The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  Tasker said “Just leave her alone. You’ll never change that. And keep your black raincoat. Bring it on over here if she tries to chuck it. I’ll give you a closet all to yourself. But you’ll have to build it first. All this house has got is a few old solid walnut wardrobes.”

  All three men were still in the yard—Tasker still on his crutches, refusing to sit.

  Mabry said “I guess we need to step inside.”

  Before they moved, though, Tasker bowed his head to Robo. “I thank you for the story about Miss Garbo—makes me like the world better this dreadful week and likely explains why you’re in the beauty business.”

  Robo grinned. “Is that what I do?”

  Tasker said “That’s what I hear.”

  Robo said “Maybe that remains to be seen.”

  Forty-five minutes later, they were back on the porch again—Tasker had asked Mabry to accompany him and Robo on the whole look-around. They’d hardly sat down when Audrey came out and said she could make a few extra sandwiches if Mr. Ketcham would stay for lunch, but he’d begged off—some promise he’d made to his youngest kid. So Tasker said “Mr. Ketcham, tell me the worst news first.”

  “Reverend Kincaid, I doubt there’s any worst news. For a house this old, I can’t see any damage of the kind you dread to find. No sign of termites, not to the naked eye. The floors feel solid. If any of the sills have started to rot, it can’t have gone far. The plaster, as you’ve seen, is fairly hard up in a number of places—cracks and fallen patches. You know you’ve got that leak in the west bedroom. You likely need a few new sheets of tin, if you want to stick with an old tin roof—I’d recommend you do; they sound so good in a driving rain. And of course I’d need to send my boys all up in the crawl space to check for any trouble with the sills. But if they’re in as good shape as I think, then once we’d taken care of the roof, the only big question I’d have for you is how much cosmetic work do you want? We could do everything from starting with your pine floors—a thorough sanding and a light coat of sealant—then coating the plaster walls with Sheetrock and a nice paint job.”

  Tasker raised a broad hand. “Stop there and tell me how much you envision in the way of hard cash.”

  Mabry burst out laughing and Robo chimed in. Mabry said “Pa, the man’s not a lightning calculator.”

  Tasker said “I’ll say you’re dead wrong.” He grinned at Robo. “Am I right, Mr. Ketcham?”

  Robo said “It feels all wrong, you calling me Mr. Ketcham. Just Robo please.”

  But Tasker said “If you say so but—forgive me please—that’s mighty peculiar. What does Robo stand for?”

  “It started as Robert, sir.”

  Tasker said “Then Robert, give me three sets of figures—say, total disaster, then rigorous facelift, then sufficient to see an old fart to his grave.”

  Robo actually clamped his eyes shut and appeared to be trying to come up with three separate quotes.

  When his eyes were still shut after thirty seconds, Mabry said “Robo, my father is well on into his eighties. He and I just returned from the local graveyard where all our family but he and I are stashed. To me, that suggests maybe two figures only—total disaster and rigorous facelift. And don’t feel compelled to give the quotes now, not this minute.”

  Robo looked at Mabry and nodded calmly.

  But Tasker also faced Mabry and said “Who in the goddamned hell called this boy and brought him out here, polite as he is, on a day when he ought to be taking his rest?” He waited as if an answer were due from Mabry Kincaid, nobody else, and when none came Tasker turned back to Robo. “You recall I’m the fellow that called you, right? And any work you do, on this lot anyhow, would be paid for out of my pocket only.”

  Robo blushed again, fiercely indeed, and turned to Tasker.

  So Mabry said to his father “I truly beg your pardon.” Then he looked to Robo, feeling more detail was relevant now. “My father’s eighty-three. I’m thirty years younger, almost to the day; but I’ve been living in lower Manhattan for a long time now, and life up there sounds maybe unfeasible for years ahead. Not to mention the fact I may be coming down, fast, with the ruins of multiple sclerosis and needing some kind soul’s steady care—” He broke off there, unsure of what came next, though his hands were on the rubber back grips of Tasker’s wheelchair.

  Robo dug at the ground with the toe of his shoe, a boy’s stage imitation of bafflement.

