The Good Priest's Son Read online

  Books by

  Reynolds Price

  THE GOOD PRIEST’S SON 2005

  A SERIOUS WAY OF WONDERING 2003

  NOBLE NORFLEET 2002

  FEASTING THE HEART 2000

  A PERFECT FRIEND 2000

  LETTER TO A MAN IN THE FIRE 1999

  LEARNING A TRADE 1998

  ROXANNA SLADE 1998

  THE COLLECTED POEMS 1997

  THREE GOSPELS 1996

  THE PROMISE OF REST 1995

  A WHOLE NEW LIFE 1994

  THE COLLECTED STORIES 1993

  FULL MOON 1993

  BLUE CALHOUN 1992

  THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE 1991

  NEW MUSIC 1990

  THE USE OF FIRE 1990

  THE TONGUES OF ANGELS 1990

  CLEAR PICTURES 1989

  GOOD HEARTS 1988

  A COMMON ROOM 1987

  THE LAWS OF ICE 1986

  KATE VAIDEN 1986

  PRIVATE CONTENTMENT 1984

  VITAL PROVISIONS 1982

  THE SOURCE OF LIGHT 1981

  A PALPABLE GOD 1978

  EARLY DARK 1977

  THE SURFACE OF EARTH 1975

  THINGS THEMSELVES 1972

  PERMANENT ERRORS 1970

  LOVE AND WORK 1968

  A GENEROUS MAN 1966

  THE NAMES AND FACES OF HEROES 1963

  A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE 1962

  SCRIBNER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Reynolds Price

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Price, Reynolds, 1933–

  The good priest’s son / Reynolds Price.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3566.R54G66 2005

  813’.54—dc22 2004065383

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-7641-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7442-5

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  FOR

  JONATHAN USLANER

  One

  9 . 11 . 2001

  9 . 13 . 2001

  The whole three weeks in Italy had felt like the rescue Mabry hoped for—not a single moment of cloudy vision and almost none of the maddening jangle of threatened nerves in his hands and legs. Even the two quick days in France, despite the routine Parisian rudeness, had failed to crank his symptoms. So he’d stuffed his ears with the airline’s free plugs and sunk into a nap in what he suspected was half-foolish hope. Maybe my body isn’t ruined after all. Maybe Rome has cured me. And the nap was so deep that the pilot’s first few news reports didn’t reach him at all. What finally woke him was the huge plane itself—a steep tilt northward, a wide swing, then a man’s calm voice as the wings leveled off.

  It said “Ladies and gentlemen,” not the usual jaunty Folks. Then it took a long pause. “The latest news is even more impressive. At the World Trade Center, the second tower has also collapsed. As many as six thousand people may be lost. The plane that crashed into the Pentagon has taken maybe three hundred lives, and a fourth plane has crashed in a Pennsylvania field with all hands aboard. All U.S. airports are now closed to traffic, and we have our orders to divert. We’re headed for Halifax, Nova Scotia. No further plans are available at present. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Mabry had removed his earplugs by then; but he’d still never heard such silence in an airplane as what swept through in the wake of that voice. Before he could look around—the plane was half empty—the pilot said four more words that were worse than all the rest. “I hope I can.” When had any of them heard such desolation?

  Behind, a single voice sobbed distinctly. It seemed to be a man.

  But since no other passenger was near in the first-class seats, Mabry rang for help; and a rattled steward told him the little they knew. Both of the World Trade Towers had been hit by full-sized jets, and both had now fallen. The collisions had come just after work started. Some reports said a plane had struck the Pentagon; a fourth plane had crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Mabry sipped at the double gin the steward brought, unasked. Then he shut his eyes to think, if thinking was possible. He knew just enough American history to calculate that, if six thousand human beings were dead, then this was the most disastrous day since the bloodiest day of the Civil War—the battle at Antietam when, almost surely, nearly four thousand died. And this day had barely started. Whoever had done this and what else was planned?

