The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics)

by J.F. Powers

  “You should see the office area,” Joe said to Hennessy. “Maybe, if there’s time later, I could take you around the plant.”

  “Oh, no!” said Conklin, next in line, and then turned to Potter to see if he’d heard, but Potter was talking to Bill, and Hennessy (“Maybe later, Father”) was moving off, and so Conklin, after more or less insulting Joe, had to face him alone.

  “Wine, Mr Conklin?”

  “Sí, señor.”

  It went with the mustache, Joe guessed, wondering whether a priest should be addressed as “señor,” whether “reverendissimo” or something wouldn’t be more like it, whether, in fact, Conklin had meant to pay him back for the “mister.” At the seminary, as Conklin would know, there were still a few reverend fathers who made much of “mister,” hissing it, using it to draw the line between miserable you and glorious them. That hadn’t been Joe’s intention. What was Conklin now, and what was he ever likely to be, but “mister”? It didn’t pay for someone in Conklin’s position to be too sensitive, Joe thought.

  And listened to Potter, who was saying (to Bill) that he’d had a raw egg on his steak tartare in München and enjoyed it. “‘Mit Ei,’ they call it there.”

  “You can enjoy it here,” Joe said. “Mrs Pelissier!” he cried, not pronouncing the housekeeper’s name as he usually did, but giving it everything it had, which was plenty, in French.

  Joe and everybody (except Father Otto) urged Potter to have a raw egg on his steak tartare, as in München—Mit Ei! Mit Ei! But Potter wouldn’t do it, although Mrs P. produced a dozen nice fresh ones, entering the study in triumph, leaving it in sorrow. Joe almost had one himself, for her sake. Potter came out of it badly.

  Joe was hoping the Barcalounger would clear when he set forth with glass and plate, but Conklin was in it, and it didn’t, and so he went and sat near Hennessy and Father Otto. “Never cared for buffet,” he told them, and got no response. (Hennessy was saying that the monastic life was beyond one of his modest spiritual means, Father Otto that one never knew until one tried.) Joe tried the other conversation. (Potter was building up the laity, at the expense of the clergy, as was the practice of the clergy these days.) “Some of your best friends must be laymen,” Joe said, and was alarmed to see Potter taking him seriously: that was the trouble with the men of Bill’s generation—not too bright and in love with themselves, they made you want to hit them. “But what about the ones who empty their ashtrays in your parking lot?”

  Potter smiled—now he thought Joe was kidding.

  “Not much you can do,” Conklin said. “Judah took possession of the hill country, but he couldn’t drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron.”

  “That so?” said Joe, thinking, What is this? He tried his wine. “Not bad,” he said to Potter and Bill (who still had their drinks from Bill’s room), but he didn’t get through to them. Potter was a talker.

  “What kind is it?” said Father Otto.

  Joe, speaking through his nose, named the wine.

  “Grape,” said Conklin, coming back from the table with the bottle from which only he and Joe had partaken so far, and sitting down with it, in the Barcalounger. “Anybody else?”

  “No, thanks,” Joe said, and was silent for some time—until he heard Conklin refer to Beans McQueen as Beans. “You a friend of Father McQueen’s?”

  “They taught this course together, at the Institute,” Bill said. “Scripture for the Laity.”

  “That so?” said Joe.

  And the talk went on as before, on two fronts, without Joe, leaving him free to go over to the table for the other bottle of wine. Hennessy wasn’t having any, but Father Otto was. “Grape, you say?” Joe served Father Otto, and also himself, and left the bottle on the coffee table in front of him, but beyond his reach—not that wine, unfortified wine, was really alcoholic, not that he was. He just had to watch himself. He wasn’t a wine drinker, but could see how he might have been one in another time and place—one of those wise old abbés, his mouth a-pucker with Grand Cru, his tongue tasting like steak, solving life’s problems by calling people “my son.”

  Potter was telling Bill and Conklin that the clergy should cast off their medieval trappings, immerse themselves in the profane everyday world, and thus reveal its sacred character.

