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

“You suppose Grace’ll be inside?” she called after him, just as if all were now well between her and her best friend in the Society.

He had his back to her and kept going, plowed on, nodding though, vigorously nodding like one of the famous yes-horses of Odense. For a moment he entertained the idea that Mrs Mathers was a mental case, which would explain everything, but it wouldn’t do. Mrs Mathers remained a mystery to him.

In the rectory, he started up the front stairs for his room. Then he went back down, led by sounds to the converts’ parlor. There he found a congregation of middle-aged women dressed mostly in navy blues and blacks, unmistakably Altar and Rosary, almost a full consistory, and swarming.

“Could I be of any service to you ladies?”

The swarming let up. “Miss Burke said we should wait in here,” someone said.

He hadn’t seen who had spoken. “For me?” he said, looking them over. He saw Grace sorrowing in their midst.

“No, Father,” said someone else, also hidden from him. “We’re here to see the pastor.”

“Oh,” he said.

“ He went out on a sick call,” said someone else.

“Oh,” he said, and escaped.

One minute later he was settling down in the garage, on the bottom rung of a folding ladder, the best seat he could find. He picked up a wrench, got grease on his fingers, and remembered that Mr Pint never touched a wrench. He wondered where he’d gone wrong, if there was anything he might have done, or might yet do. There was nothing. He attributed his trouble to his belief, probably mistaken, that the chancery had wanted a man at Trinity to compensate for the pastor. Father Fabre had tried to be that man, one who would be accessible to the people. The pastor strenuously avoided people. He was happy with the machines in his room, or on a picnic with himself, topped off perhaps with a visit to the zoo. The assistant was the one to see at Trinity. Naturally there were people who would try to capitalize on his inexperience. The pastor gave him a lot of rope. Some pastors wouldn’t let their curates dine out with parishioners — with good reason, it appeared. The pastor was watchful, though, and would rein in the rope on the merest suspicion. Father Fabre was thinking of the young lady of charm and education who had come to him after Mass one Sunday with the idea of starting up a study club at Trinity. He’d told the pastor and the pastor had told him, “It’s under study.” You might think that would be the end of it. It had been, so far as the young lady was concerned, but that evening at table Father Fabre was asked by the dormouse if he knew about young ladies.

“Know about them?”

“Ummm.” The dormouse was feasting on a soda cracker.

“No,” said Father Fabre, very wise.

“Well, Father, I had them all in a sodality some years ago.” (Ordinarily untalkative to the point of being occult, the pastor spoke now as a man compelled, and Father Fabre attended his every word. The seminary professors had harped on the wisdom of pastors, as against the all-consuming ignorance of curates.) It seemed that the pastor, being so busy, didn’t notice how the young ladies showed up for induction during the few years of the sodality’s existence at Trinity, but from the day he did, there had been no more of that. ( What? Father Fabre wondered but did not interrupt.) The pastor was not narrow-minded, he said, and he granted that a young woman might wear a bit of paint on her wedding day. But when sodalists, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of God, Mary Immaculate, presented themselves at the communion rail in low-necked evening gowns, wearing lipstick, stuff in their eyes, and with their hair up in the permanent wave, why then, Gentlemen — the pastor used that word, causing Father Fabre to blink and then to realize he was hearing a speech the pastor must have given at a clergy conference — there was something wrong somewhere and that was why he had suppressed the sodality in his parish.

By God, thought Father Fabre, nodding vigorously, the pastor had a point! Here was something to remember if he ever got a church of his own.

It must have touched the pastor to see his point so well taken by his young curate, for he smiled. “You might say the scales dropped from my eyes,” he said.

But by then Father Fabre, gazing at the cracker flak on the pastor’s black bosom, had begun to wonder what all this had to do with a study club.

“A study club’s just another name for a sodality,” the pastor prompted. “See what I mean?”

Father Fabre did not, not unless the pastor meant that young ladies were apt to belong to either and that, therefore, his curate would do well to steer clear of both. Hear their sins, visit them in sickness and prison, give them the Sacrament. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to be done for or about them. In time they would get old and useful. The pastor, for his part, had put them away in the cellar part of his mind to ripen like cheese. But the good ladies of the Altar and Rosary were something else again. Nuns could not have kept the church cleaner, and the good ladies, unlike nuns, didn’t labor under the illusion that they were somehow priests, only different, and so weren’t always trying to vault the communion rail to the altar.

“You want to be one of these ‘youth priests,’ Father?”

“I haven’t thought much about it.”

“Good.”

But, as the pastor must have noticed, Father Fabre had wanted to get some “activities” going at Trinity, believing that his apostolate lay in the world, with the people, as the pastor’s obviously didn’t. Well, he had failed. But he wasn’t sorry. Wasn’t there enough to do at Trinity, just doing the regular chores? For the poor, the sick and dying, yes, anything. But non-essentials he’d drop, including dining out with parishioners, and major decisions he’d cheerfully hand over to the pastor. (He still thought the man who rented owls to rid you of pigeons might have something, for that was nature’s way, no cruel machines or powders. But he’d stop agitating for the owls, for that was another problem for the pastor, to solve or, probably, not to solve.) Of course the parish was indifferently run, but wasn’t it a mistake to keep trying to take up all the slack? He’d had himself under observation, of late. It seemed to him his outlook was changing, not from a diminution of zeal, not from loss of vision, but from growing older and wiser. At least he hoped so. He was beginning to believe he wasn’t the man to compensate for the pastor — not that he’d ask for a transfer. The bishop was a gentle administrator but always seemed to find a place in one of the salt mines for a young man seeking a change. Father Fabre’s predecessor in the curate’s job at Trinity had been antisocial, which some of the gadabout clergy said could be a grievous fault in a parish priest, but he hadn’t asked for a change — it had come to him — and now he was back in the seminary, as a professor with little pocket money, it was true, but enjoying food and handball again. That afternoon, sitting in the garage, Father Fabre envied him.

The pastor handed a wicker basket to Father Fabre, and himself carried a thermos bottle. He showed no surprise at finding his curate waiting for him in the garage and asked no questions. Father Fabre, the moment he saw the basket and bottle, understood that the pastor was returning from a picnic, and that Miss Burke, telling the ladies he’d gone on a sick call, thought it part of her job to create a good impression whenever possible, part of being loyal, the prime requisite. Who but the pastor would have her for a housekeeper?

They walked to the back door at the pastor’s pace.

“Some coffee in here for you,” the pastor said, jiggling the thermos bottle.