  Yet when he opened his eyes again, he looked to the jittery steward alone in the all-gray galley and saw him as clear as a stark photograph—or grim as a Goya torture victim. Mabry gave him a brief consolatory wave, a windshield-wiper side-to-side gesture (he was in first class, courtesy of years of frequent-flier credits).

  His wave brought the steward back; he leaned to Mabry’s ear and whispered. “My partner works fifty yards away, across the plaza. He’s an architect. Say a hard prayer for him. Me as well—he’s all I’ve got on the planet Earth.”

  Somehow Mabry felt he knew the truthful thing to say. “Your friend’s OK. I’m all but sure.” When he looked, the steward’s name tag said Larry Leakins; so Mabry took the further risk of saying “He’s truly safe, Larry. I live down there, just three blocks south.”

  For the moment at least, Larry seemed to believe him. He squeezed Mabry’s shoulder and went back to work.

  Then Mabry scratched his palms deeply to check for numbness. He was hurting himself; the feeling was normal. And his legs were still calm. So in his mind he stroked the curious peace he still felt, like a cooling wound in the pit of his heart. He was tired, God knew, but not drunk or drugged. All his life he’d been a buoyant soul. Why on Earth now? From the time the Towers had first been bombed in 1993, he’d known the Muslims would try again—and likely succeed. Now he was right, way righter than he could ever have guessed. And aside from the blow his city and country had suffered today—and the future was botched for years to come—he’d surely taken hits of his own.

  His loft was in actual sight of the Towers. It was bound to be damaged if not destroyed. How many friends were dead? Likely the client who sent him to Paris. His daughter lived and worked uptown but was she safe? He’d never surrendered to the cell-phone plague, and he’d had no luck with airplane phones, so there was nothing he could do before landing—if there was still land in Nova Scotia. He looked out and tried to imagine nothing but water water. It was easy enough to think that the heaving steel-blue plain stretching beneath them was all there was or ever would be, from here on at least. Well, he’d shut his eyes and try for more sleep.

  Sleep took him straight in, no nightmares or frights. And even as early darkness settled round him, hours later, in Halifax—and while he was waiting to learn where he’d roost till U.S. airports opened again—he was still a calm man. By then he’d guessed that the small painting he’d brought from Paris, cushioned in socks and T-shirts in his suitcase, was the cause of his peace; but he couldn’t know why. That understanding, and the help it would bring him, was weeks away.

  With all the diverted flights, every hotel was filled before his plane touched the runway; so Mabry was seated in the living room of the Wilkins family, who’d offered him a tidy room, before he learned from their television that no private citizens
were being allowed anywhere near his part of lower Manhattan. And after a welcome Irish-stew dinner, with healthy lashings of good rye whiskey, his eerily quiet hosts left Mabry alone in the kitchen to try once more to reach his daughter. After six tries he managed to speak with her brusque roommate on the Upper West Side. Yes, Charlotte was safe but at her yoga class.

  When Mabry hung up he laughed for the first time since leaving Rome and Paris. Why should a world-class catastrophe disturb Charlotte Kincaid in the higher reaches of mind-bending yoga she’d now attained? He helped himself to another drink from the quart Tim Wilkins had left beside him and tried again to call the numbers of a couple of friends who lived in his building on Rector Street—endless unanswered rings. Then he tried his father; and at last the phone in North Carolina gave its ancient cranky ring. It had been as busy all day as the White House.

  Eventually an unexpected woman’s voice answered. “Father Kincaid’s residence. Who’s calling please?” It had only been recently that Southern Episcopal clergymen were addressed as Father by their more fervent parishioners, and no one representing his father had ever asked to know who was calling. So when Mabry repeated his full name twice and was still apparently unrecognized, he raised his voice to a civil near-shout. “Just say I’m his son—his last living child. I suspect he still knows me.”

