The Jew's Wife & Other Stories by Thomas J. Hubschman Read Free Book Online Page A

fishing
expedition. Even those who could not afford a boat tried their luck
in the lagoon for eels and small blue-back crabs.
        The cab
passed the Willets’—at least, what used to be the Willets’; Frank
Willet, Sr., died several years ago and his widow might have sold
the property. There was no sign of life, but this was mid-week when
only vacationers and retirees could afford to be at their summer
homes. The cab continued to the end of the block, made a U-turn,
and headed back past the same row of houses. It passed the Willets’
a second time, but he did not ask the driver to slow
down.
        He had
thought he would enjoy visiting the site of his adolescent summers.
But, even allowing for the wear and tear of time, this was not the
happy place he held in his memory. It was not the landscape that
had changed—the years had worked more of a change on him than it
had on the Pointe. The effect, though, was the same as if he had
found the bungalows leveled and the lagoons filled in. He should
have headed for his usual haunt in the Catskills. His lack of a car
would not have put him at a disadvantage. People befriended a
priest, especially one on vacation, the way they took to a friendly
dog.
        A
married man, divorced by the time Father Walther made his
acquaintance, once recounted to him how he still returned to the
block where he and his family used to live. What he found each time
he went back was a grotesque, more desolate than if he had found
the place abandoned or burned to the ground. Destruction, in fact,
would have seemed appropriate. But the house looked the same and
the sycamore his son used to play under hadn’t changed a leaf. By
then the place was occupied by strangers, yet something still drew
the man there—an otherwise positive, optimistic fellow. “It called
to me, Father,” he said, his cheerful manner scarcely altered by
the telling of his chilling tale. To see him in action on a Sunday
morning, tirelessly wielding a collection basket, winking at a
child on a parishioner’s lap or nodding at a familiar face, you
would have thought he never had a care in the world.
        Father
Walther did not believe he felt the same as that man did when he
stood contemplating his lost home. But he did have a nagging sense
of abandonment. Brooding on the past was never a good idea. He did
not, after all, regret anything. Why, then, this empty feeling? he
wondered as he lay staring at the cracked ceiling of the first
motel he had come upon after the cab left Ford’s Pointe. The room
smelled all too familiar—a blend of institutional linen and the
damp odor of buildings near salt water. Every rectory he had ever
been in smelled the same way. His parents’ house never smelled like
this. Nor did anyone else’s, as best he could remember. Some
smelled of garlic, cabbage or dead cigarettes, but those odors,
however unpleasant, were the kind real people created. A rectory’s
smell was anonymous. Next year he would vacation further from home,
not here in New Jersey where nothing was any longer what it seemed,
but someplace he had never been before—Maine, or the
Carolinas.
       
        In the
morning he inquired at the check-in desk where the nearest Catholic
church was located. The Willets used to attend one in Forked River,
but he knew there had to be one closer by. He was right. He called
the car service, but after a dozen rings there was still no answer.
He checked his watch (he no longer needed an alarm clock to wake
up): 6:30. Was it possible they weren’t open? He rang the desk
again, but the sleepy clerk told him there was only one car
service.
        He took
a portable mass set out of his valise and set it up on the dresser:
chalice, wafer, a small bottle of white wine, a stone containing a
relic that turned any flat surface into a temporary altar. Dressed
in a clean pair of khakis and T-shirt, he hung his purple stole
around his neck and began the ceremony, making the altar