Back in the World: Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  He was quiet.

  “Say something,” Jean told him. “Bawl me out.”

  “I don’t know you. I don’t even know your name. I might be of some help if I knew your name.”

  “Fat chance,” Jean said.

  “Then I just don’t know what to say.”

  Jean heard the snapping of the lock in the lobby door. “Adieu,” she said, and hung up. She took the sunglasses off and put them in her purse, then stood and walked around the desk in time to see Mr. Munson swinging toward the office between a pair of crutches, one plaster-bound foot held cocked behind him. There was a bandage across his forehead. “Don’t say a word,” he told Jean. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Mr. Munson lurched past her into the office. “Just a little difficulty on the ice,” he said bitterly. “Just a little taste of the old Munson karma.” He took the bank deposit bag from the drawer where Jean kept it for him, unzipped it, leaned forward on the crutches, and shook the money onto the desktop. “Here,” he said. Without looking up, Mr. Munson held out a five to Jean. “There’s a cab waiting out front.”

  “A cab?”

  “Do you expect me to drive in this condition? Look at me, for Christ’s sake, I’m a mess.”

  “You don’t look that bad,” Jean told him.

  “I look like the goddamn Spirit of ’Seventy-six or something,” Mr. Munson said. He lowered himself into the chair and propped his crutches against the desk. “I used to be good,” he said, “I mean really good.” He raised his eyes to Jean. “I’m nice to you, aren’t I? I don’t yell at you when you screw up. I don’t say anything when you sneak your little friend in. You shouldn’t look at me like that,” he said. “You should try to look sorry.”

  Tucker was asleep on the floor in front of the television. Jean opened the Hide-a-Bed and managed to get him into his pajamas and between the covers without waking him up. Then she ransacked her mother’s room for Nick’s telephone number. She didn’t find it, but she did find a new letter from her father. Jean sat on the bed and read the letter through, scowling at the sugary words he used, sometimes repeating them in a sarcastic tone. They still wrote each other love letters, her mother and father, but they had no right to; not now, not after what they’d done. It was disgusting.

  Jean went to her own room. She read Silas Marner for a while, then got undressed and stood in front of the mirror. She studied herself. She turned and glanced coldly over her shoulder.

  Jean faced the mirror again and practiced looking sad but brave. Then she got the sunglasses out of her purse and put them on, along with one of the blouses she’d stolen at Bullock’s last weekend. She switched off all the lights except the swag lamp above her desk, so that she looked as if she were standing under a streetlight. The blouse hung halfway down her bare thighs. Jean turned the wide collar up, and lowered her eyelids, and let her mouth fall open a little. “I think of you all the time,” she whispered, reciting her father’s words, “every day and every night, dearest love, only love of my life.” Jean moved her shoulders sinuously to make the sequins shimmer. “Dearest sackbutt,” she said. “Dearest raisinbrain.” She pursed her lips and made her eyelids flutter.

  Tucker yelled something from the next room.

  Jean went to the doorway. “Go to sleep, Tucker.”

  “I want Mom,” Tucker said.

  Jean took the sunglasses off. Tucker was sitting up in bed, looking wildly around as if he didn’t know where he was. Jean walked across the room and sat down beside him. “Mom’ll be home in a minute.” Tucker’s hair was sticking up all over, and Jean began to smooth it down. “You want a glass of water?”

  “I want Mom.”

  “Listen, Tucker.” Jean kept combing back his hair with her fingers. “Listen, tomorrow is going to be a really special day but it won’t come unless you go to sleep.”

  He looked around the room again, then back at Jean. “Special how?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “You mean when I wake up?”

  “Right, but first you have to go to sleep.” Jean pushed against Tucker as she stroked his hair, and at last he relented and lay down again.

  “Promise?” he said.

  “Promise.”

  When Tucker was asleep Jean got up and went outside. She leaned against the door, her skin bristling with cold, and looked around at the other apartments. All of them were dark. Jean hugged herself and padded along the rough wooden walkway, down the steps to the courtyard.

