The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  Even more calming was the fact that no one said a single word about the recent disaster or gave the least hint of suppressing any knowledge of the horror. Their calm devotion to the job at hand—an old, entirely honorable game involving considerable harmless skills—was as reassuring as anything Mabry had met with in three days of efforts from all sides of the Western world. He consulted his mind for the current vital signs and realized that he might have been, at that moment, in the grip of a previously unknown sublime drug and concealed in a well-fitted cavern on the far side of Mars—and with nothing more than a beer in his belly—till at last Vance looked up from the somehow literally triumphant shot that completed his game. Of course his smile was as wide as the exit gates from Heaven. “Gwyn Williams is back too. But you knew that.”

  Mabry said he’d heard it. In fact he’d only heard such a rumor before he left for Italy. But Gwyn had been his main target of the evening—the final hope for a little relief and the reason he’d brought Baxter’s now-orphaned painting in the trunk of the car. He’d only stopped here to pass a little time and let dark settle around the town. Through the one high window, he could see that now it was all but night. So he offered to drive Vance on home.

  Vance said “I thank you but, if I can’t drive when I finish up here, Betty Ann’ll come get me.”

  God, is Betty Ann still hauling this kindly embalmed souse around? Mabry went up to him and held out his hand, just to touch that inexplicably durable hide again. Then he headed for the door.

  His hand had barely touched the knob when Vance raised his voice. “You’re safe to drive, right?”

  Mabry turned and grinned. “I’m as right as a fifty-three-year-old scoundrel can be when he’s lonely as any sidewinder in the sand and has almost surely got multiple sclerosis to add to his joys.”

  Vance had started a whole new beer. “You’re bound to be kidding, good as you look.” He clearly needed consolation of his own, not Mabry’s bad news.

  So Mabry said “You bet I’m kidding—praying to be.”

  Just before he entered the night, though, Vance called behind him. “Let me buy you a barbecue plate between this minute and the day you leave. Hey wait—you take the combo, don’t you, with Brunswick stew and unsweetened tea?”

  Mabry said he’d welcome the gift, any day. But imagine Vance recalling the details. We can’t have eaten a meal together in forty years, and how much of that soaked brain can be left? It suddenly came to his own aging brain—Any way at all I can step back in there and rescue him, the way he did me? What? Haul Vance off to an AA meeting or a de-tox facility? Where would one be? Maybe nowhere nearer than twenty miles.

  By then, though, his mind had tilted more toward the scent of Gwyn Williams. She’d always offered more various and more desirable odors than anyone else he’d ever been near.

  When she finally answered his numerous raps on the front door and then the tall wavy-paned windows, the main odor—and the taste on her lips—was good champagne. He’d have known it, even if she hadn’t appeared with an open bottle of Veuve Cliquot in hand and gazed up at him in the deep porch darkness for a trustful long time before she said “Kiss these withered ole lips, honey baby, and step indoors. I’ve been praying for you, by the instant, here lately.”

  The lips were still long years from withering, though the black evening dress was torn down one side and gave off the smell of long decades in her mother’s cedar chest. When the first kiss ended, sooner than she wished, she set the bottle beside her on the floor. Then she peeled the long white kid glove off her right hand—she wanted to touch Mabry’s actual skin and he gladly complied.

  A second kiss followed and a thorough massage of both his hands by her own soft fingers. By then she’d pulled him backward inside, and he’d shut the door behind them. He said “Lady, I’m looking for Ms. Gwyn Williams; but I seem to have stumbled on Zelda Fitzgerald or Blanche DuBois. Can you give me some directions?”

  Gwyn looked down at herself and tried to tug the torn seam together. She was hardly drunk but when she spoke at last, she was on the verge of tears. And she couldn’t look up for fear of blubbing. “Sad as both those girls wound up, they’d have never answered the door like this; and you’re bound to know it. But then you were ever a gentle soul.”