  “That why you’re immersed in that shirt?” said Joe, but Potter just smiled and went on as before. It was odd the way Bill looked up to Potter, odder still the way they both looked up to Conklin—as what, a layman? It was a crazy world. Father Otto was telling Hennessy that the monastery should employ trained lay personnel in key positions, replace the kitchen, if not the laundry, nuns, and also certain brothers. “So Brother Gardener has to go?” said Joe.

  Father Otto turned on Joe. “You,” he said, speaking with deliberation, as if the wine, and whatever he’d had in Bill’s room, and the beer before that, had suddenly gone to his head. “You. Covered. Up. Those. Flowers.”

  “Flowers?” said Joe, and listened to the silence in the study. For the first time since the party began, he felt that others were interested in what he might have to say. “Things like petunias,” he said, and started to tell them about the leftover sod. At once he saw that they already knew about it, that it was later than he’d thought, that he was not to escape the pastor’s fate, was already being discussed in his own rectory and therefore in others by curates and visiting priests, those natural allies. “Didn’t realize you felt that way about petunias, Father. Strawberries, yes.”

  “Humph,” said Father Otto.

  “Excuse me,” Joe said, feeling that everybody was against him, and went over to the table, where he had work to do. He had to fire up the chafing dish, pour the juice from the pitted Bing cherries into the top pan, or blazer, place it directly over the flame, bring the juice to a boil, thicken with 1/2 tsp. of arrowroot dissolved in a little cold water, but Potter was telling the others that family life was in such tough shape today because Our Lord had been a bachelor, and so, carrying a dead match to the ashtray, Joe appeared among them again, saying, “We used to ask a lot of silly questions in the sem. Would Our Lord be a smoker, drive a late-model car, and so on. Kid stuff—nobody got hurt. But I wonder about some of the stuff I hear today.”

  “People living normal lives can’t identify with Our Lord,” Potter said. “Or with us—because of the celibacy barrier.”

  “That so?” said Joe. “And where you don’t have that barrier? I mean how well do we identify with Our Lord?” Joe put the question to Bill and Hennessy, too, with his eyes, passed over Conklin, tried but failed with Father Otto, who was spearing kernels of corn with his fork, making a clicking noise on his plate—rather annoying, since it broke what otherwise would have been an impressive silence.

  “He’s got you, Pot,” said Conklin, and then to Joe: “We may be closer than I thought.”

  Joe, not seeing why Conklin’s last words should cause Bill and Potter to look so sad, continued, “And when you consider we work at it full time, unlike the laity—well, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “It did me,” said Conklin

  Bill sighed, and Potter held out his glass to Conklin for wine—a highball glass with ice in it. Joe said nothing about a proper glass, afraid that Potter (who’d said earlier that he longed for the day when he’d be able to say Mass with a beer mug, a coffee cup, a small flower vase of simple design, because such things were cheap and honest and made, like us, of clay) would refuse a proper glass and, furthermore, would say why. In that way, Potter could easily evade the issue he’d raised, the celibacy issue, as he had the egg. Potter was tricky, had to be watched, but Joe was doing that—and then Father Otto had to butt in.

  “There’s been a lot of talk in the community about family life, but whatever the future holds for you fellas, I think it’s safe to say our status, or situation—some would say our lot—won’t change. When you get right down to it, a monastery’s no place for a family man.”

 
“I’ll buy that,” said Joe.

  “Oh, well,” said Father Otto. “The community’s family enough for me.”

  And that, Joe thought, is why you’re here.

  “When you get right down to it,” said Conklin (to Father Otto), “a monastery’s no place for you. Priests weren’t meant to be monks, and monks weren’t meant to be priests—and weren’t in the Age of Faith.”

  “We all know that,” Joe said—Conklin sounded just like an ex-seminarian, or an educated layman.

  “Times change,” said Father Otto.

  “Status-seeking,” said Conklin.

  Joe gave Bill a look for grinning, and to make it absolutely clear where his sympathies lay, as between Conklin and Father Otto, who appeared to be slightly wounded, Joe fetched the bottle. “Father?”

  “All right,” said Father Otto.

  Joe filled the monk’s glass, also his own, and went back to the table, with Potter’s voice following him. “Why put such a premium on celibacy—on sex, really? Think of the problems it creates.”