  The pool lights were still on so that nobody would fall in and sue. Still hugging herself, Jean tested the water with one foot. It was icy. Mrs. Fox must have turned off the heat. That was just like her, to turn the heat on in the summer and turn it off in the winter. Stupid witch. It wasn’t even her money. Jean sniffed and rubbed her arms and stuck her foot in the water again, this time past the ankle. Again she looked at the dark windows all around. Then she peeled off the blouse, tossed it behind her, and jumped in.

  Jean’s heart clenched when she hit the water. She kicked herself back up, gasping for air, and grabbed the ladder. Tremors twitched across her shoulders. Her toes curled painfully, then went numb. Jean held to the ladder and waited for the numbness to spread. She looked up. A plane was moving slowly across the sky. Jean timed her breathing to the blinking of its lights, and when she had calmed herself she took a series of deeper and deeper breaths until she had the one she wanted. Then she pushed off and dove toward the glowing red triangle at the bottom of the pool.

  Her eyes ached. That was all she felt. Jean closed her fingers around the handlebars and tried to scissor-kick the bicycle up with her, but when she had it halfway to the surface it seemed to take on weight, and she had to let it go. It settled to the bottom without a sound, sending only a dull shock up through the water. Jean filled her lungs and went back under. She took hold of the handlebars again. She dragged the bike along the tiles to the side of the pool, where she went into a crouch and shoved away hard from the bottom. Kicking furiously, clawing the water with her free hand, Jean rose slowly toward the gleaming chrome of the ladder and just managed to grab the second rung as the bike began to pull her back down.

  She let out the last of her air.

  The bike was getting heavy. Jean brought her knees up and got her feet on the lowest rung. She rested a moment. Then she moved her free hand to the rail and began to straighten her legs, pushing herself up toward the light flashing on the surface just above her. She felt her mouth start to open. No, she thought, but her mouth opened anyway and Jean was choking when her head broke through to air. She coughed out the water in her throat and then gagged on the chlorine aftertaste until she almost puked. Her eyes burned.

  Jean climbed the ladder to where she could work her hips over the edge of the pool and slide forward a bit. She let go of the rail and wiped her face. She could feel the weight of the bike in her shoulders and back. In a little while she would pull it out. No problem—just as soon as she got herself back together. But until then she couldn’t do a thing but lie with her cheek on the cement, and blink her eyes, and savor the cold air that passed through her.

  The Missing Person

  Father Leo started out with the idea of becoming a missionary. He’d read a priest’s account of his years among the Aleuts and decided that this was the life for him—trekking from trapper’s hut to Indian village, a dog for company, sacramental wine in his knapsack, across snowfields that gleamed like sugar. He knew it would be hard. He would suffer things he could not imagine in that polar solitude. But it was the life he wanted, a life full of risk among people who needed him and were hungry for what he had to give.

  Shortly before his ordination he asked to be sent to Alaska. The diocese turned down his request. The local parishes were short of priests and their needs came first. Father Leo was assigned to a parish in West Seattle, where the pastor took an immediate dislike to him and put him on what he called “crone duty”—managing rummage sales, bingo, the Legion of Mary, and visiting sick parishio
ners in the hospital. Father Leo worked hard at everything he put his hand to. He hoped that the old priest would notice and begin to soften toward him, but that never happened.

  He stayed on in the parish. The old priest kept going, though his mind had begun to wander and he could not walk without a stick. He repeated his sermons again and again. There was one story he told at least once a month, about an Irishman who received a visitation from his mother the night after her death, a visit that caused him to change his whole life. He told the story with a brogue, and it went on forever.

  The parishioners didn’t seem to mind. More of them came every year, and they kept the old priest busy from morning to night. He liked to say that he didn’t have time to die. One night he said it at dinner and Father Leo thought, Make time.

