Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“I never believed him,” Mommy said. “But then it’s a very subjective matter, I would think.”

“Must have gotten a taste for it,” Father Snow said.

“I never would, I don’t think,” Mommy said.

This was regarded as amusing by all. The girls were scandalized by the friendship between Mommy and Daddy and this weird duo. They couldn’t bear it for another night.

“Oh, girls, you look lovely!” Mommy exclaimed.

Father Snow was stirring martinis. He wore a jacket and tie. Arleen was wearing…something dreadful. The drinks in their crystal glasses were passed around. Father Snow liked to offer a small prayer before the cocktail hour began. To the girls it was merely one of his excruciatingly annoying habits. Prayer is a means of getting rid of some of our own ignorance about ourselves, Father Snow had always said. Mommy and Daddy and Arleen bowed their heads. The girls, as they always did, looked around the room. At the mirrors, the embroidered footstool, the good Chinese rug, the little brass clocks, the wallpaper of rose madder. They adored it, all this was theirs.

“A toast,” Father Snow said, “a toast to those not with us tonight.” He looked at them unhappily. “We all have to do this at once,” he said. They all took a sip of their drinks.

“Was Donny your first best boy?” one of the girls asked brightly.

“I wish I could snap out of this,” Father Snow said.

“Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work,” the other girl said with concern.

“I am thinking of resigning my parish,” Father Snow said, chewing on an olive, “and dealing with people on a one-to-one basis. Seeing them through. One by one.”

Daddy remarked that he and Mommy were with him one hundred percent on that.

“Poor Donny,” Father Snow said. “He led a fairly incoherent existence and then he died.”

“But that’s because he was so typical,” one of the girls said. “And there is nothing wrong with that, absolutely nothing. But what was the matter with his teeth? He had like a high-water mark on his teeth.” The girls found the ensuing awkward moment quite satisfying.

Father Snow blinked. “I love him very much.”

The girls sighed. He seemed to them like a mollusk at that moment. He was hardly worth the effort.

“Mommy,” one said, “tell the story about the night Daddy proposed.”

“Oh,” Mommy said, “yes. He knelt before me and said, ‘Let’s merely see each other every day for the rest of our lives.’ ” She passed Arleen a cracker with a bit of foul and expensive cheese daubed on top of it. This was declined. “Almost thirty-five years ago now.”

“Tell the whole story,” the girl squealed. “We love the story. Tell how Daddy ran over that man who was standing beside his disabled car on the highway that winter night, but Daddy didn’t stop even though he knew he’d very likely killed him because you were going to a concert. It was the night Daddy was going to propose to you and he didn’t want your life together compromised or delayed. You had your life before you!”

Father Snow visibly paled.

“It was Janácˇek’s ‘Fairy Tale’ that evening,” Mommy said. “Debussy and Beethoven were also on the program.”

Father Snow looked very ill at ease. Mommy reached out and squeezed his hand. “If this happened,” Mommy said, “you’d be able to accept it, wouldn’t you? If it had happened, you’d understand.”

Father Snow squeezed back. “Only if it had,” he said.

“That story has not been previously aired in public,” Daddy said.

The girls closed their eyes and hummed a little. They loved the story — the night, the waves of snow descending, the elegant evening clothes, the nonexistent girls, some stranger sacrificed.

Father Snow drained his drink. “I’m going to make another batch of these if I may,” he said. He extricated his hand from Mommy’s and dumped more gin in the shaker, swirled it once and poured, without ceremony. Some situations simply did not allow for the sacralization of the ordinary, which he otherwise made every effort to observe.

He swallowed and groped for Mommy’s hand again, recoiling slightly when he found it.

“Do you think we could do something about it?” Mommy said tentatively. “Is it possible after all these years?”

“Repent?” he said, his voice cracking. “Repent,” he said.

Mommy looked at him with some annoyance. “Is that all? I’ve always thought that was a rather common thing to do.” She wanted to offer more cheese to all but her hand was trapped. “I do feel sorry,” she said. “We do.”

“But the word is misunderstood!” Father Snow said. “The word translated throughout the New Testament as repentance is, in the Greek, meta-noia, which means change of mind. Meta means transference, as in metaphor —transference of meaning. Transformation.”

“Repent,” Mommy said. “So unhelpful. So common, really.”

“The English word repentance is derived from the Latin poenitare, which merely means to feel sorry, suggesting a change in the heart rather than in the mind. Poenitare is a most inadequate word that doesn’t reflect the challenge involved,” Father Snow said excitedly.

“We’ve had a good life,” Daddy said, smoking. “Full. Can’t take that away from us.”

Father Snow looked at his drink. The moment of exhilaration had passed. He was now merely drunk and again missing Donny. “Very difficult. Another way of thinking, a different approach to everything in life…” he said uncertainly.

The cats came into the room and leapt up onto Arleen’s lap. The cats would do this to people they sensed hated them, and this amused the girls. But Arleen stroked them, first the one, then the other. From one’s side she plucked a bloodsucker the size of a swollen dime. She held it between her fingers, a fat full thing with tiny waving legs, and dropped it in the dish Daddy was using as an ashtray. From behind the ear of the second cat, Arleen snapped off another. Its removal occasioned a slight clicking sound. She dropped it beside the other one. The things stumbled around in the ashes in the little china dish. The attractive floral pattern that was so Mommy, that Mommy admired on all her china, was totally obscured. In this pretty room, this formal room with the silk shades, the portraits of ancestors and the lark beneath the bell jar.

“That’s disgusting, Arleen,” one of the girls said. They had no doubt that she had produced them fraudulently. Their pets, their darlings, could not possibly be harboring such things. “Are you a magician? Isn’t that unchristian?”

“No, no,” Arleen said, ducking her head shyly. “I’m hardly a magician, I’m an adviser, a companion.”

“Arleen’s no amateur,” Father Snow said.

“A companion?” the girls said.

“The woman can listen to anything and come to a swift decision,” Father Snow said. “I rely more on the ritual stuff. Words. Blah, blah, blah.”

Arleen turned to Mommy. “You should get rid of them.”

“The cats?” Mommy said. “Oh, I know, sometimes they spray .”

“No, the girls,” Arleen said. “High time for them to be gone.”

The girls gaped at her.

“Your mother’s not well, you’re killing her,” Arleen said simply.

Mommy looked at them. She looked as though she didn’t know what to think. Daddy rested his burning cigarette in the dish, then ground it out and lit another. The ashes moved with continuing, even renewed, effort.

Mommy quickly spread more cheese on the crackers, wads of it, a bit more than was nice, actually. She stood up to pass the plate, tottering a bit.

“Oh, do sit down,” one of the girls said, exasperated.