  “Think of the problems it doesn’t create,” said Joe, and while Potter and the others were thinking of those problems (Joe hoped), he poured the juice from the pitted Bing cherries into the top pan, or blazer. That done, he appeared among them again, saying, “The premium isn’t on sex. It isn’t on celibacy. It’s on efficiency and sanctity.”

  “Oh, no!” said Conklin.

  “Oh, yes,” said Joe. “Even if we don’t hear much about that aspect of the priesthood today.” And, having given them more food for thought, Joe left them again, for he still had work to do, but before he reached the table the impressive silence his words had produced was cruelly violated.

  “Father, how can we make sanctity as attractive as sex to the common man?”

  Joe had put that question to a Discalced Carmelite before an S.R.O. audience at the seminary during the war years, and Joe could hear it yet, that famous question, and had to expect to hear it yet from certain men—Potter’s permissive pastor was one—of that era, but not, Joe thought, from somebody like Conklin, and showed it.

  “Got to talkin’ . . . in Bill’s room,” Father Otto said, apologetically, and paused to watch his plate (which he’d been holding in a sloping manner) start down his outstretched leg, jump, and land on the floor, right side up. Once, twice, he nodded, as if to say no harm done, but his head hung down, finally, in an uncompleted nod.

  Joe sprang into action. Others, nearer to Father Otto, had already sprung. But it was Joe who removed the fork (in the circumstances, a dangerous instrument) from Father Otto’s hand and thrust it at Potter, who hesitated to take it by the greasy end, and it was Joe who deftly kicked the plate aside and told Bill to pick it up, and Joe who instructed Hennessy and Conklin, instead of foolishly trying to firm him up, to lay the monk out on the couch. Joe then changed his mind about that, in view of the sepulchral effect it might have on the party. “Bedroom! Bedroom!” he cried. “Not mine! Not mine!” Conklin and Hennessy, frog-marching Father Otto this way and that, didn’t seem to know what they were doing. Then Joe saw what the trouble was. It was Conklin. Why, when there were plenty of clergy present, when the person in distress was himself one of them, why should a layman be playing such an important part? “Here, let me,” Joe said, shouldering in, but the layman wouldn’t let go. Joe ended up with Hennessy’s portion of Father Otto. And so, borne up by Joe and Conklin, the helpless monk was removed from the scene.

  When Joe got back from the guest room, he found that the juice, which he had yet to thicken with 1/2 tsp. of arrowroot dissolved in a little cold water, had already thickened, having been kept at, rather than brought to, a boil. Until then, he had hoped to serve cherries jubilee for dessert and to do the job himself, so Mrs P. wouldn’t have to be present, but now he didn’t know. The juice had definitely lost its liquidity, was hardening or charring at the edges of the top pan, or blazer. To go ahead now, with or without the arrowroot, might be a mistake. So, playing it safe, he blew out the flame, dished up the cherries as they were, room temperature and rather dry without their juice, and served them swiftly, with spoons. He said nothing, and nothing was said.

  The conversation died when Joe sat down with his dish and spoon. He had tuned in earlier, though, while serving, and was curious to know why Hennessy thought that Conklin shouldn’t go on teaching at the Institute. “If he’s reasonably competent, and if Beans wants him back—well, why not?” said Joe, feeling broad-minded. (Hennessy, too, had that effect on him.) No response. “O.K. I’ll put it another way. What if he shaved off his mustache?”

  Potter and Bill shuffled their feet and protested, but Joe ignored them. “Why not?” he asked, speaking directly to Conklin.

  “You talkin’ about the mustache or the Institute?”

  “Both.”

  Potter and Bill protested again.

  “It’s a fair question,” said Conklin. “About the Institute. You better tell him, Bill.”

  Joe looked at Bill. “Well?”

  “Conk’s lost his faith,” Bill said.

  “That so?” said Joe. He was sorry to hear it, of course, and felt that more was expected of him, but he also felt that condolences weren’t in order, since some people regarded the loss of their faith as a step forward, and since he didn’t want to sound like he was rolling in the stuff himself. He now saw why Conklin had been invited, saw why so much was being made of him by Potter and Bill, saw what was really going on. It was an old-fashioned spiritual snipe hunt, such as they’d all read about, with Potter and Bill, if not Hennessy, happy to be participating, and also, it seemed, the snipe. That was the odd part.

