J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

Bill and his friends then departed, Hennessy murmuring, “See you later.”

“Fine young men,” said Father Otto.

“Uh-huh,” Joe said. “Split a bottle, Father?”

“All right.”

Joe carried the empties into the kitchen. “Everything O.K. in here?” he said to Mrs P., and opened the refrigerator — always an embarrassing act for him, even when alone. He had cut down on snacking, though, had suffered less from “night hunger” since Bill moved in.

“Sure you want to eat in the study, Father?”

“It’s Bill’s party,” Joe said, although he felt as Mrs P. did about eating in the study.

“He’s lucky he’s got you for a pastor, Father.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Joe said, but didn’t argue the point. He returned to the study and poured half of the beer — more than half — into Father Otto’s glass. “Hey. How’d that man get on second?”

Father Otto observed the television screen closely and nodded, as if to say yes, Joe was right, there was a man on second.

“The official scorer has ruled it a single and an error, not a double,” said the announcer.

“Who made the error?” Joe said, more to the announcer than to Father Otto.

“According to our records, that’s the first error Tony’s made this season,” said the announcer.

Father Otto got up and, as was his habit from time to time, left the room.

After a bit, Joe went to see if anything was wrong, but Father Otto, who used the lavatory off the guest room, wasn’t there. Then, listening in the hallway, Joe heard the old monk’s voice among the others in Bill’s room, and returned to the study. Sitting there alone, finishing off Father Otto’s beer, Joe asked himself, What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, really, he told himself. The curate was entertaining in his room so as not to interfere with the game, the visiting priest was a fair-weather fan, if that, and so, really, nothing was wrong — it meant nothing, nothing personal that the pastor sat alone. He didn’t like it, though.

One of the best things about the priesthood, Joe had been told in the seminary, is other priests—“priestly fellowship.” The words had sounded corny at the time, but Joe had believed in the idea behind them and he still did. For years, though, he hadn’t had room in his life for those who should now be his intimates — two of his classmates had died, and others seemed equally remote. Pursuing his building program as he had, he had been forced to associate almost exclusively with the laity, and now, at forty-four, he found he wanted more from life. And for some reason he wasn’t finding as much priestly fellowship as he’d hoped to find where he kept looking for it — under his own roof.

Despite the age gap, Joe had tried hard with Father Otto. In the beginning, there had been pro football games (spoiled by Father Otto’s totally uninformed comments and rather amused attitude), drives into the countryside to see the autumn foliage (“You should see it at the monastery”), visits to new churches of all denominations, since Joe would have to build a new church someday (visits discontinued because Father Otto wasn’t, as he put it, terribly interested in new churches, or, for that matter, old ones, and disliked the bucket seats in Joe’s car). Now, as a rule, they spent Sunday afternoon at home, in the pastor’s study, sent out for seafood dinners, which Father Otto seemed to look forward to, and watched television, which the monk didn’t have in his cell in the monastery. This was all right when there was something on, by which Joe meant major sports, not water-skiing, and also things like Meet the Press and Face the Nation , but Father Otto wasn’t so discriminating — he enjoyed quiz programs and government propaganda. At such times, Joe would go downstairs to his office to read, or slip into his bedroom for a nap. All in all, not an ideal situation.

With Bill, Joe had tried harder, since so much more was at stake — the pastor-curate relationship. It had begun badly. Bill, reporting for duty on his first day, a Saturday, had barely made it in time for afternoon confessions, had dined out the next day without giving sufficient notice, had come in late that night, and had to be summoned to the office area the next morning. (Evidently, he’d thought that a priest just sat around in his room waiting for something to turn up.) And he’d been ordained without even a hunt-and-peck command of typing — a great blow to Joe, who’d said that a man who couldn’t type was as ill-equipped for modern parish life as a man who couldn’t drive, and Bill had laughed. A very bad time in the relationship.

Joe was still carrying the work load he had carried before, doing all the parish accounts and correspondence and trying to find jobs that Bill could do — quite a job itself. The future looked better, though, with Bill going ahead in his typing, using the text and records provided by Joe and his own phonograph, which, at first, at the end of each day, he’d lugged up to his room to play folk and protest songs on but now, thank God, left in his office. Bill was sweating it out now, yes, but so was Joe, and really Bill couldn’t complain. It wasn’t all business in the office area. With the connecting door open, they could carry on conversations desk to desk, and if the flow was rather more one way than the other, that was because there was so much that Bill didn’t know about procedure and policy, about the local community, about the world in general. Here, too, Joe tried to help Bill, working from a dozen or so periodicals that crossed his desk, passing them on with some articles marked “Read” or “Skip.” It was all right if Bill read the recommended matter during office hours as long as his typing and filing didn’t suffer. Sometimes, too, Joe would drop in on Bill and smoke a baby cigar with him (wanted to get Bill off cigarettes), and two or three times a week, an hour before closing time, Joe would put on his hat and say, in the gruff voice he affected when he was about to be more than ordinarily decent, “Knock it off.” Bill would then cover his typewriter (Joe was strict about that), and they’d go off in Joe’s car, the radio playing for Bill. They had visited a number of rectories on business that could’ve been handled by telephone simply because Joe liked being seen with his curate. At least once a week, after what might have started out as a routine stop at the hospital or the garage (Joe’s car was a lemon), they’d dined out in style, and gone on to box seats at the stadium. They had attended a half-dozen games before Joe really accepted the fact that Bill wasn’t terribly interested in baseball. At Bill’s suggestion, they had taken in a couple of lousy foreign movies. But mostly they spent their evenings at home, in the pastor’s study, pastor in his chair, his Barcalounger, feet up, curate in attendance, with cigars and drinks (served from the bathroom, where the liquor was kept in the same drawer with the shoe polish and thus kept in its place), TV if wanted, and good talk.

Well, fairly good talk.

Little interest was shown when Joe spoke of the remarkable personalities who had flourished at the seminary during his era, and likewise when Bill spoke of his recent trials there — of piddling causes that already sounded like ancient history. Bill could say the usual things about the late Pope John, and about the present Pope, but he couldn’t discuss Frank Sinatra (“the Guv’nor”) or Senator Dirksen, and he hadn’t even heard of people like Fishbait Miller and Nancy Dickerson. Large, fertile areas of conversation — Capitol Hill, show business, sports — had therefore been abandoned. But what made the likeliest subjects impossible — the difference between Joe and Bill — was what kept them going when they got onto religion.