The Good Priest's Son Read online

  Gwyn found her granny glasses—she’d worn them even before John Lennon made the style urgent—and she studied the picture slowly, from near and far. At last she said “I could almost guarantee it was once a painting. What is it now, though, and why’s it a treasure?”

  Mabry quickly told her the story of Baxter Sample’s finding the picture and buying it, sight unseen; then of his own loop through Paris to collect it from the raging harridan who meant to steal it and now of what seemed more likely by the hour—that Baxter lay somewhere under a billion pounds of New York rubble. Mabry’s first sob—oddly delayed for a man with such feelings—rose and died, unheard.

  Gwyn stroked the surface of the canvas with her left hand; and though she was almost forty years older than Leah in Halifax, like Leah’s her fingers seemed as knowing as the most alert blind woman’s. Still, she said “Let’s talk about New York in a minute; but first I want to know what this is.”

  At that, Mabry gave her the small envelope with the note from Philip Adger. When he told about Leah Wilkins finding it, she read it aloud, raising her eyebrows high at the name. “You know Mother had Adger cousins in Charleston. You’ll need to meet them, if they’re alive, and see what they know.”

  Mabry said “That’s an idea at least.”

  “Considering the fact that the thing is yours now, almost surely, your priestess—moi!—hereby informs you.” She held both hands an inch above the canvas, shut her eyes, faced the ceiling, and said “I’m telling you, child, that this dim picture is a real Van Gogh, not an Adger at all.”

  Mabry looked down at the peanut-butter reality. “Wouldn’t that be fine?”

  “Fine? You could sell it and restore every house in the county to pristine condition—and that would just cost you the interest on your profit for about four days.” Sensing that she needed to get more serious, Gwyn paused. Then she said “It could also be the worst curse of your life.”

  Mabry said “Tell me how.”

  “You’re bound to know, short as we’ve always been on cash—money is the source of all hatred, treachery, violence, fleas, ticks, mice, and all other horror in the history of man.”

  He said “Woman too—”

  “I’ll allow that,” Gwyn said.

  “Mighty handsome of you.” When Gwyn gave a bow of her own in his direction, Mabry knew he was sober enough to say the two things that were heaviest on him. “A couple of things I want you to know—”

  “I’m your best ear,” she said. “Remember when you used to call me that?”

  “More than a century ago.”

  Gwyn reached with both hands beneath her real gold hair and cupped her ears. “They still work, darling.”

  So Mabry said “I guess you know that Frances died, in dreadful pain, five months ago.” He waited till Gwyn shut her eyes in agreement. “But I don’t think even hyper-psychic you can know that modern medicine has apparently detected that I have multiple sclerosis.” His description was a little more certain than any doctor had agreed to yet. Here and now, though, it felt right.

  Gwyn shut her eyes again, then rose and slowly went to the sink. She drank a full tall glass of water and washed her eyes before she came back. When she sat down she said “We’ve both been a little drunk here, right?”

  Mabry nodded, though he’d never felt less than sober lately.

  So Gwyn said “Please tell me you made that up.”

  “Oh I wish I could. No, I had the first slight symptoms when Frances was dying—some numbness down my right leg, night sweats, cold flashes. You see, I’d treated Frances so badly wrong before we parted; but we never lost touch—weird as Charlotte can be, she forced us to have fairly frequent contact. Then when Frances learned that the doctors had run out of treatments for her kind of cancer, she called me with the news—it was two in the morning. Thank God I was alone and still up and cleaning a tiny Degas. Anyhow I’d been in New York more than ten years by then—even when Frances ditched me—and I knew right away that she’d soon need somebody with her, night and day. Charlotte couldn’t easily quit the job she’d only just got with her Episcopal adoption agency. I knew Frances had the money to hire a whole houseful of maids and nurses for as long as it took. But suddenly I heard my voice telling her I’d come down to D.C. the minute she wanted me—if she ever could again—and I’d stay till she didn’t need me a minute longer. I mean, my line of work can mostly be done anywhere there’s decent light and a small box of tools. She thanked me, to be sure; but when we hung up a few minutes later, I thought I’d likely never see her again.”

