The Solace of Leaving Early (13 page)

Amos ducked through the doorway. The small bedroom had been used as a storage room, perhaps for years. There were bags of material and yarn; an old sewing machine; boxes of books and old shoes. The single dresser in the room was stacked with boxes. There was hardly room to move. And there was only one bed, a twin, neatly made with a white bedspread. Both girls were sitting on the edge, holding hands. Madeline’s feet touched the floor; Eloise’s didn’t. They looked up at Amos.

“They never much stayed here,” Beulah said, as if she had become aware of the room for the first time. “I saw them almost every day, but there wasn’t call for them to spend the night.”

Amos nodded.

“They stayed with Gail fairly often, but not with me. Not much.”

He nodded again, but he was ready for Beulah to leave. He wanted to be alone, to take them in. His heart pounded in his chest and his palms began to sweat.

“I’ll leave you be, then.” Beulah backed out of the doorway, but left it open.

“I’m Amos,” he said. “I’m the minister at your grandmother’s church.” What he wanted to say was:
You
both
have her eyes
. “Beulah—your grandma, I mean—tells me you don’t want to be called Madeline and Eloise anymore, is that right?”

The numbness, the cocoon they seemed wrapped tightly in, suddenly lifted, and both girls were present. Madeline stared at him, vigorously nodding, and Eloise, after glancing at her sister, nodded too. Amos noticed the hats lying on the bed behind them.

“Yes, sir,” Madeline began, then cleared her throat. “We’ve been given new names, and we’d like to be called by them.”

“I see. Well, what are they? I’ll call you anything you like.”

“I’m Immaculata, like the Immaculate Conception, and this is Epiphany, like when Christ appeared to the Gentiles.”

Beulah might have mentioned this little detail. Amos had assumed they’d changed their names to Ashley and Brittany.

“Goodness. What—I wonder—what do those names mean to you?”

The three studied one another. “It doesn’t matter what they mean to us,” Immaculata said.

An interesting answer. “Why not?”

She considered a moment. “Because those are the names we were
given
.”

“Ah.”

“Do you have any gum?” Epiphany asked, pointing at Amos’s pocket.

“I—let me see, here—wait, yes. Yes, I do. It’s Teaberry. Have you had that kind of gum before? Because it’s not good for bubbles, but I like how it tastes.”

They each took a piece. Amos saw their hands for the first time, the jagged edges of their fingernails, the dried blood on the sides of their thumbs where they’d picked at the skin. Immaculata’s straight, nearly white hair was flat and lifeless; Epiphany still had two barrettes caught in her curls, but all the way down toward the bottom of her ears, as if they were just barely holding on. They needed baths and clean clothes.

They chewed the gum. “It’s okay,” Epiphany said.

“What kind of gum do you like? And I’ll bring it next time.”

“That kind with the moose on it.”

“It’s a zebra,” Immaculata corrected her.

“Moose or zebra. Big mammal, with or without antlers. I’ll find it.”

The girls joined hands and looked back at the floor.

“I’m glad to have met you. Your grandma has my phone number, if you need anything, and also you could just walk down to my house. I’m a block and a half down Plum Street.”

The girls didn’t answer, so he turned toward the door.

“Mr. Townsend?” Immaculata said.

Amos turned and looked at her. She was only eight and Amos knew it, but something about her made him feel he was looking at another adult. “Yes?”

“I wonder if you could find my school books? Because I really need them. They’re in a backpack shaped like a frog. We’re going to have lessons in the afternoons, but I can’t get started without the books.”

“You’re going to do school work in the afternoons, just the two of you?”

She nodded. “I’ve been asked to teach Epiphany some things she didn’t get to in first grade. Also we have to stay caught up. For next year.”

Amos promised to find them, then closed the door behind him. He told Beulah he’d be back the next day, then ran home and called AnnaLee Braverman. When she answered the phone, he just started talking: blindness, hip, storage room, school books, baths, fingernails. AnnaLee came right over, and before she was even fully in the house, said, “Amos, I have an idea.”

*

Amos saw Jack only two days before he died. He wandered into Amos’s office in the middle of the afternoon, without calling ahead, and Amos was so alarmed by Jack’s appearance that for a moment he thought he should call someone—a doctor, Jack’s mentor in Faith In Families, Father Leo—but Jack was calm and composed. He said he was hopeful that the increase in his medicine would help, and that he had begun a vigorous program of round-the-clock prayer. His hair, uncut and unclean, hung in his eyes, and his hands trembled each time he brushed it away.

“Pray without ceasing?” Amos asked. He even smiled inwardly, thinking of Franny Glass. “It seems to be taking a toll on you. You look tired.”

Jack shook his head. “I’m not, really. I feel very strong, very optimistic.”

Amos sat a minute with his chin in his hands, not sure which direction the conversation should go. “And what are you optimistic about, Jack? That you’ll come to terms with what’s happened?”

“No, no, absolutely not. That would be total defeat. No, I’m optimistic that Alice will be guided by the Spirit of the Lord, as I have been, and that she’ll bring our children and come home.”

Amos sighed. “Jack—”

“—Amos, I—listen. I read the Bible every night. I’ve heard it all my life, and I’ve been in a Bible study group with Faith In Families for months now. I don’t know much about the Old Testament, but I know enough. Look up the word ‘marriage’ or ‘wife’ or ‘woman.’ It all says the same thing. A woman is to be subservient to her husband. The man is the high priest of the home. The two shall be as one. If a woman divorces her husband and marries again, she’s an adulterer. Women aren’t even supposed to
speak
. It couldn’t be more clear. Are you going to argue? Do you even have any grounds to disagree?”

“As a matter of fact—”

“There are laws, Amos. There are natural laws and man-made laws and marriage laws, and you know them as well as I do.”

“You’ve made a terrible error, Jack, please listen to me—”

“Do you deny the Christian law, Amos? Just say so—”

“Jack, slow down—if you want to talk about the Scriptures, we can—look at Luke
10:25
, it’s perfectly clear:
love
is the final requirement of the law. Love is the fulfillment of the law. There’s nothing beyond that.”

“Yes, and I love Alice and I love my children, and we are meant to be together on earth as well as in heaven, and I believe God will answer my prayer and put an end to all this.” Jack stood and offered Amos his hand. “I’ve got to be going. I believe you did the best you could.”

Amos took Jack’s hand and held it. “Please don’t go—you’ve made an understandable but terrible—”

Jack pulled away and turned toward the door. “Another time, maybe. And Amos,” he said from the hallway, “I love the book of Luke. My favorite verse is in there.”

“Which one?”

“Chapter twelve, verse twenty: ‘You
fool
. This very night your life is being demanded of you.’ ”

*

Amos stared out his study window at the clear night. The pups had quieted down. He remembered (tonight and often) one of the most important classes he took as an undergraduate English major, British Literature: Beowulf to Pope. He hated it at first, hated Beowulf, Chaucer, Sir Gawain, the Faerie Queene, all of it, really, even though the professor, Dr. Hempel, was gifted and passionate and funny. Then they read Marlowe’s
Faustus,
and there was something from the beginning so perfectly . . . what was it? When they finished the play, the professor asked the class, “What was Faustus’s real sin? Where did he really fall?” And there had been the standard answers: He was greedy. He desired power, knowledge. He was lustful and blasphemous. Dr. Hempel agreed that Faustus had been all those things, but that Marlowe had very carefully planted a clue in the first scene in the play; he had revealed the trap from the beginning.

In the text, Faustus is reading the vulgate of Saint Jerome, and comes to Romans
6:23
: “The wages of sin is death,” he quotes, and stops right there, despairing, without turning the page. Dr. Hempel looked out at the class. “You’re all good Christians, right? What’s the rest of the verse? What would Faustus have seen if he’d turned the page?” There had been no answer. “‘For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ Don’t you understand? Faustus was eternally damned
because he was a bad reader.”