  “Right about those poor girls,” Mabry said, “wrong about me. But we could just call each other’s names. That’d prove we don’t have Alzheimer’s anyhow.”

  Gwyn finally looked up. She was only nine months younger than he, but those green eyes were finer than ever. She took up the champagne bottle again and said “I was Margaret Gwyneth Williams before I started drinking.” Then she launched the smile that she could make more gorgeous by the moment, if she really tried. “And you’d be who, kind sir?”

  He said “I was Mabry Kincaid in Paris last Tuesday; then I set out for home and the world half ended. So who am I now?”

  “You’re the same sweet boy. Or you look like you are. But you need some champagne.” Gwyn turned her back on him and walked down the hall toward the dining room and kitchen.

  When she was twenty feet away, Mabry said “Am I meant to follow you or just stand here and die?”

  She didn’t look back. “Child, when have I ever leaned on your free will? Do what you choose.” By then she’d entered the dining room, and the sound of her feet was still moving on.

  So Mabry chose to follow. And by then every step of her trail was what he hoped—perfumed by a good deal more than champagne. A little artificial scent (French, to be sure), a trace of the mayonnaise she’d recently hand-made, the acid of an over-ripe tomato, and his main hope—the strong assertion of her sex, an odor he’d kept on storage in his mind since the last time he’d been in bed beside her, both of them naked. What? Twenty-eight years ago?

  Her destination was the kitchen worktable. And by the time he reached her, Gwyn was slicing bread for the sandwich she’d meant to make from the fresh mayonnaise and the big tomato when he interrupted her supper plans. She’d forgot about her prior conviction that he needed champagne.

  He reminded her. “You once seemed to think I was under-spirited.”

  It was not the clearest remark of the evening and she didn’t understand. The sandwich had her full attention.

  Mabry went to the cabinet, found a champagne glass and reached for the bottle.

  That got her attention. She still didn’t face him, but she spoke very softly. “I know you’ve had kitchen privileges here since you were an infant; but you might just renew your license, don’t you think?”

  “How would I do that?”

  “Try saying this—‘Signora Becchi, may I steal a glass of wine?’”

  “Signora Becchi?” Was she suddenly married, after so much long and unbroken single life? And where’s Signor Becchi?

  Gwyn tore a strip of high laughter from the air that lay between them. “Ignore that please. No, help yourself, Mabry. My hands are wet.”

  He poured the champagne (it finished the bottle, which he stashed in the garbage can). “Permission to sit?”

  “End of joke, dear friend. Let’s get back to normal—as if we could. Any - way, what’s this about you in Paris?”

  She silently offered to make him a sandwich; he omitted the pool-hall potato chips and told her he’d filled way up at his father’s. Then he told her the story of Rome and Paris, Halifax and Wells. Something had told him to leave the painting out in the car, so he didn’t mention that. And by the time he’d finished the lengthy story of his trip, Gwyn had consumed her sandwich and brought out a bottle of near-frozen Châteauneuf for him to open. As he worked with the antiquated corkscrew, he reminded himself that you asked for Gwyn’s news at your own peril—as her own mother had once warned, “Gwyn is garrulous to a fault.” So he silently slid through what he knew of her past.

  In the years since he’d seen her, she’d spent a good deal of time in bas Italia, south of Naples (the home of Signor Becchi?), and before that, with a serious rancher in up
per Montana. Mabry pretty much knew what lay before that—what a stone-freak hippie she’d been in the Sixties, the dead-earnest campaigns she’d waged against Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam, and her howling grief at the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Then once the war ended, she’d gone to North Vietnam and slaved herself almost to the bone with various short-lived international agencies that were hoping to feed the victims of U.S. bombing and find good homes for the battle orphans, especially those with American GI fathers.

