly know the woman.”
“You wouldn’t want me to give her your mother’s number?”
“No,” he said, wearying of the game. But if it was just a game, why did he feel like St. Peter after he had denied Christ in Pilate’s garden? “There’s no need.”
“Alright, Father,” Margaret replied brightly. “I’ll do just as you say.”
She ended by asking him to tell his mother that she was making a novena to the Blessed Virgin for her recovery.
The next morning the cornfields were scarcely visible beyond the pasture nine stories below. No horses were in sight. Jetliners continued to move cautiously through the dense cloud layer, engines straining to keep the machines on target in a world grown blind and inhospitable.
Visiting hours did not start until two p.m. He had slept well but was fully awake at seven-thirty, so he had the entire morning to kill. He said mass, read his office and ate a leisurely breakfast. But it was then still only nine-thirty. He decided to read for a while, then drive to the mall for lunch.
His mother kept the remnants of the family library, never an extensive collection, in a small bookcase that stood to one side of the twin bed where she slept. Ted had taken the other twin for his boy. A desk that Ted had refinished at the same time he stripped and varnished the dining table stood beside the bookcase.
Some of the book spines were instantly familiar: The Five Little Peppers, Pollyanna, a complete set of Journeys Through Bookland. They predated his earliest memories. His mother used to read him nursery rhymes from volume one of Journeys Through Bookland, still the only part of the set to show any wear. Other books—Eat Well to Stay Well; God Love You, by Fulton J. Sheen—represented a later period of family history. Still others had appeared when he was in his adolescence. Some, still in dust their jackets, were recent and unfamiliar acquisitions: a history of the Irish “race”; some popular fiction, including a best-selling priest novel; a consumer report on prescription drugs; the autobiography of a 1940s film star.
He also found one of his high school texts, a copy of the Aeneid which for some reason had survived all his mother’s spring cleanings. He opened to a random page and came upon his adolescent handwriting carefully penciled into the margins—grammatical notes on tricky constructions, cross references—but no translations, which were strictly forbidden by his teacher, Father Patwell.
He tried reading the Latin but quickly found himself lost in a maze of passive participles and ablative absolutes. It was hard to believe he had ever mastered such difficult material. Certainly the old Church Latin he had come across read in seminary bore little relation to these complicated constructions.
He put the Aeneid back and removed The Five Little Peppers from the shelf above. He could not recall anyone ever actually reading any of these novels, though he vaguely remembered using them for building blocks and scribbling on the blank pages at the front- and end-leaves when he was still a pre-schooler. His marks, primitive attempts at the alphabet, each letter of which took up an entire page, were still visible, suggesting a Richard Walther even less familiar than that of the adolescent, but at least rememberable , version of him expressed by the handwriting in his high school text.
He closed the book and replaced it. He didn’t open any others.
When he arrived at the start of visiting hours, his mother was conferring with her doctor. Father Walther had met him when he took his mother for a checkup during a previous mid-summer visit. His mother owned neither a car nor a driver’s license. She had been dependent on his brother to go anywhere but the mall, which was serviced by a shuttle bus that stopped at the senior citizens’ project. When Ted moved she was left to fend for herself.
“Hello, Doctor,” he said, noting that his mother’s roommate was gone and that the bed had been made up with fresh sheets. “How’s the patient?”
“I think she’ll be herself again in a day or two,” the handsome Southerner replied, regarding his patient sternly. “I just hope she realizes now that the human body is not indestructible.”
The idea of his mother thinking otherwise struck the priest as absurd. She was n
ever stingy with the time or effort she gave her fellow tenants, but he had never gotten the impression she was overtaxing herself.
“There’s nothing, then...to be concerned about?”
The young doctor directed another frown at his patient.
“The test results are not all in yet. But as far as I can see, there doesn’t seem to be anything amiss. Her heart is strong. Blood pressure is okay. Red and white count look good. The episode she experienced seems to have been the result of fatigue, perhaps from overexcitement. I’ll check her again in a couple weeks, but I don’t anticipate any recurrence as long as she behaves herself.”
The implication that his mother had been behaving like a frenzied schoolgirl started Father Walther wondering if Sidney Small did not bear some responsibility for her condition. Last night he had been too distracted to ask Small if they had been together during her recent vacation. Was it possible that old cavalier had been the reason for her extending her stay in the mountains beyond what she had originally planned?
“I’ll be back in the morning,” the doctor said.
“Will I be discharged then?” she asked, her voice clear of the rasp that had afflicted it yesterday.
“I don’t see why not.”
The doctor offered his hand to the priest. “Nice to see you again, Father.”
After the doctor left, his mother lay quite still beneath the carefully arranged bed linen, her small hands resting on the fold of the cotton sheet. Her index finger scratched absently at the flesh beside her thumbnail.
“You look much better,” he began, taking the seat Sidney Small had occupied the previous evening.
“I guess I’ll live.”
“You had a good night? You slept well?”
“Like a baby.”
“They gave you a sleeping tablet?”
“I don’t really know. They give me so many different pills.”
He laughed. “Mother, you should ask. You have a right to know.”
She raised an eyebrow and turned down the corners of her mouth. She had yet to look him in the eye, but she had stopped picking at her thumb. Her hands now rested quietly on top of each other.
The Jew's Wife & Other Stories Page 13