  “Conk just doesn’t take God for granted—unlike some of us in the Church,” Potter said, apparently to Joe. “That’s been our trouble all along. Atheism and faith—true faith—have that in common. They don’t take God for granted.”

  Joe looked cross-eyed at Hennessy.

  “But Conk’s not an atheist,” Bill said to Joe. “Are you, Conk?”

  Conklin smiled. “No, but I’m working on it.”

  Joe wanted to hit him.

  “That’s what I like about Conk,” Potter said, grimly. “He’s honest.”

  Bill nodded, grimly.

  Joe sniffed. “What I don’t get,” he said to Conklin, “is why you want to go on teaching at the Institute if you’ve lost your faith. Just want to keep your hand in, or what?”

  “Don’t blame Conk,” Potter said

  “Conk wants to quit,” Bill said.

  “He should,” Joe said, and gave him an encouraging nod.

  “No!” cried Potter, and stood up. “What matters in teaching is a man’s competence, not his private beliefs, or lack of same. And that applies to things like Scripture and theology, if they’re teachable, and I say they are. By agnostics, infidels, and apostates, you say? Yes! I say. And, thank God, some of our better institutions agree!” Potter sat down.

  Bill stood up. “But how many of our seminaries, Pot? How can we go on calling theology the Queen of Sciences?” Bill sat down.

  “How about Beans?” said Joe, without getting up. Joe was pretty sure that Beans didn’t need Conklin, was just doing an ex-seminarian a favor, letting him keep his hand in, and maybe hoping for a delayed vocation. “He know about this? No? Better tell him, then, so he can find somebody else, if necessary.”

  Potter and Bill both stood up, both preaching, and Potter, of course, prevailed, but he was repeating himself.

  “Look,” said Joe. “The Institute isn’t one of our better institutions.” Even as an adventure in adult education, which was all it claimed to be, it probably didn’t rate too high. “And it wouldn’t be one of our better institutions if you guys pulled this off.”

  “It’d be a start,” said Potter, sitting down.

  “It’d be a stunt,” said Joe, getting up. Going to the door, he took the tray from Mrs P., but on his return, with his mind on the trouble there could be over Conklin at the Institute—factions, re
solutions, resignations, and so on—he overran the coffee table, jarring it and cracking his shin. In some pain, he backed up and put down the tray, saying, “I worry about you guys.” Pouring and handing around coffee, sloshing it, he spoke to them as he sometimes did to Bill alone, late at night.

  HOME TRUTHS

  He said that he, at their age, had dearly wanted to be a saint, had trained for it—plenty of prayer and fasting, no smoking, no booze (“Actually, I didn’t drink anything but beer then”), and had worn a hair shirt for a short period. At their age, he had worked out on himself, not on other people, and that was the difference between the men of his generation and theirs. One of the differences. “You guys even want to be saints? I doubt it. You’re too busy with your public relations.”

  CHANGING STANDARDS

  There might be worlds to be won, souls to be harvested, and so on, but not with stunts and gimmicks. He had been rather pessimistic about the various attempts to improve the Church’s image, and he had been right. Vocations, conversions, communions, confessions, contributions, general attendance, all down. And why not? “We used to stand out in the crowd. We had quality control. We were the higher-priced spread. No more. Now if somebody drops the ball somebody else throws it into the stands, and that’s how we clear the bases. Tell the man in the next parish that you fornicated a hundred and thirty-six times since your last confession, which was one month ago, and he says, ‘Did you think ill of your fellow-man?’ It’s a crazy world.”

  STRANDED

  There had always been a shortage of goodness in the world, and evil and ignorance were still facts of life, but where was the old intelligence? He had begun to wonder, as he never had before, about the doctrine of free will. People, he feared, might not be able to exercise free will anymore, owing to the decline in human intelligence. How else explain the state of the country, and the world, today? “We don’t, maybe we can’t, make the right moves—like those poor whales you read about. We’re stranded.”