The Good Priest's Son

by Reynolds Price

  He’d almost forgot Blair knew them. “You’re damned right. In that one way, I’m a lucky man.”

  She finished her wine, refused his offer of a second glass, and said “What else is wrong?”

  Before he’d left town for Europe, Mabry phoned and gave her a light account of his visits to various doctors—the baffling weirdness in his eyes and hands. He’d forgot, though, how he’d underplayed the possible badness of what might be wrong, other than just middle age and his own stark fears.

  But by then their food had come. Both were having slightly different versions of shrimp and pasta; and for five minutes onward they managed to submerge in their plates with smiles of pleasure and occasional chatter about the very New Yorkish fact that, in an authentic-tasting Italian restaurant, most of the staff were plainly Mayan. On all sides now there were profiles as reliably aquiline as anything hacked into any pyramid in Yucatán—and as silent as they accomplished their duties. These genes had once been the kings and slaves who’d subjected each other to tortures as exotic as pulling string loaded with sharp-edged beads back and forth through holes in their lips and tongues, and Blair expounded on the details with the smiling over-elaboration to which most art experts were prone.

  Beneath Blair’s lightness and Mabry’s, though, he felt himself pulled back strongly to the days when he’d been in intimate touch with all of Blair, all he could reach with two hands and ten fingers. Yet some perverse flash made him feel the need to turn the moment against itself before he could dive headlong into teenage-lover foolishness. He couldn’t remember precisely how much he’d really told her about his neuro mysteries, how scary they’d been and still were. And had Charlotte told her more while he was in Europe? He resisted the further urge to touch her, and he said “You know about my latest middle-aged fright?”

  “I doubt I do,” she said. “Which one?”

  Mabry knew he’d asked for at least that degree of dismissiveness but it stung anyhow. So he made it hard. “The heavy chance I may have M.S. and will soon be leaning on my few real friends.”

  Blair completed an unusually long stint of chewing and swallowing, as solemn as if it were some professional test. Finally her face acknowledged his gravity. “Friends you’ve got. Who on Earth has got more?”

  Mabry laughed. “I lie awake, trying to count. But friends are one thing, good wives are another.”

  She widened her eyes at his certainty. “Nothing to give you at this point but Amen.”

  Far more than he’d expected, that angered him. He laid his napkin beside his plate and actually stood. No words came to him, but Blair’s face quickly reddened.

  The waiter approached them and waited in silence.

  After what felt like numerous decades, Mabry sat back down. Then he said “I know you’re Blair Patrick. No other expectations. Continue, as they say in Radiation, to breathe freely now.”

  Blair pushed her own plate back the small half-inch that would indicate finished, but the waiter was gone again.

  So Mabry said “Coffee, espresso, ice cream? They have ice cream almost as good as that place on Piazza Navona.” He’d suddenly remembered the time Blair approached him and Frances in Rome, her junior college year, a whole year after he’d met her in Chapel Hill. All three had ordered hazelnut ice cream and sat outside in the chill March light till Frances shivered hard. Blair said “You’re freezing!” and they went separate ways. Anybody you’d ever met up with in Rome had a special slot in your memory surely.

  Mabry called the waiter, ordered their ice cream and coffee, then offered Blair a thoroughly genuine smile but no apology and no further medical information. “Here’s a serious question, darling.” He went on to give her a stripped-down story of the painting he’d fetched from Paris for Baxter. He ended with the fact that Baxter was very likely dead and that so far no will had been discovered, though surely a lawyer of his distinction would have filed a will somewhere. He thought that Blair would turn to some angle of that problem first.

  But no, she said “Did you say Philip Adger?”

  Mabry said “From Charleston. A friend of mine in North Carolina says she’s kin to the South Carolina Adgers.”

  Blair fell on the news like a buoy in a storm. “That makes two of us. I’ve even been down there, to Adger’s wharf where they made their millions—none of which percolated north to me.”

  “Nor to poor Adger apparently. For whatever reasons, he seems to have spent his whole life in France, ending up with a small hotel in Paris and a monster of a daughter-in-law who tried to cheat my client out of five hundred dollars.”