  When Mabry went for his own glass of water, Gwyn said to his back “You surely don’t feel she owed you one goddamned copper penny?” Gwyn had been—briefly, to be sure—one of the women with whom Mabry had cheated on Frances.

  Mabry stayed at the sink but turned on her, almost frighteningly. “You planning to specialize in meanness in your menopausal years?”

  It hurt, as it was meant to. Gwyn shrugged it off with a literal shake of her head and shoulders. She whispered “Touché.”

  So he came to the table, took a long look (over Gwyn’s shoulder) at the muddy little picture—a wide stretch of architecture maybe or so Adger claimed. He put one hand on Gwyn’s shoulder. “You guarantee it’s a Van Gogh?”

  Gwyn leaned down and smelled the surface. “I guarantee that pitiful Dutch soul had something important to do with it anyhow.”

  Mabry well understood the limitations on Gwyn’s expertise in matters of authentic art—all those surely fake Buddhas she’d sold. This gluey dimness, distinguished only by a handsome old frame, plainly had nothing to do with the tormented Vincent. Still, Mabry all but longed to credit Gwyn’s hunch; and the money that might be involved if it were a masterwork didn’t mildly faze him. He already had more money than he needed for at least four or five years to come, thanks to Frances; and surely this picture would always be Baxter’s, however dead he was. In another moment, Mabry brought up his other hand and caressed the crown of Gwyn’s head.

  She reached back and took the hand on her shoulder.

  So he said “Can we go upstairs and lie down awhile? I mean, I’m dead tired and probably shouldn’t drive home without a nap.”

  Gwyn laughed a little. “Is rest all you’ve got in mind, old chum?”

  “Girl, I’m still too young to know my mind.” He also laughed.

  “Then call your father first, or he’ll think you’re bleeding in some country ditch—people are dying in droves this week.”

  The kitchen clock said ten twenty-five. A call would be a good idea. But who would he wake up? He dialed Tasker’s number anyhow; and after the usual excess rings, a man’s voice answered—a black man’s baritone. “Preacher Kincaid’s house.”

  Mabry was stumped. Who the hell is this? He gave his name and asked to speak with his father. The man said “Mr. Kincaid, your father’s watching a movie and asked not to be disturbed. Can I give him a message?”

  Mabry still couldn’t think who this was—clearly not Nelson, the former caretaker. But a strain of anger was mixed with his voice when he said “I have no idea who you are, sir.”

  The man said “Oh, I’m Audrey Thornton’s son—the live one, don’t you know? I’m Marcus, sir.”

  Ah, sure. Audrey said he’d come at bedtime to help with Pa (so the younger son is dead after all). He said “Then Marcus, I’m glad you’re there. And I hope to meet you soon. For now, please tell Pa I’ll be late; but I’m perfectly fine. Just having a pleasant reunion with a friend.”

  Marcus said “I’ll tell him but you don’t need me to come get you, do you? You in any trouble?”

  Mabry grinned to himself. I could easily be—or headed there. Still he only said “No, son, thank you. Me and my car are in good shape.” He regretted the word son; how condescending might it sound in this world down here?

  Marcus ignored any possible mistake, for now at least. “I hope you’ll be staying on a good while. I need to meet you. You could really help me.�
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  Whoa a minute. Mabry couldn’t imagine what help would mean, with this young man—money or what? All he said, though, was “My plans are mighty unsure with all this awful stuff in New York, but I guess I’ll be here a few more days—sure. Maybe tomorrow night?”

  Marcus said “Right, Chief. I’ll see you soon after dark tomorrow, OK?”

  Where did the chief come from? Was it Marcus’s dry response to Mabry’s word son? Whatever, Mabry chuckled. “After dark tomorrow. Now be sure to tell my pa I’m safe and will see him at breakfast.”

  With no further word, Marcus was gone.

  The hole he left in the air was bigger than Mabry would have guessed. He held the phone ten seconds and then said “Marcus?” twice before he conceded the boy was gone. Or is he a man? Whatever his age, better call him a man .

