Uncle Bobby went to the barbershop in the basement of the First National Bank Building (eight chairs) and had his sideburns shaved down to points like check marks; Daddy went to the little neighborhood shop (two chairs) and had his shaved off. Uncle Bobby had a modern kitchen in his apartment, but ate out; Daddy drove home for lunch. Uncle Bobby was younger than Daddy (and Mama), but there was more to it than that. Uncle Bobby was a live wire and could come up with bright ideas; Daddy wasn’t and couldn’t. It was Uncle Bobby’s idea to have HACKETT’S COAL IS HOT STUFF on the trucks and on the left-field fence at the ball park, and also HIT THIS SIGN AND WIN A TON (HOME TEAM ONLY) — the last part was Daddy’s idea.
Uncle Bobby, who said of Daddy and himself, “He’s coal, I’m ice,” and of Joe, “He’s a little of both,” had built up the ice end of Hackett’s by stopping home deliveries, by concentrating on hotels, institutions, and reefers (refrigerated boxcars), by moving into soft drinks (after consulting Joe) and now into near beer.
If Joe decided to be a businessman and someday stepped into Daddy’s shoes, Uncle Bobby, only an employee now, would become a full partner in Hackett’s.
Uncle Bobby and Joe were, as Daddy wasn’t with either one of them, pals. When they were out in Uncle Bobby’s Chrysler coupe, a tan one with a thin red stripe, wire wheels, and a rumble seat, they honked at chicks (what Uncle Bobby, from Kansas City, called them) in high-heel pumps and said, “Hotsy totsy!” and “Hot ziggity!” to each other. But Joe was backward with people unless he knew them, and Uncle Bobby wasn’t. At the barbershop in the First National Bank Building (where Joe now went), when Uncle Bobby said, “Whatcha say, Red!” to the old colored man who shined shoes, Joe said nothing, just smiled, as he did when Uncle Bobby said, “Hello, Beautiful!” to the manicurist who had a spit curl like Betty Boop and wore a uniform like a nurse, only pink, with high-heel pumps and no stockings. While she was doing him, Uncle Bobby would talk about how tired he was from his heavy dates and ask about his chances with her, winking at Joe and the barbers. (Joe wished he could wink like Uncle Bobby, so quick, like the tongue of a snake, but couldn’t, he’d found, practicing it at home in front of a mirror, each time having to wait for it.) At the bakery shop in the Arcade, Uncle Bobby ate cookies right out of the showcase, passed some to Joe, and made the chicks who worked there (who at first said, “No! No!”) laugh and squeal when he said he’d eat them if they weren’t very careful. Hugging and kissing them, he’d say, “C’mon, Speed”—sometimes he called Joe that, or Ace—”get y’self some of this!” Joe wanted to, but didn’t, just smiled. In the end, Joe paid for everything with Uncle Bobby’s money, keeping the change, and sometimes the chicks, panting, fluffing out their hair, and adjusting their uniforms, would say, “What a pair!”
Uncle Bobby — a non-Catholic, he didn’t have to go to church — got a lot of fun out of life. And if Joe did decide to be a businessman and not a priest, he could marry somebody he knew, maybe Frances, even if she was two years older, who could become a convert (as Mama had when she married Daddy) but probably wouldn’t because she was so snippy and contrary (when Joe had tried “Hello, Beautiful!” on her, both times she’d said, “Shut up!”). Or he could be single like Uncle Bobby and have heavy dates. Either way, married or single, if he decided to be a businessman he could go on living in the house — and have heat piped into the little tower, which could be his den.
If he did decide to be a businessman, he would also perform good works, like Joseph of Arimathea, the rich merchant who’d paid for Our Lord’s tomb.
If he decided to be a priest, he couldn’t go on living in the house. That was one of the bad things about being a priest, having to move around and maybe live in a run-down neighborhood such as Hackett’s plant was in because it had to be close to the railroad tracks. If he decided to be a priest in a religious order, though, he could live out in the country, at a college, and have invigorating walks and talks with students along the railroad tracks (different out there in the country), and maybe have some exciting adventures, and also do good, as often happened in the Father Finn books (“‘My God!’ cried the atheist”) that Sister Agatha read to the class at the end of the day if the class had been good. But Sister, though she belonged to a religious order herself, had advised Joe not to join one. Maybe if he decided to be a secular priest, as Sister was praying he and other guys in the class would, he wouldn’t mind living in a run-down neighborhood if, like Our Lord, he loved the poor, as he would if he decided to be a priest. But that was another bad thing about being a priest — always having to try to be like Our Lord.
In the class play at Easter, when Joe was carrying the two-by-four cross, the hostile crowd was more hostile than it had been in practice — some guys were jealous of Joe for being Our Lord and even, in the case of Catfish Toohey, whose father was one of Daddy’s drivers, for being Joe. By wagging the long end of the cross behind him, Joe managed to keep back the hostile crowd and, when falling for the third time, had managed to bring one of the arms of the cross down like a hammer on the foot of Catfish, who’d let out a yell and hopped around on the other foot, causing a few in the audience to laugh and Iggy Buker’s father to call out, “Do it again!” After that performance, Sister Agatha had asked Joe to explain his conduct. “Catfish hit me a lot harder than he was supposed to, Sister, so I just hit him back.” Sister had been disgusted with Joe. “‘So I just hit him back.’ Anybody can do that! And with the cross! Joe, what must Our Lord think of you? Ask yourself that.”
That might be the worst thing about being a priest, having to ask yourself that. Everybody had to, of course, but it wasn’t the same for other people, even for nuns. Priests were in a class by themselves. To them alone, not even to Our Blessed Mother, had Our Lord given the power to turn bread and wine into his body and blood, and to forgive sins. Such gifts couldn’t be fully understood by us here below, in our fallen state, Sister had told the class. “But just remember this, class, the next time there’s an electrical storm — thunder and lightning are as nothing, no more than the buzz of a fly, compared with the power of the priesthood.”
That made up for all the bad things.
One afternoon that summer there was an electrical storm when Joe and Frances were smoking his cigarettes in her garage, once a stable, the smell of the pony and the horses before it still there, and he told her about the power of the priesthood.
“Religion,” she said, crossing her legs so he could see her garters but not very well in the dark. “It’s like Santa Claus, only it’s for old people afraid of dying.”
“Frances, you don’t have to believe in it if you don’t. But if you do and you won’t—that’s the sin against the Holy Ghost, Sister said.”
“Screw Sister,” Frances said.
Try to get a lot of fun out of life, then, and also perform good works? But not have the high place in heaven (if there was one; Frances said there wasn’t) he’d have as a priest?
These were questions Joe couldn’t answer that summer, and one evening when asked by the party people what he was going to be when he grew up, to be on the safe side, he said: