The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  Tasker actually waited a minute, gazing at the room, then out the window. Finally, not turning back to Mabry, he said “Son, I’d flat forgot the cemetery.” Then he looked to his one surviving son and was plainly honest. “What I said there seemed the truth at the moment—and even back here, later that night. But surely you’re old enough now to know how the truth shifts and slides from hour to hour, if not by the instant.”

  “Yes sir, I am.” When he’d sat through a loaded wait of his own, he still had to say “But aren’t you in the business of eternal truth?”

  “Oh I was,” Tasker said. “I was, back when.”

  “And you don’t believe it now?”

  “On and off,” Tasker said, “like most human beings. Or am I wrong?”

  Mabry said “Don’t ask me, Pa. I mostly gave up, thirty-odd years ago—believing, that is, in anything but beautiful objects, women included and occasional men.”

  “You ever touch a man?”

  Mabry said “I didn’t mean that.”

  Tasker said “I did, a thousand years back, before I was married. More than half the fellows in seminary were queerer than Uncle Harry’s hatband, and even normal Christian ministers specialize in touching each other but you’ve noticed that.”

  Mabry laughed. “I have, here and there, yes sir.”

  Tasker said “Do rabbis?”

  Mabry laughed harder. “You’ll have to find you an observant Jew to ask.”

  Tasker said “Ask around up north for me, hear?”

  Mabry said “I will and I’ll phone you collect with what I find. I somehow doubt I’ll have a whole lot to report on the rabbi end.”

  Tasker said “You do it. I’ll pick up fast, to hear a dispatch from rabbi country .” He was also laughing by then, more laughter than Mabry had heard from a parent in many hard years.

  The ninety-minute drive to Raleigh—Marcus at the wheel—had been quieter than their recent meetings. There was no unpleasant charge in the air, chiefly exhaustion and Mabry’s silent jangling apprehension at what he’d find in New York. Mabry did say, as the airport hove into view, that he’d left two important things behind him in Wells—the portrait Marcus had given him and another small picture. He didn’t expand at all on the Philip Adger canvas, but he explained why he was leaving the portrait. When Audrey had left him the previous night, he’d finally decided it was safer for Philip’s picture if it stayed here at Tasker’s till there was some definite word on Baxter, life or death (Mabry did take Philip’s small envelope, and its strange claim, with him). So he’d set the dim landscape on the left edge of the bedroom mantel with Marcus’s double portrait on the right, and now he explained about the portrait to Marcus. “You know I can barely imagine what’s waiting for me in the city. My daughter’s already warned me to expect major chaos in my loft downtown. So I didn’t want to risk any damage to our portrait. I’ll send for it later.”

  “Or maybe come get it?” Marcus was literally turning off the highway at the airport exit.

  “That may take longer than any of us knows.”

  “You’ll come for Father Kincaid’s funeral, won’t you?”

  Mabry said “Absolutely but, Marcus, you generally have to kill a Kincaid. We’ve got genes so tough the angels will have to slug us at Judgment.”

  Marcus said “I hope you last just as long as you want—a hundred and fifty.”

  “If I still know my name.”

  “But, Mabry, your dad isn’t long for this world.”

  Even coming from a post-adolescent lad with slim education, that chilled Mabry. “What makes you say that?”

  “He told me.”

  “When?”

  “Last night, when I laid him down.”

  Mabry said “Remember his words?”

  “Something like ‘Marc, you’ve been a saint to me. But I won’t be leaning on you much longer.’”

  Mabry said “That was likely just old-man talk. He used it with me too.”

  “Did he give you five thousand dollars or more?” Marcus couldn’t help smiling at the windshield before him.

  Mabry said “Hasn’t given me ten cents in years. What are you talking about?”

  Marcus said “When he said what I told you, he reached down under the covers and brought up a brown envelope with my full name on it. ‘Don’t open this till you get to your car,’ he said, ‘and don’t ever mention a word of this to Audrey’—and I haven’t; so help me keep his secret please.”

  Mabry said “Wait. What was in the envelope?”

  “Oh, sorry. Five thousand dollars in fifties, a wad big enough to choke a bull.”

