The Good Priest's Son: A Novel - Hardcover

Price, Reynolds

3.45

226 ratings by Goodreads

9780743254007: The Good Priest's Son: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743254007 ISBN 13: 9780743254007

Publisher: Scribner, 2005

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Visiting his aging Episcopal priest father when his own home is decimated by the September 11 attacks, art conservator Mabry Kincaid meets his father's caregiver, an ambitious African-American woman, and struggles with mixed feelings about his adult daughter. By the author of Noble Norfleet. 40,000 first printing.

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About the Author:

Reynolds Price (1933-2011) was born in Macon, North Carolina. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he taught at Duke beginning in 1958 and was the James B. Duke Professor of English at the time of his death. His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

Chapter 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 no...

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