The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (4 page)

   
On the
other hand, the priest had no way of knowing if he was being told
the whole truth. He believed the only way to keep people honest was
to treat them as such. But he knew it probably didn’t work most of
the time, and he didn’t enjoy being duped anymore than the next
fellow. Some people were hopelessly unscrupulous—almost hopelessly.
You couldn’t live as if a little Christian charity would magically
cure everyone of greed and selfishness. A mendicant might have the
luxury of being able to play Saint Francis, but he was a secular
priest—one who had to live in the world, if not of it.

   
His head
ached with confusion. He was again eating the mechanic’s food and
making conversation, such as it was. But all the while he was
racked with indecision.

   “
Sleep
on it,” the mechanic told him after a dessert of raspberry-lime
Jello. No one had mentioned the Ford since they had sat down to
dinner, but the man seemed to know what was on the priest’s mind.
Meanwhile, there was no question about Father Walther’s not
spending the night. The mechanic had brought home his suitcase. The
priest was grateful for that. His office was inside and he must
complete reading it before midnight—technically, by one a.m. during
Daylight Saving Time. He also knew he had no alternative to
accepting their hospitality. But to show good faith he decided to
tell the mechanic that he would take his advice about the car. The
mechanic merely nodded for reply, but Father Walther felt better
for having spoken. If nothing else, he felt reassured that secular
prudence and Christian ethics could sometimes coincide.

   
In the
morning he returned to the garage to get the rest of his
belongings. The mechanic figured the junkman would offer sixty or
seventy dollars for the car. Father Walther asked if that would
cover the cost of his labor. After a moment’s grave deliberation
the mechanic said it would. They rode in silence then. Silence
seemed to be the man’s normal medium, but this time he seemed
unusually preoccupied. Finally he cleared his throat and declared
above the roar of wind and muffler, “I’ll send you a check for any
refund.”

   
He had
called his mother the previous evening and finally heard some
concern in her voice. He assumed the concern was for his
predicament (along with trepidation about his spending the night
with Protestants). But when he telephoned again after turning over
the keys to the Ford, he realized something else was bothering
her.

   “
The man
has offered to drive me to a bus depot,” he told her. “I can be in
Baltimore by mid-afternoon. Can I get a connection to your
place?”

   
She
wasn’t sure. Only commuter buses ran between Baltimore and her part
of the state. Making a connection would depend on what time he
arrived there.

   “Is something wrong, Mother?”

   “No,” she replied without
conviction. “I just had some plans to go away for a couple days
with the girls. It’s alright.”

   “When are you supposed to
leave?”

   “It doesn’t matter. Hop a bus like
you said. Only, I don’t know what you’ll do if you can’t get a
connection in Baltimore.”

   “
That’s not a
problem. I can always take a cab. When are you scheduled to go away
with your friends?”

   
She hesitated.
He sensed she was about to cry.

   “
Wednesday
morning.” He waited while she fished a tissue from the sleeve of
her housecoat. “I wouldn’t have made plans, only you said you would
be staying just these two days.”

   
He took a deep
breath.

   “
It’s okay, Ma.
You go ahead with your trip. I’ll see you when you get
back.”

   “
It’s
just for a couple days. To the mountains. I thought it would be
nice to see the mountains again.”

   “
Of
course it would. You haven’t been away in years. I wouldn’t dream
of letting you cancel the trip.”

    “
But what
will
you
do? You
haven’t even got a car now.”

   “
I’ll manage,”
he said. “I’ll have a fine time, and so will you. We’ll compare
notes next week.”

   
The
mechanic dropped him off at the bus stop outside a lonely grocery
store on a two-lane state highway. The bus would take him to
Philadelphia, where he could get a long-distance connection north.
He would be back in his parish by nightfall. He thanked the
mechanic for his hospitality, and the man started to climb back
into his dilapidated Plymouth. Then, on an impulse which in a more
demonstrative person might have amounted to just a formality, he
turned and offered the priest his hand.

   
He
waited half an hour without any sign of a bus. There was very
little traffic of any kind, all co-opted, he supposed, by the
faster Interstates. He asked in the grocery—a general store,
actually—about a schedule, but the elderly proprietor was vague.
“There’ll be one by and by.”

   
He sat
down on a weathered bench at the roadside and began reading his
office. He was wearing the same black serge pants he had set out in
two days ago, but had replaced his Hawaiian print with a blue
short-sleeve. His black vinyl suitcase, a Christmas gift from the
altar boys, squatted on the gravel beside him. In it were two sets
of clean under wear—and one dirty—another sport shirt, a bathing
suit, a pair of chinos, socks, handkerchiefs and toilet articles, a
mass kit, and a bottle of detergent for doing hand wash. It hadn’t
occurred to him to pack any books except his office and a missal.
When he was young he used to read lives of the saints. Later he
read Chesterton and what he considered to be other good Catholic
authors. But as his responsibilities in the parish grew, he found
he had less and less time for elective reading. In the last year he
had finished only two books, and both had been manuals on parish
management.

   
He
peered through the shimmering heat, but still saw no sign of a bus.
He was beginning to regret the end of his detour. Despite all the
fatigue and frustration, he had enjoyed playing the role of
mysterious stranger. He had seen a side of life that a uniformed
clergyman was denied. As he sat in the hot sun recalling the
mechanic’s gruff generosity and his wife’s proud grief, he realized
that he was going to miss them.

