The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  The truths they’d released into the same air were way too painful to confront, not tonight. And whether Gwyn was serious about restoring the houses, Mabry was hardly likely to accept her challenge. By now, though, he was roused enough to move closer toward her. They’d confessed their guilt. Frances was as far gone as she’d ever be. Wasn’t it time for a little mutual self-reward, albeit on the smoking ruins of Western civ.? He hadn’t entirely bought Gwyn’s dismissal of him as nothing but a narcissistic brat. Hadn’t she herself, after all, been trooping round the Earth, eager to press her political convictions on the widows and orphans and titans of other lands? And—despite all his waste and outright deceit—hadn’t a few hundred beautiful objects left his hands more beautiful, and safer, than they’d been before he touched them? He rocked toward Gwyn, laid his right arm across her sensible hips and pulled his own body closer still.

  She said “Say more please about your M.S.”

  “Maybe I went a little too far. It’s not a medical certainty yet—that’ll take awhile longer—but the chances are better than sixty percent. And if it’s not M.S., then something weird’s got a foothold in me and scares me to death when it suddenly raises its various heads.”

  Gwyn reached over and began very lightly to ruffle his scalp. “I’m going to deliver another fearless prophecy, here and now—you’re just undergoing a normal response to Frances’s death, all those weeks beside her and all that pain. Not to mention the guilt. You’ll slowly walk on away from whatever’s wrong now.”

  Mabry said “I’ll do my level best to believe you.” Then sensing he’d been given some sort of permission, he began to explore her in accordance with his memories of their times together in a far distant world.

  She helped him along, gently correcting his occasional mistakes and adding her own soft hands on his body.

  They worked in full silence.

  And Mabry truly enjoyed the minutes, though his cock had been out of service so long that it never quite hardened. Still, it gave a respectable performance, all things considered; and what it couldn’t accomplish, his knowing hands did. Or at least he got thanked.

  When they’d drawn back a little and calmed awhile, Gwyn said “I know I’m saying this, here, on unreal time; but the way I feel, I could wish we didn’t have to leave here again.”

  Mabry’s mind joined her enough to let him say “Who says we do?”

  “We will of course. But it’s been first-class while it lasted, sweet child.” The voice was hers, no mimicry. In another few seconds, she’d sunk fast asleep.

  Mabry took a short snooze of his own, then covered her with the nearest quilt and made his way out with Philip Adger’s sad little picture under his arm.

  The dim porch light was on at his father’s, but no window was lit—it was nearly one-thirty. Despite the dark prospect, Mabry knew he was sober enough to feel the way toward his bedroom. The rest at Gwyn’s had helped, but the whole long day’s trip down from Nova Scotia remained to be slept off. Tasker had given him a front-door key; but when he got there, the door was unlocked. He stepped in quietly and paused long enough to let his eyes adjust to the blackness. Then he turned left to cross the sparsely furnished living room. Even the generally creaky floorboards cooperated nicely, and he was almost ready to enter the back hall when a deep voice said “Welcome home.” Mabry stood in place and waited for the sudden chill to run through his bones. It was not his father’s voice, not Audrey’s surely. And firmly secular though he was, he considered briefly the chance that this was something spooky—some spirit messenger, called up in his father’s bedtime prayers and bent on convincing Mabry that this house was home. When he was calm enough to speak, Mabry said “I was born here, yes. But who please are you?” At that point, he thought he could see a form sitting upright on the sofa, against the starlit bay window.

  The form said “Mr. Kincaid, I talked to you on the phone. I’m Audrey’s son, Marcus.”

  Mabry stayed in place, eight yards from the man. “I didn’t know you spent the nights here.”

  Marcus said “I wasn’t asleep. I was waiting for you.”

  “In this much dark?”

  Marcus turned on the small table lamp beside him. He was fully dressed in a burgundy shirt and khaki trousers, and he looked wide awake. If Audrey had actually borne him, he was a darker shade of African than she; and he had a more up-to-date head of hair—a nicely planned design of tight braids and bare rows that set off a likably homely face with eyes as alive as a fast young threatened thing back in the trees, one of the taller antelopes maybe—threatened but not afraid and surely not cowed. Marcus said “I can think a lot better in the dark.”