  The woman thought through that as slowly as if she were testing the claim between her teeth for gold. Then her voice went lower, a sudden and disarmingly beautiful pitch. “Oh good, Mr. Kincaid, he’s truly been worried. Next time, call him sooner.” The words were slow and oddly accented—an almost surely American black voice but distinctly altered by life abroad or by earnest intent.

  For a moment a patch in Mabry’s chest warmed to her sound. Even in Italy no woman’s voice had sounded that welcoming, but the whiskey made him snag on her orders to call sooner next time. Before he could ask what plans the woman might have for further chaos, she set the receiver down. Mabry could hear the trail of her footsteps wandering off and at last the sound of his father’s new wheelchair.

  There were the usual thirty seconds of fumbling and wheezing; then “Darling Jackass, where is your butt?”

  The big surprise of the long entirely incredible day came instantly. Tears filled Mabry’s eyes. For another half minute, he couldn’t speak. Then he said “Oh Pa, I’m almost up in the Arctic—Halifax, Nova Scotia.”

  The Reverend Tasker Kincaid paused to test the truth of that. Was this truly his son? Was his only near-kin somehow safe in Canada? At last he said “This new TV you so rashly sent me?—it’s saying all the flights that weren’t hijacked are skewed around badly. You’re intact though, boy?” The rust was clearing from the old man’s voice. By now he was sounding priestly again. Not the holy-Joe fraudulent timbre so rife in the Christian clergy but an almost trustworthy confident beat. He also sounded more nearly in control of his faculties than he’d been for months.

  Mabry had thought that the day’s disasters would have shaken his father. He’d stumbled only three weeks ago and broken an ankle; and at best lately, his memory had seemed more fragile by the week. But this voice now was encouraging. So Mabry said “Pa, I’m in full possession of all my limbs and most of my wits, such as they are. A kind family up here has taken me in for as long as I’m grounded—two days at most, they say.”

  Tasker said “Who is they? You’re assuming the airports will open, ever. I’m assuming worse trouble is barreling toward us than anything we’ve seen today. These Muslim lads know what they’re doing and we plainly don’t. They’ve got H-bombs.”

  Mabry laughed again, now pleasantly weary. “Why is it that a heathen like me takes the rosy view while my favorite clergyman foresees the worst?”

  “—Because your pa is a priest, dear Hotdog. God is famous for smiting us, hip and thigh, just when we think He’s our best friend.”

  Mabry said “He’s holding four aces today, that’s for sure. He or Allah.”

  “Don’t knock Allah. Allah’s got our phones tapped—and don’t forget, Allah’s just the Arabic name for our God.”

  There was some consolation in learning that, whatever else the day had destroyed, his father still held on to monotheism; so Mabry took another deep draft from his tumbler of rye. He was not a big drinker under normal conditions, but surely he was past his limit today, so he tried to steer the talk to saner zones. “The airline says we may fly out tomorrow. Lord knows, there are ten million things I’ve got to check on.” He’d been on his first real vacation in years.

  Tasker said “Your zillion things can wait forever. Where are the things these people treasured who perished today? What good did things do them?” The old man heard himself mounting the pulpit and he chuckled apologetically. Then he said what he thought was his most important truth. “You don’t have a home, son. Not in New York. You never did.”

  For an instant Mabry feared his father might know some awful fact; and the dim Canadian kitchen around him, with his hostess’s cookie-jar collection, threatened to be a permanent prison.

  In Mabry’s pause, Tasker gouged his point deeper, though he kept his tone down. “You’ve never made a home since you left your mother. And you know that.”

  Again, for a moment, it seemed a mere fact. He’d never let his marriage be a home. Then his anger at his father’s endless large-and-small condemnations rose in his throat. “Listen, Pa, you don’t know that. You’ve spent as little time with me in the past forty years as you could possibly spare.” That much, anyhow, was true.

  And Tasker had the sudden grace to grant it. “It’s been years, if ever, since I claimed to be a father. But I also know you’ve failed your own child, as lately as today.”

  “Pardon me, Preacher, but how do you know that?”

