“…Sylvia was Nancy, yes. Maybe when he saw my shock he got second thoughts about anything else he had planned to say. Or maybe he never intended to share his secret in the first place. Come to think of it, Charlie was always pretty selective about what he chose to confide. I guess he hasn’t changed. But I’m sorry,” he added, “for you.”
“What for? I was the one who left you holding the bag. I’m the one who should apologize. After...my nightmare I thought you’d think...Well, I didn’t know what you’d think. But I didn’t have the nerve to stick around and find out. Anyhow, I want you to know I’m really glad you came by this evening. I feel a lot better about myself.”
“I’m glad too.”
“Where will you go when you leave here? Back to your rectory?”
“I don’t think so. Much as I miss Margaret’s cooking.”
“Surely after—what is it, seven years?—you could force down some more pot roast.”
“I suppose. But you forget I still have two days vacation.”
“Another chance to go to hell with yourself. What sort of escapade will it be this time? A debauch in Secaucus? An interlude in Hackensack?”
They both laughed.
“A little peace and quiet would be nice.”
“And green grass?”
“Yes,” he said. “That would be delightful.”
“There’s a motel down the road where you could pitch your tent. We could be out on the first tee by seven.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The sun was just reaching its zenith. But on the veranda where they were seated a strong breeze made the midday heat bearable. Below them, a nine-iron shot away, a threesome was getting ready to hit off the first tee.
“Mad dogs and Englishmen.”
A waiter arrived with sandwiches and tall glasses of iced tea. They hadn’t eaten since breakfast four hours earlier, but Rosalie was only nibbling at her tuna salad, while the priest tore into his club sandwich with an appetite.
“Was I right about the course?” she asked.
“Beautiful. As fine as any I’ve seen.”
She took another dainty bite and stared across the ninth fairway shimmering in the heat.
“This place used to be the best-kept secret in the county. But no more.”
He followed her gaze over the wide grass. “How long have you been playing here?”
“About three years. Almost from the day it opened.” She chewed contemplatively, took a sip of tea and added, “I had someone to play with in those days—a regular partner, I mean.”
“Oh?”
She sipped again. Most of her sandwich still lay untouched. His own had long since vanished. “We broke up.”
It hadn’t occurred to him that by partner she had meant a boyfriend. Her attention had again drifted to the hot fairways or, rather, to whatever memories those acres of green grass summoned up. He found himself wishing she would return to the present. When she noticed his expression, she laughed. “It wasn’t especially serious. At least, not for him.”
“But it was for you,” he replied in his confession-box tone.
“I didn’t know then that you could fall in love with someone without their returning the compliment.” She smiled. “It seems like a long time ago.”
The breeze that had made the veranda bearable died abruptly. They moved indoors to the bar-cum-restaurant, which also offered a good view of the course. Although technically it was still lunchtime, the place was deserted. The majority of golfers had finished their rounds and rushed home to work on the house or take the wife to the shopping mall. The few tables in use were occupied by older couples without family obligations or lawns to mow.
“Happy?” Rosalie asked. At first the question didn’t register. He understood her meaning, but it was as if layers of dense matter that hadn’t been breached in decades, if ever, had to be penetrated before the query made sense. She was regarding him with a benevolent smile, and that benediction alone seemed to fill him with a sense of well-being.
“Yes. I am.”
“Me too. I guess you don’t have to win the lottery. That’s hard to understand when you’re young. Ten years ago nothing short of a magic-carpet ride could make me believe I was happy.”
“Did you have many—magic-carpet rides?”
“A couple. At least they seemed that way at the time. Now I’d probably get airsick. How about yourself?”
He tried to translate the experience she seemed to have in mind into something relevant to his life as a priest. But all he could think of was his first masses. “There were moments when I was newly ordained.”
“What kind of moments?” She leaned expectantly across the table. “I won’t make fun. Honest.” Her eyes were shining the way they had in the candlelight at Charlie’s.
“Moments of religious feeling,” he said. “I used to get them when I was a kid too, after receiving communion.”
“But not anymore?”
“No.”
She patted his hands, which were joined on the table between them. It was a mocking gesture, but her face was free of ridicule.
“Welcome to the club, Richie.”
He smiled wanly. Did he really have to accept spiritual coma the same way he had to resign himself to the apathy of middle age? He had assumed that his dearth of enthusiasm was due to some spiritual deficiency, some moral failure which honest effort and grace would eventually cure. But his inertia might be due to something as simple and plebeian as the aging process. Were his tearful responses to holding the consecrated body of Christ in his young hands equivalent to those adolescent love affairs Rosalie had alluded to? Did he have nothing but thirty years of dull routine ahead of him? He wasn’t sure he could face that sort of future with the resignation Rosalie seemed to have achieved.
“Time for a beer, I’d say.” She turned to get the waitress’s attention. A foursome fresh from the last hole waved back at her. As they approached the table the older of the two men put his arm around Rosalie and kissed her warmly. Then his wife or girlfriend did the same.
“Where have you been keeping yourself?” the man asked, squeezing her hand fondly. “You look fabulous.”