  Finally the old priest did die. Father Leo collected his papers for the diocese and found copies of several reports the old priest had made on him. They were all disparaging, and some of them were untrue. He sat on the floor and read them through carefully. Then he put them down and rubbed his eyes. It was the first warm night of the year. The window was open. A moth fluttered against the screen.

  Father Leo was surprised at what he’d found. He couldn’t understand why the old priest had hated him. But the more he thought about it, the less strange it seemed. Father Leo had been in love once, before entering the seminary, and remembered the helplessness of it. There had been no reason for him to be in love with the girl; she was no better than other girls he knew, and apart from loving her he didn’t like her very much. Still, he probably would have married her if he had not felt even greater helplessness before his conviction that he should become a priest. She was desolate when he told her what he was planning to do, to the point that he nearly changed his mind. Then she lost interest. A few months later she married another man.

  Vocation was a mystery, love was a mystery, and Father Leo supposed that hatred was a mystery. The old priest had been pulled under by it. That was a shame, but Father Leo knew better than to ponder its meaning for him.

  A monsignor from the chancery was named to succeed the old priest. Father Leo brooded. He began to fear that he would never get his own parish, and for the first time he considered leaving the priesthood, as most of his friends from the seminary had done. But he never got very far with this thought, because he could not imagine himself as anything other than what he was.

  The monsignor asked Father Leo to stay on and teach religion in the parish elementary school. Father Leo agreed. At the end of their interview the monsignor asked if there were any hard feelings.

  “Not at all,” Father Leo said, and smiled. That night, driving back to the rectory from a visit with his sister, Father Leo began to shake. He was shaking so badly that he pulled onto the shoulder of the road, where he pounded his fist on the dashboard and yelled, “No hard feelings! No hard feelings!”

  But he came to like teaching. His students were troubled and cruel to each other but they were still curious about things that mattered: what they should believe in, how they should live. They paid attention to what Father Leo said, and at these moments he felt glad to be where he was.

  Every couple of years or so the diocese sent out new books to religion teachers. Father Leo found the changes confusing and stopped trying to keep up. When the books came in he put them on a shelf and forgot about them. That was how he got fired. His classes were inspected by a priest in the education office that sent the books, and afterwards Father Leo received a summons. He went before a committee. After they questioned him, the chairman sent a letter to the monsignor saying that Father Leo’s ideas were obsolete and peculiar. The committee suggested that he be replaced.

  The monsignor took Father Leo out to dinner at a seafood house and explained the situation to him. The suggestion of the committee was actually a directive, he said. The monsignor had no choice in the matter. But he had been calling around and had found an open position, if Father Leo was interested. Mother Vincent at Star of the Sea needed a new chaplain. Their last chaplain had married one of the nuns. It so happened, the monsignor said, looking into his wine, swirling it gently, that he had done several favors for Mother Vincent in his days at the chancery. In short, if Father Leo wanted the position he could have it. The monsignor lit a cigarette and looked out the window, over the water. Gulls were diving for scraps.

  He seemed embarrassed and Father Leo knew why. It was a job for an old priest, or one recovering from something: sickness, alcohol, a breakdown.

  “Where will I live?” he asked.

  “At the convent,” the monsignor said.

  Something had gone wrong at Star of the Sea. It was an unhappy place. Some of the sisters were boisterous, and their noise made the silence of the others seem that much deeper. Coming upon these sad, silent nuns in the corridor or on the grounds, Father Leo felt a chill. It was like swimming into a cold pocket in a lake.

  Several nuns had left the order. Others were thinking of it. They came to Father Leo and complained about the noise and confusion. They couldn’t understand what was happening. Father Leo told them what he told himself: Be patient. But the truth was that his own patience had begun to give out.

  He was supposed to be spiritual adviser to the convent. Many of the nuns disregarded him, though. They went their own way. The director of novices described herself as a “Post-Christian” and at Easter sent out cards showing an Indian god ascending to the clouds with arms waving out of his sides like a centipede’s. Some held jobs in town. The original idea had been for the nuns to serve the community in some way, but now they did what they wanted to do. One was a disc jockey.

