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

“Many of ’em, John.”

“Blow it out,” Mrs Stoner said, returning to the room. She waited by the light switch for Father Firman to blow out the candle.

Mrs Stoner, who ate no desserts, began to clear the dishes into the kitchen, and the priests, finishing their cake and coffee in a hurry, went to sit in the study.

Father Nulty offered a cigar.

“John?”

“My ulcers, Frank.”

“Ah, well, you’re better off.” Father Nulty lit the cigar and crossed his long black legs. “Fish Frawley has got him a Filipino, John. Did you hear?”

Father Firman leaned forward, interested. “He got rid of the woman he had?”

“He did. It seems she snooped.”

“Snooped, eh?”

“She did. And gossiped. Fish introduced two town boys to her, said, ‘Would you think these boys were my nephews?’ That’s all, and the next week the paper had it that his two nephews were visiting him from Erie. After that, he let her believe he was going East to see his parents, though both are dead. The paper carried the story. Fish returned and made a sermon out of it. Then he got the Filipino.”

Father Firman squirmed with pleasure in his chair. “That’s like Fish, Frank. He can do that.” He stared at the tips of his fingers bleakly. “You could never get a Filipino to come to a place like this.”

“Probably not,” Father Nulty said. “Fish is pretty close to Minneapolis. Ah, say, do you remember the trick he played on us all in Marmion Hall?”

“That I’ll not forget!” Father Firman’s eyes remembered. “Getting up New Year’s morning and finding the toilet seats all painted!”

“ Happy Circumcision! Hah!” Father Nulty had a coughing fit.

When he had got himself together again, a mosquito came and sat on his wrist. He watched it a moment before bringing his heavy hand down. He raised his hand slowly, viewed the dead mosquito, and sent it spinning with a plunk of his middle finger.

“Only the female bites,” he said.

“I didn’t know that,” Father Firman said.

“Ah, yes…”

Mrs Stoner entered the study and sat down with some sewing — Father Firman’s black socks.

She smiled pleasantly at Father Nulty. “And what do you think of the atom bomb, Father?”

“Not much,” Father Nulty said.

Mrs Stoner had stopped smiling. Father Firman yawned.

Mrs Stoner served up another: “Did you read about this communist convert, Father?”

“He’s been in the Church before,” Father Nulty said, “and so it’s not a conversion, Mrs Stoner.”

“No? Well, I already got him down on my list of Monsignor’s converts.”

“It’s better than a conversion, Mrs Stoner, for there is more rejoicing in heaven over the return of… uh, he that was lost, Mrs Stoner, is found.”

“And that congresswoman, Father?”

“Yes. A convert — she.”

“And Henry Ford’s grandson, Father. I got him down.”

“Yes, to be sure.”

Father Firman yawned, this time audibly, and held his jaw.

“But he’s one only by marriage, Father,” Mrs Stoner said. “I always say you got to watch those kind.”

“Indeed you do, but a convert nonetheless, Mrs Stoner. Remember, Cardinal Newman himself was one.”

Mrs Stoner was unimpressed. “I see where Henry Ford’s making steering wheels out of soybeans, Father.”

“I didn’t see that.”

“I read it in the Reader’s Digest or some place.”

“Yes, well…” Father Nulty rose and held his hand out to Father Firman. “John,” he said. “It’s been good.”

“I heard Hirohito’s next,” Mrs Stoner said, returning to converts.

“Let’s wait and see, Mrs Stoner,” Father Nulty said.

The priests walked to the door.

“You know where I live, John.”

“Yes. Come again, Frank. Good night.”

Father Firman watched Father Nulty go down the walk to his car at the curb. He hooked the screen door and turned off the porch light. He hesitated at the foot of the stairs, suddenly moved to go to bed. But he went back into the study.

“Phew!” Mrs Stoner said. “I thought he’d never go. Here it is after eight o’clock.”

Father Firman sat down in his rocking chair. “I don’t see him often,” he said.

“I give up!” Mrs Stoner exclaimed, flinging the holey socks upon the horsehair sofa. “I’d swear you had a nail in your shoe.”

“I told you I looked.”

“Well, you ought to look again. And cut your toenails, why don’t you? Haven’t I got enough to do?”

Father Firman scratched in his coat pocket for a pill, found one, swallowed it. He let his head sink back against the chair and closed his eyes. He could hear her moving about the room, making the preparations; and how he knew them — the fumbling in the drawer for a pencil with a point, the rip of the page from his daily calendar, and finally the leg of the card table sliding up against his leg.

He opened his eyes. She yanked the floor lamp alongside the table, setting the bead fringe tinkling on the shade, and pulled up her chair on the other side. She sat down and smiled at him for the first time that day. Now she was happy.

She swept up the cards and began to shuffle with the abandoned virtuosity of an old river-boat gambler, standing them on end, fanning them out, whirling them through her fingers, dancing them halfway up her arms, cracking the whip over them. At last they lay before him tamed into a neat deck.

“Cut?”

“Go ahead,” he said. She liked to go first.

She gave him her faint, avenging smile and drew a card, cast it aside for another which he thought must be an ace from the way she clutched it face down.

She was getting all the cards, as usual, and would have been invincible if she had possessed his restraint and if her cunning had been of a higher order. He knew a few things about leading and lying back that she would never learn. Her strategy was attack, forever attack, with one baffling departure: she might sacrifice certain tricks as expendable if only she could have the last ones, the heartbreaking ones, if she could slap them down one after another, shatteringly.

She played for blood, no bones about it, but for her there was no other way; it was her nature, as it was the lion’s, and for this reason he found her ferocity pardonable, more a defect of the flesh, venial, while his own trouble was all in the will, mortal. He did not sweat and pray over each card as she must, but he did keep an eye out for reneging and demanded a cut now and then just to aggravate her, and he was always secretly hoping for aces.

With one card left in her hand, the telltale trick coming next, she delayed playing it, showing him first the smile, the preview of defeat. She laid it on the table — so! She held one more trump than he had reasoned possible. Had she palmed it from somewhere? No, she would not go that far; that would not be fair, was worse than reneging, which so easily and often happened accidentally, and she believed in being fair. Besides he had been watching her.

God smote the vines with hail, the sycamore trees with frost, and offered up the flocks to the lightning — but Mrs Stoner! What a cross Father Firman had from God in Mrs Stoner! There were other housekeepers as bad, no doubt, walking the rectories of the world, yes, but… yes. He could name one and maybe two priests who were worse off. One, maybe two. Cronin. His scraggly blonde of sixty — take her, with her everlasting banging on the grand piano, the gift of the pastor; her proud talk about the goiter operation at the Mayo Brothers’, also a gift; her honking the parish Buick at passing strange priests because they were all in the game together. She was worse. She was something to keep the home fires burning. Yes sir. And Cronin said she was not a bad person really, but what was he? He was quite a freak himself.