The Solace of Leaving Early (10 page)

Wally almost choked on his coffee.

Selma reappeared, walking slowly and carrying a white bakery box, which she sat on the counter in front of Langston.

“That’ll be $
9.82
, altogether. With tax.”

Trying to imagine the graduated tax that could produce such a total, Langston pulled a ten-dollar bill from her pocket.

“Whatchoo think, Langston?” Wally asked, startling her so that she nearly dropped the money.

“Pardon me?” she said, glancing his way.

“What do ya think about all this—throw the bum out, or what?”

Langston cleared her throat, stalling for time, then quickly weighed her options: speak and regret it forever, or remain silent and regret it forever. She chose regret.

“I think,” she began, uncomfortably, “that none of this is even remotely our business, and that we turn out to be a grossly prurient and insatiable nation. But since we know all the details, and since they are being bandied about even in the depths of Indiana, I will say that I think he must have loved her, and that she loved him. I’ll direct you to the evidence: he gave her a copy of
Leaves of Grass,
which is less romantic and seductive than passionate and expansive. He wanted to open the world to her, as Whitman wanted to open the world for his readers, and his lovers. And she clearly adored him. Perhaps she behaved foolishly—who wouldn’t have? And as far as that other thing goes, that pressing question down at the plant—yes, she will be famous for a long time for having performed oral sex on the president of the United States, and she ought to be. I daresay that’s closer than any of us will ever get to him.”

Wally and Larry stared at the coffee cups, stricken. Herschel continued to read his paper, expressionless. Selma squinted at Langston, nodded, then turned and swiveled toward the kitchen. Before she could make any more faux pas, Langston grabbed the bakery box, and left.

*

After she had delivered the sugar-cream pie to Beulah Baker, AnnaLee knocked on the attic door. Langston was about halfway through
Purity of Heart
, and happy to have company.

“Come on up,” Langston called, and scooted back on the bed to make room.

“How’s it going with that?” AnnaLee asked as she sat down, pointing to the Kierkegaard.

“Well. It’s going well. But I wish I’d gone to graduate school in theology or religious studies. I have so many questions and no one to talk to.”

“I brought you this present,” her mother said, taking a small green book out of her apron pocket.

“What’s this?”

“
A Short Life of Kierkegaard,
by Walter Lowrie. I thought you might find it helpful. Lowrie wrote a much, much longer work that contains a formidable amount of Kierkegaard’s writing, but this book is pretty condensed, and . . .” She stopped speaking and looked down at the floor.

“And?”

“Nothing. I just thought you’d enjoy it.”

“But wherever did you get it? I’ve never seen it on our bookshelves.”

“I had it when I was a teenager. Your Grandma Wilkey had it on that bookcase in the parlor because she never had enough books of her own to fill it up. I drove out there and got it yesterday while she was at her Flower Club. Taos . . .”

Langston let a long moment pass while she pretended to reinspect the counterpane on her bed.

“Taos loved Kierkegaard,” AnnaLee continued, with a certain strain in her voice. “He loved his philosophy and his approach to Christianity, but mostly he loved Kierkegaard’s story, the very strange man he was and the sad life he lived.”

“I can imagine that. Isn’t there a, what, a broken engagement? a lost love at the center of his life?”

“Yes, it’s tragic. Especially from this distance. Kierkegaard’s father had a terrible secret, which he passed along to his son, and Kierkegaard felt he could never marry, because he would
infect
—something like that—his fiancée with the truth. It was a disastrous choice. I’ve been moved to tears by less than that, by stories with less dramatic endings.”

“I’ll read it. Thank you,” Langston said, sincerely. It had been years since AnnaLee had been willing to talk like this. She sometimes made forays, tender little jaunts toward her daughter, but mostly she seemed too damaged for Langston to approach her.

“Now,” AnnaLee said, straightening the bed in a businesslike way, “speaking of marriages. I’d like for you to go with me to a wedding tomorrow.”