  “Did he finally get a bargain?”

  Here and now, as with Gwyn and Marcus and his friend at the North Carolina museum, he pulled well back. But he wanted to know this much at least. “Suppose young Philip’s boyish picture—a long dark building which may be the actual château in Auvers—lies on top of a Van Gogh oil sketch, at least a few quick strokes in Van Gogh’s hand?”

  At once Blair suspected the degree of cover-up. “You can tell me, Mabry. I’ve kept a great many secrets for you, recall. You know what’s under young Philip’s stumbling, right?”

  Again he smiled. “I know what’s under an ancient liner that lies around the whole framed picture—tree branches, I think, and a cloud or two.”

  “And clearly by Vincent?”

  “Somebody a whole lot surer-handed than your young cousin.”

  Blair said “Exciting” and plainly meant it. Then she faced him, dead-on, and batted her amazing lashes fiercely (they were longer than the costliest camel’s-hair brushes). “But of course you haven’t dreamed of getting it X-rayed?”

  Mabry batted his own in return a few seconds. Then with both hands in the air, he moved to damp her down. “The nearest X-ray machine to my father’s is in a hospital packed with unwed mothers and people with blood pressure twice yours or mine from lifelong diets of pure salt pork” (he wouldn’t mention his trip to Raleigh and the State Museum). “So no, it’s never yet undergone any form of testing beyond my own eyes. And now, as I told you, my client Baxter is almost surely dead; and he seems to have died without a known relative. As I said, if he left a will, nobody’s yet found it; so your cousin Philip’s picture may well be an orphan. But the picture itself is still in my possession, in my father’s house to be exact; and the last thing I need is an item in the Post—Wonder Picture Discovered in Paris Cellar!”

  Blair said “Understood. Absolutely” and zipped her lips shut as the ice cream arrived.

  When they’d both had spoonsful, Mabry finally said “Let’s say—and honest to God, I don’t know—let’s say there’s a fairly elaborate Van Gogh oil sketch lurking on the canvas. Properly cleaned, how much might it bring?”

  Blair said “You know that’s not my field, but you and I both read the daily art news. Wouldn’t you say, oh, several hundred thousand?”

  “Or with this provenance, the story of a young American boy who was with Van Gogh on the evening when Vincent stepped back of the building your cousin was painting and shot himself? Maybe you and I could do the research.”

  Blair was calmer now than Mabry. “If the story truly proves to be right, and if your client died with no known kin or anything resembling a legal will, maybe close to a million. But Lord help whoever gets involved. You can well imagine that a big auction house deals daily with exactly such problems—a valuable object and a complicated will, or none at all. If your client left a genuine orphan; and it’s now in your hands with no known heir, you could be a zillionaire. Or you could be embroiled in a packet of nightmares for the rest of your life—almost surely would.”

  “A nightmare poised on a night-mare’s nest,” Mabry said. His dessert was gone that fast, and he’d already drunk his whole first espresso and signaled to the evident heir of a Mayan king for another.

  When he’d walked her all the way back to Christie’s door, they stood in a patch of light as pure as any in Iceland; and Blair thanked him for lunch in terms that wo
uld have served had he treated her to a coronation in a whole other country—no worries, no reminder of their city’s ruin, no imminent choices of home or safety. When Mabry agreed that he’d phone on Friday once he’d seen his doctor, she apologized for her rudeness at lunch and said “You know how much your friendship means to me. You know I’d do anything on Earth. Just say the word.”

  So he said “Two words then—eternal service.”

  She didn’t understand him.

  “Your presence beside me—whatever, whenever I’ll need you. Nothing less.” Even he wasn’t sure of his meaning—his full request, if it was a request.

  Blair tried to smile and failed, then pointed behind her at the whole Christie’s building. “But you also know I’ve got this job. I’m not a rich woman.”

