The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) (16 page)

“A little tragedy took place in our department this afternoon,” Renner said, after Emil had gone. “Victoria Marzak versus the super”—for whom Renner indicated the Entrepreneur; I was confused until I remembered their heads were alike. “It was three acts, beginning with Victoria giving the super hell because working conditions are so bad in the stock rooms (which they are). She delivered a nice little declaration of independence. I thought the day had finally arrived. The workers of the world were about to throw off their chains and forget their social security numbers. The super said nothing in this act.

“In the next, however, he went into action. He surpassed Victoria in both wrath and righteousness. His thesis, as much of it as I could understand, was that Victoria and the girls could not expect better conditions—for the duration. Victoria said it was the first she’d heard of our being a war plant. The super mentioned our ashtrays and picture frames, and said she ought to feel ashamed of herself, always complaining, when there were boys dying in foxholes—yes, boys who needed our products. Ashtrays in foxholes! I thought he was laying it on too thick at this point, even for him, and I did a foolish thing. We won’t go into that now, as it might obscure the larger meaning of the tragedy.

“Act Three was classic, revealing the history of human progress, or the effects of original sin (reason darkened), depending on your taste in terminology. The super introduced Victoria to the supernatural element, which in our department goes by the name of Pressure From Above. He invoked Pressure as the first cause of all conditions, including working. In short, the less said about conditions, the better. Victoria wilted. But Pressure, besides being a just and jealous god, is merciful. The super forgave her trespasses, said he was working on a raise for her, and she went back to her job (under the same conditions), beating her sizable breast and crying
mea culpa
for having inveighed against them—conditions, that is—as things sacred to Pressure. Curtain.”

Renner rubbed his eyes and gazed past me. Mr Ross had risen from the chicken livers and mushrooms. Emil stacked the dishes for removal.

“I want to pay you for everything,” Mr Ross said, meaning, I presumed, the bread, butter, and beets. The cardplayers looked at each other wisely at this, as though the law had thus been fulfilled.

“In case you are wondering,” Renner continued, “Victoria represents suffering humanity suffering as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”

“Amen,” I said.

Renner’s voice cracked and he began again. “How did the Austrian Socialists, the best organized working-class group in history and pacifists to boot, reconcile themselves to the war in 1914?”

“No doubt they organized committees,” I said, “or took the ever-lovin’ long view.”

“Worse. Dressed in the Emperor’s uniforms and crammed in boxcars ordinarily reserved for cattle, they rode off shouting—imagine—‘Down with the Czar and Imperialism!’”

“A distinction to make a theologian blush,” I said. “But tell me, what was this foolish thing you did in the second act?”

“I stood up to the super and told him a few things, mostly concerning the rights and dignity of man.”

I considered the implications of this for a moment. “Then, as we say, you are no longer with the company?”

“Yes.”

“You were fired?”

“Yes. Insubordination.”

Emil was telling Mr Ross how much everything was. Mr Ross pulled out a couple of bills and pressed them blindly into Emil’s hand.

“And the rest is for the house,” Mr Ross said. The cardplayers sniffed at each other and shared their disgust. Emil thanked Mr Ross from the bottom of his heart, shook his hand, put it down, and took it up for a final shaking.

At the door Mr Ross turned smartly and waved a large farewell which seemed to include Renner and me and the poets playing pinochle. Then he vanished into the street.

“Good-bye, Mr Ross,” Emil said plaintively, as if to his memory. Emil went to the card table, sat down, and fooled with his sleeves. The Entrepreneur, dealing, jerked his head at the door, snarled something in German, and went on dealing. The fat one nodded and belched lightly. The Irishman closed his eyes in a long blink. Emil grinned at his cards.

“That was Mr Ross,” he said.

“So that was Mr Ross,” the Entrepreneur said, attempting Yiddish dialect.

Abruptly Renner stood up, jolting our table sharply, his face all swollen and red, and started across the floor. Before I could get up and interfere, he came to a wavering halt. Looking at him were four surprised faces and there seemed to be nothing about them familiar or hateful to Renner. Evidently he was bewildered to find no super: he had seen his head a moment before. He gave me an ashamed look which was not without resentment. Then he walked back to our table, stuck his pipe, which was lying there, in his pocket, threw down some money, and went out the door.