  Tasker said “Robo, would a week be long enough for you to come up with those two sets of figures? My beloved son here has simplified your work.”

  Robo said “A week’ll be plenty, Reverend Kincaid.”

  Mabry moved close enough to Robo to grip his left shoulder. Then he pointed to Tasker. “He no more loves me than I love myself.”

  Tasker said “Don’t let that slow you down, son.” By son, this time, he seemed to mean Robo Ketcham.

  Mabry thought This is getting too scary for me. Scary, he knew, was not the right word; but then everything to do with love and family had been past his reach or understanding—mostly, generally, all the time.

  As if somebody beyond them had fired a sizable cannon or snared a mean stretch on a nearby drum, all three men suddenly burst into laughter. None of them knew entirely what Mabry had meant about love, not to mention the chorus of all three voices. But it came on them all as a welcome relief.

  And then from behind them, Audrey’s voice came again. “It’s way past lunchtime, way past naptime. I’m calling quits on all you gentlemen, whoever you are.” Then she too laughed, not a common response from Audrey but thoroughly welcome. What she needed to say, but was holding back, was that the time for Father Kincaid’s rest was over. Either Mabry would haul his father up the single step of the door jamb, or she’d come get him (she knew there’d be hell to pay in the evening if the old man didn’t get his midday snooze).

  So Mabry said “Come fetch him, Audrey. I’ll walk Robo to his truck.”

  Tasker looked hard at Mabry. “I summoned him here. I’ll send him off.” Then he held out his right hand to Robo. “Whatever anybody else in this household may try to tell you—by phone, fax, telegraph, or tom-tom—I’m the man in charge of this one house and the land around it, for as long as I’ve got a conscious breath left. Don’t take any private communications from anybody else.”

  For an instant Robo was understandably baffled. But then he grinned. “Reverend Kincaid, as you’ve likely guessed, this business of mine is one that sometimes puts me in the midst of family fights. As I understand it, you and I are doing business here—or agreeing not to do it. I’ll get back to you in a very few days with preliminary figures. Then if you’re interested, I can send my various experts in for a closer look.” He and Tasker locked eyes, both of them grinned, and Robo bounded off the porch like a boy a lot younger than he claimed to be.

  Audrey had disappeared from the door, leaving Mabry and Tasker alone on the porch with the bright day well advanced beyond them. So Tasker said “How many pardons do I owe you, son?”

  “For what?” Mabry said.

  “You’re bound to know I went way too far in the cemetery. And many sons would feel insulted for that little moment I just staged with Robo.”

  Mabry said “The graveyard scene was hard, I’ll grant—mainly because I know it wasn’t a scene at all but a look at your heart. As for you and Robo and work on this house—you’ve got my blessing to do anything on Earth to these walls, including fire.”

  Tasker said “I doubt we’ll burn it.” But he said no more about the cemetery. He’d said what he meant there, and he wouldn’t deny it.

  In late afternoon Mabry roused himself from a long lie-down. It had been mixed in restfulness—more or less conscious stretches of troubling nostalgia and one or two patches of genuine dread for the city of New York, for his small place in it, and the only other resident who still ought to concern him deeply. When he’d eaten his sandwich an hour before and turned his father over to Audrey, she’d said “There’
s a piece of mail for you, back on your bed. Federal Express brought it while you were gone.”

  The thought of attention from Federal Express in a village as nearly abandoned as Wells was all but comic. “Who in the world knows I’m even down here?”

  Audrey said “I’d be the last to know.”

  Tasker had all but shouted from his room. “That man who detoured you through Paris, your loving daughter, and—what?—maybe forty percent of the good-looking women on Manhattan Island.”

  Mabry had said “Pa, you lie down now and get the rest you clearly need—you’re hallucinating, pal.”

  Tasker said “Very likely. But then I’ve hallucinated all my life—I believed in God, Lyndon Johnson, and you. Look where that got me.” By then he was mumbling.