Rosalie turned toward the priest.
“Les and Sherry, this is my friend Richie.”
Father Walther started to get up, but Les waved him back to his seat with one hand while pumping his palm vigorously with the other. “A pleasure.”
The second couple was introduced, and all four were invited to sit down. Despite the extravagance of their greeting, it turned out that Les and Rosalie had known each other less than a year before she had left the hospital where Les was still head accountant. Sherry—she was his wife, although her ring looked like something out of a gumball machine—worked in a law firm. She was short and mousy but seemed not in the least unsure of herself or of her exuberant husband. The other couple stayed in the background while Rosalie and Les brought themselves up to date. Finally, Les apologized for excluding everyone else from the conversation.
“Let’s all go back to my house,” Rosalie said. “We can throw a couple steaks on the grille.”
“I have a better idea,” Les countered. “We head over to my place for Tom Collinses and then have dinner at my club. Tonight’s cabaret night.” He glanced at Father Walther and the other couple, none of whom had yet contracted his enthusiasm. “On me,” he added, as if that were all that had held them back from assenting.
“Say yes, Richie,” Rosalie urged, taking his hand.
“I really should get a move on. Besides, I don’t have any clothes but the ones I’m wearing.” He fingered his blue sport shirt.
“No problem.” Les sized him up, weaving from side to side like a comic tailor. “I make you a forty-two, regular.”
“More or less. But...”
“No problem at all. I have a couple jackets left over from my”—he patted his modest pot—“slimmer days. Shirts too. How about it, old man? You won’t disappoint my best girl Rosie?”
Le
s’s house was itself scarcely less grand than a country club. Set on a piece of land not much wider than a city lot, it ran very deep into a long yard that ended in a meticulously kept tennis court. There was no swimming pool, but the basement contained both a hot tub and steam room. There were also regulation-size billiard and pool tables and a universal exercise machine. Considering the flab the man had flaunted, the house hardly seemed one that he would be the owner of.
The upper floors seemed better suited to the man’s personality. The living room could have doubled as a small ballroom. It was designed for entertaining, and “entertaining” in this house obviously meant food and alcohol. Even before the house tour began, pitchers of martinis and tall glasses of Tom Collinses appeared as if spontaneously on the lustrous end tables. With the drinks came canapés of cold cuts, dips and finger sandwiches reminiscent of the fare the Catholic Daughters provided when they were trying to impress each other. Only, here the opulence seemed a matter of course.
Father Walther was still hungry from his exercise that morning. His host pressed more food on him. No one else seemed to have much of an appetite, although they threw down gin like it was lemonade. He had been in expensive houses before, but this one made him feel as if he had never seen the way people of means lived. The homes of his parishioners, even those of lawyers and other professionals, seemed deliberately subdued. The furniture, even when well made, seemed diffident, as if even that much conspicuous display were only a professional requisite, like the furnishings of a doctor’s waiting room. Here the display was unabashed: marble flooring, oriental carpets, a “conversation pit,” red velvet wall covering. There was nothing apologetic about the room, or about anything else about the house. It bespoke hard cash without embarrassment or restraint. As he sat eating and listening to the conversations going on around him, he couldn’t decide which was worse—extravagance of this sort or his parishioners’ hypocritical reserve.
Les suggested a dip in the hot tub. There were no takers, just a barrage of jokes about the host’s prurient interests.
“Alright, then, how about some steam? Girls first.”
“No, you boys go ahead,” his wife said. “I want to show Rosalie and Tara the curtains for the bedroom.”
“No guts, no glory. Come on, guys. Bring your drinks.”
A few minutes later Father Walther was seated in a small basement room so filled with steam that he could barely see his companion a couple feet away. They had nothing on but terrycloth towels. Les remained outside, regulating the controls.
“If you think this is bad,” Bernie said, “wait till you hit the cold shower.”
“What’s that for?”
“Close the pores or something. It’s all voodoo to me.”
Father Walther tried to make out his companion through the hot fog, but all he could distinguish was a shifting shadow. He had sat opposite Bernie in the living room a little while ago but had been unable to get two consecutive words out of him.
“You do this often?” the priest asked.
“Only when Les forces me. You may have noticed, he’s a very insistent person.”
They could hear the host cursing his inability to satisfactorily manipulate the controls.
“He’s not happy unless he gets it so hot you can’t breathe. Claims it cleans out the system. I’ll say one thing for a steam bath: If you’ve got any alcohol in you when you enter one, you won’t when you leave.”
“Is that a fact?”
“It makes heavy drinkers like Les feel less guilty about how much they comsume.”
“God damn fuck!”
They sat in silence as the heat continued to build. Father Walther tried to remember what kind of latch the door had and wondered if it was apt to jam.
“He’s only had it a month,” Bernie went on. Then, after another hiatus, “What line of work are you in?”
Father Walther hadn’t given any thought to how he would answer this question. He assumed that at some point Rosalie would identify his occupation. But she had not done so thus far, and he wasn’t sure if that was by design. He didn’t want to get involved in another deception of the kind which had led to the dressing down he received in Martha’s dining room, but he was reluctant to cause everyone to stiffen up the way they usually did when they found a clergyman in their midst.