Even now Amos had to shake his head in wonder. The genius of it, to send a man to hell, and all because he failed to read a text closely. Amos rose from this desk, turned out the light in his study, and went to bed.

Chapter 12

AT INTERMISSION

Having lost inspiration for
Tunnel,
Langston decided to take the alternative route, and certainly the more widely received literary wisdom: write what you know. There were, she believed, a number of novels available to her, given what she knew. In addition to the postmodern subterranean novel and the academic
précis,
she also had an idea for a book-length sonnet sequence, a dramatic psychological study of a certain type of man, written in heroic/epic form. She turned her attention to it again, after having avoided it for a few months.

In the year she had worked on the sonnet sequence, she had only gotten as far as the first sonnet, and then only as far as the title. She had spent many a frustrating hour trying to produce the perfect synthesis of

form and soul. The series was entitled
The Narcissist Café,
or alternately,
At the Narcissist’s Café.

She took out the sheets on which she had been working for a year. In addition to the title she had many options for a first line, most of which had been crossed out:

We meet on your chosen firing ground.

You ask to meet on the firing ground.

The tables conceal your firing ground.

The waitresses . . .

. . . and many others, all with the requisite ten syllables, and all flubbed by the wretched meter of “firing ground.” She had tried variations on the theme, by using “hanging tree,” and once, “hanging judge.” The margins contained her extensive notes on the themes of the poem, the matter of the beloved as judge and/or executioner; the betrayed as crucified innocent. In the progressive logic of the poem the speaker is asked to meet her beloved; he breaks her heart at her favorite table, the table he always employs for such tasks, and in the end, he asks her the same questions he has asked of all the others: How broken are you? How much have I hurt you? How long will it take you to heal? How perfect was I? This theme would be highlighted by the repetition of both “I” and “eye,” employing theories of the male gaze.

Langston studied her notes carefully. She tapped her pencil on the table. She rubbed Germane’s fur with her feet. The whole poem was right there in front of her. She had done the architectural work flawlessly, she felt. So where was the poem? What labor had she not performed? Perhaps she needed to do more reading . . . perhaps she needed to study with more breadth the phenomenon of narcissism. She made a note to herself to look into a diagnostic manual the next time she visited the public library in Hopwood.

She rubbed Germane’s belly and thought about a certain café in Bloomington. She could see it all very clearly; the stained glass windows taken from an abandoned church. The thin, bored waitresses who studied dance. The wide plank floors, the way they held light from the Tiffany lamps; the corridor between the tables and the bar, where there remained, inset in the floor, models of human feet cast in brass. If one stepped in them and followed the pattern, one could perform a box step, or even a fox-trot. On the wall next to each table, next to the sconces that provided each table with its own circle of lamplight, were quotations about reading, her favorite of which was from Kafka: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” And another from Henry Miller: “I believe at a certain age it becomes imperative to reread the books of childhood and youth. Else we may go to the grave not knowing who we are or why we lived.” And over the table in the far-left corner, the most private and desirable table, this bit of the poem “Recuerdo,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

We were very tired, we were very merry—

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

And you ate an apple and I ate a pear

From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere.

Thinking of those beautiful lines (how rich! how spare!) nearly brought a lump to Langston’s throat. Her room, the world, suddenly became too saturated with meaning, and she felt she might swoon. If someone had asked her—and she almost felt as if someone were—to begin at the door and describe every inch of the café she could have, and if that person had then said,
No: more,
she could have gone on to illuminate the detail in the wallpaper and the curve of the chairs; the graffiti carved into certain tables (“Jesus is pallid impotence”); the texture of the blueberry coffee cake, which was so moist and dense it felt like butter on the tongue. She took a deep breath and reminded herself of where she really was. She memorized the smells around her, where she had come to be. All she could smell was her dog. She couldn’t imagine what was wrong with her poem.

Her mother knocked on the attic door, shattering Langston’s reverie, and asked her to come downstairs; they needed to talk.

