Home (22 page)

“All right. Jack went to church this morning.”

“And then what?”

“Who knows. I’ll improvise. This is uncharted territory.”

“So it is.” He looked at her. “You don’t think this will seem too cynical, do you? Hypocritical? Unctuous? Calculating?”

She shrugged. “People go to church.”

“Other people do. I mean, I’ll hardly be inconspicuous. And old Ames doesn’t think the world of me.” After a moment he said, “Well, nothing to be done about that, hmm? That’s why I thought of going in the first place. I can’t think of another approach. I have tried. I will sit under his preaching, as they say, and maybe his feelings toward me will soften a little. I’ll be very attentive.” He smiled. He said, “It’s worth a try. Then he and the wife will come to dinner, I’ll play a few of the old favorites. It could work.”

“All this is fine, Jack. But I can’t quite convince myself that it’s necessary.”

He nodded. “I’ve been a torment to his dearest friend for forty-three years, give or take. He’s sick of me. He doesn’t want to be, but he is. I would be, too. But I want to talk to him.”

She said, “It’s a good idea. Very good, I think.”

“All right, then. If you say so. I’ll probably do it.”

Jack put on his tie and his hat and went off to the store to buy groceries for Sunday dinner with two ten-dollar bills from the household money Glory kept in the drawer in the sideboard. She could have called the grocer’s and ordered them, as she usually did, but Jack said he needed to get out of the house for a while. So she went down to the Ameses’. Lila was in the garden picking lettuce into a basin and Robby was fooling around on his swing, lying across the plank on his stomach, pushing and pivoting and sweeping the grass with his fingertips. Lila stood up when she saw Glory at the fence and smiled at her and called the little boy to come say hello, so he came and said hello and then ran off to look for his friend Tobias, who had been called in for lunch.

Glory said good morning, and Lila answered, “It is. It’s a fine morning.” She brushed her hair back with her hands. “Could you use some salad? It’s coming in faster than I can eat it myself, and my men aren’t much for greens, neither one of them.” She handed the basin to Glory. “I was just picking it because it’s so pretty. I’d be glad if you could use it.”

Lila was wide at the shoulders and hips, and her hands were large, tentative, competent. Sometime, somewhere, it had seemed good to her to pluck her brows thin and arched, and so they remained, a suggestion of former worldliness at odds with her stalwartly maternal frame. Sunlight seemed a bother to her, like a friendly attention she might sometime weary of, though for now she only smiled and shrugged away from it, holding up her hand to shield her eyes. Glory said, “Papa asked me to invite you to dinner tomorrow.”

She nodded. “Jack stopped by a few minutes ago. I told him I’d speak to the Reverend about it. Preaching wearies him more than he likes to admit.”

“It could be an evening dinner. That would give him time to rest.”

T
HAT AFTERNOON, WHEN SHE WAS OUT IN THE GARDEN
weeding the strawberries, picking the handful of ripe ones, she heard the DeSoto’s starter straining twice, then again, and then the roar of an automobile engine, the sound robust for a moment, then trailing away. Again the starter and the engine, and after a minute or two the rattle and pop of gravel as the DeSoto eased backward out of the barn. It gleamed darkly and demurely, like a ripe plum. Its chrome was polished, hubcaps and grille, and the side walls of the tires were snowy white. There was a preposterous beauty in all that shine that made her laugh. Jack put his arm out the window, waving his hat like a visiting dignitary, backed into the street, and floated away, gentling the gleaming dirigible through the shadows of arching elm trees, light dropping on it through their leaves like confetti as it made its ceremonious passage. After a few minutes she heard a horn, and there were Jack and the DeSoto going by the house. A few minutes more and they came back from the other direction, swung into the driveway, and idled there. Jack leaned across the front seat to open the passenger door. She walked across the lawn to the car and slid in.

“Wonderful!”

He nodded. “We’re doing all right so far. I smell strawberries.”