  “A good-sized bull at that—any letter or message?”

  “Just a note, in his hand. Something like ‘This is all I can give you before I’m gone. It’s way too little for what you’ve given me, but buy all the education it will afford.’”

  Mabry could hardly have been gladder to hear it. “For God’s sake, hurry on now and buy it.”

  Marcus said “I mean to, soon as you can advise me how. But don’t you think that means he knows he’s bound outward soon?”

  Mabry nodded. “It could surely mean he thinks so.” There wasn’t time to speculate on when and how his father had got the cash (a visit to the bank, of course; but who drove him there except Audrey or Marcus or, a long shot, Gwyn?) or—most interesting—whether the gift had been planned for a while or had followed on the heels of the confrontation with his own blood son in the cemetery and in the two days since.

  As they entered the airport grounds to deposit the rental car, Marcus said “I believe old people—even serious young people—can think themselves to death if they truly want to pass on.”

  Mabry could only say “You please help him as much as you can, anywhere he needs to go.”

  Marcus said “You too,” which might have angered a son but didn’t.

  Then Mabry looked up toward Terminal A and saw the actual first sign of local fear—two uniformed National Guardsmen with rifles posted by a door. Many doors, many rifles, many very grim-eyed young men on duty—for days or weeks or likely forever, the rest of Mabry’s life anyhow. Till this moment, here in clear fall sunlight two feet to the left of a young man more alive than any colt, Mabry felt dead, dead and forgot and halfway glad at least. Then he felt cold fright, like fingers kneading deep in his brain.

  Then Marcus switched off the engine and said “Safe landing, Chief.” He meant they’d landed at the car rental slot. A way more dangerous landing might yet lie ahead for Mabry, five hundred miles north.

  Four

  9 . 17 . 01

  9 . 19 . 01

  It had been five years since Mabry spent a whole night in the Algonquin Hotel; but he was still in the back seat of the taxi, paying his fare, when Mike—the chief bellman (a trim man with “the map of Ireland” all over his face)—came to the curb and spoke through the cracked-open window, “Mr. Kincaid! I heard you were coming. Did me a world of good this awful week.” And Mabry was hardly standing on the sidewalk—two yards from the site of the famous heartbreaking photo of Scott Fitzgerald near the end of his life—before Mike was introducing him to the strapping young new doorman, Ed. In the lobby, he was greeted at once by a further cheerful clutch of employees who remembered him from the seventies and early eighties when he’d stayed here often on trips up from D.C.—more bellmen (Eddie and Kevin and Peter) and Jenna at the front desk to check him in with the effortless ease of a likable cousin, speeding through a few minor details before slipping him the key card to what was now called the Dorothy Parker suite.

  In the wake of such a welcome, then, he was alone in the silent paneled elevator before he took a moment to reflect on why he’d chosen to stay here one more time, especially now that he could have sprung for the Plaza or the Waldorf. Well, they knew you, whoever you were, once you’d stayed here twice; and they cared for the chinless schoolmarm from rural Illinois with the individual care the place had given to Faulkner and Welty, Olivier, and Yves Montand
and Simone Signoret (not to mention the less distinguished Round Table jokesters whom the owner blazoned now on lap rugs and a king-sized recent dining-room painting).

  Once Mike had set his suitcase on the bed, and he’d tipped him nicely, Mabry studied his long face an instant and said “Mike, you’re way too young to have known Mrs. Parker, right?”

  “Right, I came here in ’63; and she came in once about six months later for drinks in the lobby with a gentleman friend. But I didn’t speak with her and—frankly, Mr. Kincaid—she seemed a sad case.”

  Mabry could add a little to that. “Oh God, she was by then—or so I’ve read—but I have one story that’s not on the walls here. A client of mine knew her husband, Alan Campbell; and shortly before Campbell killed himself, he sent my friend a letter with a very late Parker remark. It seems she and Campbell had gone to an L.A. screening of a dreadful movie called The Chapman Report. It was meant to be a comedy, based on the Kinsey Report, about a survey of American sexual behavior; and at the dreary end, as Campbell and Mrs. Parker were trying to leave the theater without being seen, a publicity flak from the studio spotted Mrs. Parker and raced over toward her, pen in hand. ‘Oh Mrs. Parker, we would be so honored if you’d give us a quote about the film.’ Campbell said ‘Dottie never broke stride. She drilled the flak dead in the eyes and said, very clearly, “In my opinion, The Chapman Report will set fucking back fifty years.”’”