  “Exactly. Precisely. All friendships fail at that very point. And I’ll wind up—where your parents likely will—in a nursing home, spoon-fed by strangers who wish I’d just die and free them up for a night at the movies or an unbroken snooze if nothing more .” Then he could laugh, to free her so far as freedom was likely now that he’d fully explained himself.

  Back at the hotel in midafternoon, Mabry sat at his narrow desk to list the chores that needed prompt attention. Since a return to his loft was days or weeks away, shouldn’t he think of finding a temporary apartment or a less expensive hotel at least? He needed to see someone at his bank and, for now, move Frances’s great largess to some destination that was both safer and more productive than the money-market savings account where it presently rested. He needed to phone down to Wells and speak with Audrey and Tasker. And—God!—he needed a small easy job to occupy him now, something to head off a crash into major blues or worse. How had he let Blair escape after lunch without asking her for something simple he could do with few tools? Or maybe he should phone some museum friend and scare up a similar uncomplicated errand.

  When he’d noted down that many headings, he listened as a major fact dawned in his skull. You’ll do damned little till Dr. Brewer has lowered whatever booms he’s got, if he’s got a real boom yet. And you won’t see him for two more days. So there in the midst of Dorothy Parker’s meager leavings, he let himself measure his own meager present.

  It was Wednesday afternoon. Since coming to town, he’d seen his apparently likable daughter, her increasingly likable and admirable partner, Baxter Sample’s baffled Australian butler (who might yet prove a sturdy rescue), the promising but burdened Italian super at his inundated home, and a helpless former girlfriend. None of them had phoned today. No one from North Carolina had phoned. The world was proceeding on its terrified or indifferent way, or so the television assured him. Yet barring Miles Watson, none of his friends or family seemed so much as mildly unnerved; and plainly no one needed him. No one on Earth.

  He’d got to the age of fifty-three; he couldn’t think he was truly a monster of self-entrapment or ingratitude. Yet here he sat, entirely alone, in the dark green walls of a famous hotel with nothing to do and no one to help. Boo hoo. You could phone down to Malcolm, this minute, and offer to join her in her practical work—giving crushed human beings small bits of their dead. Or surely there’s some other useful task you could volunteer to shoulder for a few days. No, you’re paralyzed in your own tricky skin till Friday afternoon. Then you may just have the medical equivalent of a sizable rock set down at your feet to focus on, maybe something that real to circle around for the rest of your life.

  An hour later he’d walked a peaceful twenty-six blocks north to his favorite small clutch of paintings in the world, the Frick Museum. He hadn’t called to see if it might have closed since the trouble, and yes it was open—no soldiers on duty and no unusual body search when he bought his ticket. As ever, on the walk he’d decided which picture he’d really try to see. Today it was the Rembrandt self-portrait in the long West Gallery; and it too was there, he could suddenly see at a glance through the door—unaltered, unspoiled, and golden as ever beneath its numerous layers of varnish that begged to be stripped off and no doubt should be if only the world possessed a conservator who’d know which layer was darkening varnish and which might just be an actual glaze of color laid on by Rembrandt’s supremely knowing hand.

  As he went toward the Rembrandt, Mabry paused in the prior room by two of his other favorites—the wide Bellini of St. Francis calmly receiving the ghastly stigmata from a vision in the sky and the Holbein portrait of steely Sir Thomas More, still in possession of the head he’d soon lose to Henry VIII. Each was a picture Mabry would have surrendered all his worldly possessions to own for thirty days. Think of them hung either side of your bed. Then he was ready to see the Rembrandt, a picture that was hard to see in any visit, hanging as it did in a room that likewise held one of the largest of all Vermeers and the now-disputed Polish Rider, which was either one of the grandest of Rembrandts or an utterly inexplicable event managed by yet another painter who’d never produced a surviving picture that could lay a finger on the glorious Rider (lately a small Dutch committee had assigned it to a modestly talented Rembrandt pupil named Willem Drost).

