“Yes, because that’s how it is.”
That night, talking during commercials, they were watching an old movie, new to them, in which Tyrone Power, employed by a carnival traveling through a part of the South that looked a lot like California, had drunk himself out of his good job as a barker and now, fit for nothing else and attracted by the pay, a bottle a day, had accepted the job of geek, which seemed to mean that he — yes — bit off the heads of live poultry. Ugh.
“That,” Joe said, rising from his BarcaLounger, “calls for a drink.”
Bill, when Joe came out of the bathroom with their drinks, said, “Man here to see you this evening. A Mr McMaster.”
“Who?”
Bill must have seen that Joe recognized the name, and did not repeat it. “Just a courtesy call, he said.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Said just to tell you he’d call again.”
“Uh-huh. Thanks.”
At the next break for a commercial, Bill said, “Everybody’s talking about it, all my classmates.”
“Alka-Seltzer?”
“This drive. Arf.”
“That so?”
“Joe, you think I don’t know what you’re doing these nights when you go out?”
Joe gazed straight ahead, at the tube, and said nothing.
“You’re trying to raise money.”
“So?” But not looking at Bill.
“You’re in a bind.”
“So?” Still not looking at him.
“Joe, I think you should’ve said something to me about this.”
“Why?” Studying the action in a commercial for breakfast cereal, actually interested in it, a sack race.
“Why not?”
“Sack race.”
“Yeah, I can see.”
“Not a hundred-yard dash. Not a mile run.”
“Joe, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s a sack race, Bill. The priesthood.”
“Yeah, sure. Joe, I think you should’ve said something to me, but I know why you didn’t. You’ve got this thing about money and the priesthood, and I can see how you got it, what with your first Mass and all. I can see how you got the way you are, Joe.”
Joe looked at him then. “How’d you get the way you are, Bill, or were?”
“All right, Joe.” Bill blushed, remembering, it seemed, his reluctance to get involved in parish finance, his “Thanks” when Joe offered to handle the strong-arm stuff.
“Look, Bill. These may be the best years of your life as a priest, and as long as I have anything to say about it, as long as you’re here, I want you to be just that, a priest — and not a bill collector. Time enough for that when you’re a pastor.”
“Sure, Joe, and thanks. But what if I want to help? I don’t like it now, the way it is now, with you doing all the dirty work. I mean it, Joe. I want to help.”
“We’ll see,” Joe said.
Joe had a pastor’s concern for his curate, a father’s wish for his son to have it better, and he also had qualms about revealing how many dp’s there were in the parish — a reflection on his system — but since there were so many, and the servant, as Scripture says, is not superior to his master, and Bill was so willing to help, Joe decided to let him.
So the alphabetical list, lines drawn through the names of those Joe had failed with, halos around those, possibly three, he’d persuaded to try again, was split between them. And at nightfall, except on Saturday and Sunday, usually after a few innings and a bath, in Bill’s case a shower, immaculate in black and white (Joe had read that the Wehrmacht in WWII wore its dress uniforms in battle), they’d (more like the RAF now) scramble their planes, Joe in his black bomber, Bill in his little caramel fighter, give each other a comradely salute, a slow wave from their respective cockpits, and take off on the night’s mission.
For Joe, by now, it was more of the same, but for Bill it was new, and if Joe returned to the rectory first, if Bill was still out there somewhere, as he was on the first night (watching TV with the family of the breadwinner who was expected to arrive at any moment but didn’t), Joe worried about him. He knew, from debriefing him, that Bill was catching a certain amount of flak — had been criticized for driving a foreign car, asked how much the rectory had set the parish back, advised that money matters should be discussed during business hours.
“Part of the trouble,” Bill told Joe, “is we’re calling on people during prime viewing time.”
“I know,” Joe said.
One night, after he’d been at it for a week, Bill said, “Parishioners in good standing could be used to do this job.”
“You want out, Bill? If you do, I’ll understand — no one better.”
“No, I just mean they are being used in some parishes.”
“For Arf, Bill, not for this. Don’t mention Arf to people, Bill, even indirectly. As far as this parish is concerned, Arf doesn’t exist. That’s not the problem here.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s a problem, yes, but it’s not the problem.” In admitting, in effect, that his system wasn’t working Joe had lost ground with Bill, as he’d known he would, but what Bill had proposed, and was perhaps still proposing, would be wrong. “It wouldn’t be fair to use parishioners in good standing for this, fair to them, or to the others, especially to them. It’d be like asking them to go to confession to a layman.” And Joe cited the case of the dp who wouldn’t talk to Bill because he was only the assistant, to which Bill nodded bleakly.
“On the other hand, Bill, this isn’t what we were ordained for, and whether we succeed or fail is immaterial.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It’s not as if we were out trying to preach the Gospel.”
“No.”
“We’re just a couple of bill collectors.”
“Yeah.”
“So don’t take it so hard.”
“O.K.”
But Bill continued to take it hard, showing the weakness of his strength (innocence). Having done so well for his hairy missionaries, he may have thought he had a way with people. The trouble was, in Joe’s view, that Bill’s understanding of the Cross, like that of most young people today, was nominal, narrow, unapocalyptic, and so failure to him didn’t, as it did to Joe, make much sense.
When they returned to the rectory, though, their evenings out, fruitless for Bill and nearly so for Joe, became something else — the best nights yet for priestly fellowship. Joe, if he returned first, as he usually did, would hand Bill a drink (“How’d it go?”—“Still batting zero”), and Bill, if he returned first, now followed that practice (“How’d it go?”—“Lousé”). Bill hadn’t had occasion to make the drinks before, with Joe there, and need not have followed his example, but did. A little thing, yes. In other respects too, Bill was coming around — he’d entirely given up cigarettes for baby cigars and, almost entirely, the guitar (no little thing, in Joe’s view).
But priestly fellowship, like love, is perhaps best measured in intangibles.
So often in the past, even at the best of times, Joe had sensed in Bill a prim disapproval of the kind of thinking and drinking that went on in the study at night, a stubborn, subterranean desire to be elsewhere. Not so now. So often in the past Joe had been afraid to get up and attend to their glasses, lest Bill get up too — and go to bed. Not so now. So often in the past conversation had become debate, one man arguing from received knowledge, the other from earned experience, each more interested in grinding his generation’s ax than in arriving at the melancholy truth. Not so now.
Their evenings out, apart, had tempered and brought them together.