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

When Dolly’s sister came home, Teresa gave her the bad news. She was sorry, she said, going at once for her coat and things. Maybe they’d be able to get somebody by Monday. Dolly cried. Dolly’s sister, paying up only when Teresa had her coat on, offered her an extra dollar as a bonus, but Teresa said, “No, thanks,” and hoped they understood. A dollar!

That evening Teresa celebrated by eating in a new cafeteria, and after dinner she saw a double feature. The next day, Saturday, she slept late. Toward sundown she thought of Dolly: now she’s dusting the furniture from her wheel chair, now she’s got the wig in her hands, tying the flower into it, now she’s waiting by the door for the priest to come, now they’re sitting down to it, now they’re eating the cake Teresa had baked, and now, much too soon for the poor thing, before she could read her poems, the priest had gone, and the unopened bottle of ginger ale chilled on in the refrigerator.

By Sunday afternoon Teresa was getting tired of her little apartment and beginning to consider a quick visit to her relatives downstate. But that evening Mrs Shepherd called.

“Teresa?”

“Yes.”

“Remember that lead I spoke to you about?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid it fell through.”

“Oh.” Teresa was afraid of what was coming.

“Teresa, will you help me out — try it just one more week, maybe just a day or two, just until I get someone?”

“Oh, no…”

“You won’t reconsider?”

“Oh, no…”

“Teresa, I already told them you’d come tomorrow. I mean I was sure you’d help me out of this spot. I mean I just knew you’d do it for me.”

“But, Mrs Shepherd…”

“As a friend, Teresa?”

Teresa was holding her breath for fear she’d weaken.

“Good night, Teresa, and thanks anyway.”

A few minutes later Mrs Shepherd called again.

“I told them you weren’t coming, Teresa,” said Mrs Shepherd as though she expected to be thanked for it. “Teresa, that Dolly — did you ever notice anything about her?”

“What about her? She’s been an invalid all her life.”

“I mean — did she seem all right — otherwise?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say she’s crazy — if that’s what you mean.”

“Then I don’t understand it. She said you stole some money from her and that’s why you quit. She says that’s why you won’t come back…”

Teresa lay awake until shortly before the alarm went off in the morning. At the usual time, she got on the streetcar and rode out into the suburbs. Coming up the walk, she saw Dolly’s face at the level of the window sill, waiting. As always, the door chain, protection against burglars and rapists, was on, but after a moment, Dolly admitted her. “You poor thing!” Dolly cried.

Before Teresa could say a word, Dolly put the blame on herself. Having the priest over, she said, had upset her so. The money had not been stolen. She had just forgotten all about paying out for the bottle of ginger ale. “And it’s still there, Teresa, untouched. Oh, let’s have a glass! Let’s do! In honor of your coming back!” Dolly twirled herself down the hall, calling back, “You’ll have to get it down, Teresa. After all, you’re the one put it ’way up there by the ice cubes.” Then in a gay reproving voice, “Teresa, this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t done that !”

MR MCMASTER, a hernia case convalescing in one of the four-bed wards, was fat and fifty or so, with a candy-pink face, sparse orange hair, and popeyes. (“Eyes don’t permit me to read much,” he had told Myles Flynn, the night orderly, more than once.) On his last evening in the hospital, as he lay in his bed smoking, his hands clasped over a box of Havanas that rested on the soft dais of his stomach, he called Myles to his bedside. He wanted to thank him, he said, and, incidentally, he had no use for “that other son of a bitch”—meaning the other orderly, an engineering student, who had prepped him for surgery. “A hell of a fine engineer he’ll make. You, though, you’re different — more like a doctor than an orderly — and I was surprised to hear from one of the Sisters today that you’re not going into the medical field.” Mr McMaster said he supposed there must be other reasons for working in a hospital, but he didn’t sound as though he knew any.

Myles said he’d been four years in a seminary, studying for the priesthood — until “something happened.” There he stopped.

Mr McMaster grinned. “To make a long story short,” he said.

Myles shook his head. He’d told Mr McMaster all there was for him to tell — all he knew. He’d simply been asked to leave, he said, and since that day, three months before, he’d just been trying to make himself useful to society, here in the hospital. Mr McMaster suddenly got serious. He wondered, in a whisper, whether Myles was “a cradle Catholic,” as if that had something to do with his expulsion, and Myles said, “Yes. Almost have to be with a name like mine.” “Not a-tall,” said Mr McMaster. “That’s the hell of it. The other day I met a Jew by the name of Buckingham. Some Buckingham!”

Scenting liquor on the patient’s breath, Myles supposed that Mr McMaster, like so many salesmen or executives on their last evening, wanted to get a good night’s rest, to be ready for the morrow, when he would ride away in a taxicab to the daily battle of Chicago.

Again Mr McMaster asked if Myles was a cradle Catholic, and when Myles again told him he was, Mr McMaster said, “Call me Mac,” and had Myles move the screen over to his bed. When they were hidden from the others in the ward, Mac whispered, “We don’t know who they may be, whatever they say.” Then he asked Myles if he’d ever heard of the Clementine Fathers. Myles had. “I’m with them,” Mac said. “In a good-will capacity.” He described the nature of his work, which was meeting the public, lay and clerical (the emphasis was on the latter), and “building good will” for the Clementine order and finding more readers for the Clementine , the family-type magazine published by the Fathers.

Myles listened patiently because he considered it part of his job to do so, but the most he could say for the magazine was that it was probably good — of its kind. Yes, he’d heard the Fathers’ radio program. The program, “Father Clem Answers Your Question,” was aimed at non-Catholics but it had many faithful listeners among the nuns at the hospital. And the pamphlets put out by the Fathers, many of them written by Father Clem — Myles knew them well. In the hospital waiting rooms, they were read, wrung, and gnawed upon by their captive audience. “Is Father Clem a real person?” Myles asked. “Yes, and no,” Mac said, which struck Myles as descriptive of the characters created by Father Clem, an author who tackled life’s problems through numberless Joans, Jeans, Bobs, and Bills, clear-thinking college kids who, coached from the wings by jolly nuns and priests, invariably got the best of the arguments they had with the poor devils they were always meeting — atheists, euthanasianists, and the like. “Drive a car?” Mac asked. Myles said yes.

Mac then said he wanted it understood he wasn’t making Myles any promises, but he thought there might be a job opening up with the Fathers soon, a job such as his own. “Think it over,” Mac said, and Myles did — needing only a moment. He thought of his correspondence with the hierarchy, of the nice replies, all offering him nothing. For his purposes, the job with the Fathers, unsuited as he was to it, could be ideal. Traveling around from diocese to diocese, meeting pastors and even bishops face to face in the regular course of the work, he might make the vital connection that would lead him, somehow, to the priesthood. Without a bishop he’d never get into another seminary — a bishop was more necessary than a vocation — but Myles had more than meeting the right bishop to worry about. He had lost his clerical status, and was now 1-A in the draft. The call-up might come any day.