  Mike laughed, though with a slight professional reserve—respect for a dead former patron, honored here in these three dark green rooms, hung with her pictures and sayings and posters from the films she’d written with Alan Campbell.

  By then it was midafternoon. Mabry paused to realize how luckily he’d navigated the recent journey and the hours—no strangeness whatever in his body or mind and surprisingly little in the way of scary new security at the airports or on board his plane (he’d badly needed an airborne snooze). So he thought he’d try to track down Charlotte and see if dinner was a possibility.

  As he lifted the phone, he felt another chill. What if her kind letter was an unreliable fluke and he met coldness now or the brush-off in which Malcolm specialized whenever Charlotte was out—or hiding out? It would be a real setback. But he dialed the number.

  And Charlotte answered in the midst of the third ring. “Pa?”

  She’s taking this much of a dare—that it’s me and that I’m still actually me . But when did she start to call me Pa ? He could ask her that later. For now, he rolled with the name. “It’s Pa, sweetheart.” And then he choked, not so much because of the implicit affection but because of the reminder of the heartbreaking moment in Gone With the Wind when Vivien Leigh has waded her way back to Tara through Yankee hell-and-holocaust only to find her beloved Irish father in dementia. Doesn’t she lean to kiss his curly white head and say “Oh Pa, don’t worry about anything. Katie Scarlett’s home”? Mabry even tried it on Charlotte now. “Katie Scarlett, dear child—”

  And wondrously she got it. “Safe back at Tara. You’re in decent hands, Pa. Are you at the Algonquin?”

  “So I am—the handsome Dorothy Parker suite.”

  “Are they still publicizing that tiny sad drunk?”

  “They are. And tiny she was apparently but not as sad as you may think. She wrote some crackerjack poems and one short story that I think’s great. I’ll defend her further, if you’ll join me for dinner.” The pause was longer than he intended. “You and Malc, that is.”

  “Malc’s working a late-night shift downtown; and that’s what I can tell you about, among a zillion other things. What time’s good for you?” Her acceptance was as matter-of-fact, tinged with warmth, as the simplest agreement to sit for three hours at her Buddhist class.

  Does she call it a class? Mabry glanced to the clock beside him on the table. “Fine but I’ll need a quick nap. Wait, it’s Sunday, right?”

  “Monday, Pa.”

  “Sorry, I’ve been way off stride with dates ever since I left France last Tuesday.”

  “—You and the entire Western world, for now and maybe the rest of our lives.” She waited, then imitated Vivien Leigh as Scarlett at her most balked. “Paw, O Paw, the Yankees have raised the taxes on Tara to where I don’t see any way to pay unless I peddle my tender white thighs.”

  Mabry laughed but then couldn’t help his true feelings. “You save those thighs, sweetheart. And better not mention them to Paw. Well-brought-up girls don’t mention their intimate parts to Paw, not above the knee anyhow.”

  Charlotte laughed. “But whoever said I was well-brought-up? Still, aye aye, sir. Want to say I join you down there at six?—get an early evening.”

  “At six o’clock then. Call me from the lobby.”

  He was so tired he’d had the sense to set the alarm for five-fifteen. So he woke at five and lay, eyes open on the ceiling above him, and thought of what old Silvio had told him just before he retired some years ago after many decades as a bellman here—how he’d come into a lower room one morning, after getting a call from the mother of a young man to see if anyone at the hotel had seen her son. He hadn’t come home, to Roslyn, for three or four days. He’d worked at the hotel off and on for several years, and sometimes they’d lend him a room when they had a vacancy on a weekend night and he was in town. Anyhow Silvio promised the mother he’d check; and then on a hunch he came to the lower room, looked it over fairly quickly, and noticed nothing but the unmade bed—a tangle of white sheets. It was the slack guest season, just after Christmas; and the maids hadn’t got round to cleaning the room. It did seem strange, though, that the windows were open on a grim winter day; and the room was freezing. So Silvio closed the window; and just as he turned to head back out, he took a second look down at the bed; and there, after all, lay the man he was looking for—cold dead, snow white in the knotted white sheets, staring up open-eyed like Mabry right now. The lost man had brought the wrong friend home from some late bar, got strangled for his pains; and the killer had the sense to open all windows so the stench of dead meat could quietly escape.