  Then from the head of the stairs, Gwyn said—in her richest Tallulah Bankhead voice—“Darling, wasn’t this lie-down your exclusive idea? You ready or not?”

  Mabry said “Ready,” not knowing what for, and walked on toward her. When he’d climbed the first four steps, great blooms of light exploded through his eyes, in a cushioned silence but over and over at terrifying yet intriguing intervals. He could barely see through them, so he stopped in place and thought an enormous under-statement—This is something new. Should he call Gwyn down and ask her to drive him to the nearest hospital, which was twenty miles away? When he’d stood still there for half a minute, the lights slowly faded, in his right eye at least.

  And Gwyn called again. “You all right, friend?”

  So he reached for the stair rail to steady his legs; and hand over hand, he slowly pulled himself to the top. Very likely I’ll be dead in a year. Well, what the hell? Nothing to it apparently. No place to run, even if your legs work. It comes to get you whenever it’s ready, as Baxter Sample already knows.

  When he woke, it was dark still. But enough street light slatted through the blinds to let Mabry gradually establish his whereabouts. A big high bed with four tall posts, a big room around him with a ceiling so distant it might have been the sky, a warm presence beside him on his left. Surely it’s Gwyn. She was turned toward him, but her breathing sounded very much like sleep. He turned to face her. And she smelled like Gwyn, yes. The hair that fell across most of her face still seemed to be Gwyn’s—and it felt like hers when he brushed the ends lightly with his nose—but she’d shed the evening dress and was wearing only what seemed to be a slip or a short nightgown.

  He didn’t remember what had happened, though, between the time he dragged himself up the stairs and now. He looked down at himself—he was also in his underwear—and a quick frisk suggested that his cock had undergone no recent activity, whether pleasure or simple humiliation. So he had a quiet minute to consider what should, or might, come next. Since Gwyn was far gone, he could try to find his clothes and the picture downstairs and head for his father’s. He could roll to his right side—the side he mostly slept on—and rest till morning. Or being this near to an all but life-long friend and partner in occasional undemanding pleasures, he could bring her awake with his voice and hands and hope for at least the kind of welcome he’d been starved of for so long.

  Starved? When he’d sat by Frances through her last hard weeks and made his silent vow to hold his body back from any real sex for some appropriate stretch, he knew that any stretch beyond a month would be unlikely; but now one month had gone into five. The early days had been truly a strain. Within a month, though, relief like a trickle of clean springwater welled up in him and freshened both his mind and his body. At the gym he visited three times a week, four younger women and a middle-aged gay lawyer had made frank approaches or left their numbers on scraps of paper in the door of his locker.

  In considerable amazement, he’d nonetheless discarded the women’s numbers and thanked the lawyer cheerfully; and while—at his age—he was unavoidably pleased by the interest, he felt no serious pangs in his rapid retreat into steady work, regular meals with old friends, and a few trips out to Montauk for weekends with an older widowed playwright friend who’d bought an oceanfront house back when such property was in the reach of actual human beings. His vow hadn’t included masturbation, but he had little trouble in cutting way back on even that likable domestic reward. So now he moved close enough to Gwyn’s lips to touch them with his own—an intended goodbye, for tonight anyhow.

  He’d barely drawn back when her voice said “Darling, it’s all gone, ain’t it?”

  She didn’t sound fully awake, but apparently she knew who was with her. So Mabry propped himself on his left elbow and said “What’s gone, other than our youth, thank God?”

  She waited long enough to leave him almost free to head out, then she said “You don’t miss our beautiful youth? We were both damned lovely.”

  “—Lovely enough to make an endless stream of trashy mistakes that hurt other people.” He wanted to laugh at the end of that, but his mind wouldn’t let him. It agreed with his voice, agreed in spades.

  When her own mind had managed to process his claim, Gwyn once more whispered “Touché again, dammit.”

  Mabry figured he could make an acceptably graceful exit at that point, but she’d raised his curiosity anyhow. “Anything else gone?—I’ve lost a wisdom tooth, and I think it took my last trace of wisdom with it.”