“Mama! Is this at your church? No. I can’t believe you. You are entirely
ruthless;
you have no heart. No.”

“Langston, listen. Joannie Johnson and Jim Cross are getting married tomorrow, and they’re just in high school—”

“You gave me a present to make me go to church! That’s mean!”

AnnaLee took a breath. “I’m not asking you to go to church. I just think it would be a nice thing—”

“I don’t even know these people! Why would I want to go to their wedding?”

“I’m trying to tell you that.”

“Are you social just for the sake of it? Do you attend things—weddings and funerals and sheep-shearings, or whatever—out of a sense of
form
? In a place like Haddington, where all civilized conventions are eschewed in favor of—”

AnnaLee held up her hand. “Stop. I mean it.”

They were silent a few hot moments. Langston could hear her heart beating, and her mother was flushed.

“Joannie and Jim are teenagers. Joannie is six months pregnant and embarrassed, and almost no one she’s invited is coming to the wedding, and her mother called me this afternoon and said Joannie will feel awful if the church is empty. This is a matter of simple compassion, Langston. It isn’t complicated, and saying yes will not reveal a weakness in your character. Saying no might very well.”

“No.”

“It’s a little ceremony and a cake-and-punch reception in the Fellowship Room after. An hour out of your day.”

Langston pulled her knees up and put her head down on them, then gathered her braid around to her chest so she could tug on it until the pain made her feel she could stay inside her body. Her mother was deliberately trying to drive her insane, Langston knew it, she’d been trying for years, and through tactics so seemingly innocent no one would believe Langston if she accused AnnaLee of it. There would be bowls of salted nuts at the wedding reception, nuts in little glass bowls. Langston couldn’t even
bear
to think of them. And those buttery homemade mints that were an ungodly combination of flavors, and probably began as pure lard. Everyone there would be so pathetic and lumpy, and some of the dresses would be homemade, and the bride! A pregnant—

“An hour, Langston.”

“Oh God! Oh God all right I’ll go! Just leave me alone!” she shouted, then threw herself into her pillow and began sobbing. What kind of love is this, Langston wanted to wail at her mother, that pushes and pushes until we break? She couldn’t say no, and saying yes enraged her. There was no place to go. There was no place to
be
.

“Sweetheart,” AnnaLee said, straightening Langston’s braid and rubbing her trembling back. “I know how unhappy you are.”

Langston didn’t answer. She just lay facedown, unyielding, until her mother got up and went down the stairs. After she heard the attic door close, Langston raised her head for air and there was Germane’s face, and the look he was giving her was so naked, so worried, that she buried her face in his neck and cried even harder, and he just stood still and let her do it.

Chapter 9

THE WEDDING

Amos rose on Saturday morning filled with a dread he hadn’t felt since the last year in Mt. Moriah. His reluctance to accept who he was and what he had to do (and what he had to do was simple, really, nothing difficult or dramatic) was so crushing it felt like gravity on an uninhabitable planet. Didn’t he, he wondered now, facing himself in the mirror after his shower, become a minister partly as a way to balance this inertia? He knew from an early age that he would not survive in a world of commerce or industry or law or medicine. Profit alone certainly would not have motivated him to function every day. If his life were purely his own he might never get up in the morning, and what is working for a living but taking as a matter of faith that one is due a certain profit?

Amos’s first inkling of his calling came not in church or during prayer; there was no conversion experience. In fact, he had never been fully convinced of the truth or efficacy of his vocation. He decided to become a minister while watching television as an undergraduate English major at Ohio State, sitting in a lounge with other boys from his dormitory. He could no longer remember the name of the program, but it featured a detective who was stalking a multiple murderer, and the detective was driven in his work; driven, obviously, because lives depended on him succeeding. If the detective (Dirk, let’s say) decided not to get up in the morning (or even in the middle of the night, in the middle of the winter, during an ice storm) because he was
too sad,
innocent people would die and evil would reign victorious.
I could do that job,
Amos thought, feeling a peculiar wave of energy in the region of his stomach. He meant he could do that job except for the part about being a detective, and examining crime scenes and carrying a gun and living in immense danger all the time. And Amos also didn’t want to smoke or drink too much coffee or whiskey, and he didn’t really want to hang around with other policemen. He just wanted, somehow, to give his life to other people, and not so much to save them as to save himself.