  Luckily, Mabry could chuckle now and even consider what secrets were sealed in the beds and walls of every hotel room, unless the hotel had opened for business that same day—and even then some wildness might well have gone down. Far worse things can happen than whatever’s loose in me now. At least one psycho killer is prowling the block at this moment. He knew he was only hunting the feeble consolations that could ease him briefly. Well, he’d made himself laugh by then, a small cause for thanks. There on his back he checked his body, piece by piece, especially his eyes and the feeling in his hands, and found again that there seemed to be no problems since—when? Since his unfathomed blind spell forty-eight hours ago. In the morning he’d phone his personal doctor and try to see him soon. That could take a week; but maybe he could scare the kind man with his blindness story, true as it was.

  The shower and shave went without incident. Then he passed up a look at the TV news. If the world had ended, Charlotte would tell him. He sat on the sofa and flipped through the past week’s New Yorker—as out of date now as any issue of the Police Gazette from the 1890s. When he’d taken literally all he could manage, he couldn’t hold off requesting a quick room-service Scotch.

  It reached him seconds before the phone rang—his child in the lobby. Child. When had he last thought of Charlotte as that? It feels right, though. And when he’d opened the door on her smile, he said “Darlin’ child.” Her face was an almost alarming mixture of her mother and Mabry—the Kenyons and the Kincaids, two strong Anglo strains: raven black hair (unaided by dye), very dark blue eyes (almost royal purple), and pale white skin without the least blemish anywhere in sight. He’d made then—or joined in making—a single beautiful thing at least.

  Charlotte opened her arms and folded him in, as nearly as her arms could reach around him. “I am your child, sir. We know that for sure.” When she moved back a step, of all things she said “We do know it, don’t we? You’re not going to tell me
I’m adopted someday, or merely the bastard you may think I struggle to imitate at times?”

  Honestly, it disturbed Mabry. “You want to test our DNA tomorrow?” When she didn’t shake her head yes or no, he said “It would be a gigantic waste of money, I can guarantee.”

  Charlotte said “I believe you. Let’s clutch every penny we’ve got to our bosoms till we find good ways to spend them on each other.” By then she was walking up the narrow hall to join him in the green sitting room. Once she’d digested the Parker memorabilia on the walls—and the really quite lovely photograph of Dottie as a young woman maybe not much past thirty—Charlotte could see his indentation on the sofa, so she sat in the deep wing chair just opposite. Then she saw his Scotch. “You’re one up on me.”

  “Not truly,” he said. “It got here the instant you rang from downstairs. Let that one be yours, just to prove your pa is no hapless drunk; and I’ll call for another.”

  Slightly to Mabry’s surprise, she accepted.

  An hour later, they were both still sober but relaxed enough to have got through accounts of where they’d each been and what they’d done since their last meeting a month ago. Aside from a few logistical questions—where would Mabry live till his loft was available (if it ever was), and could Charlotte and Malc be involved somehow in whatever solutions he’d find for his problems?—the only question on Mabry’s mind at least was simple. Why has my daughter changed her tune about me so drastically? Why am I forgiven? Or why am I not the master villain I was last month?

  The room-service waiter arrived with their own small table and deftly sorted the army of plates and old-fashioned heavy bright warming-lids (they’d both ordered burgers with melted cheese, slices of purple onion, and tomato that somehow resembled a tomato, even this late in the growing season). Mabry tasted the accompanying Australian burgundy, pronounced it better than drinkable, signed the astronomical check, and launched the question before his first bite. “Darling, I very much hope I’m not staring down a gift mule’s throat too early in the evening; but help me with this—you don’t seem as mad with me as you were when I left for Italy.”