Keeper of Dreams (92 page)

And that was why he felt so empty, there in his new house, even though his whole family loved the place, even though he had worked so hard to build it. Because the fact that he lived there meant that he was exactly as good as those people who had despised his father, and he knew that it was his father who was good, not them.

Not me.

Lucille even tried to stop me, he thought. She knew. That was why she kept saying, We don’t need such a big house. We don’t need all those rooms. I don’t have to have a separate sewing room—I
like
sewing in the family room with everybody around me.

Helaman had been deaf to all she said; he had taken it for granted that she was only saying these things because she always worried about money and because she was too unselfish to ever ask for anything for herself; he knew that secretly she really wanted all these fine things, these big rooms, these well-earned luxuries.

Only once had she put her foot down. The architect had specced out gold fixtures everywhere, and Lucille had rejected it immediately. “I’d feel like I had to wash my hands before I could touch the faucet to turn it on,” she said. Helaman was all set to go ahead anyway, on the assumption that she really wanted them after all, until she looked him in the eye and said, “I will never use a bathroom with gold fixtures, Helaman, so if you put them in, you’d better build me an outhouse in the back yard.”

Even then, what had finally convinced him was when she said that chrome fixtures went better with all the towels because they didn’t have a color of their own to clash with.

I wasn’t listening, thought Helaman. She was telling me exactly what the Spirit told me that night in my childhood, showing me in the scriptures
what my goals should be and what I should think about money. And I knew she was right, yet I still went ahead and built this house and now I can’t bear to live in it because every room, every bit of wainscoting, every polished oak molding, every oversized room is a slap in the face of my father. I was so angry at those snobs that I had to get even with them by becoming just like them. I don’t belong here, I don’t want to live among people who would build and live in houses like these, and yet here I am.

Tom Boke stood in my house and wept because I had so much, and I kept it all for myself. I am the opposite of my father. I had the money to do good in the world, and I used it to build a monument to Helaman Willkie, to win the respect of people whose respect isn’t worth having.

He was trembling with the cold. He had to go inside, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to take another step toward that house.

It’s a beautiful house, said a voice inside him. You earned it.

No, he answered silently. I earned the right to live in a house big enough for my family, to meet our needs, to keep us warm and dry. There is no work in the world that a person can do that can earn him the right to live in a house like
this
, when so many others are in want. I sinned in building it, and I will sin every time I put a key in the lock on that door as if it were my right to take this much of the bounty of God’s Earth and keep it for just my family to use.

The door to the house opened and light spilled out onto the porch, onto the bare trampled ground that didn’t yet have a lawn. It was Lucille, coming outside to find him. Lucille, wearing a coat and carrying another, looking for her husband to keep him warm. Lucille, who had understood the truth about this house all along, and then loved him enough to let him build it anyway. Would she love him enough to let him abandon it now?

He could not walk back to the house, but he could always walk to his wife, and so he called out to her and strode on trembling, uncertain legs toward where she waited for him.

“Here’s a coat,” she said. “If you don’t have the brains to stay indoors, at least wear the coat. I don’t want to have to bury you in the back yard, not till the landscapers come in the spring, anyway.”

He took her teasing with good cheer, as he always did, but all he could really think about was the impossibility of telling her what he needed to tell her. It was so hard to think of the words. So hard to know how to begin.

“So can I stay out here and talk to you?” said Lucille.

He nodded.

“The house is too big, isn’t it,” she said. “That missionary has told you about poverty and you took the news as if you’d never heard of it before and now you feel guilty about living here.”

As so often before, she had guessed enough about what was in his heart that he could say the rest himself. “It wasn’t the boy, what he said. I was already unhappy here, I just didn’t know it.”

“So what do we do, Helaman? Sell it?”

“Everybody will think we built a house bigger than we could afford and
had
to sell it.”

“Do you care?”

“There’ll be rumors that Willkie Housewares is in financial trouble.”

“It’s not a corporation. The stock won’t drop in value because of a rumor.”

“The kids will never forgive me.”

“
That
is possible.”

“And I don’t know if I could ever look myself in the eye, if I gave you a kitchen like that and then took it away because of some crazy idea that living here means I’m ashamed of my father.”

“Your father loves this house, Helaman, he’s been over here a dozen times during the building of it, and if he hadn’t promised your sister Alma that he’d spend Christmas with
her
family in Dallas he’d be here with us tonight.”

“What about you?”

“Moving is a pain and I won’t like doing it twice,” she said. “But you already know that I never wanted a house this big.”

“But I wanted you to have it. I wanted you never to be like my mother, living in a ward where all the other women looked down on her, raising a family with no money in a tiny house.”

“
Our
old house wasn’t tiny, it was just small.”

“You love the new kitchen. I don’t want you to give up the new kitchen.”

“You sweet, foolish man, I love the kitchen because you took so much care to make it perfect for me.”

“I’ll give it all up,” said Helaman. “Because I can’t live with myself if
I stay in a place like this. But how can I take it away from you and the kids? Even if you didn’t really want it, even if you never asked for it, I gave it to you anyway and I can’t take it back.”

“So, will you rent an apartment near the main store and come visit us on weekends? Helaman, I couldn’t bear it if this house came between us. Why do you think I didn’t try to stop you from building it? Because I knew you wanted it so much, you were so hungry for it—not for yourself, but to give it to us. You needed so much to give this to us. Well, you
have
given it to us, and the kids and I love it. You meant to build it for the best motives, and as soon you realized that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, you were filled with remorse. The Lord doesn’t expect you to sell it and live in a tent.”

