The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  To Mabry’s own surprise, once he’d paused for an overdue napkin-wipe of his lips, he burst into the opening lines—in Italian—of the Divina Commedia. His Italian had never been especially accurate; but owing to the Kincaid gene for mimicry, his accent was apparently impressive, even to native Italians. He’d more than once seen the facial shock on waiters and shopkeepers, not to mention curators, when he addressed them in wretched grammar but with an impeccable Roman accent. Neither Audrey nor Tasker knew enough Italian to order so much as a respectable pizza, so they listened to him reel out the first twenty lines of Dante in patient respect. Then Tasker said “I’m guessing it’s Dante.”

  And Audrey said “Me too. But the first two pages of the Roman phone book would sound just as good, in your voice anyhow, Mr. Mabry.”

  He said “Mr. Mabry one more time? I know you’re teasing but—”

  Tasker rushed in. “Worse than teasing. She’s punishing you for American history—the Southern division anyhow.”

  Audrey smiled but didn’t deny it. Still, she faced Mabry. “I believe I can see you’re enjoying your supper.”

  Mabry’s mouth was full again so he nodded fiercely. “Your supper, lady. You cooked every morsel or am I wrong?”

  Tasker said “Dead right. Give her five minutes’ notice, she can cook every cuisine known to me or you—or any spy satellite soaring above us.”

  Audrey said “I cooked in Baltimore a number of years, at a number of restaurants, before I came down here.”

  Mabry leaned back from the table and bowed his upper half in her direction. “I’ve held off complimenting your art, lest I burst into tears. You’ve sure-God mastered the joys of my boyhood.”

  “You’re kind,” she said with a slight excess of solemnity.

  Mabry said “Accurate, far more than kind.”

  Tasker said “Amen.”

  Mabry said “Careful, Pa. You’re in danger of wearing Amen out. I thought you’d retired from the active priesthood.”

  Tasker struck the air with a half-frantic hand. “Don’t ever retire from anything. Die panting in harness or bleeding at the joints. Just don’t let anything retire you but Death.”

  Audrey said “I thought you were enjoying your rest—all the reading you do, the drives we take, the movies we watch.” Her left hand was flat on the table before her.

  Tasker covered it, then grasped it lightly (it was getting unusual attention today).

  She let him hold it maybe five seconds, then drew it away.

  Only then did Mabry wonder again if anything bound this mismatched two except the care that Audrey was paid to give an old man’s weakness—slim pay, no doubt. He said “Seems like I heard the evenings down here make swinging Manhattan feel soporific.”

  Tasker said “When was the last time I swung in New York—thirty-odd years?”

  Audrey said “I’ve never even seen New York.”

  Mabry said “You’re kidding me.”

  “Not a bit. I’ve had two sons to raise and a good many other debts on my hands.”

  Mabry said “Then we go to bed right now? Where’s the Ovaltine?”

  Tasker gave no answer but deferred to Audrey.

  She smiled at Mabry and by now her face had partly agreed to welcome him into his own birthplace. “Father and I are watching our way through the hundred best American movies from a rental service we subscribe to.”

  Mabry noticed the we but didn’t comment. “Lord, how many do you have to watch per night?”

  Tasker said “Three a week. I think it’s American in Paris tonight.” He looked to Audrey with no hint that their choice might not be a normal night’s viewing in the wake of recent events.

  And she assented as gravely as if Ingmar Bergman had directed a little-known Swedish version of the Gene Kelly caper.

  So Mabry laughed. “Considering I myself was a Yank in France just three days ago, I think I’ll go for a ride, if that’s agreeable.”

  Tasker said, of all things, again “You got plenty cash?” (he meant did Mabry have American money, though Mabry heard it as a patriarchal question).

  He said “Thanks, Pa. I changed some lire and francs in Baltimore.” He pushed his chair back. “What time is lights out on the local scene?”

  Tasker said “Anytime your city-dwelling heart requires.”

  Audrey said “My son comes in at ten o’clock and helps Father Kincaid get ready for bed.”

  Mabry said “I can save him that duty for a few nights anyhow.”

  Tasker shook his head. “You can’t lift me, son. I need brute lifting—on and off the john, in and out of bed. I know what tricks your back’s played on us since you were the pee-wee soccer goalie.”