THEY HAD COME to the dessert in a dinner that was a shambles. “Well, John,” Father Nulty said, turning away from Mrs Stoner and to Father Firman, long gone silent at his own table. “You’ve got the bishop coming for confirmations next week.”

“Yes,” Mrs Stoner cut in, “and for dinner. And if he don’t eat anymore than he did last year—”

Father Firman, in a rare moment, faced it. “Mrs Stoner, the bishop is not well. You know that.”

“And after I fixed that fine dinner and all.” Mrs Stoner pouted in Father Nulty’s direction.

“I wouldn’t feel bad about it, Mrs Stoner,” Father Nulty said. “He never eats much anywhere.”

“It’s funny. And that new Mrs Allers said he ate just fine when he was there,” Mrs Stoner argued, and then spit out, “but she’s a damned liar!”

Father Nulty, unsettled but trying not to show it, said, “Who’s Mrs Allers?”

“She’s at Holy Cross,” Mrs Stoner said.

“She’s the housekeeper,” Father Firman added, thinking Mrs Stoner made it sound as though Mrs Allers were the pastor there.

“I swear I don’t know what to do about the dinner this year,” Mrs Stoner said.

Father Firman moaned. “Just do as you’ve always done, Mrs Stoner.”

“Huh! And have it all to throw out! Is that any way to do?”

“Is there any dessert?” Father Firman asked coldly.

Mrs Stoner leaped up from the table and bolted into the kitchen, mumbling. She came back with a birthday cake. She plunged it in the center of the table. She found a big wooden match in her apron pocket and thrust it at Father Firman.

“I don’t like this bishop,” she said. “I never did. And the way he went and cut poor Ellen Kennedy out of Father Doolin’s will!”

She went back into the kitchen.

“Didn’t they talk a lot of filth about Doolin and the housekeeper?” Father Nulty asked.

“I should think they did,” Father Firman said. “All because he took her to the movies on Sunday night. After he died and the bishop cut her out of the will, though I hear he gives her a pension privately, they talked about the bishop.”

“I don’t like this bishop at all,” Mrs Stoner said, appearing with a cake knife. “Bishop Doran—there was the man!”

“We know,” Father Firman said. “All man and all priest.”

“He did know real estate,” Father Nulty said.

Father Firman struck the match.

“Not on the chair!” Mrs Stoner cried, too late.

Father Firman set the candle burning—it was suspiciously large and yellow, like a blessed one, but he could not be sure. They watched the fluttering flame.

“I’m forgetting the lights!” Mrs Stoner said, and got up to turn them off. She went into the kitchen again.

The priests had a moment of silence in the candlelight.

“Happy birthday, John,” Father Nulty said softly. “Is it fifty-nine you are?”

“As if you didn’t know, Frank,” Father Firman said, “and you the same but one.”

Father Nulty smiled, the old gold of his incisors shining in the flickering light, his collar whiter in the dark, and raised his glass of water, which would have been wine or better in the bygone days, and toasted Father Firman.

“Many of ’em, John.”

“Blow it out,” Mrs Stoner said, returning to the room. She waited by the light switch for Father Firman to blow out the candle.

Mrs Stoner, who ate no desserts, began to clear the dishes into the kitchen, and the priests, finishing their cake and coffee in a hurry, went to sit in the study.

Father Nulty offered a cigar.

“John?”

“My ulcers, Frank.”

“Ah, well, you’re better off.” Father Nulty lit the cigar and crossed his long black legs. “Fish Frawley has got him a Filipino, John. Did you hear?”

Father Firman leaned forward, interested. “He got rid of the woman he had?”

“He did. It seems she snooped.”

“Snooped, eh?”

“She did. And gossiped. Fish introduced two town boys to her, said, ‘Would you think these boys were my nephews?’ That’s all, and the next week the paper had it that his two nephews were visiting him from Erie. After that, he let her believe he was going East to see his parents, though both are dead. The paper carried the story. Fish returned and made a sermon out of it. Then he got the Filipino.”

Father Firman squirmed with pleasure in his chair. “That’s like Fish, Frank. He can do that.” He stared at the tips of his fingers bleakly. “You could never get a Filipino to come to a place like this.”