He dressed for the wedding slowly, and hours ahead of time. Joannie and Jim, he reminded himself, Joannie and Jim; he didn’t know them at all. They shouldn’t have been getting married, they shouldn’t have gotten pregnant, they would never make it and lives would be ruined, or at least dramatically altered. Joannie seemed to know nothing about the world and had dropped out of high school altogether too willingly, it seemed to Amos, and Jim, a former football player at the county high school, had just graduated and was working two part-time jobs in Hopwood, neither of which provided health insurance. They were living and would continue to live with Joannie’s parents, Ed and Sue Johnson. In premarital counseling Amos had taken one look at them (at Joannie’s furious blush, the way she still carried herself like a child; at Jim’s military-style haircut and pronounced ears) and thought:
what a long road you have to walk
. But of course he agreed to marry them. He would have married anybody, really, not considering it any of his business, or a stain on his conscience, how people conducted themselves after the ceremony.

Sitting on the back porch with a cup of coffee, Amos thought about Joannie and Jim, about weddings, about his own sense of apprehension. It’s just too soon, he nearly said out loud, it’s too soon after the funeral. In a movie this wedding would have been a joyous, healing event, and the audience could have pretended that life really was cyclical, and that all things worked together for the good and in their own season, but that was a sentimental lie, and Amos knew it. His hands were shaking. Deep in his heart, what he wished he could do was grab those two stupid teenagers by the hair and and say to them, “You want to see a marriage? I’ll show you a marriage.”

*

“You had the girls quickly, I guess,” Amos had said, in his first meeting with Alice alone.

She laughed. “Well, you could say that. We got married a year after we met, and I got pregnant less than a year after that. I was twenty-two when Madeline was born, and Eloise came two years later.”

“Had you wanted children? That young, I mean?”

Alice considered the question. “No. I—I don’t know, really. I hadn’t actually thought about any of it until I met Jack, and then it was just a whirlwind. I finished out that year of school, and then came home and started planning the wedding, and I thought I’d go back to school but never did. Then I found out I was pregnant, and pregnancy has a peculiar way of . . .”

“What?”

“It forces you to live very, very slowly inside your future. The doctor told me I was pregnant and I thought, ‘Ah. So that’s what I’m doing now.’ And it was all I did. My mind was driven right down into my body, and I put all of my energy into growing the baby. I almost never thought about art school. I didn’t think about the life I had been living, because I was just living my life.”

Amos didn’t say anything for a minute, trying to imagine that feeling. “And what was your marriage like then, in those first years?”

“Oh, it was good,” Alice said, smiling. “It was very pure. We were clean people, and we had done this momentous and subtle thing, we’d gotten married and made a baby together, and we just sank into it, it felt like sinking every day. The smells of a home and the smells of a baby and a marriage bed, the intimacy, the familiarity, the safety, all of it. We were succeeding where other people failed, and we thought we’d go on succeeding at it forever, each year added to the last until . . . until we’d what? I don’t know. Built up a big scrapbook, or seen the thing through all the way to the end? So we could die? I don’t know.”

Amos had smiled, thinking of his recent favorite joke: A man and woman go to visit an attorney. The man is ninety-seven and the woman is ninety-five, and they say, after creaking into their chairs: “We want a divorce and we want it right now.” The attorney is stunned, and says, “How long have you been married?” The wife says, “Seventy-five years.” The attorney says, “But why would you want to throw that all away now, at the end of your life?” The husband says, “We would have done it much sooner, but we were just waiting for the kids to die.”

“So when did things start to go wrong, would you say?” Amos asked.