  Mabry said “I’ll be back to say good night at least.” He almost stood to thank Audrey once more.

  Before he could rise, though, Audrey said “You don’t want even a taste of dessert?”

  Before he could think, Mabry said “What is it?”

  By then she was on her feet, taller and even finer looking. She narrowed her glinting eyes on Mabry.

  Tasker held out arms in both directions. “Easy now, children—”

  But before Mabry could apologize for rudeness, Audrey said “How about you name your favorite, kind sir?”

  Mabry knew right off. “Brown-sugar pie with cold whipped cream or forty-five more homemade heart’s delights from the same department as what we’ve just had.”

  Audrey said “I can’t guarantee your heart’s going to be entirely delighted with the butter content of what I’ve made next; but it’s hand-made chocolate pie, with whipped cream, in a hand-rolled crust.”

  Mabry bowed again, deeper still. “Oh bring it on. And don’t slice it too small, kindly, ma’m.” His eagerness was thoroughly real.

  “Ma’m is the same thing as Mr. Mabry from here on out,” Audrey said. By then her back was turned to the men; she was already slicing pie at the sideboard with all the commitment she lavished on Greek of the first century AD.

  After the pie, Mabry dialed a new Manhattan number on the hall phone.

  A man’s voice answered. “Miles Watson speaking.”

  It rang no immediate bell with Mabry. He thought he’d dialed wrong.

  But when he said he was sorry for the error, the man said “Mr. Kincaid, is that you?” It was Baxter Sample’s butler. But till now the butler had always said “Mr. Sample’s residence. This is Miles, his butler.”

  Mabry said “Right, Miles. Yes, it’s Mabry Kincaid. Is Mr. Sample in?”

  Miles waited a good while. “Sir, I’ve had no word from Mr. Sample since he left Tuesday morning at seven for the office.”

  “No word whatever?”

  “None whatever, sir, from him or any of his office staff. Oddly enough, the main office number rings normally; but no one has answered since Tuesday morning just after the first crash.”

  “And you’re sure Mr. Sample got to the office?”

  “Are you still in Europe, Mr. Kincaid?”

  “I’m in North Carolina actually.”

  “But you must have seen, sir, what the situation’s like in New York—absolute hell up here. Still, I’m sure you’d agree that Mr. Sample would have rung me if he were able. I’m here in the duplex, hoping for something.” What was left of Miles’s former voice was a whiff of his familiar Australian brass. He’d been the only actual butler Mabry had encountered in years of working with the rich; and Miles had seemed entirely impeccable, though no more than thirty. Whatever had happened to Baxter Sample, Miles would land on his big broad feet and with a legacy maybe—Baxter had shown him considerable affection.

  Mabry said he’d call again tomorrow; then he tried to hang up.

  But Miles said “Sir, are you all right?”

  Mabry could only picture Miles as he’d been—a tall, brick-outhouse-solid ex–rugby player with an army record—but now he heard a sudden note of genuine forlornness. So he said “I’m safe, thanks. I had a good trip but am glad it’s over.”
Somehow he didn’t quite want to mention Paris or the picture he’d fetched on Baxter’s account. “I’m at my father’s place in North Carolina. He hasn’t been in good health. And as you may know, my neighborhood’s still quarantined. I’ll likely be here then till I can get home.” Mabry heard his voice denying his father’s claim.

  He passed a few more moments of provisional sadness with Miles, learning incidentally that the butler knew of no close kin or dependents of Baxter’s. Even Baxter’s whole office staff was missing—four adults and a teenage Xeroxer.

  Finally Miles reverted to his own present state—he was all but a boy, still, and a long way from the Antipodes, hired no doubt as much for his looks as his stamina. He took a long pause; then said “Mr. Kincaid, what if they find a corpse?”

  That last word was the most shocking single thing Mabry had heard all week. How many Americans now would use as real a word as corpse? Most people, even the police on TV, were substituting passed on for dead.

  Before Mabry could answer, Miles rushed ahead. When should he close the duplex for good, what would become of all the contents, and to whom should he turn for any last bills and his own last wages?

  Mabry urged calm patience for a few more days. Then he gave him Tasker’s phone number and promised he’d check back every evening. When he hung up, he heard muffled laughter from the kitchen—Audrey’s and Tasker’s voices joined in a way which seemed so enviable that a chance at temporary rescue occurred to Mabry’s lonely mind. He went to his room, took the wrapped painting from among the sour T-shirts in his suitcase and rushed toward the evening.

