The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (14 page)

   “
Bless me,
Father, for I have sinned.”

   
He confessed to
the generic sin of impurity (he would go into detail later) adding
that he was a priest. The fact that he was clergy did not make a
sin any more or less grievous, but it put the offense into a
different context. This was one time it was not possible to play
the anonymous layman.

   “
Do you love
her?”

   “
Father?”

   “Do you love the woman? I presume
it was a female.”

   This was not a question he had
anticipated. It was not even a question he would have considered
relevant. And yet, to answer truthfully, how could he help but
recall the way he had felt when Rosalie’s head was resting on his
chest after she had fallen asleep like an exhausted child? Was that
love?

   “
Did you
have any feeling for her, or was it just a sexual
release?”

   “
I don’t think
sex had much to do with it.”

   
Until now the
Jesuit’s profile had been very close to the screen separating them,
his head cocked to one side as if he were hard of hearing. Now he
turned and faced forward toward the pews he could see through the
confessional door, just as Father Walther could when he heard
confessions himself.

   “
She knows
you’re a priest, this woman?”

   “
Yes. But she’s
non-Catholic.”

   
He waited to see
if he should go on. The lack of response from the Jesuit confused
him. “We were houseguests at a mutual friend’s. We had never met
before. She became frightened after having a nightmare and asked if
she could stay with me for a while.”

   
He described
their circumstances—the hosts’ trip to another city, the evening he
and Rosalie spent together.

   
The Jesuit
sighed with impatience.

   “
Were you a
virgin when you entered the seminary, Father?”

   “
Yes.”

   “
And after? Was
this your first time with a woman?”

   “
Yes.
But…”

   “
Have
you considered leaving the priesthood? Many have, you
know.”

   
Father Walther
was too surprised by the question to reply.

   “
Are you happy
in your vocation?”

   “
I have my ups
and downs.”

   
He waited, but
the Jesuit said nothing. From the incline of his dim profile seen
through the grille, he might have been asleep.

   “
I’m not
sure I’ve made clear exactly what happened, Father,” he began
again.

   
But the
Jesuit seemed to have lost interest. “Say an Act of Contrition.” He
began reciting the absolution. When he finished he leaned toward
the grille and, out of the side of his mouth like a horseplayer
giving a hot tip, whispered, “Say a prayer for me.”

   
It wasn’t until
he shot the slat closed and began hearing the confession of someone
on the other side of the confessional that Father Walther realized
the man hadn’t even bothered to give him a penance.

   
CHAPTER
EIGHT

   “
I’d say you had
a busy week, Father,” the portly Dominican retreat master told him
the next morning after a typical retreat breakfast of underdone
eggs and soggy toast. There had been an introductory talk shortly
after he arrived the night before. The retreat master had also made
himself available for confessions. But Father Walther had just
confessed that afternoon, and besides, he was not the only one
there in need of spiritual comfort.    

   
He was one of
six. Two were elderly, an arthritic who had retired five years ago
from a pastorship in Union City, and a gregarious Italian who never
stopped smiling. The arthritic volunteered that he spent about half
his time in retreat houses like this one. He seemed to know the
cuisine in every such establishment in several dioceses. The other
three priests were middle-aged. They were a good deal quieter than
the older fellows, no doubt because they had more on their
minds.

   
Father Walther
had decided on making the retreat, a weekend affair in Staten
Island for clerics like himself, right after his bizarre experience
with the Jesuit. He had hoped to unburden himself to that man, but
instead, the priest had merely offered him the option of leaving
the priesthood. At least, that was all Father Walther was able to
make of the Jesuit’s words after he stepped out into the blinding
light of Fifteenth Street. Maybe here in this former seminary, as
secluded on its own couple hundred acres as anything in upstate New
York, he would find the guidance he needed.

   
He was seated in
a room about a third the size of his own digs at Holy Name. There
was a desk with several bookshelves ascending the wall behind it.
Next to the desk and behind the swivel chair occupied by the
retreat master was a large window that looked out onto a parking
lot. A narrow cot—far too narrow to support the Dominican’s
girth—lay flush against the opposite wall. As the visitor, Father
Walther got to occupy a handsome, but uncomfortable,
imitation-leather recliner.

   “
Do you think
you’ve learned anything as a result of your adventures?” the
Dominican asked, his hands joined across the midsection of his
cassock, his huge torso tilted toward the window which framed a
gray Saturday morning.

   
They had been
talking for the better part of an hour. The retreat master had
scheduled a conference with each of the six priests at half-hour
intervals. If nothing else, the extra time he was devoting to him
confirmed Father Walther’s suspicions about his spiritual state: He
had done the right thing in coming here—a better alternative,
certainly, than Father Lapcheck. Only, his retelling of the events
of the past week was beginning to wear. His body was rested, but
his mind had a limited tolerance for so much soul-searching. And
the glare from the window behind the Dominican was giving him a
headache.

   “
You seem like
the sort of person who sets high standards for himself.”

   “
No higher than
the next fellow’s.”

   
The Dominican
rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, his lips pursed in a fat man’s
kiss.

   “
If anything,”
Father Walther continued, “I’d say they aren’t high enough.
Otherwise I wouldn’t have tolerated the rut I’ve been in for the
past year.”

   
The Dominican
closed his eyes. His great chest heaved up and down like a sea
wave. But just as he seemed about to doze off, his eyelids popped
open. Father Walther couldn’t help wondering how he maintained such
a great weight. He didn’t eat any more than the others at
breakfast, and not even a stick of gum had crossed his lips since
this session began.