  “I’ve talked to your daughter—my one grandchild—two or three times today. Talked to her, not ten minutes ago. She’s not heard from you.”

  “You must have her cell-phone number then. I refuse to use it. And she won’t respond to calls anyhow from the midst of a perfect yoga position with both heels locked behind her neck.”

  Once more Tasker laughed and, this time, his chuckle had become more nearly the giggle from the rare times he’d roll on the floor with Mabry and Gabriel (the golden brother who’d died at age eighteen). When Tasker had caught his breath, he took a new tack. “The weather down here is so damned gorgeous you’d barely believe it.”

  And Mabry saw a splendid Carolina late summer day—he still loved the gripping damp and the blazing light like year-old brass. But he couldn’t risk yielding to what reeked suspiciously of one more urge to fly down and visit the Aged Laid-Up Solitary Parent. He launched his own tack. “Reverend Kincaid, sir, who was the damsel that answered your phone? She didn’t seem to know you had kinfolk. Have you found some chunky new girlfriend from Poland or an anorexic model from Mazatlán?”

  “Audrey—you know her.” Tasker clearly believed the claim.

  “No, Pa, I don’t.”

  “Don’t lie to me. Audrey—you grew up with her. Well, very nearly.” Tasker’s mind was balking on the woman’s last name. “She’s close kin to us, old Cooter’s grandchild.”

  Mabry said “You mean Thornton? Wasn’t Cooter a Thornton?” Cooter had been Mabry’s grandmother’s cook, an antique—but nonetheless rail-straight—figure from near slavery days. She wore a perpetual black cloche hat that made her head look like a cooter shell, the dark safe house of a ground turtle, a terrapin. And she’d only retired, with hard-earned dementia, at ninety-odd years old, when Mabry was maybe five or six. But even with his adult knowledge of the local miscegenation rate, any chance that they were kin to Cooter or her numerous clan was more than unlikely, however intriguing.

  Tasker said “Thank you—yes. She’s Audrey Dell Thornton.”

  Mabry said “If she’s who I think, she’s bound to be Cooter’s great-great- or great-granddaughter, Pa. She’s something like twenty years younger than me.”

  But Tasker only s
aid “Not quite.” Then he said the full name again, rolling it out like a phrase from the grandest litany in the prayer book—the old prayer book before they made it sound like something Xeroxed on cheap copy paper. And the nicely imposing sound braced the old voice even more strongly. It sounded almost as firm as it had, oh thirty years back—the days when Mabry would call from college and try to ease out a few extra dollars for one more trip to a Vietnam protest in D.C. or Boston or down to Key West for “a spring break of painting.” (Tasker might say “Painting what exactly?—frescoes of luscious oases around girls’ quivering navels?” And Mabry might say “You sound like you’ve seen more navels than me.” Then Tasker would snort but shake loose a small piece of cash from the little he had.)

  If Mabry had ever seen Audrey Thornton, he couldn’t remember a face or voice. And what was this about being kin to her? At last report, his father was tended by Nelson Summers, an elderly black man of sumptuous dignity, reliable as any granite hillside. The family had known him since before Mabry’s birth. “Where’s Nelson tonight?”

  Tasker paused till Mabry thought he was gone. “Nelson decided I was too hard on him. Audrey bailed me out. She’s sleeping here now. You know all this.”

  There was no point in another denial, but Mabry had to ask “Can she handle your weight?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  With a genuine mildness, Mabry said “Can she lift you onto the john; and what about that deep bathtub?”

  “I haven’t gained a pound in sixty years.”

  “I understand that, sir. But Nelson was Goliath. He could heave you over his shoulder and burp you.”

  Tasker said “I’m glad to hear your Sunday-school facts at least have stayed with you. But Audrey can handle most of my needs. And her son can manage the rest.”

  “Does the son also live with you now?”

  “He comes in at bedtime, just long enough to help me.”

  There were whole new layers of important information here, but plainly tonight was not the right time to sort them out. Still, Mabry pushed on. “So she’s treating you right?”