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

But the pastor had gone, saying, “Just so you give it.”

Father Fabre got behind his servers and started them moving toward the altar. He saw the pastor in front of a battery of vigil lights, picking up the burned matches. Parishioners who had used them would be surprised to know that the pastor blew out all the lights after the last Mass. “Fire hazard,” he’d said, caught in the act.

Before the eleven o’clock, after resting a few minutes between Masses in his room, he went to the bathroom and called down the laundry chute to Miss Burke in the kitchen. “Don’t set a place for me. I’m invited out for dinner.” He stood ready at the chute to cut her off but heard only a sigh and something about the pastor having said the same thing. He hadn’t expected to get away with it so easily. They were having another critical period, and it was necessary, as before, to stand up to her. “I hope I let you know soon enough,” he said. She should be happy, with them both gone. She wouldn’t have to cook at all. And he was doing her the honor of pretending that she planned their meals ahead.

“Father!”

“Yes, Miss Burke.”

“Is it Mrs Mathers’ you’re going to?”

He delayed his reply in the hope that she’d see the impertinence of the question, and when this should have been accomplished, he said, “I hope I let you know in time.”

He heard the little door slam at the other end of the chute. Then, as always in time of stress, she was speaking intimately to friendly spirits who, of course, weren’t there, and then wailing like the wind. “Sure she was puttin’ it around she’d have him over! But we none of us”—by which Father Fabre assumed she meant the Altar and Rosary Society—“thought he’d go there ! Oh, Lord!”

He’d lost the first fall to the pastor, but he’d thrown Miss Burke.

Going downstairs, he heard the coin machines start up in the pastor’s room, the tambourines of the separator, the castanets of the counter. The pastor was getting an early start on the day’s collections. He wore a green visor in his room and worked under fluorescent tubes. Sometimes he worked a night shift. It was like a war plant, his room, except that no help was wanted. The pastor lived to himself, in a half-light.

In the hallway downstairs, John, the janitor, sitting in the umbrella chair, was having coffee. The chair had a looking-glass back, and when John turned his head he appeared to have two faces.

“Thought you had the day off,” said Father Fabre.

“Always plenty to do around here, Father.”

“I suppose.” They knew each other well enough now for John not to get off that old one about wanting to spend the day with his family.

“She’s really rarin’ in there,” John said. “I had to come out here.” He glanced down at the floor, at the cup of muddy water cooling there, and then fearfully in the direction of the kitchen. This did not impress Father Fabre, however, who believed that the janitor and the housekeeper lived in peace. “Not her responsibility,” John said.

Father Fabre, knowing he was being tempted, would not discuss the housekeeper with the janitor. Curates came and went, and even pastors, but the janitor, a subtle Slav, stayed on at Trinity.

“I told her it was none of her business.”

“ What isn’t?”

“If you want to go there, that’s your business,” John said. “I had to come out here.” John reached down for his cup, without looking, because his hand knew right where it was. “I don’t blame you for being sore at her, Father.” (“I’m not,” Father Fabre murmured, but John, drinking, smiled into his cup.) “I told her it’s your business what you do. ‘He’s old enough,’ I said.”

“What’s she got against Mrs Mathers?” Father Fabre asked, wondering if Mrs Mathers was any match for the housekeeper. A natural leader vs. a mental case. It might be close if the Altar and Rosary Society took sides. But the chances were that Miss Burke would soon be fighting on another front. Impossible for her to wage as many wars as she declared.

“Hell, you know how these old maids are, Father,” John was saying. “Just needs a man. You can understand that.”

Father Fabre, calling it a draw with John, turned away and left.

The other guests at Mrs Mathers’ didn’t act like Catholics. Mr Pint, a small man in his sixties, was surprisingly unfriendly, and his daughter, though rather the opposite, went at Father Fabre the wrong way. It might have been the absence of excess respect in her manner that he found unsettling. But Mrs Mathers, a large motherly but childless widow with puffy elbows, had baked a cake, and was easy to take.

They were all on the back porch of her second floor flat, watching Mr Pint make ice cream.

“Let me taste it, Dad,” Velma said.

“I can’t be standin’ here all day with this cream gettin’ soft on me,” Mr Pint said.

Velma pouted. She had on a purple dress which reminded Father Fabre of the purple veils they’d had on the statues in church during Passiontide. Otherwise there was nothing lenten about Velma, he thought.

“If you taste it now,” he said, “it’ll just take that much longer to harden.”

Mr Pint, who might have agreed with that, said nothing. He dropped a handful of rock salt into the freezer, a wood-and-iron affair that must have been as old as he was, and sank again to his knees. He resumed cranking.

Father Fabre smiled at Mrs Mathers. Parishioners expected a priest to be nice and jolly, and that was how he meant to be at Mrs Mathers’. With Mr Pint setting the tone, it might not be easy. Father Fabre hadn’t expected to be the second most important person there. The cake, he believed, had not been baked for him.

“Your good suit,” said Mrs Mathers. She snatched a Better Homes and Gardens from a pile of such magazines and slid it under Mr Pint’s knees.

“Sir Walter Reilly,” said Velma, looking at Father Fabre to see if he followed her.

He nodded, doubting her intelligence, wondering if she was bright enough to be a nurse. Mrs Mathers was a registered nurse.

“Aw, come on,” Velma said. “Let me taste it, Dad.”

Mr Pint churned up a chunk of ice and batted it down with the heel of his hand. “By Dad!” he breathed, a little god invoking himself.

Mrs Mathers wisely retired to the kitchen. Velma, after a moment, ingloriously followed.

Father Fabre gazed over the porch railing. With all the apartment buildings backed up together, it was like a crowded harbor, but with no sign of life — a port of plague. Miss Burke, he remembered, had warned him not to go. John, however, had said go. Mr Pint’s shirt had broken out in patches of deeper blue, and his elastic suspenders, of soft canary hue, were stained a little. Pity moved Father Fabre to offer the helping hand, prudence stayed it, then pity rose again. “Let me take it awhile,” he said quietly.

But Mr Pint, out to deny his size and years, needed no help, or lost in his exertions, had not heard.

Father Fabre went inside, where he found the women, by contrast, laughing and gay. Velma left off tossing the salad, and Mrs Mathers’ stirring spoon hung expectantly in mid-air. “I’m afraid I wasn’t much help out there,” he said.

“That’s just Dad’s way,” Mrs Mathers said. “Come in here a minute, Father, if you want to see something nice.”

Mrs Mathers led him into a little room off the kitchen. She wanted him to see her new day bed. He felt the springs as she had and praised the bed in her terms. He meant it when he said he wished he had one, and sat down on it. Mrs Mathers left the room, and returned a moment later whispering that she believed in flushing the toilet before she made coffee. That was the quickest way to bring fresh water into the house. Father Fabre, rising from the day bed, regretted that he wouldn’t be able to pass this household hint on to Miss Burke.