J.F. Powers

 I’ve been meaning to read J.F. Powers for years. He’s always described as a Catholic writer. When people told me about Powers, the implication was that I’d have to read him if I ever hoped to understand the thoughts and feelings that pop into the head of any person exposed to that form of nurture.

I finally found “The Valiant Woman,” which is about Father Firman and his housekeeper, Mrs. Stoner. Mrs. Stoner is a character. Father Firman sometimes wonders who, among all the priests he knows, has the most insufferable housekeeper. His brooding includes this memory:

 

She was a pie-faced girl then, not really a girl perhaps, but not too old to marry again. But she never had. In fact, he could not remember that she had even tried for a husband since coming to the rectory, but of course he could be wrong, not knowing how they went about it.

 

• J.F. Powers’s story “The Valiant Woman” appeared in Prince of Darkness and Other Stories; New York:  Doubleday and Company, 1947. I find it in A Reader for Writers, edited by Jerome W. Archer and Joseph Schwartz; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966, pp. 521-8.