“Sell all you have and give it to the poor and come follow me,” Helaman quoted.

“That was what he said to a rich
young
man. You’re middle-aged.”

“And you’re just saying whatever you think will get me back into the house where it’s warm.”

“Well, what
are
you going to do, then? Never come back inside again?”

To Helaman’s surprise, he found tears running down his cheeks, his face twisting into a grimace of weeping. “I can’t,” he said. “If I go back inside then it means I’m just like
them
.”

“So don’t
be
just like them,” said Lucille, putting her arms around him. “You never
have
been just like them, anyway. You’ve never run your business the way they do—you’ve been fair and even generous with everybody, even your competitors, and everybody knows it. There’s nobody in the world who resents your having this house—your employees love you because they know you’ve paid them more than you had to and made less profit than you could have and you work harder than any of them and you forgive them for mistakes, and every one of them is glad for you to finally move out of that house that we’ve stayed in since 1975. Most of them don’t understand why it took us so long to move. You can live in this house with a clear conscience. You’re
not
like the rest of these people.” She looked up and down the street. “For all we know, half of
them
might not be like the rest of these people.”

“It’s not about them or what anybody else thinks,” said Helaman. “I just can’t be happy there. It’s like what that missionary said. Tom, right?
He said, ‘I just can’t live in America anymore.’ Well, I just can’t live in that house.”

Lucille stood there in silence, still holding him, but not speaking. Helaman was still full of things to say, but it was always hard for him to talk about things inside himself, and he was worn out with talking, and even though he had stopped weeping now, he was afraid of feelings so strong that they could make him cry. So the silence lasted until Lucille spoke again.

“You can’t sell the house,” said Lucille. “It won’t be a poor person who buys it, anyway.”

“You mean I should give it away?”

“I mean we should give it away in our hearts.”

He laughed. He remembered the testimony meeting where Sister Mooller, who had more money than General Motors, had gotten up and said that thirty years ago she and her husband had decided to consecrate all they had to the Lord, and so they gave it away “in their hearts,” which was why the Lord had blessed them with so much more in the years since then. Whereupon Lucille had leaned over to him and whispered, “I guess the Lord really needed that new Winnebago they bought last month.”

“Don’t laugh,” said Lucille. “I know you’re thinking about Sister Mooller, but we could
really
do it. Live in the house as if it weren’t our own.”

“What, never unpack?”

“Listen to me, I’m being serious. I’m really trying to find a way for you to have all the things that you want—to give this house to us, and yet not be the kind of man who lives in a big fancy house, and still keep the family living under one roof.”

“That
is
the problem, isn’t it.” He felt so foolish to have gotten himself into such a twisted, impossible set of circumstances. No matter what he chose, he’d feel guilty and ashamed and unhappy. It was as if he had deliberately set out to feel unrighteous and unhappy no matter how things turned out.

“Let’s consecrate this house to the Lord,” said Lucille. “We were going to dedicate it tomorrow, anyway, as part of Christmas. Well let’s do it tonight, instead, and when we dedicate it let’s make a covenant with the Lord, that we will always treat this house as if others have as much right to use it as we do.”

Helaman tried to think of how that would work. “You mean have people over?”

“I mean keep watching, constantly, for anybody who needs a roof over their heads. Newcomers who need a place to stay while they’re getting settled. People in trouble who have nowhere else to turn.”

“Bums from the street?”

She looked him in the eye. “If that’s what it takes for you to feel right about this house, and you’ll be here at night to make sure that the family is safe, then yes, bums from the street.”

The idea was so strange and audacious that he would have laughed, except that as she spoke there was so much fire in her eyes that he felt himself fill with light as well, a light so hot and sweet that tears came to his eyes again, only this time not tears of despair and remorse but rather tears of love—for Lucille, yes, but more than for her. There were words ringing in his ears, words that no one had said tonight, but still he heard them like the memory of a dear old friend’s voice, whispering to him, Whatever you do to help these little ones, these humble, helpless, lonely, frightened children, you’re doing it for me.

And yet even as he knew that this was what the Savior wanted him to do, a new objection popped into his mind. “There are zoning laws,” he said. “This is a single-family dwelling.”

“The zoning laws don’t stop us from having visitors, do they?” said Lucille.

“No,” said Helaman.

“And if somebody stays very long we can always tell Sister Barnacuse that they’re faux relatives.”

Helaman laughed. “Right. We can tell her that we’ve got a lot of brothers and sisters who come and visit.”

“And it’ll be the truth,” said Lucille.

“This can’t be one of those resolutions that we make and then forget,” he said.

“A solemn covenant with the Lord,” she said.

“It isn’t fair to you,” said Helaman. “Most of the extra work of having visitors in the house would fall to you.”

“And to the kids,” she said. “And you’ll help me.”

“It has to be like a contract,” said Helaman. “There have to be terms.
So we’ll know if we’re living up to the covenant. We can’t just wait for people in need to just happen along.”

“So we’ll look for them,” said Lucille. “We can talk to the bishop to see who’s in need.”

“As if anybody in
this
ward is going to need a place to stay!”

“Then we’ll ask him to talk to the stake president. There are other wards in this stake. And people you’ll hear about at work.”

“Someone new every month, unless the house is already full,” said Helaman.