  What was out there, first, but the twenty-odd houses that had made up the village—a village from which the old life had been uprooted by the death of tobacco, the blessed end of segregation, and the railroad’s abandonment? All Mabry’s kin, but his father, were gone. And it took him no more than twenty minutes now to pass two white-folks churches, three black-folks churches (a little farther out), a new post office as faceless as all recent federal buildings, one live grocery store, three abandoned stores, a dead filling station, and one tiny beer-hall with a damaged neon sign in the window, a pool table, and (surely) the standard clutch of post-adolescent bikers trying hard to look like threats to all other humans. The dead public school still stood on the edge of the field that had been a Confederate drill ground, but the sizable timber depot where his father’s father had been stationmaster—and where he’d died, at nearly a hundred, on the telegraph key substituting for a youngster—had been moved bodily five hundred yards to sit by the house of one old boy who had a good deal more feeling for the place than the Seaboard Railroad itself.

  Likely, some of the few dozen men, women, and children who lived now in the pleasant old houses—plus a few “mobile homes”—were laying down cellars of memory and feeling that might eventually rival Mabry’s own for depth and thanks. The solitude and stillness were near at hand for anyone reckless enough to tear his eyes and ears away from the TV and wander the thickets and weedy fields. What was mainly gone was what had seemed the eternal richness of the monstrous relation between whites and blacks that had nonetheless yielded more than two centuries of a daily tolerance far more complex than anything visible now in schools and stores. Well-gone, God knew, but not yet replaced with anything richer—anything with half a chance of pressing, from human pain and guilt (slightly more of each than the average province), the arts of poetry, fiction, drama, music, dance, and the riveting sacred rites of the Southern past.

  When his car had clocked off all those memories, Mabry hedged a little longer. He headed east, parallel to the dug-up rail tracks. And in two more pitch-dark miles he’d reached the white graveyard and negotiated the narrow entry, moving twenty yards onward and stopping by his family’s large plot. He stayed in the car and tried, in his mind, to count the graves and recite the names—four of them dated before his birth, yet he’d known six others: aunts, uncles, cousins, and the one grave too hard to visit tonight.

  Of the six, he’d loved at least three—Tasker’s mother, his own, and Gabe, his brother. And there was only one person whom Mabry had truly despised—a drunken abuser of wife and children, an average demonic man-in-the-street who happened to be Mabry’s second cousin. Normal as the demon was, and though he’d never laid a hand on Mabry, the buried nearness of his corpse was one more presence keeping Mabry in the car. And in twenty more seconds, another high wave poured through his whole body—cold dread this time. Again he heard Audrey Thornton’s question—Are these the Last Days?—and his grin that had followed. Whether or not she thought there might be some irrevocable plan in the mind of a possibly demented God to shut down the universe—or this speck of a planet—in thermonuclear fire here soon, for Mabry the question had a sudden force. He stayed in place till that one possibility faded. Still he couldn’t help thinking Tasker’s likely right—these madmen won’t stop till they’ve finished off New York.

  He switched on the map light long enough to check his watch and see that he couldn’t go back to his father and Audrey yet, not with this many hours left before sleep was feasible again. The friends he’d thought might be in town and welcome him no longer seemed a good idea. Then he’d drive five miles to the county seat anyhow and see if, by chance, a bar had opened or even a café was still in business as late as eight p.m.

  No such luck of course, not this deep in the toils of the Bible Belt. There was only the same eternal pool hall—twice the size of the one in Wells—with its own Cold Beer neon in the single window, this one with a hint of imagination—an apparent mermaid poised between the two words. He went in there and, before he could choose his brand, he saw—through air like a literal smoke pudding—a face he thought he recognized from adolescent summers. Surely it was Vance Scott.

  Whoever it was, the man grinned in Mabry’s direction but gave no further real sign of recognition.

  And when Mabry went toward him, the man leaned way forward to take his next shot with the cold focus of a fighter pilot .

  Hadn’t Vance been an actual pilot, in some war or other? Yes, Vietnam.

  But the shot went askew; and the man said “Christ Almighty,” then looked straight at Mabry. “You’re still Mabry, right?”