*

“No no no, I can’t, you can’t make me do this, it’s out of the question.” Her panic, her immediate sense of doom—of a struggle unnamed, unknown, long lost—caused Langston to feel as if she’d suddenly become allergic to her own skin. She stood as stiffly as she could, rubbed her hands up and down her arms, which had broken out in little red bumps, then put her hands in her pockets. She pulled them out again, and just for good measure, turned around in a circle, as if she were looking for but couldn’t find the door out of the living room.

Walt was standing behind her, miserable, and AnnaLee was in front of her, and there was something in her mother’s posture, in the way she had made her pronouncement, that was like a cage. Perhaps one of those terrifically primitive and suggestive cages the Vietcong employed. Germane was pacing and making a whining sound deep in his throat, and Langston remembered, thankfully, that she was an adult and could make her own way in the world. She was no longer seventeen. She pulled herself up to her full height, then forced herself to stop rubbing her arms.

“No, Mother. I won’t. I’m nearly thirty years old, and I will not take on such a responsibility, not to mention the menial aspect of the work, which is nearly existentially insulting.”

AnnaLee looked at the ceiling and sighed. “Ah yes. The existential insult. It’s been little known in Haddington before now.”

“I would not ask you, now please consider this with me, Mama, I would not ask you to perform a task utterly unsuitable to your current condition. I would not, for instance, request that you complete the first draft of my postmodern subterranean novel,
Tunnel
. I would not ask you to finish that small project I began on the indoor/outdoor nature of revelation in Emerson. I would not—”

“I think I understand your point, Langston.”

“—ask you to change your relationship to reality in order to better suit my sensibilities. Therefore, I believe it is unjust for you to ask me to do something I find so glaringly out of step with both my nature and my plan for the rest of the summer. I have a
tremendous
amount of work to do. I hope we’re settled on this. I shan’t, and not for love nor money.”

“That’s fine, that last part, I mean, because there is neither love nor money involved. I’m asking you—no, no actually, I’m telling you—that you’re going to do what’s right, and it’s really just as simple as that. You are not going to spend the summer in the attic working on one of your projects. You are, in fact, going to spend the summer and, depending on what happens, next school year, taking care of Madeline and Eloise. They are children, Langston, and they are in trouble, and Beulah is not—I’ve watched her over the past few days and she’s not capable of raising them—and maybe it’s okay with you to watch two little lives, two innocent babies go down in flames while you write a sonnet sequence, but it’s not okay with me and I won’t allow it, and this is my house.”

How quickly Langston lost her composure! Within a split second she was right back to hives. “I’ll leave! I swear to heaven I’ll take Germane and leave, you don’t have any power over me, you can’t, I’ll go back to—”

Walt cleared his throat. “Sweetheart, your car won’t start.”

She turned so quickly her vision dimmed. “
What?
I have no form of transportion?”

He nodded, sadly. “I tried to start it yesterday. It’s dead as a doorknob.”

“You have to
fix
it, Daddy.”

“I tried. I did. It was just old.” He stared at the floor.

Langston began to sob in great gasps of anguish. She was now a prisoner in her parents’ home, and they had chosen to torture her. She couldn’t catch her breath, even though she knew she was making an embarrassing scene. She couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen, and began to feel faint.

Then her mother had ahold of her and was exerting pressure on various parts of her body, squeezing Langston’s shoulders, periodically holding her head fast against AnnaLee’s chest. There was a fair amount of AnnaLee, just in terms of size, and a part of Langston relaxed involuntarily, and leaned into her. Langston continued to weep with abandon; she
felt
like weeping but couldn’t understand, intellectually, why she was doing so. Her synapses seemed to have skipped a crucial gateway. She was behaving as if she had received the most blood-curdling news of her life, a message that left her entirely naked, exposed to a power both random and elemental.

