Free The Jew's Wife & Other Stories by Thomas J. Hubschman

staircase, they were both laughing about
their attempts to draw Frank Willet into their religious and
astronomical debates.
       “What’s Frank doing now?” Charlie
asked.
       “Accounting, the last I heard. He
lives near the Water Gap. But that information is eight or nine
years old.” It was hard to believe a decade had passed without his
seeing someone with whom he had shared the entire first half of his
life. “We should have a reunion. You and me, Frank, Tommy Giordano,
John McCoy. We could make a night of it.” They entered the kitchen,
where Sylvia was boiling water in a spaghetti pot. He winked at the
new Mrs. Weeks. It was strictly a clerical wink, an ocular nudge in
the ribs, meant to offer reassurance. He felt sorry for her. She
had to have been going through hell earlier.
        Then
Charlie said, “Richie, I’d like you to meet Rosalie
Sykes.”
        A young
woman in a two-piece bathing suit—she looked at first like a
teenager, but he quickly advanced that estimate by several
years—was sitting near the glass doors leading out to the terrace.
She was slim, with brown hair the same shade as Sylvia’s, but
better cared-for. Her skin showed the deep tan of a sun-worshipper.
The glare from the glass doors, closed for the sake of the
air-conditioning, prevented him from seeing her face clearly, but
it seemed pretty in a way Sylvia’s was not.
       “ Hi,” he
replied to her indifferent greeting. “Do you live in the
neighborhood?” He wasn’t sure if “neighborhood” was the correct way
to describe the scattering of custom-built homes between the
highway and beach, but experience had taught him that when he met
someone for the first time it wasn’t so much what he said as that
he did in fact say something. People looked to a priest to get the
conversational ball rolling. But the young woman merely stared back
at him as if he had made a bizarre, even indecent
suggestion.
       “ Rosalie’s my cousin,” Sylvia told him. “She’s staying with us
for a few days. She was up on the deck when you got
here.”
        He felt
a twinge of the same resentment he had felt when Charlie told him
of his divorce and remarriage. He didn’t mind sharing the place
with another houseguest (however anti-social this one seemed), but
why couldn’t Charlie have said something about someone else staying
over? There wasn’t even a proper place for her to sleep unless
there was a third bedroom tucked away somewhere. He wondered how
many other surprises Charlie had in store.
       
        A table
was set up next to the terrace doors to catch the evening breeze.
Charlie sat at one end, leaving the priest and Rosalie to face each
other. Sylvia was seeing to the corn. The sky was already dark at
the horizon. There hadn’t been much of a horizon to see at Fords
Pointe. The town of Seaside obscured it to the east, and a scrub
forest blocked the western view.
        Rosalie
had changed to shorts and a halter top. She had also pinned her
hair up more securely. A pair of gold loops dangled from her ears.
Her complexion had the glow of a woman who spent a lot of time out
of doors in all seasons of the year.
       “ My,
my,” she remarked as Sylvia lit two long white candles.
       “ We like
to put on airs every now and then,” the hostess said, blowing out
the wooden kitchen match. “I only hope the wind doesn’t put them
out. You don’t mind, do you?” she added incongruously.
        Father
Walther realized it was to him she had addressed the
question.
       “As long as they’re not
blessed.”
       “The wine,” Charlie snapped. “It’s
not still in the freezer?”
        The
refrigerator door hissed open. Bottles clinked together.
       “How often can you get away,
Father?” Rosalie asked.
       “’Richie’,” he insisted. “In
fact,” he said, turning halfway toward the kitchen where Sylvia was
scalding herself with corn water, “I wish everyone would try to
forget