  Gwyn punched her pillows, sat half-upright and thought a good while as she looked out through the still dark window. When her voice came eventually, it had very little of her old tiresome Cassandra delight in telling him terrible news. “The world ended two days ago.”

  It honestly took him the better part of half a minute to understand. “I very well may have lost my home and all the contents. I may have lost a good client, as I told you. My daughter’s safe, though maybe she’d rather not speak to her pa again, not anytime soon. But the world appears to be trotting along.”

  Gwyn had quit smoking eight months ago, longer ago than Mabry quit sex; yet her longing for a cigarette at this moment all but swamped her ability to forge ahead with this self-absorbed post-adolescent friend beside her in her mother’s best bed. When she spoke, she sounded the way she felt—more or less benignly exasperated. “The whole of Western civilization—plus many thousand lives—ended this week on native ground, and all it means to you is your own piddling business?”

  That seemed to deserve a considerable wait. Then Mabry said “You may have nailed it, yes ma’m.”

  “Then maybe you better just haul your sorry ass out of my house.” There was no indication she was not dead earnest.

  So Mabry said “Wait. Let me say what I mean.”

  “I think you’ve said it in very clear fashion—you’re a self-enraptured maniac.” But oddly she laughed.

  He knew she was right—her words, not the laugh. At least half right. He went on, though, to try to explain. “I mean, what else can we do but lie here, or stand up tomorrow, and do our business? You don’t plan to head for New York—do you?—and start slinging rubble off the heads of dead folks?”

  “I don’t, no,” she said, “but—” Again she faced her window.

  “And don’t you know Western civ. has withstood the Visigoths, the Nazis, Joseph Stalin, and all their soul-stunted grinning henchmen, plus the endless procession of child molesters?—”

  “Including our parents.” Even in the dark, she turned to Mabry at last.

  He said “My parents never laid a finger on me. I wish they had. I craved molestation.”

  Gwyn was fierce by now. “They sure as hell touched sixty zillion black kids from the day the first slave ship docked in Jamestown, a hundred and fifty miles northeast of here.” She actually pointed northeast. “And of course I don’t just mean your and my ma and pa but all our people, our lily-white forebears.”

  Mabry’s voice was sincerely calmer—he was not only tired but strangely at peace. “Gwyn, your old friend Western civ. could never have crawled up out of the chasms of Asia and Europe without a liberal suppl
y of slaves.” Before she could reach to claw his eyes out, he went on. “I’m not defending the practice for an instant, just pointing out that almost everything you and I’ve loved in art and literature and cooking and you-name-it would almost certainly not have happened without the hard-forced service of men and women and children. Homer and Sophocles and Vergil and Horace were riding, soft as down pillows, on slaves as wretched as Dachau inmates.”

  Gwyn said “Name a great woman that depended on slaves.”

  “Sappho,” he said.

  “Sappho had all those willing girls.”

  “Most of whom she owned.”

  Gwyn said “There’s no proof of that—I just read all her poems (you can read them in an hour). Anyhow, this much is past even your pissant intellect—this week has changed us all forever in ways we can’t yet begin to feel.”

  Mabry said “I may not doubt a syllable of that—can we be sure yet? Tell me what else to do, though.”

  She sat even farther upright and covered both her eyes long enough to think she knew the answer. “Take the money Frances left you and rebuild your homeplace. I’ll do the same here. Then we’ll both hunker down for eternity in the walls where we first glimpsed daylight—and hell, we could meet for drinks every month or so, if you’ll share the bar tab.”

  Mabry thought Does everybody in this whole county know what I just learned about my bank account? “What makes you think Frances would be fool enough to leave me a dime?”

  Gwyn said “I knew Frances Kenyon Kincaid well enough to know she did. Who did we ever know that had a better heart? And to think I snuck around, stealing pieces off of you, back in the first few years you knew her. Me and several dozen more.”

  In the dark Mabry nodded.

  Since Gwyn couldn’t see him, she said “How wrong am I?”

  “Not very,” he said, “if several dozen can mean fourteen.”

  “Agreed,” she said (men always knew their exact box score—every man she’d known, though few would give her a truthful total). She fumbled for his right hand and found it, cooler than the room around them.