  It was only then that Mabry fully registered another fact. His father had brought in a good deal of the furniture Mabry grew up with; and someone had arranged it in the old familiar order—useful chairs and tables and floor lamps, even the old enormous radio. Mabry sat on the edge of the overstuffed footstool. “Thinking anything good in this hard week?”

  Marcus finally delivered what seemed like a carefully arrived-at grin. “You mean do I think I’ll be drafted by Sunday? I guess I could be. Should I head out right now for Canada or Ghana?”

  Mabry said “Considering our last war was mainly fought by men of your color, you might want to think about running right now—before sunrise.” But he also smiled, though a little less broadly than Marcus had managed. Then he suddenly knew he was tired to the bone. He got to his feet. “Now that you mention it, I actually slept in Canada last night. I need to turn in.”

  Marcus stood up too; he was medium-height but strongly built, and his big ears fanned out as widely as if he’d set them on patrol. “I was hoping I could know you somehow, Mr. Kincaid.”

  Mabry said “How about we talk at breakfast then?”

  Marcus shook his head hard. “I can’t be here at breakfast time. Audrey would kill me. She doesn’t know I’m still in the house.” He was speaking at normal volume, though the kitchen was not that far away. “But see, I didn’t know how long you’d stay; and I need to talk to you about my art. I can’t get the kind of advice I need anywhere around here.”

  Whatever that meant, and most people’s art was more than hard to take, it was news to Mabry. And maybe it was the lateness and his exhaustion speaking, maybe it was one of the reckless good patches that survived in his mind, maybe it was the fact that Marcus was the only fully live human being he’d seen since Leah Wilkins last night in the Halifax kitchen. In any case, the next thing he heard himself say was “Are you free from, say, ten o’clock tomorrow morning till you’re due to come back here and help my father go to bed?”

  Marcus said “I can sure-God arrange to be.”

  Mabry’s lunge kept going. “And you’ve got a valid driver’s license?”

  “Since the age of sixteen—”

  “Then come back at ten and drive me to Raleigh. You ever been to the State Art Museum?”

  Marcus said “Just nine times or more, since I was a schoolchild. I worship that place.”

  Mabry heard himself take the next step of a plan that he had no idea his mind had made. “I want to see a friend of mine who works in the conservation department. He can lend me a few of the things I need to start work here on a picture I’m cleaning for a man in New York who’s likely to be dead in the World Trade Center.”

  Marcus said “I’m sorry to hear it. I hope you didn’t know him all that well.”

  Odd as it sounded, it was still a winning sentence. So Mabry said “He was the only lawyer I’ve known with a real sense of humor, but my friendship with him was mostly professional.”

  Marcus tried to look interested, but his young eyes were impatient. He was plainly hoping to push on toward the kind of advice he’d already mentioned. “Mom told me about your trade awhile back.”

  Mom was another all-but-universal modernism—TV born and bred—that Mabry loathed (he still said Mother). But he tried to push past it and return simple courtesy. And trade? Mabry had
n’t thought of what he did as a trade for years, maybe ever. But he liked the sound. This young man might be an artist after all. Well then, Mabry Kincaid was a practiced tradesman. He needed to get his ass to work. With a weary flap of his hand, he told young Marcus “Good night for now.”

  When Mabry was fully out of sight, Marcus could no longer hold back. “Yes!” he whispered loudly.

  Mabry heard him. Have I started something I can’t finish? But he was too tired to walk back now and change the plan.

  Mabry dreamt all night, the kinds of fearsome pursuits and entrapments that ride you hard and leave you more hungover at dawn than any drunk evening. When he woke at five-fifteen, his room was still dark; but he knew there was no hope of sleeping again. Yet he couldn’t get up. The bed he was born in felt safe at least, for an hour longer. Though the starlight was strong enough to outline a few family pictures on the walls, he tried not to look. Each one portrayed a face he’d loved or liked—or enjoyed anyhow—and the sight of them now might plunge him deeper into wet self-pity than he already was.