  After that, he was vague—yes, didn’t she wind up in some fairly decent hospital in Hanoi that nursed her back from near-starvation? And then there was the episode where she lived in Hong Kong for a few years and tried to launch an export business, selling highly dubious “ancient” Chinese ceramic horses and carved jade Buddhas to hapless tourists and State-side dealers. She’d contacted him at some point in those years in the hope that he’d accept a partnership with her and provide certificates of authenticity for her often handsome but quite likely fake items.

  When he begged off involvement in any such career-ending venture, Gwyn’s letters—and occasional trans-Pacific phone calls—stayed good-natured and always epic in length and personal specificity. There’d never be less than a full account of her ongoing love life, with frequent snapshots of the various men—all mostly Anglo, all ultimately terminated (to hear Gwyn’s version) when they proffered engagement rings with plans for rooted lives and well-to-do in-laws in Asia, Europe, or Iowa and Nebraska. But here was this hint of a husband named Becchi, though at the moment she was wearing no wedding band.

  So while she was still rinsing her dish and cutlery at the sink, Mabry told a lie in hopes of hearing where she’d been lately. “Pa said he heard you were fixing this place up and planning to stay on.”

  She finished her chore, came back to the table and filled both their glasses. “I have both hot and cold flashes on the subject, but what in the hell would I use for money? It’s a sweet old place, but don’t you just know it would take several fortunes to bring back to life?”

  Mabry looked round slowly, as if he knew a lot more than he did about restoring anything bigger than a medium-sized oil painting or a portable urn. At last he said “I hear there are one or two boys in town who’re not at all bad at the restoration business.”

  Gwyn said “Robo Ketcham and Randolph Baynes—they’ve both just given me estimates. Want to guess what they’d charge?”

  Mabry grinned. “I’m from New York, remember. Their sights may be set a good bit lower. What?—under two hundred thousand, I’ll guess.”

  “—By about ten cents. And both their bids are suspiciously similar. They’re brothers-in-law, recall.” Gwyn knocked back the first two inches of her wine, but then she’d always had a hollow leg.

  “So’s everybody else between here and Raleigh.” Mabry crossed his eyes and twisted his mouth, a suggestion of the local inbred monstrosities.

  Gwyn thought that through and at last broke up in her unique laugh, maybe the thing that had brought Mabry here. Or so he felt, as the promising waves spread out and rung his head and shoulders like orchid leis in a 1950s Hawaiian movie.

  Both her hands were spread on the table.

  Mabry reached out and she let him take them, so he leaned and lightly kissed both—backs and palms.

  Then she brought them inward and down to her lap. One of the straps of her gown had broken, just since he’d been here. But she let it be. She half-suspected, and was underestimating, that her youthful beauty had partly survived the heavy wear she’d inflicted on her mind and body.

  Mabry saw clearly, and for the first time tonight (or for years), how lovely she was—and with a whole new stillness. He took a long pause to let it sink in. Then he said “So what are we celebrating then, if not a restored house and you back in town?”

  “Oh I was just cleaning out Mother’s cedar chest. This is the dress she wore when Father won his little term in the State legislature—remember how Earth-shattering that seemed? Anyhow, I tried the dress on. And I thought it fit till I heard a seam split while I was making mayonnaise. That called for the champagne I’d had in the pantry for several weeks, and then you turned up. Don’t you think you’re worth a celebration?”

  Mabry said “I’m glad at least one soul thinks I am. But if I’d waited another ten minutes, the champagne might easily have disappeared.”

  Gwyn frowned at his eyes. “You could have sat here all night, sweetheart, and not said that.” Then she laughed again. “Mother spoke that maxim about twice an hour, if I was in earshot anyhow.”

  Mabry said “So did mine.”

  “What’s the hound-dog meanest thing you ever said to your helpless mother?”

  Mabry wondered why that had come on her suddenly. But he said “Oh, God, how much time have I got?” Then he rummaged across an apparently endless screen of possibilities.

  “—Till both of us sit right here and starve.” Gwyn laughed again but she plainly meant it.