“Shhhh,” AnnaLee whispered, rubbing the back of Langston’s head. “Listen to me, your father and I love you more than anything, you are the one great treasure of our lives. And I hate to be the person to tell you this—I wish it weren’t true—but you need to stay a while. I don’t know why you left school and you don’t have to tell me, none of that matters, and I know that the possibility of running away from, I’m not even sure what to call it, an intractable situation? has always been a great comfort to you, and I know why, I do. But really this isn’t about you or me or even those children, it’s about life, Langston, the way life just bears down upon us and we are forced to withstand its weight and I am
sorry
. I’m truly sorry, angel.”

Langston nodded, then lifted her head, wiping away tears with the sleeve of her T-shirt. Her father was patting her back, too, and she turned and looked at him, and oh my, what a hard man he was to see. Between his handsome silence and the way he always seemed to be leaving a room, Langston often felt like a phantom fathered her. And then—those times he did come clearly into focus—he arrived like a lightning bolt: the way he was aging (what if she
lost
him?), the steep toll of the past everywhere evident on him, the bargains he’d made, his patient, plodding love.

Langston looked back at her mother, and for a moment she could hardly tell AnnaLee and Walt apart. They could say what they would, but all of her parents’ best lines were in their faces.

*

She and Germane walked down to the park, Langston still periodically hiccuping with tears. Either she was exhausted from crying or else there was something soporific in surrender, because she felt almost too tired to put one foot in front of the other.

The park was almost always abandoned, and rightly so. The old basketball court was crumbling into a moon landscape, and the goal was hanging by one hinge. The merry-go-round was off balance, and set up a wail every time a wayward child tried to move it. There were no seats on the swings; the teeter-totters were splintered into dangerous propositions. Only the slide remained functional, in part because it was forged by Vulcan himself. It was a huge, hulking, rust-free piece of metal that had stood in the park since before AnnaLee was born. By July one could fry bacon on it, if one were so inclined.

Langston sat down on the merry-go-round and Germane trotted over to her with a stick in his mouth.

“Oh, Germane, let’s do please try to be honest for once,” she said, taking the stick out of his mouth and dropping it at his feet. He picked it up, wagging his tail. “Oh,
all right
.” There seemed to be a conspiracy afoot to exasperate Langston to the edge of her tolerance. She threw the stick toward the basketball court and Germane flew after it, catching it on a bounce, then ran off after a squirrel.

At some point it becomes imperative to reread the books of childhood. They had played together here many hours, undaunted by the limitations of the equipment. Langston sat very still and tried to remember his voice; she tried to recall him cinematically, all the lovely, concrete details of the boy Taos had been, the way they both lived in their heads, was that right? Had they lived mostly in their heads? Hadn’t that changed, and would she have noticed when it happened or was it something only seen much later? Taos was an indirect communication, he had been a person she couldn’t know while she was in the way with him. She felt her breathing slow, she remembered, oh yes—what a wonderful thing to recall after so many years—a surprise he had given her for Christmas when she was eighteen, close to the end, two tickets to see
La Boheme
at Clowes Hall in Indianapolis. They would go together, her parents had given her a wine-colored velvet dress, it was like a date. They went in Taos’s truck, and it had been a long drive in bad weather but she wasn’t afraid with him, well almost never. She had slipped and nearly fallen in the parking lot, but he caught her, and she suspected, then, that things might not go well, that the whole evening had been misconceived, but as soon as the lights went down and the play began Langston loved it so much, she felt from the very beginning that she could devote her life to opera. She lost herself. And then the lights went up for the intermission, and Taos turned to her, his eyes always unnaturally bright, his hair (their mama called blackandyellow) a curly mess, and asked Langston if she was enjoying herself.

“Oh yes, I simply adore it. I’m having a fabulous time.”

Taos nodded. “Let’s leave then, shall we?”

And Langston simply stood up and reached for her coat. She knew exactly what Taos meant; she knew he wasn’t being perverse or clever or idiosyncratic. He was handing her the sweetest possibility this life offers: to leave in the middle, while everyone else stays behind and waits for the heroine to die in the cold.