  My city’s been poleaxed and far more people than we know are dead, including Baxter. The whole country’s struck in a way that may last, the rest of my life anyhow. My loft is knee-deep in poisonous dust, maybe ruined past fixing. My only child will barely speak to me, and I’m caving downhill into blind paralysis. My gimped old pa is all I’ve got. So who the hell can take care of me when I’m a cold cod, bent double in a wheelchair? And I’m still a young man. I could last forty years.

  That—and one or two naps, plus the scraps of prayer he’d say when the cards were down—kept him in bed till he heard the first real human sounds from the kitchen. Pots and pans and the rasp of an actual coffee grinder. Even his grandmother hadn’t ground her own coffee since, oh, the Depression. Is it Tasker or Audrey? One or the other. So he dragged himself upright, washed his face and stumbled his way into yesterday’s funky clothes, intending to head for the kitchen and whomever. When his hand was on the china doorknob, though, there was Baxter’s French picture in its wrappings, leaned on the wall. Suddenly it seemed the next urgent thing.

  He untied it again and took it to the window. His watch said six-twenty; and even this close to the fall equinox, there was light enough to let him see the dim surface again. Why hadn’t he wondered what might lie under the wide linen matt that covered at least the edges of the canvas? He took his Swiss Army knife with the thousand tools and gently pried out the retaining nails at the back of the picture. When he’d laid the frame on the foot of his bed, he went to the brighter window and studied the larger picture. Fool, you failed the first challenge here. But maybe it was good you didn’t know last night. You’d have fed Gwyn’s fantasy—for now he could see that the frame had covered more than an inch of the canvas, all around. And what was covered was considerably cleaner than the rest. Maybe the signs of quite a different subject—was it clouds and occasional tortured tree limbs? In any case, young Adger’s effort had left uncovered a different hour in the French countryside (this was surely not Charleston)—an even darker moment maybe that set in motion an older painter’s ending. Was there something really interesting here? Had Baxter thought so? But Baxter had never seen the canvas.

  Too groggy still to feel anything more than mild curiosity, Mabry propped the unwrapped picture back on the wall and went to the kitchen.

  Audrey had already set the table and was working at the stove. She looked toward Mabry but offered no greeting.

  “Your father’s in his room.”

  “Is he awake?”

  She didn’t face Mabry; she was scrambling eggs. “He’s been awake since five o’clock—every morning, five sharp.” She didn’t seem especially happy with the fact.

  So Mabry said “I guess that doesn’t give you much sleep.” He wasn’t aware of any deeper meaning.

  But Audrey turned with a hot-eyed frown. “I get as much sleep as I need, thank you, yes.”

  His father’s voice called him then. “Step here, baby boy.”

  Mabry was not the baby son. The actual baby—Gabriel, Gabe—was thirty-one years gone, killed at eighteen in a hunting accident, a few miles from here. It was still a sizable hole in Mabry’s heart and surely in his father’s. So he stepped on forward, not meaning to correct his father on the point.

  Tasker was fully dressed in a jumpsuit—battleship gray with burgundy piping down his arms and legs. At the sight of his son, he assumed a droll grin and stretched his extremities out before him. He looked like a long-retired admiral, one who’d never lost a battle and wouldn’t today. “Audrey bought me this getup at the new mall in Roanoke Rapids. She says it’s the latest in fetching attire for elderly gents. Don’t tell me she’s wrong.”

  Mabry did his best to match the grin. “Not wrong at all. It’s the height of male snazz but—” He dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “Did she truly say fetching?”

  Tasker paused as though he were actually searching. Then he called toward the kitchen. “Audrey, didn’t you say my new suit was fetching?”

  No answer at all, though the sounds of cooking were plain to hear.

  Tasker gave the quick shrug of a boy caught in mischief. “Did you get a wink of sleep?”

  “I got home late but, yes sir, I slept a good two hours.”

  “You must have met up with some old friends then.” Tasker had never been a probing father; this was the closest he was likely to move into Mabry’s private life.

  Hell, tell him the whole thing. It might cheer him some. “I stopped at the pool hall and saw poor old Vance Scott.”