   “
Even so,
Father, you strike me as a man who judges himself harshly. I may be
wrong, but that’s the impression I’m getting. Were your parents
keen on your becoming a priest?”

   “
I wouldn’t say
‘keen.’ I made the decision at an early age—“

   “
How early? How
old were you?”

   “
Seven or
eight.”

   “
That’s early.
What did you want to be before you decided to become a
priest?”

   “
I never wanted
to be anything else.”

   “
Never? Not even
a policeman or fireman? Little boys do, you know.”

   “
I
didn’t.”

   
The Dominican
allowed his swivel chair to tilt further back, letting in more
painful daylight.

   “
Did you like
little girls?”

   “
I liked little
girls.”

   “
How did you
fancy devoting your life to a career that excluded them from your
life?”

   
Father Walther
shrugged. “I didn’t think much about it.”

   “
No?”

   “
Not until I was
much older. But even then the prospect didn’t seem all that
dreadful.”

   “
How old were
you then?”

   “
Fifteen,
sixteen.”

   
The Dominican
guffawed. “At sixteen years of age the thought of giving up girls
for the rest of your life didn’t bother you? Do you realize you
were just then approaching your years of greatest sexual
urgency?”

   “
My decision was
made long before that.”

   
The Dominican
leaned further back, his chair groaning like a horse that was used
to being misused but hadn’t yet given up complaining about
it.

   “
Did you ever
have a problem with masturbation?”

   “
No.”

   
The Dominican
shook his head in amazement.

   “
You’ve been
very kind to spend this much time with me,” Father Walther said,
“but I seem to be getting a bad headache.”

   “
Of course,
Father. I’m sorry. Would you like something for the pain? There’s
an infirmary on the second floor.”

   
Father Walther
thanked him but said he had aspirin in his suitcase. They set no
time for a second conference.

   
His head
continued to throb even after he had swallowed two aspirins, pulled
down the shade in the room assigned to him and laid a damp cloth on
his forehead. He tried to clear his mind of thought, but the
interview he had just had continued to play in his mind. At the
beginning of the session he had described his adventures in South
Jersey—at least those that seemed to bear on the purpose of his
making this retreat. He mentioned Rosalie, but only as part of the
bigger picture of spiritual malaise he was suffering from. The
Dominican encouraged him to speak at length. Sometimes he
interrupted to ask for a fuller account of the curate’s reactions
to one event or another. But when Father Walther reached the end of
his tale, the retreat master, like the Jesuit, chose to focus
exclusively on the woman.

   
Father Walther
thought he had made it clear that his spiritual lethargy had come
on long before he laid eyes on Rosalie Sykes. Why, then, the those
two priests preoccupation with her? Surely as a counselor, if not
as a priest himself, the Dominican realized that every person’s
sexual development was different. His own may have been unusual,
but it was surely not unique. The models held up to Richard Walther
as a child were not of people who had merely attempted to achieve a
state of perfect chastity, but of young men and women who had in
fact succeeded at that ideal. They were canonized saints, and he
was far from being a saint. Yet, for whatever the reason, he had
been spared much of the torment the chosen of God frequently
suffered in their struggle to remain pure in thought and action. He
didn’t know why he had been granted this dispensation. He supposed
a psychologist could make a few intelligent guesses. Those guesses
might even be true, psychologically speaking. But that truth did
not mean his chastity was not also a gift in the religious sense—a
special grace from God. If one were to take the psychologists’
explanations as the last word on such matters, the visions of
mystics like St. Teresa would be reduced to mere hallucinations,
psychotic disorders.

   
But he did not
want to fall into the sin of pride. He was here, after all, because
he had not been able to manage his priestly life as well as he
ought. But his head throbbed each time he recalled the Dominican’s
sly grin and the Jesuit’s patronizing casuistry. What had happened
to traditional morality, to old-fashioned counseling? Bill Lapchek
never queried him about his sex life, or mused on the love of
celibates for women. But then, Bill Lapchek never spoke much about
anything else either.

   
He felt as if he
were the only one of his kind. But he couldn’t tell if his sense of
isolation was the result of the Church deserting its age-old
beliefs or if he had just lost touch with the direction the
religion had been heading in all along. It would be presumptuous of
him—arrogant, even—to believe he had held to the true course while
Rome strayed. But it was not just the psychiatric approach of
clerics like the retreat master that jarred. His pastor’s
materialism was even more troubling. And that old man would be the
first to anathematize Freud. Psychology was now taught in Catholic
universities and seminaries (what few were left). But what about
sin and grace? Was Freud, or someone even more up-to-date, to
replace the Ten Commandments?

   
His head pulsed.
He hadn’t had a headache like this—deep, oscillating pain—since
childhood. Those headaches used to come on for no apparent reason.
His mother had applied holy water in an attempt to relieve them.
When did he stop having them? He could not recall ever having one
in seminary. Apart from a bout of appendicitis, he had never been
ill enough from any cause to miss a class or chapel
service.

   
He got up and
poured himself a glass of water. The room was the same size as the
retreat master’s but less comfortably furnished. There was
certainly no vinyl recliner. A single straight-back chair sufficed,
primarily for use at a small metal desk at the foot of the bed—an
ironstead affair as old as the building itself. The walls were a
dirty blue. A high window was secreted behind dark brown curtains
and a drawn yellow shade. Jail cells were more attractively
appointed.