She held out her hands. “I haven’t washed them.”

He took one, eyed it, and gave it back. “How about a little spin around the block?”

“Papa will want to come.”

“Yes, well, I’m working up to that. I’d like to put a couple of miles on this thing, so I’ll know it can be trusted. We wouldn’t want to make the old fellow walk home.”

So she closed the door and they pulled into the street.

He said, “You must have a license. You used to drive.”

“I do. Somewhere. Do you?”

He looked at her. “Why do you ask?”

“Never mind. Just making conversation.” They completed a
decorous circuit of the block, and when they pulled into the driveway, they saw their father standing in the screen door.

“Something very exciting!” he called. “I thought I might come along, if it’s no trouble.” He seemed even about to attempt the front steps.

“Wait!” Jack ran across the lawn and took him by his arms and helped him down to the sidewalk.

“Thank you, dear. This is very good.” He leaned on his cane and gazed appraisingly at the DeSoto. “Yes. It’s a fine-looking car. I knew I must be saving it for some reason.” He chuckled. There was a barely restrained glee about him, as though he felt he had done something, or had done nothing, to excellent effect. “I had offers for it, you know. Several of them. Yes.” He regarded the gleaming DeSoto with something warmer than pride of ownership. “And now, look what you have done with it! Jack, this is wonderful!”

Jack was watching all this with his hands on his hips and a look of grave, distant pleasure, as if it were a moment proposed to him by imagination, an indulgence he could not finally allow himself. “It seems to run all right,” he said. “I suppose we could take a little drive.” He helped his father into the front seat. “I’ll go in and get a couple of dollars for gas, just in case.” He walked toward the house, then came back. He held out his cupped hands to Glory and she emptied the berries into them. “Two minutes,” he said. When he came back he had the berries in a cereal bowl, rinsed and glistening with water. He handed the bowl to Glory and climbed into the driver’s seat. He turned the key, turned it again, and the engine caught, and the three of them backed out and sailed off down the street. When a neighbor waved, the old man made the merest gesture of his hand in reply, as if this were all foreseen and intended, too perfect a vindication to be in any way remarkable. Jack laughed.

Glory said, “Have a strawberry.”

Jack took one and handed it to his father, then took one for himself. He popped it in his mouth and spat the stem out the window.

“Yes,” his father said, as they passed through the countrified outer reaches of Gilead into country itself, “this is the high life.”

The sky was blue, the terraced hills glittered with new corn, and in the pastures the cows were standing with their calves or lying in the mingled, muddied shade of oak trees. “Well, I’d almost forgotten it all,” the old man said. “It’s good to get out of the house from time to time. Ames will enjoy it.” He talked for a while about the old Gilead. It was the smell that reminded him. There used to be chicken coops and rabbit hutches behind every house almost, and people kept milk cows, and there was enough open land right in town to be plowed with a horse or a mule and planted in corn. You knew the animals around town just like you knew the children, and if some old she-goat was grazing in the flower garden, well, you knew her and she knew you and you could just walk her home. But the geese could be mean, and noisy. They’d follow you along and nip at you, pinch your heels. There was no sleeping through the racket all those roosters made in the morning. But at night you could hear the animals settling, and that was very comforting. Jack drove with such solemn caution that the dogs that ran out to the car were a long time in giving up the chase and falling back.

They turned onto another road, and then Glory and her father were silent for a while, watching the landscape grow uneasily familiar. Then Jack said, “Oh.” He said “I—” and pulled off onto the shoulder to turn the car around, so close to a shallow ditch that the rear wheels slid in the sand. A hundred yards ahead of them was the bridge across the West Nishnabotna, and a little way beyond it that small white house. Jack gunned the car and it lurched into the road and stalled. “Sorry. I can deal with this,” he said. “Give me a minute.” He put his hands to his face and took a breath. Then he put the car in gear and turned the key and touched the choke and it started, and he maneuvered it very carefully, reversing twice before he eased onto the right side of the road. “I guess it’s time to go home,” he said.

