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

Bill talked up the changes in the liturgy, the vernacular, lay participation, ecumenism, and so on, and Joe didn’t. Bill claimed that religion had hit bottom in our time and had no place to go but up, and Joe questioned both statements. Bill said that religion (though not perhaps as we know it) was the coming thing, and that the clergy (though not perhaps as we know them) were the coming men. “Fuzzy thinking, Pollyanna stuff,” said Joe, and advised Bill to stop reading Teilhard de Chardin and other unpronounceables. So Bill was inclined to be bullish, and Joe bearish, about the future.

As for the present, the immediate present, Joe could understand how Bill might be unhappy in his work, considering the satisfactions there were, or were said to be, in the priesthood, which, unfortunately, was not what it was cracked up to be in the seminary and not what you chose to make it. If Bill had expected to labor in certain parts of the vineyard, and not in others — in the slums, and not in the suburbs — he should have said so years ago and saved the diocese the expense of educating him. And if Bill felt, as he said, thwarted and useless where he was — well, that was exactly how men in slum parishes felt. The truth was Bill had got what he wanted — a tough assignment — without the romantic props that went with a slum parish: bums, pigeons, and so on. Naturally, after living in the rarefied atmosphere of the seminary, Bill was finding it hard to adjust to reality. A slight case of the bends. That was all. Or was it?

Sometimes, late at night, Joe would call Bill an apostolic snob — accuse him of looking down his nose at the parishioners just because they weren’t derelicts or great sinners — and sometimes, late at night, Joe would call Bill a dreamer. In that connection, Joe had noticed that Bill had a faraway look in his eyes, and that Bill had a head like a violin. Dreamers hadn’t been so common in the Church back when he’d been one himself, hadn’t constituted a working majority then, Joe was saying one night, when a picture of Rudolf Hess appeared on television and Joe noticed that Hess had a head like a violin. Joe was beginning to develop his thesis, saying the fact that Hess had flown to Scotland in the hope of stopping the war, a war that still had years to run, certainly proved that he was a dreamer, when Bill interrupted: “The fact that you’ve got a head like a banjo, Father — what’s that prove?” Well, Joe had tried not to show it, had smiled, but he had been hurt — a very bad moment in the relationship.

On the whole, though, they were getting along. There were nights, yes, when Bill had to be called more than once before he came out of his room, before he left off strumming his Spanish guitar, listening to FM, or talking to his friends on the phone. There were nights, too, when Bill returned to his room earlier than Joe would have liked, when Joe had maybe had one too many… The truth was these weren’t the nights that Joe had looked forward to during his years as a pastor without a curate, and during his years as a curate with a pastor who avoided him… and still they weren’t bad nights, by rectory standards these days. There had been some fairly good talk — arguments, really, ending sometimes with one man making a final point outside the other man’s door, or, after they’d both gone to bed, over the phone. “Bill? Joe.” And there had been moments, a few, when the manifest differences of age, position, and opinion between pastor and curate had just disappeared, when Joe and Bill had entered that rather exalted and somewhat relaxed state, induced in part perhaps by drink, that Joe recognized as priestly fellowship.

At one such moment, feeling content but wondering if he couldn’t do better, Joe had invited Bill to have a friend or two in for a meal sometime.

“Should I call the others, Father?” said Mrs P., sounding apprehensive, for the others were getting kind of loud in Bill’s room.

“I’ll do it,” Joe said, but when he saw himself knocking at Bill’s door, looking in on a scene he’d been more or less excluded from, he phoned over. “ Bill? ” Either Bill or Father Otto should’ve answered the phone — possibly Hennessy or Potter, but not Conklin.

They arrived in the study like conventioneers, some carrying glasses, and immediately formed a circle that did not include Joe. He came between them, mentioning Father Otto’s bus, and bumped them over to the food. Then he went and stood at the other end of the table, by the wine — ready to pour, hoping to get into conversation with someone. Father Otto was first in line. “Just like the monastery,” Joe said, referring to the nice display of food on Father Otto’s plate.

“Yes,” said Father Otto, who’d been saying (to Hennessy) that some days were somewhat better than others to visit the monastery if one intended to eat there. “We have a cafeteria now.”

“Wine, Father?”

“What kind is it?”

Joe, speaking through his nose, named the wine.

“On second thought, no,” said Father Otto, and moved off with his plate, which he carefully held in both hands but in a sloping manner.

Hennessy was next, and he also refused wine. But he complimented Joe on his building program, calling the new rectory “a crackerjack,” which suggested to Joe that the works of Father Finn— Tom Playfair, Claude Lightfoot , and the rest — were still being read and might have figured in Hennessy’s vocation, as they had in his own.

“You should see the office area,” Joe said to Hennessy. “Maybe, if there’s time later, I could take you around the plant.”

“Oh, no !” said Conklin, next in line, and then turned to Potter to see if he’d heard, but Potter was talking to Bill, and Hennessy (“Maybe later, Father”) was moving off, and so Conklin, after more or less insulting Joe, had to face him alone.

“Wine, Mr Conklin?”

“ Sí, señor .”

It went with the mustache, Joe guessed, wondering whether a priest should be addressed as “ señor ,” whether “ reverendissimo ” or something wouldn’t be more like it, whether, in fact, Conklin had meant to pay him back for the “mister.” At the seminary, as Conklin would know, there were still a few reverend fathers who made much of “mister,” hissing it, using it to draw the line between miserable you and glorious them. That hadn’t been Joe’s intention. What was Conklin now, and what was he ever likely to be, but “mister”? It didn’t pay for someone in Conklin’s position to be too sensitive, Joe thought.

And listened to Potter, who was saying (to Bill) that he’d had a raw egg on his steak tartare in München and enjoyed it. “‘ Mit Ei ,’ they call it there.”

“You can enjoy it here ,” Joe said. “Mrs Pelissier!” he cried, not pronouncing the housekeeper’s name as he usually did, but giving it everything it had, which was plenty, in French.

Joe and everybody (except Father Otto) urged Potter to have a raw egg on his steak tartare, as in München— Mit Ei! Mit Ei! But Potter wouldn’t do it, although Mrs P. produced a dozen nice fresh ones, entering the study in triumph, leaving it in sorrow. Joe almost had one himself, for her sake. Potter came out of it badly.

Joe was hoping the Barcalounger would clear when he set forth with glass and plate, but Conklin was in it, and it didn’t, and so he went and sat near Hennessy and Father Otto. “Never cared for buffet,” he told them, and got no response. (Hennessy was saying that the monastic life was beyond one of his modest spiritual means, Father Otto that one never knew until one tried.) Joe tried the other conversation. (Potter was building up the laity, at the expense of the clergy, as was the practice of the clergy these days.) “Some of your best friends must be laymen,” Joe said, and was alarmed to see Potter taking him seriously: that was the trouble with the men of Bill’s generation — not too bright and in love with themselves, they made you want to hit them. “But what about the ones who empty their ashtrays in your parking lot?”