  So Mabry had moved on off to his own room, and there on the bed was the large envelope with its detailed airbill, an unmistakable communication from his daughter Charlotte and charged to her account. Since he’d left the message with her roommate on the 11th, Mabry hadn’t tried to phone her again. Learning about the huge deposit in his savings account had convinced him Charlotte would be foaming with rage, and now he took up the envelope with genuine reluctance. Why should her mother have left him a cent? Could he stand to take the bitter dose she’d no doubt aimed straight at his eyes (her marksmanship, like her mother’s, was perfect)? Go on and take it though. He pulled the rocker toward the sunny west window, sat, and opened the envelope very neatly.

  Dear Mabry,

  I had a direct wire deposit sent to your savings account two days ago, then wondered if I had the right account number or even whether your bank was still standing and in business. Let me know immediately please if the money went astray in these wild times. Whatever you’ve had recent causes to think, I wouldn’t want that.

  Malcolm has just gone to work downtown, a kind of duty that’s too sad to write about here and now. I’ll tell you when we talk, if she can stand to do it for more than a few days. Thanks in any case for checking on us. We’re doing OK and have lost nobody we really knew, but you can imagine that people in general are still a little dazed. I hope your luck has been as good as ours in avoiding harm. Up here New Yorkers, despite the daze, are thrilled with their new hero status, something they haven’t had since the cover of Life magazine at the end of WWII (that sailor kissing that collapsed trained nurse) and have always hoped the rest of the country would be forced to acknowledge.

  A friend of Malc’s and mine is working downtown with the Salvation Army (she doesn’t have to carry a tambourine; still, believe it if you can!). I gave her your address and asked her to drop by if she could. She phoned just now and said your block is waist-deep in silt and nobody’s being allowed to wade through, not to mention drive by. But she also said the buildings in your vicinity look strong. Maybe we can all pitch in, down the road, and clean up your loft?

  Granddad says you’re “ticking over,” whatever that means. Sounds like your heart’s beating anyhow. Let me know if I can help with the loft or anything else up here. Any plans for returning?

  Till when,

  Charlotte

  It was almost past belief—the whole letter, every word. He’d had no such open-armed message from his daughter since maybe her first year at sleep-away camp; and he read it through again and again, testing every word and phrase for irony. Since she was her mother’s chief heir, he assumed she’d known of the sum Frances had left him; and while they’d never discussed it, he’d just assumed that—since she’d bitterly and rightly resented the few things she knew about his infidelities to her mother—she’d begrudge him every penny. Maybe this partly confirmed anyhow what he’d come to assume—that Charlotte’s share of Frances Kenyon Kincaid’s estate was so big as to leave her no reason to envy his own. Even so, the suggestion that she and Malcolm, her female partner, might help him clean up the no doubt monumental debris in his loft was all but overwhelming in its unexplained kindness. And it ushered him into a rest as deep as any he’d had since those hours on the plane out of Paris before the pilot’s bad news woke him.

  In late afternoon then, awake again (though still on his back), strangely he thought of little but his work. If Baxter Sample truly was dead, then that was the end of not just a likable acquaintanceship but also a generous private client. He was lucky, lately, to have turned down others, though; and more than one of them might still want his services if he made contact. For more than a year, he’d delayed a woman in outer New Jersey who claimed she had a large Rubens portrait that “needed an overhaul.” He’d never been asked to overhaul any large picture by a world-class painter, and this might be at least worth a day’s drive out through the Pine Barrens to see what—in truth—she actually had. A friend who’d done some light work for her had said she wouldn’t let him see the Rubens but that, in general, she was no fool at all. And more than a few young craftsmen lately had asked for private lessons—to work beside him on large and small projects instead of three to five years in graduate school. So quite aside from Frances’s gift, he wasn’t likely to starve, not soon.

  He glanced at his watch. It was nearly four-thirty; and again he had no idea what an evening at home might hold, except TV with his father and Audrey (if Audrey would deign to join him and Tasker; so far she’d been skittish about their joint company except over food). Still, he should at least wash his face and check the paper for a movie maybe, in Henderson or Oxford or even a drive down to Raleigh or Durham. Maybe Gwyn would be game to drive them that far, if he’d catch her before she started downing the white wine.