Alice blinked a few times, readjusted herself in her chair. She had worn, for that first meeting, a black turtleneck and black jeans, small, wire-framed glasses, and black shoes that looked hopelessly European.

“I can’t say for sure. I mean, I’ve rewritten our history a little bit by now, haven’t I? Isn’t that what we do when we’re unhappy? He . . . he held me too tight at night, I couldn’t sleep, and when I complained he said he just wanted to be close to me. I started taking a mild sleeping pill every night, just to get through it. My skin started to feel achy, like I was raw. This was early on, in the first four years. And he became very angry when other people left their marriages or were unfaithful, anything. Things that didn’t even remotely faze me. I’ve never cared, really, who slept with whom or how someone else’s marriage turned out, no one else’s relationships make any sense to me, anyway. Why would I care, why did he care? I would say to him, ‘Can’t we just wish them the best and live our own life?’ but he would rant and rave and snub people we’d loved only months before, and then there was that scandal at your church, well, it wasn’t your church yet, but the minister who preceded Pastor Schaeffer, Pastor Kilburn. I’m sure you know all this. When Pastor Kilburn left his wife and took up with, what was her name, Teresa? who used to play the piano? Jack said we couldn’t go back, as if the church—the building—and all the people in it were tainted, somehow. We started going to Sacred Heart because Jack’s aunt had converted years before—she’s
very
religious, you know—and I said to him, ‘Jack, you’ve become medieval.’ But he was absolutely determined.”

“And you just went along with him?”

“Why not? Catholicism is beautiful, and he found something that was conservative enough and ancient enough to make him happy, and I didn’t really care one way or the other. I think I didn’t want to fight over small things, I wanted to save up all my strength in case I ever really needed it, in case some disaster ever struck, like if one of the girls got sick or something. I didn’t want to be depleted by holding on to petty positions, and I didn’t want to be self-protective. I wanted to trust him, and to give him what he needed.”

“So what happened?”

“Well. The girls got a little older and I could see I wouldn’t be able to go back to art school, so I started just doing little things that interested me. I’d always been good at weaving, and so I decided to make some little baskets, just small things, to practice. And then I thought, well maybe I’ll make something no bigger than a cup, and I can make it out of a strange fiber. So I looked around and thought about it, and considered various fibers and what they’re good for, and it struck me that it would be very interesting to make some little baskets out of hair.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hair, human hair. It’s very strong, you know, and beautiful, and it’s fairly resistant to the elements and to decay. I went down to the beauty shop and asked Betty if I could start having the hair she swept up at the end of the day, and you know, she said yes without ever asking me what it was for. The people of this town are amazing.”

“They certainly are.”

“I had this idea that I’d make little braided cables, some dark, some light, and then weave those together, and I got sort of tired of waiting for Betty to call, so I cut off all my own hair. Just to get started. It was really long then.”

“A good idea.”

“Yes, I thought so. And then when Jack got home he had a fit. I’d never seen him so angry. He shouted at me and had tears in his eyes, he was
shaking,
he was so mad. He told me I didn’t have the right to cut my hair off without consulting him, that I was his wife and it was a terrible thing, an unforgivable thing to come home and not recognize me. I asked him, ‘Are you saying that this was, in some way, your hair, and that I should not have removed it from my head without your permission?’ And believe it or not, he said yes. Then he accused me of being resistant to him, of keeping some part of myself closed, or independent of our family or something. He said I constantly did violence to our oneness, and that he could feel it, and that we would never be truly happy (he would certainly never be happy) or safe and confident until I stopped, until I let go of my need to be an individual.”

Amos wrote a sentence in his notebook, tapped his finger against the desk. “Had you done other things, other individual things, before you cut off your hair?”

Alice nodded. “Sometimes I stayed up when Jack wanted to go to bed. Just to read. I took walks. Once in a while I’d say I was going to see my mom, and then I’d drive into Hopwood and see a movie by myself. I love watching movies alone, I don’t know why. And sometimes I just wanted to be away from them, you know, not just him, but all of them. And I always told Jack if I’d gone to see a movie, but it made him crazy. He hated for me to have an experience, or a memory? maybe a memory of something? that he didn’t have.”