Through all this his father maintained a serene, high-minded
expression, as he always did when he sensed emergency. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I have been keeping an eye on events in Egypt. In that one case I have felt that the policies of Eisenhower are appropriate to the situation. But time will tell.”

Jack said, “True.”

“Kenya is another matter.”

“That’s true, too.”

After another mile or so he pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. “Glory, would you mind driving the rest of the way? It isn’t far. I forgot to get gas. I’m not sure the gas gauge is working, and it distracts me to worry about it. And that worries me.” He laughed. “I haven’t driven a car in twenty years.”

So she changed places with him. He held the door for her, ceremoniously, smiling at her, wry and weary. “Thank you so much,” he said.

She looked to see where the pedals were, and the clutch, and then she put the car in gear and it lurched and died, and she tried again and it started. Jack said, “There’s still something wrong with the—with the blasted thing. It doesn’t sound right. This was stupid of me. I knew I should have stayed in town.” He lit a cigarette and rolled down the window.

Glory said, “We’ll be fine,” having no particular grounds for confidence except that as they approached town the houses were less scattered. Rural people might or might not have telephones, but they were certain to have gasoline, and, if it came to that, to have practical experience with balky machines. That is what Jack dreads most, she thought. Having to knock at a door. Out here someone might know about him, without mitigating acquaintance with his estimable father. Well, she would spare him that, one way or another. And the car was running well enough. Her father appeared to be dozing, though still maintaining that statesmanlike expression that meant he could be counted on not to add difficulty to a situation, even by seeming aware of it.

When the DeSoto had brought them home, Jack stood up out
of the backseat and stretched, and then opened his father’s door. The old man roused himself. “I will telephone Ames,” he said. “After I’ve had some rest.” He handed Jack his cane. “If you don’t mind, dear. I’m a little bit stiff.” Jack lifted him out by his arm, and then he seemed at a loss how to help him, because his father had made a sharp little cry, and then laughed. “Ouch!” he said. Jack looked at Glory, tired.

She said, “Let me help.” She took her father’s other arm, and they walked him into the house, slowly, carefully. Her helping did nothing to lessen her father’s pain, but it did spare Jack from being the sole immediate cause of it. She took off the old man’s tie and shoes and bundled him into his chair. She went to the kitchen to get him aspirin and a glass of water, and she heard the car start and went out to the porch. She saw the beautiful old plum-colored DeSoto disappear into the barn, and then she heard the barn doors close. When Jack came in, he held the keys out to her.

“It’s your car,” she said.

“I’m making you a gift of it.” He shook the keys so they jingled. “Here. I don’t want the damn thing.”

“Tell me that in a week and I might believe you.”

He dropped the keys on the piano and smiled at her. “Whatever you say, Pigtails.”

She said, “Jack, you can’t leave.”

“Well, I can’t very well stay, can I.” He rubbed his eyes and laughed. “No point in it. I can see myself giving my lady love a tour of the scenes of my youth. Not that she has so many illusions about me. But the few she does have might just be crucial.”

“Maybe they are. Who knows. But we have to think about Papa. We don’t want to kill him.”

“No, we don’t. And if we were to leave, we would be forever alienated from our little sister, on whom we have become surprisingly dependent.”

“Yes, we would. You would. And I mean it, Jack. If I’ve ever meant anything in my life.”

“Such ferocity,” he said, and laughed and rubbed his eyes. “Thank you. A good brisk threat can orient a fellow. But what is this? Now you’re crying!”

She said, “Never mind.”

“You forgive me.”

“Of course.”

He said, “There are all the others, Glory. The old fellow would love to have them around, and they’d be a lot more help to you than I am.” He said, “This might be too hard, you know. I’m not exactly a pillar of strength. And if I went wrong, it would be better if I did it somewhere else. Better for Papa. I do think about that.”