The Fancy Dancer

He’d given her the first stone on her twenty-fifth birthday.
    “And I’ll give you the third one on your seventy-fifth birthday,” he said, grinning slyly, “if the economy hasn’t gone down the drain by then.”
    “And if we’re both still around,” said Mother. She blew him a kiss.
    Her fingers were now busy with the super-professional bow that the druggist’s helper in Cottonwood had built on my little package. Inside, between two layers of cotton, her girlish fingers found a Roman coin for her collection. She had just about every old silver and gold dollar minted in the United States, but her weakness was Greek and Roman coins. I had found this right at the little stamp-and-coin shop in Cottonwood a couple of weeks ago, and would be paying for it for the next six months.
    The lovely old bronze thing lay in her palm—as old as the religion I served, as the traditions that bound us all.
    “How sweet of you, Tom,” she said. “It’s one I don’t have.”
    “Are you sure?” I said. “The guy at the store said I could exchange it if you’ve already got one.”
    “I’m sure,” said my mother. “It’s a very nice An-tinous....”
    “Who was Antinoiis?” asked my father.
    “He was a close friend of the Emperor Hadrian,” said my mother primly without looking at me.
    I had to hold back a smile. I had read enough Roman history in the seminary to know that the young Antinous was more than just a friend of Hadrian. My father either saw through the explanation and didn’t let on that he did, or he was satisfied with it, for he just said, “Oh.”
    I was remembering the little velvet tray of coins on the counter in the Cottonwood coin shop. My finger had sorted through the heavy coins—faces of empresses and goddesses, faces of stem and jowly emperors—and it came to rest on this coin with its profile of a good-looking young man with curly hair. I had no idea who he was until the store owner told me he was some second-century a.d. weirdo. But I liked it anyway, and I bought it.
    My mother had her hand pressed to her chest as if to stop her heart from fluttering.
    “It’s been' quite a birthday,” she said. “I feel like I’m really ten years old.”
    She sat there glowing with her air of girlish wisdom. You had the feeling that my mother had never really grown up, but that she knew an awful lot for her age.
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    After dinner, we sat in the parlor awhile.
    My father and I had a little Drambuie in his favorite old rock-crystal brandy glasses. The big color TV, which stood by the vitrine full of old bric-a-brac, stayed turned off. My mother sat with her coin books, finding the right place to slip Antinous in. My father and I talked about the economy—St. Mary’s troubles finding money and the bank’s troubles with ranchers going broke. On the mantel, the china clock ticked between the two French bisque figurines, shepherd and shepherdess, that had stood there as long as I could remember.
    I sat there sipping Drambuie and looking at my parents. They were both a breath of the virile past, two living fossils shut away from the dust, like the rare seashells in the vitrine. They were so much a match for each other that they might have been poured from the same batch of white clay at the same factory, like those two figurines. They wanted me to marry and have children for old reasons, not modem ones.
    Later, I left them for a little while to keep my monthly appointment with Father Matt.
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    I drove across town and parked the Triumph near the cathedral. Walking into the shadow of those great spires, and under the sculptured portal, I went in.
    Except for a nun in a short modem habit who was arranging flowers on a side altar, the cathedral was
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    empty. I kneeled down in front of the altar where the Blessed Sacrament was kept, and tried to collect my thoughts. I’d learned the hard way that I had to be very still inside for these talks with Father Matt.
    But I couldn’t. I kept having this heady feeling that I’d just won some sort of heavenly sweepstakes. Rushes of memory kept going over me. Playing against Missoula in the state football championship, and losing. Kissing Jean for the first time, very gently, and later breaking the engagement, also very gently. Hitchhiking to Butte to hear E. Power Biggs play the pipe organ in concert, and feeling very daring because hitchhiking is illegal in Montana.
    Moments of recollection were so rare now. Priests were supposed to have a