“Probably not,” Father Nulty said. “Fish is pretty close to Minneapolis. Ah, say, do you remember the trick he played on us all in Marmion Hall?”

“That I’ll not forget!” Father Firman’s eyes remembered. “Getting up New Year’s morning and finding the toilet seats all painted!”

“
Happy Circumcision!
Hah!” Father Nulty had a coughing fit.

When he had got himself together again, a mosquito came and sat on his wrist. He watched it a moment before bringing his heavy hand down. He raised his hand slowly, viewed the dead mosquito, and sent it spinning with a plunk of his middle finger.

“Only the female bites,” he said.

“I didn’t know that,” Father Firman said.

“Ah, yes . . .”

Mrs Stoner entered the study and sat down with some sewing—Father Firman’s black socks.

She smiled pleasantly at Father Nulty. “And what do you think of the atom bomb, Father?”

“Not much,” Father Nulty said.

Mrs Stoner had stopped smiling. Father Firman yawned.

Mrs Stoner served up another: “Did you read about this communist convert, Father?”

“He’s been in the Church before,” Father Nulty said, “and so it’s not a conversion, Mrs Stoner.”

“No? Well, I already got him down on my list of Monsignor’s converts.”

“It’s better than a conversion, Mrs Stoner, for there is more rejoicing in heaven over the return of . . . uh, he that was lost, Mrs Stoner, is found.”

“And that congresswoman, Father?”

“Yes. A convert—she.”

“And Henry Ford’s grandson, Father. I got him down.”

“Yes, to be sure.”

Father Firman yawned, this time audibly, and held his jaw.

“But he’s one only by marriage, Father,” Mrs Stoner said. “I always say you got to watch those kind.”

“Indeed you do, but a convert nonetheless, Mrs Stoner. Remember, Cardinal Newman himself was one.”

Mrs Stoner was unimpressed. “I see where Henry Ford’s making steering wheels out of soybeans, Father.”

“I didn’t see that.”

“I read it in the
Reader’s Digest
or some place.”

“Yes, well . . .” Father Nulty rose and held his hand out to Father Firman. “John,” he said. “It’s been good.”

“I heard Hirohito’s next,” Mrs Stoner said, returning to converts.

“Let’s wait and see, Mrs Stoner,” Father Nulty said.

The priests walked to the door.

“You know where I live, John.”

“Yes. Come again, Frank. Good night.”

Father Firman watched Father Nulty go down the walk to his car at the curb. He hooked the screen door and turned off the porch light. He hesitated at the foot of the stairs, suddenly moved to go to bed. But he went back into the study.

“Phew!” Mrs Stoner said. “I thought he’d never go. Here it is after eight o’clock.”

Father Firman sat down in his rocking chair. “I don’t see him often,” he said.

“I give up!” Mrs Stoner exclaimed, flinging the holey socks upon the horsehair sofa. “I’d swear you had a nail in your shoe.”

“I told you I looked.”

“Well, you ought to look again. And cut your toenails, why don’t you? Haven’t I got enough to do?”

Father Firman scratched in his coat pocket for a pill, found one, swallowed it. He let his head sink back against the chair and closed his eyes. He could hear her moving about the room, making the preparations; and how he knew them—the fumbling in the drawer for a pencil with a point, the rip of the page from his daily calendar, and finally the leg of the card table sliding up against his leg.

He opened his eyes. She yanked the floor lamp alongside the table, setting the bead fringe tinkling on the shade, and pulled up her chair on the other side. She sat down and smiled at him for the first time that day. Now she was happy.

She swept up the cards and began to shuffle with the abandoned virtuosity of an old river-boat gambler, standing them on end, fanning them out, whirling them through her fingers, dancing them halfway up her arms, cracking the whip over them. At last they lay before him tamed into a neat deck.

“Cut?”

“Go ahead,” he said. She liked to go first.

She gave him her faint, avenging smile and drew a card, cast it aside for another which he thought must be an ace from the way she clutched it face down.

She was getting all the cards, as usual, and would have been invincible if she had possessed his restraint and if her cunning had been of a higher order. He knew a few things about leading and lying back that she would never learn. Her strategy was attack, forever attack, with one baffling departure: she might sacrifice certain tricks as expendable if only she could have the last ones, the heartbreaking ones, if she could slap them down one after another, shatteringly.