“That was about four years ago?”

“Yes, that’s right. Four years now. And things have gotten dramatically worse.”

*

At one o’clock Amos arrived at the church to check on the arrangements, such as they were. There were two baskets of flowers, lilies, sitting at either end of the altar, and white bows attached to the end of every pew. He could hear the murmuring of the women in the Fellowship Room, where they were setting up for the reception. The pianist, Rhonda Macey, was already there, wearing a plain blue dress with a small corsage, arranging her music on the piano stand. He waved at her on his way back to his office, and she waved back. Rhonda was all business at weddings, which Amos appreciated.

In his office Amos straightened his tie and went over the page of vows he kept tucked into his Bible, the very standard stuff (and which Joannie and Jim had requested—they didn’t need poetry, thank you), then looked out the window at the empty parking lot. At one-thirty he would pose for a photograph, and the service would begin at two. He sighed.

*

He saw them together and separately, for six months. Father Leo hadn’t helped them, Robert Collins hadn’t helped them (the thing Alice didn’t say in front of Jack was that she felt those men encouraged Jack, however incidently; that they reaffirmed his growing belief that the family was the single most sacred institution in human history, and that a man’s job was to guide it like a ship through a storm), and certainly Jack’s mentor in “an organization,” as Alice had put it (the organization being Faith In Families, Amos had learned with alarm) hadn’t helped them, although he had whipped Jack up into a frenzy of religious zeal and emotional pomposity. In those six months Amos watched Jack slide into a stunning decline: he lost weight, he became more involved in the charismatic renewal movement in his church—once even asking Alice to undergo an exorcism—and finally, out of desperation, he started taking an antidepressant, which made him sleepy and tongue-tied. He was convinced he would lose Alice and the children, and in his fear, clung to them more tightly than ever.

*

Jim Cross had requested permission (and received it from Amos) to play country music on a portable stereo during the reception, but prior to the ceremony Rhonda had been allowed to choose the music she’d play, and Amos was relieved to hear only the standards. If he had had to face, today of all days, some girl trudging up the aisle with a karaoke machine in order to belt out “The Battle Hymn of Love,” he would have fled the building.

But everything seemed fine as he preceded the groom and his best man out the side door. Everything was quiet, and Rhonda was playing just the usual processional. There were only about twenty people scattered through the pews, evenly divided between the bride’s and groom’s sides. Amos took his place at the front of the church, then turned and patted Jim on the shoulder, wishing him luck. Jim gave him a goofy smile, a kid’s smile; this was nothing to him, Amos thought. It was just like prom night. The swinging doors at the back of the church were opened by the ushers, and the matron of honor, Joannie’s sister, Tracy, took her first steps down the aisle. Tracy was more than a few pounds overweight, and was wearing a tight, pink dress that caused Amos’s head to swim. He was so embarrassed by the color and the revelatory nature of the dress that he began to blush, and had to look down at his own shoes. Then Rhonda played the first notes of the bridal march (loudly—why did they always have to be played so
loudly
?), and the pews creaked, indicating that the few witnesses present were rising to watch the bride. Amos looked up just as Joannie took her first steps through the door, clutching her father’s arm. Ed Johnson looked flushed and worried (there was the small matter of his daughter’s pregnancy), and Joannie was strangely pretty, her hair gathered up, her cheeks pink. Rather than looking puffy, as she had the last few months, she just seemed healthy and young. Amos smiled at her, oh the world and what she’d gotten herself into, she had no idea, and somehow she’d probably survive it and look back on this day, how? what would she see? That was the strangest thing about weddings, from Amos’s point of view, that they pretended to be sacred occasions but in fact had no meaning. Because a marriage isn’t a marriage until it’s over, he thought, until the couple looked back, years later, at the moment they wed and said, “Oh, that’s what really happened that day.”