  It was Gwyn’s name in his mind that did it. He was still lying flat, facing the ceiling, when he knew—truly knew—that her crazy-sounding notion two nights ago had to be true. Philip Adger’s homely little daub lay on top of a Van Gogh sketch, both apparently in oils. Philip seemed to have painted a significant building atop a far more fluent sketch that had rendered a sky with clouds and a few bare trees, branches at least. Let’s say Gwyn’s right. How on Earth did it happen? He suddenly recalled, from the life of Van Gogh he’d been reading a few weeks back, a line from a letter Vincent wrote to his brother just a few days after settling in Auvers—the last place he lived before killing himself. It went something like “There are numerous painters here in the village—in fact, next door to me is an entire family of Americans who paint away, day after day.”

  Mabry had all but memorized the sentence because it seemed so weird. The whole possibility that a family of artistically hungry Americans, from (say) age five to fifty, should be painting away, cheek by jowl with one of the world’s great painters—and one who was driven by madness, or whatever, to kill himself in a very few days—was more than a little past easy belief. So try this. Philip Adger was the adolescent son in a family of well-to-do Charlestonians. They’d come to France and were living in rooms very near the café where Vincent had his own room. Somehow they all met and—unlikely as it seemed—Vincent took to young Philip, who was way more ambitious than his one surviving picture seemed to justify. Anyhow the boy and the tortured man wound up painting together—for a day or two anyhow—in the fields outside town. Vincent, who was known to speak excellent English, not only gave Philip a little encouragement, he also gave him a canvas that Vincent had used and discarded, unfinished. Philip painted on it—simple as that. When Vincent shot himself and died, Philip stayed on in France for whatever reasons through the rest of his life and wound up running the hotel in Paris where, long years later, Baxter heard of the picture from Philip’s witch of a daughter-in-law and bought it, tipsy and sight unseen, for something like five hundred dollars.

  Now it lay in its wrappings ten feet from Mabry’s right arm and Baxter was dead. He sat upright on the edge of the bed and thought he could take a clean T-shirt, wet it a little, wipe away a little more of the natural dirt of a century from the face of Philip’s painting and test Gwyn’s certainty. Do I want to know now? Aren’t there things I need to know first—like Baxter’s whereabouts? And even if Baxte
r is truly dead, do I have any right to scrape away at Philip Adger’s picture to get at Vincent’s? Hell, if Baxter’s gone—and he has no heirs—the thing could be mine. How would I know? Maybe nobody’s left to ask but Miles the butler. And asking Miles would be telling him I’m holding something precious.

  Mabry stood, went toward it, and had the package in his hands—how precious did it feel?—when he thought he heard a knock at his door. It was barely closed and surely not locked. He looked down to be sure his trousers were zipped. Then he said “Who’s there?”

  “Just a sidewalk artist, not much else.” The voice was frail and high.

  But Mabry thought he knew it. So he lowered his own voice to the deepest best. “Shoot, I collect good sidewalk art; got some first-rate pieces from masters of the trade in New York and London, even Rome.”

  The hidden voice said “Mine’s not first-rate, I can all but guarantee. But it’s strictly for you.”

  Mabry cracked the door open, and yes it was Marcus.

  He was in a clean shirt and pressed Levi’s (did anyone outside the old Confederate states still press their blue jeans?), and both hands were holding a package a lot like Philip Adger’s package.

  So far as Mabry knew, Marcus had never seen Philip’s package; but with Audrey in the house—and Marcus’s apparent freedom to roam it at will—who knew what anybody understood about the dark picture? Anyhow, Mabry looked to his watch. Marcus was several hours too early to lay old Tasker down.

  And he said “I know I’m early for your dad, but that’s not why I’m here at the moment. I brought you this.” He extended the package.

  Mabry didn’t know why but he hesitated to reach out and take it.

  So Marcus laughed and shook it. “It’s not a bomb, I swear to God.”

  Mabry said “A lot of things are these days, since I got home from Europe at least.”

  Marcus looked to the spotty ceiling. “This old house is the last place a bomber would aim at.”