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

“Will you give me your advice, Father?” He felt that she sensed his indifference and interpreted it as his way of rejecting her. She either had no idea how little sense she made or else supreme faith in him, as a priest, to see into her heart.

“Just what is it you’re after, Mrs Klein?”

“He left me all he had, Father, but it’s just laying in the bank.”

“And you want me to tell you what to do with it?”

“Yes, Father.”

Father Eudex thought this might be interesting, certainly a change. He went back in his mind to the seminary and the class in which they had considered the problem of inheritances. Do we have any unfulfilled obligations? Are we sure?… Are there any impedimenta?…

“Do you have any dependents, Mrs Klein — any children?”

“One boy, Father. I got him running the bakery. I pay him good — too much, Father.”

“Is ‘too much’ a living wage?”

“Yes, Father. He ain’t got a family.”

“A living wage is not too much,” Father Eudex handed down, sailing into the encyclical style without knowing it.

Mrs Klein was smiling over having done something good without knowing precisely what it was.

“How old is your son?”

“He’s thirty-six, Father.”

“Not married?”

“No, Father, but he’s got him a girl.” She giggled, and Father Eudex, embarrassed, retied his shoe.

“But you don’t care to make a will and leave this money to your son in the usual way?”

“I guess I’ll have to… if I die.” Mrs Klein was suddenly crushed and haunted, but whether by death or charity, Father Eudex did not know.

“You don’t have to, Mrs Klein. There are many worthy causes. And the worthiest is the cause of the poor. My advice to you, if I understand your problem, is to give what you have to someone who needs it.”

Mrs Klein just stared at him.

“You could even leave it to the archdiocese,” he said, completing the sentence to himself: but I don’t recommend it in your case… with your tendencies. You look like an Indian giver to me.

But Mrs Klein had got enough. “Huh!” she said, rising. “Well! You are a funny one!”

And then Father Eudex realized that she had come to him for a broker’s tip. It was in the eyes. The hat. The dress. The shoes. “If you’d like to speak to the pastor,” he said, “come back in the evening.”

“You’re a nice young man,” Mrs Klein said, rather bitter now and bent on getting away from him. “But I got to say this — you ain’t much of a priest. And Klein said if I got a problem, see the priest — huh! You ain’t much of a priest! What time’s your boss come in?”

“In the evening,” Father Eudex said. “Come any time in the evening.”

Mrs Klein was already down the steps and making for the street.

“You might try Mr Memmers at the First National,” Father Eudex called, actually trying to help her, but she must have thought it was just some more of his nonsense and did not reply.

After Mrs Klein had disappeared Father Eudex went to his room. In the hallway upstairs Monsignor’s voice, coming from the depths of the clerical nap, halted him.

“Who was it?”

“A woman,” Father Eudex said. “A woman seeking good counsel.”

He waited a moment to be questioned, but Monsignor was not awake enough to see anything wrong with that, and there came only a sigh and a shifting of weight that told Father Eudex he was simply turning over in bed.

Father Eudex walked into the bathroom. He took the Rival check from his pocket. He tore it into little squares. He let them flutter into the toilet. He pulled the chain — hard.

He went to his room and stood looking out the window at nothing. He could hear the others already giving an account of their stewardship, but could not judge them. I bought baseball uniforms for the school. I bought the nuns a new washing machine. I purchased a Mass kit for a Chinese missionary. I bought a set of matched irons. Mine helped pay for keeping my mother in a rest home upstate. I gave mine to the poor.

And you, Father?

EXCEPT FOR A contemporary placard or two, the place conspired to set me dreaming of the good old days I had never known. The furniture did it — the cloudy mirrors, the grandiose mahogany bar, the tables and chairs ornate with spools and scrollwork, the burnished brass coat hooks and cuspidors, all as shiny-ugly as the day they were made, and swillish brown paintings, inevitable subjects, fat tippling friars in cellars, velvet cavaliers elegantly eying sherry, the deadliest of still-life fruit, but no fishes on platters.

At a table across the room, Emil, the waiter, and two patrons finished a hand, talked about it, scraped the cards into a muddy deck. They spoke an aromatic mixture of English and German. Emil, a little spaniel of a man, fussed with his flapping sleeves and consoled the fat man whose king had not been good enough.

Renner, using both hands, elevated a glass of beer in momentary exposition, raised his eyes to heaven, and drank deeply. I wondered if, despite everything, he might still be fascinated by the Germans. I could think of no other reason for coming here.

I signaled Emil. He smiled too graciously, put down his cards, and came over to pick up our glasses, saying “Gentlemen.” One of the cardplayers frowned at me for interrupting the game. He was the one we called the Entrepreneur. Renner had acquired his English abroad and reporters to him were journalists; the cardplayer, who might possibly be a salesman, had become an Entrepreneur.

When Emil brought our glasses back, quivering and amber, I became preoccupied with a button on my coat, escaping the gelatinous impact of his smile. I could sense Renner undergoing it. When Emil withdrew, Renner said, “He’s not as simple as he pretends to be.” This struck me as off-key to the point of being funny. And still it may have been that I had already recognized, without consciously acknowledging, something dimly sinister about Emil.

Renner dipped his glass at a bowl of fruit rotting on the wall. “It’s too bad der Fuehrer couldn’t paint a little. Another bad painter, we could have stood that.” He began to speak in what I had come to know as his autobiographical tone. He appeared to listen to himself, skeptical, though he was accenting words and ideas, of the meaning in what he said, trying to account for himself on earth. “Anyway, my mother hired a sergeant major to discipline me when I was eight years old. The Austrian army was not the most formidable in the world, except of course at regimental balls, but she hoped he could do the job. He couldn’t. I was not to have many such victories.”

The idea of Renner the child died away when I looked at the man across the table from me. Renner had rusty hair, bristling abundantly, tufted eyebrows, an oddly handsome face with the depth and decision of a wood carving about it. When I looked again Renner the man was lost in our surroundings. I saw an album world: exaggerated bicycles and good-old-summertime girls, picnics and family reunions, mustachioed quartets, polished horses galloping through Budweiser advertisements, the heroes and adventures of Horatio Alger, the royal commerce of the day. The furniture reached boldly into the past and yanked these visions into being. I had only to step out the door to find everything changed back fifty years. Meanwhile the green walls, waiting to be smoked black, stood patiently around us.

“Because he could paint like that,” Renner said, “my uncle became president of the Vienna Academy.” I glanced needlessly at the pictures. Renner laughed shortly. “He had a patriarchal beard, however, which he used to clean his brushes on. His only attempt at eccentricity and it failed. In fact, it killed him— lead poisoning.”