  It occurred to Mabry that she might be crazy, genuinely mad. As a college student, he’d worked the late shift in the mental ward at Duke Hospital; and he knew how often lunacy, in various forms, left women’s beauty oddly intact. All the more reason, then, to try to be honest to this girl now. He said “Mother called me in Washington in the spring of ’89 and asked me to meet her in Petersburg the next afternoon. She was up there to see her oldest sister. I was extra pleasant in the hope of finding out what was on her mind. Why should I quit work on a vast icon I was repairing for Dumbarton Oaks to drive three hours down the Interstate for Cokes and peanuts with two old ladies I’d known forever and would know forevermore? So I said ‘Ma, I’m busier than I’ve ever been,’ which was not quite a lie but—what?—a severe exaggeration. She said ‘I’ve begged you nine thousand times not to call me Ma. Call me Mother or, since you’re now full grown, you’re free to call me Eunice.’ So for the first time, I called her Eunice; but I still begged off.” His voice shut down at that point; and he reached for the last of Gwyn’s tomato that was still parked beside them on the edge of the table.

  Once he’d swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, Gwyn said “And what was so mean about that?”

  Mabry said “She wanted to tell me the last thing she thought I needed to hear, from her at least—that she had the worst kind of brain tumor known. By the time Pa called me, three weeks later, with the bleak news, she’d gone past speech.”

  Gwyn’s wide eyes were brimming. When she could speak, she said “Promise you don’t want to hear mine now.”

  Mabry tested himself—was he even half drunk? No, cold sober. Or maybe cool sober. So he reached for her hands again. Then he said “Girl, you started this. Haven’t I just done my share?”

  Gwyn had to agree. Then she brought both hands back to the tabletop and said “You have gutted me like a hog on a rack in a cut-rate stockyard.” She edged her hands toward him.

  But he couldn’t yet touch them. “Gwyn, what can you mean? I—”

  “Oh not you, sweetheart. That was what I said to Mother once.”

  “It’s elegant—I’ll give you that much—but maybe it’s way too elegant to believe.”

  Gwyn smiled but insisted. “I guarantee I said it.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Let’s omit my age,” she said. “But it happened too goddamned recently. Like you, I saved the worst I could possibly do or say for last. Of course, she was on her own deathbed when I said it.”

  He kept his voice down; but he said “Gwyn, what the hell did you mean?”

  “How can you ask that? You knew Mother.” When Mabry nodded, Gwyn said “Then you know I was telling the absolute truth. I might have turned out fairly well if I’d been born from Father’s belly, not Mother’s. My mother was a slaughterhouse.” She seemed entirely serious.

  But Mabry had to laugh.

  And Gwyn was suddenly too tired for anger. She just said “Remember my five-minute naps?”


  He did. She’d always been able to put her head down anywhere and fall into a sleep deep as coal mines, then wake up exactly three hundred seconds later, refreshed and alert. So he said “Be my guest.” He thought she’d head upstairs to a bedroom or maybe one of the living room sofas.

  But no, she laid her head on the table—still damp with tomato pulp—and was instantly gone.

  Mabry saw it as a relief at first. He could quietly stand and leave her to sleep off the flood of wine. He could phone her in the morning and come back by in the afternoon, well before either of them had commenced the evening drinks. And he was on his feet and into the hall when he suddenly thought I brought her the picture. Sad as it is, she’ll love the story. As much as me, she needs all the cheer anyone can supply.

  He went and was back in under five minutes, just time enough to untie the string and be in the midst of loosening the tape when—bang on schedule—Gwyn raised her head, knew right where Mabry was, and looked straight toward him. “I dreamed you flew out of here with great long powerful sweeps of your wings.”

  He had to say “Your dream was merely correct, O priestess—and I went to the far side of Planet Earth to fetch a small treasure for your delectation.” He gave a sweeping bow from the waist. “But here I’m back. I couldn’t leave you long.” He reached for a towel that lay nearby and dried the tabletop. Then he laid the package between them and carefully unveiled the picture.