   
He
wasn’t ready yet to return to his clerical persona. It wasn’t
enough just to play Everyman to a few Howard Johnson waitresses.
What he needed was a real vacation, not merely from his life as a
cleric but from the identity of the priesthood itself. He did not
want to be relieved of his vocation; he could not imagine life
without being able to say mass and forgive sins. And he certainly
did not want to philander. What he did want was time off from the
world’s idea of who he was, an idea that made it impossible for
anyone to treat him as a normal human being—not his housekeeper,
not the milkman, not even his own mother.

   
The high
metal brow of some kind of oversize vehicle appeared in the waves
of heat shimmering above the concrete road. He mouthed a silent
prayer, one he had learned in grammar school but had survived all
the theology he had received since. In a sense, it was no longer
canonical because it addressed the deity as Holy Ghost, while
Vatican II had altered His title to Spirit. But the prayer had
served him well, especially when he had to make his mind up
fast.

   
It
turned out to be just another of those mammoth trailer-trucks that
had plagued him on the Turnpike. He greeted it with relief. He was
always quick to caution parishioners against believing in omens,
but it was hard not to see this as a sign. He picked up his valise
and walked back into the store.

   “
Do any other
buses stop here besides the one to Philly?”

   
The old man
completed a column of accounts he had been worrying with a pencil
stub. Then he looked the stranger over as if for the first
time.

   “
What sort of
bus did you have in mind?”

   “
Just one that
goes some place other than Philadelphia.”

   
The storekeeper
glanced down at the black valise, then returned to his account
book. Another consequence of anonymity, Father Walther realized,
was suspicion.

   “
There’s
one to Atlantic City. But you missed that by a couple
hours.”

   “
When’s the
next?”

   “
Tomorrow
morning.”

   
This gave him
pause. It was one thing to take a little detour on the way back to
his parish; it was quite another to risk marooning
himself.

   “
How far
is it to a real bus depot—where I can get a bus to other shore
points?”

   
The old
man again looked up from his figures, now as if at a pesky dog that
refused to go away.

   “
Take
this here road five miles north. Then go right at 537. That’ll take
you into Camden.”

   
Father
Walther regarded the man mutely. How was he supposed to take a road
anywhere without transportation?

   “
There’s no bus
to Camden?”

   “
Nope.”

   “
A car
service?”

   “
None I know
of.”

   
What did
ordinary people do in such circumstances? It was hard to imagine
himself as a layman stranded on a deserted highway in the
boondocks. He suspected that ordinary people, certainly a man of
his own age and some knowledge of how the world worked, didn’t find
themselves in this kind of predicament in the first place. Kids, he
knew, hitchhiked. Sometimes he picked one up, always careful to
give him (and sometimes even her) a homily about the dangers of
thumbing rides from strangers—a silly tack to take, now that he
thought about it: if they shouldn’t hitchhike, even priests
shouldn’t pick them up. If a cleric could shed his identity just by
removing his roman collar, surely a murderer or child molester
could just as easily disguise himself as a priest.

   
He
crossed the road and looked down the road as far as where it bent
around a stand of scrub pine trees. Directly across the way was the
general store. He could not see in through the screen door, but he
knew the old man could see out. He didn’t need any spectators for
his first attempt at hitching-hiking, so he moved a few yards up
the road.

   
Another
tractor-trailer passed him, then a panel truck, then nothing at
all. The sun made his hair, already graying at the temples, hot to
the touch. His vinyl valise was softening like macadam. The old man
came out of the store and surveyed the road without appearing to
notice the sweltering priest. Father Walther picked up his bag and
began walking north. That was what hitchhikers did—walk in the
direction they were headed while waiting for cars to come along. He
didn’t understand the logic of it, but at least it put some
distance between himself and the store owner.

   
Two cars
passed without slowing down. He was getting thirsty. He should have
bought something to drink.

   
Suddenly
a battered pickup appeared and skidded to a stop even before he
remembered to stick out his thumb. A woman in jeans and a man’s
rolled-up dress shirt pushed the side door open for him. Amazed at
his abrupt change of fortune, he told her where he was
headed.

   
She told
him to get in, then gave the sideview mirror a cursory glance and
skidded back onto the road. Her long blond ponytail made her look
younger than her probable age—he guessed forty. She didn’t look
like a farmer, but the pickup smelled of animal. She had bright
blue eyes.

   “
You
looked like you were fixing to melt,” she said, glancing at his
shirt, which was soaked through with perspiration. “You ain’t from
around these parts, are you.”

   
He
wondered how she knew that but was too embarrassed by the way she
was looking at him to give more than a one-syllable reply. He was
used to the opposite sex paying him attention, even in a harmless
way flirting (more so when he was younger). He knew his attraction
had to do with his being forbidden fruit. If for one moment one of
those harmless admirers suspected him of having a reciprocal
interest, she would undoubtedly run straight for her boyfriend or
husband. But the grin this woman had turned on him made him feel
the way he imagined women felt when they said a man was undressing
them with his eyes.

   “
I bet
Old Man Crocker gave you a dose of his hospitality. That’s how come
you were roasting your butt off in the sun when he could just as
easily call you a cab.”

   “
There’s a car
service?”

   “
Of course there
is. Where did you think you were—Injun territory?”

   
She
grinned elaborately and reached onto the floor beside her seat. She
came up with a plastic container half-filled with what looked like
some kind of pink juice. She removed the cap and took a sip, then
offered it to her passenger.

   “
No
thanks,” he said. He didn’t mind sharing the bottle, and God knew
he was thirsty. What made him decline was the idea of putting his
mouth to the same spout a woman’s lips had just touched.

   
But her
arm, covered with a frost of fine blond hair, remained
extended.