  “Not sober surely?”

  “When was Vance last sober—1965? No, but sober enough to tell me Gwyn Williams was back in town. So I went to see Gwyn.”

  Tasker’s face was still not serious, but he said “I heard she was here. Gwyn may be the poorest girl I know.”

  That didn’t ring right. Surely Tasker hadn’t seen her in thirty years. “When was the last time you saw her, Pa?”

  Quickly, Tasker’s eyes went grave, caught in a small lie. “Four or five days ago.”

  Gwyn surely hadn’t mentioned such a meeting.

  “You ran into her somewhere in town?”

  Tasker drew back again. “She came to the house here.”

  Mabry said “I spent several hours with her last night; and she never mentioned laying eyes on you, much less coming here.”

  “Son, it was a pastoral visit in reverse. Gwyn wanted communion, she came to this house, and I gave it to her. It’s part of my job, very nearly the only part left.”

  “Gwyn’s a Methodist—or was, right?”

  Tasker said “I’m not a Roman Catholic priest. I don’t recall ever turning away any human being who asked for the sacrament. I did have a gorgeous Irish setter turn up at the altar rail one warm Sunday morning. I had to refuse her, gently of course.”

  Early as it was in the day, Mabry was surprised by the news on Gwyn. Surprised and curious. But he knew not to probe further, not with this priest. He looked round and saw the new TV, turned off. “Any fresh word this morning?”

  Tasker said “I turned it off at sunrise. They’re still saying maybe six thousand people died—in New York alone, then several hundred at the Pentagon and maybe fifty on the plane in Pennsylvania. And nobody has the slightest idea how those few men hijacked four full-sized American planes, made them take off on time—very nearly on time; can you believe it?—and do what they did.”

  Mabry said “Any word on whether they’ve opened up lower Manhattan to traffic?”

  Tasker said “I listened especially for that. It’s roped off indefinitely—unless you’ve got an ancient dog or an aged parent trapped in a building with no food or water.” He carefully straightened the creases in his trousers. Then he glanced up, smiling. “You’re a lucky man, boy. Your aged parent is here and means to stay.”

  Before Mabry had to deal with the loaded implications of that, Audrey stood in the door, looking straight toward him, grim as Jus
tice on any courthouse.

  “Your breakfast is ready.”

  Those four words were also, plainly, loaded. Mabry looked to Tasker.

  But all Tasker said was “Son, roll me forward.”

  Audrey’s breakfast was as fine as her supper—impeccable scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, fried tomatoes, English muffins, and somebody’s homemade peach preserves with coffee dark enough to power a drowsy platoon of combat marines. Tasker and Mabry talked a little—the day’s outlook—but Audrey hardly spoke a word; and before the men were finished eating, she’d got up, set her dishes in the sink, taken a broom, and headed out to sweep the front porch.

  So Mabry said “Audrey feeling all right?”

  Tasker said “Did she look sick to you? Son, if you’re going to have an employee in the house—notice I haven’t used the word servant in thirty-odd years—you’ll have to thicken your skin enough to bear the rapid changes of weather, the indoor weather. Audrey’s peeved that you asked young Marcus to drive you to Raleigh, I think.”

  A genuine surprise. “Oh God. You know he waited up last night in the dark living room for me to get home?”

  “No sir, I didn’t. He’s an energetic boy though.”

  Mabry said “So it appears. He told me how eager he was to meet me and that he was an artist—or hoped to be. So since I was tired to the point of stupefaction, I said the first thing that came to mind.”

  Tasker smiled. “Did he tell you he’s got a full-time job? He delivers prescriptions for the drugstore in town.”

  “He didn’t mention that. He sprang for my plan and said he’d be here by ten this morning.”

  Tasker nodded fast. “No doubt he will. He’s never failed me. Are you riding down to see Will Green at the museum?”

  It all but floored Mabry—Is there some kind of spy system loose in the house?—and his voice was all but hot. “That was the plan last night at least, but how—may I ask—does the whole damned household know my business so early?” He didn’t mention that half the county seemed to know.