  Mabry laughed. The still was peculiar but he let it pass. “I was, last time I checked a mirror.”

  “You look enough like him anyhow.”

  Mabry said “And you’re still Vance—almost, anyhow. Didn’t we go to summer camp together, back when the world was younger than now?”

  Vance nodded solemnly. “Oh Christ, yes we did.” It seemed like a real discovery for him, one that might yield rewarding results. “Was it you or me that wet the bed the first night out?”

  There seemed to be three other men in the place. Each one of them looked up to Mabry at that point and waited for his answer. And Mabry knew. He grinned and said “I’d never have brought it up myself; but since you did, old son, it was you. After that, I told you my bedtime secret—eat a handful of salt in the mess hall with supper.”

  Vance said “And it worked—or am I wrong again?”

  Mabry said “Right as rain.”

  So Vance held out a hand that made untanned gator hide feel silken.

  But to Mabry it felt like an unexpected form of protection.

  Vance’s face, though, belied the hand. The eyes were bleared, and the skin of the face was all but trenched. Still, he held Mabry’s hand longer than expected; and he searched Mabry’s eyes as if he’d lost something that was maybe hidden there. Finally he found it. “Didn’t somebody tell me your Frances had died?”

  Mabry couldn’t think how that plain fact had reached Vance Scott in here. But he wouldn’t ask. He said “Yes, Frances died in April.”

  Vance said “Cancer.” It wasn’t a question.

  Mabry managed a Yes. It hurt a good deal more than he’d have guessed.

  Vance said “I hardly knew her, as you recall; but in memory she’s still a damned good woman. She loved you an
yhow. I could see that much.” Vance’s facts were facts, wherever they’d come from.

  Mabry nodded again but put up the flat of his hand in the air. They’d gone as far as he could handle, here at least.

  Vance also nodded. “You’re bound to need you at least a semi-legal narcotic.”

  Mabry was glad to hear that, and it left him feeling he should pause here awhile.

  But when Vance returned with the icy bottle, he faced Mabry earnestly again and said “Bad as you cheated, she left you well-fixed. Spend it all, boy. Don’t leave a cent behind you when you truck off.”

  It was hard to resist either slugging Vance—he was so far gone, a punch would be easy—or engaging him in a point-by-point grilling. Where the hell had he got his information, and how much of it was drunken guessing from a few scraps of half-educated memory? But Mabry resisted. He wanted to stand here—a space that was not his father’s house and was surely as safe this week as any room in the continental U.S.—and drink his free beer before heading out. As Vance turned back to take his next shot at the billiard table, Mabry suddenly knew a reason to stay.

  Vance had maybe saved his life in the summer-camp lake in 1959. They’d been learning to dive on the buddy system—you and your buddy were each other’s lifeguard. Mabry’s buddy was named Stan Seaman, and Stan as ever was entirely absorbed in showing off to a small knot of snobs a whole year older. Mabry successfully executed his first required dive from the medium-high board. But before he surfaced, his trick left shoulder dislocated—nauseating pain, helplessness, then the onset of panic as he struggled to reach the shallows on one arm without revealing his trouble or his fear. Before he reached a safe depth, though, he heard a level voice beside him in the mountain-cold water—“I got you, Mabe.” It was Vance and so he had. Though Vance was only a few months older, he was already two sizes bigger than Mabry; and with an amazing minimum of effort, he swam beneath Mabry, surfaced like the Navy’s most trustworthy submarine and bore him to the edge.

  Somehow tonight seemed Mabry’s last chance to return the favor—to stand a quiet guard on Vance as he fumbled the evening away in solid smoke and the mortuary shine of a long fluorescent tube overhead. So Mabry stood his chosen guard for over half an hour, saying no more than fifty words to answer questions from Vance and the manager and the one or two raddled boys who deigned to acknowledge his ongoing life. At first there was consolation in standing in the kind of world he wouldn’t have guessed had survived outside nostalgic movies—not only the pool tables, the cue sticks polished to an antique beauty by at least three generations of serious hands and the underwater light, but even an actual smoke-cured original example of the calendar from circa 1953 with Marilyn extended in air-brushed grandeur, “Nothing on but the radio,” as she’d later said (he could sell it in New York tomorrow for several hundred dollars).