  The rowdy nuns ran around together and played pranks. Their jokes were good-natured but often in bad taste, and they didn’t know when to stop. A couple of them had stereos and played weird music at night. The hallways echoed with their voices.

  They called Father Leo “Padre” or just “Pod.” When he walked past them they usually made some crack or asked a cute question. They made racy jokes about Jerry, the fellow Mother Vincent had hired to raise funds. They were always laughing about something.

  One evening Father Leo went to Mother Vincent’s office and told her, again, that the convent was in trouble. This was his third visit that month and she made it plain that she was not glad to see him. She neither rose to meet him nor invited him to sit down. While he talked she gazed out the open window and rubbed the knuckles of her huge red hands. Father Leo could see that she was listening to the crickets, not to him, and he lost heart.

  Mother Vincent was strong, but old and drifting. She had no idea what was going on downstairs. Her office and rooms were on the top floor of the building, separate from the others, and her life took place even farther away than that. She lived in her dream of what the convent was. She believed that it was a perfect song, all voices tuned, sweet and cool and pure, rising and falling in measure. Her strength had hardened around that dream. It was more than Father Leo could contend with.

  He broke off, though he hadn’t finished what he had come to say. She went on staring out the window at the darkness.

  “Father,” she said, “I wonder if you are happy with us.”

  He waited.

  “Because if you are not happy at Star of the Sea,” she went on, “the last thing I would want to do is keep you here.” She looked at him. She said, “Is there anywhere else you want to be?”

  Father Leo took her meaning, or thought he did. She meant, Is there anywhere else that would have you? He shook his head.

  “Of course you hear complaints,” she said. “You will always hear complaints. Every convent has its sob-sister element. Myself, I would trade ten wilting pansies for one Sister Gervaise any day. High spirits. A sense of fun. You need a sense of fun in this life, Father.”

  Mother Vincent drew her chair up to the desk. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Father,” she said, “you are inclined to take yourself too seriously. You think too much about your own problems. That’s
because you don’t have enough to keep you busy here.” She put her hands on the desktop and folded them together. She said that she had a suggestion to make. Jerry, her fund-raiser, needed some help. The convent could not afford to hire another man but she saw no reason why Father Leo couldn’t pitch in. It would be good for him. It would be good for everyone.

  “I’ve never done any fund-raising before,” Father Leo said. But later that night, back in his room, he began to like the idea. It meant that he would meet new people. He would be doing something different. Most of all, it meant that he would be getting out every day, away from this unhappy place.

  Father Leo had coffee with Jerry a few mornings later. Though the weather was warm, Jerry had on a three-piece suit which he kept adjusting. He was nearly as tall as Father Leo but much thicker. There were lines across the front of his vest where the buttons strained. Rings sparkled on his thick, blunt fingers as he moved his hands over the sheets of paper he’d spread on the table. The papers were filled with figures showing what the convent’s debts were, and how fast they were growing.

  Father Leo hadn’t known any of this. It came as a surprise to him that they could owe so much—that it was allowed. He studied the papers. He felt good bending over the table with Jerry, the smell of coffee rising up from the mug in his hand.

  “That’s not all of it,” Jerry said. “Not by a long shot. Let me show you what we’re actually looking at here.” He took Father Leo on a tour. He pointed out the old pipes, the warped window frames, the cracked foundation. He dug at the crumbling mortar in the walls and even pulled out a brick. He turned a flashlight on pools of scummy water in the vast basement. At the end of the tour Jerry added everything up—debts, operating expenses, and the cost of putting the physical plant back in shape.

  Father Leo looked at the figures. He whistled.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Jerry said. “Our Lady of Perpetual Help was twice as bad as this, and I had them in the black in two years. It’s easy. You go where the money is and you bring the money back.”