  But today the huge nearby self-portrait—painted, Mabry knew, when Rembrandt was one year younger than he—came suddenly at him like a wide and tall heat-seeking weapon, with his own particular temperature precisely gauged as its present target. Then it passed on through him, from head to foot, and left its meaning, a thoroughly common message but remade now with the force of the painter’s power of hand and his straight delivery of three plain truths made oracular today by inimitable genius—You’re no more lonely than any man or woman. Women’s lives are tragic because they can seldom succeed in ceasing to love their children. Men’s are lonely because they seldom truly love.

  Each of the three parts seemed dead true, true enough today to steer him straight back downtown past Tiffany and Cartier and the trashy dealers in pornographic Japanese ivories, that were often quite funny and could be bargained for, to his wide rented bed and deep on into the rest he awarded himself at sunset.

  He’d only meant to sleep half an hour, then take himself to dinner at the Jewel of India, just up the block. The thought of their first-rate keema mattar with garlic nan and mango chutney had mingled with his memories of Rembrandt as his mind drifted out into dreamless sleep. But when he woke, the room was pitch dark; and he found himself in the midst of one more frightening failure to know where his body lay. In which direction was the door to the living room; where was the john and where were his own stinging hands and feet?

  He thought he could move them. It even felt as if he was furiously waving his hands in the air near his face. He brought both hot palms down and aimed at masking both his eyes, but the dark was so thick he couldn’t confirm he’d done what he meant to. So he lay still, hoping some slot of light would slice its way toward him or some surrounding nimbus from the street outside would gradually glow. In four minutes maybe a reddish flashing showed to his left. That might be the window wall. He swung what seemed to be his legs toward that red shine. His bare feet seemed to find a floor.

  He seemed to stand and walk toward what had once been the john door. When his left hand reached out and fumbled beside him, he found a light switch; and yes, it was the bathroom. In pure gratitude he sat down on the commode, just to pee; and by the time he’d finished, he was so aware of thanks for the simple skills he’d called on in the past five minutes that he came near to tears. The only sign of a physical failure was the dryness of his eyes. They refused to weep.

  Long showers had seldom been possible for Mabry, but this one lasted twenty minutes; and when it was done, for the first time he recalled in all his travels, he put on the terry-cloth robe that the hotel offered in his bedroom closet. Then—still in unbroken peace—he sat on the living-room sofa, faced the blank TV, and waited for the drink and the room-service supper he’d ordered. After an immensely long ten minutes, the phone rang for the first time in two days. An instinct told him that room service had discouraging news—they lacked
the makings of something he’d ordered (he’d ordered a lot).

  But room service mostly announced himself as Chuck. This was a woman. “Mr. Mabry Kincaid?”

  “Speaking,” he said.

  “Just a moment, sir. I’ll get your party.” She sounded close by, no more than a few yards down the hall. Then there was the loud sound of a phone being dropped and a distant man’s voice saying “Christ Jesus. See, I told you.” It sounded like no one Mabry knew. Then a long wait. Then “Mabry?”—a woman.

  “—Kincaid,” he said again.

  “It’s Audrey Thornton, Mabry.”

  “Where the hell are you, Audrey?” Watch your language now. She’s almost a priest herself.

  “It’s not Hell exactly. It is a hospital, though, in Roanoke Rapids.”

  Her house was in that eastern direction from his father’s. “You been in an accident?”

  “No, Mabry, but Father Kincaid has.”

  “Oh Lord, another fall?”

  “A fall came first but—”

  So Mabry filled her pause. “Are you in his room?” He thought she might be hiding some hard truth from him.

  “No, I’m out in the hall at the nurses’ desk, using Marc’s cell phone. He forgot and left it with me last night. Small blessings abound—”

  Mabry broke in. “Then start at the beginning please and tell me the story.”

  Audrey waited another few seconds before she chose to honor his request. “He either had a stroke and then fell down, or he fell and then had a stroke on the floor.”

  Mabry realized slowly that she hadn’t yet said the word alive or dead. He also felt that he shouldn’t say them, not to Audrey at the moment. So he said “Can he speak?”

  “You want to speak to him?” Audrey had plainly reached the point where she wanted to end her role on the phone.

  Mabry said “I didn’t mean that. No, I’m wondering how you think he is.”