“Administration,” he said. “Charity work.” He couldn’t see enough of his companion’s face to see how he had reacted.
“Yourself?”
“Teaching. Mathematics.” For the next few seconds there was only the hiss of the vents pouring still more steam into the chamber. Father Walther decided he would stick it out another five minutes. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would subject himself to this kind of punishment voluntarily. “I used to be a Catholic priest.”
Only parts of the man’s body were visible, and they were constantly changing—now a patch of hair, now a square of pink shoulder. Father Walther wondered if he had heard correctly. Until that moment he had considered the man a typical suburban husband, more quiet than most, but who wouldn’t be with the likes of Les around? By his name he had taken him for Irish American. But there was nothing clerical about him, none of that public, on-stage manner most priests affected.
“For almost ten years,” Bernie went on, apparently oblivious to the steam. For those who can take it, it’s a wonderful life.”
“’Take it’ in what sense?”
The man’s face seemed to glide in and out of a cloud of steam. Father Walther could discern no particular expression on it.
“The sacraments, mass, sick calls. Are you a Catholic by any chance?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, then you know what I mean. You know how a Catholic looks up to a priest or nun. You don’t realize it when you’re up there on the altar or sitting in the confessional, but it’s kind of like playing God, or at least like God’s specially chosen representative. That was actually how we were encouraged to see ourselves. You must have gotten those same lectures if you attended Catholic grammar school, about the hierarchy of callings: nuns and priests on top and everyone else a distant second. Most kids didn’t take that sort of thing seriously, or if they did they outgrew it when they left Catholic school. But I took it all literally. For me there was only one really noble thing to do with your life, and that was to have a vocation. I never realized the word could be used in any other sense until I was in senior year of high school. Somebody said he intended to pursue a vocation in ...I think it was medicine. I felt like saying to him, ‘You don’t mean a vocation, man,’ because a vocation was what I had, or thought I had, and that could mean only one thing. Only much later did I realize what fantastic arrogance is involved in that way of thinking.”
Father Walther was as surprised by the man’s sudden volubility as he was by the revelation he was a priest. What had possessed him to unburden himself to a stranger in these absurd circumstances? Was it the anonymous, confessional aspect of the place (it seemed more like an anteroom to hell than a confession box)? Or had he unconsciously sensed the presence of another cleric, sniffed it out the way cops claimed they could pick out one of their own in a crowd of strangers?
“So, now you’re starting a new life.”
“Born-again. Isn’t that how our Protestant brethren put it?”
Father Walther detected a note of self-mockery, as if disillusionment about the lay life was also setting in. It suddenly struck him that in this steam room he was being presented with the life that would be his own if he should ever turn his back on his vows and become the Everyman he fantasized about. Bernie had known both worlds—priest and layman. Father Walther wanted to know if he was happy (the self-mockery proved nothing, he knew from experience), if he felt damned, if he stopped at the scenes of accidents to give last rites. But he didn’t know how to ask any of these questions without seeming impertinent or revealing his own identity.
“You have children?”
“Two. A boy and a girl. The idea
l number. Minus the point-five. What’s become of Les?”
For all his new-found garrulousness, there was a restless quality about the man that suggested deeper complication. Were those nerves the result of constant self-examination, even of remorse? Did his decision to leave the priesthood hang over him like a murder victim’s ghost? Or was his moodiness the cause, rather than the result, of his decision to take off his roman collar? Whatever the case, Father Walther suspected there were going to be no further revelations from him. He felt both relief and chagrin—relief at not having to continue the pretense of being someone he was not, chagrin because he may never again come this close to knowing the heart of such a man.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to exit this inferno.”
Despite his earlier decision Father Walther remained behind in the steam room until he thought Bernie had finished showering. When he exited he found he was all alone in the cavernous basement. All that was left of the ex-priest was a dripping shower nozzle.
He suffered the icy water for a few seconds, then toweled off and dressed. He was combing his hair when he heard a noise at the other end of the basement. Les was sitting there on a low divan, shaking his head like a fighter who had just gotten up from a long count.
“Fell sound asleep,” he said not so much in apology as wonder. “Too much gin.” He seemed unaware he had left two houseguests in a steam-filled sauna. He got to his feet, momentarily lost his balance, then stumbled across the wine-colored wall-to-wall carpet. When he reached the shower stall, he blinked hard and shook his head again. “You turned the steam off?”
“I didn’t know how. Besides, I thought you would be going in yourself. Maybe it would clear your head.”
Les shivered a reply and made his way toward the sauna controls. Then he stumbled into the the shower stall, his trunk-heavy body hunched like a bear’s.
“How’d you like it?” he asked.
“Good. I feel refreshed.”
Les removed the tight knit shirt he wore open to the belt and threw it on the floor behind him. “Good,” he said, turning on the shower. Still in his trousers, he stuck his head under the cold spray. “Ahh,” he groaned. “Good, good. I’m glad.”
The Jew's Wife & Other Stories Page 16