Earthly Possessions (13 page)

This was when they hadn’t yet opened the lipstick factory, so when Saul got home from class I don’t think it took him twenty minutes to track me down. Everybody knew where I’d gone; everybody’d seen me tearing off down the street on a brisk October day without a coat on. Or so they said. (Actually I’d been walking, very calmly.) Saul came to the motel and knocked on my door, two sharp knocks. “Charlotte, let me in. What’s the matter with you?”

I was suddenly filled with strength. I was jubilant. I wanted to laugh.

“Charlotte!”

It was clear from the self-assured tone of his voice that he didn’t know what he was up against. I refused to answer him. After a while he went away.

Then everything buckled and crumbled. I felt so sad, I thought something inside me was breaking. I wished I could erase all I’d ever done, give up and die. So when the phone rang, I pounced on it. It was Saul. He said, “Charlotte, quit this, please.”

“I’ll never quit,” I said.

“You want me to get a key from Mrs. Baynes and come in after you?”

“You can’t, I’ve got the chain on the door.”

“Look. I know you wouldn’t leave me,” he said.

“I wouldn’t?”

“I know you love me.”

“I don’t love you at all.”

“I think this must have something to do with your condition,” he said.

“Condition? What condition?”

“You’re pregnant. Aren’t you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told him.

“You can’t fool me, I remember from when my brothers were born.
Lots
of times I … Charlotte?”

I was counting. I looked around for a calendar but there wasn’t one. I had to count on my fingers, whispering dates to myself. Saul said, “Charlotte?”

“Oh, my God in heaven,” I said.

Saul said, “Charlotte, I wish you wouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain like that.”

Being pregnant affected me in ways I hadn’t foreseen. For one thing, I became very energetic. I would dash around the studio, shoving heavy cartons aside, wheeling that old camera on its creaky stand till the soldier or whoever rose from his chair looking anxious: “Uh, ma’am, do you think this is wise?” I was stronger and needed less sleep. Long into the night sometimes I’d be pacing the floor. But I was also easily hurt, and things could make me cry for no reason. Julian, for instance.

Julian was Saul’s youngest brother, the handsomest and most shiftless of all. He had a sulky, rumpled, Italian look that used to charm all the girls in school, and his weakness was gambling. But gambling men are not as dashing as the folk
songs make them out to be; they tend to break down when they’re on a losing streak. Julian showed up at our door one morning unwashed, ragged, with a string of bad checks trailing clear back to Texas. He fell into one of Alberta’s old beds and slept a week, waking only for meals. When finally he got up he seemed purified, like somebody recovering from a fever. He said he would do anything—change his ways completely, make up every cent he owed. He started work at the radio shop, and Saul wrote on Bible School stationery to everybody holding one of Julian’s bad checks, promising to send the money as soon as we had it.

On my daily walk that the doctor had ordered, I would pass the radio shop and see Julian bent low over tubes and wires, dimmed by a picture window as grainy as an old photograph. In the well of this window was the same display they’d had when I was a child: a plastic knob, a twist of wastepaper, and the dusty innards of an RCA Victor phonograph. I wanted to go in and pull Julian out of there. I almost did, sometimes.

But Julian said he had settled down, was here forever, planned to join the church, even. “In Texas,” he said one night, “I thought about church a lot. I thought about those songs they sing, all those hymns I never used to care for. One morning I woke up in jail, not even knowing how I’d landed there, and I said to myself, ‘If I get out of this I’m going back where I came from, join the church and straighten out my life. Going to stay with my brother till I die of old age,’ I said to myself.”

I looked at Saul.

“You tell them that on Sunday,” Saul said.

“I got to know a few of the prisoners. Why, they’d been in and out of jail all their lives, had no hope any more. Know how they passed the time? They’d chew up their bread and make it into statues, get the guards to sell it outside.”

“Stop,” I said.

“Little statues of Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, people like that. Little chewed-up statues.”

“I don’t want to hear about this,” I said, and started crying. Everybody stared at me. “Why, Charlotte,” said Saul, and my mother fumbled at her bosom for a Kleenex.

I really was very peculiar during those months.

Our daughter was born June 2, 1961, at the Clarion County Hospital, where I refused all anesthesia including aspirin so I could be absolutely sure nobody mixed her up with any other baby. We named her Catherine. She had fair skin and light brown hair, but her face was Saul’s.

From the first, it was clear she was bright. She did everything early: sitting, crawling, walking. She put short words together before she was one, and not much later began to tell herself long secret stories at bedtime. When she was two, she invented a playmate named Selinda. I knew that was normal, and didn’t worry about it. I apologized when I stepped on Selinda’s toes, and set a place for her at every meal. But after a while, Catherine moved to Selinda’s place and left her own place empty. She said she had a friend named Catherine that none of us could see. Eventually she stopped talking about Catherine. We seemed to be left with Selinda. We have had Selinda with us ever since. Now that I think of it, I might as well have taken that anesthesia after all.

They have this free offer on the radio sometimes: you send them a self-addressed envelope and they’ll send you a pamphlet called “What If Christ Had Never Come?” That always makes me laugh. I can think of a lot we’d have missed if Christ had never come. The Spanish Inquisition, for one thing. For another, losing my husband to the Hamden Bible College.

Oh, I did lose him. He wasn’t the old Saul Emory. He’d adopted a whole new set of rules, attitudes, platitudes, judgments;
he didn’t even need to think. In any situation, all he had to do was rest back on his easy answers. He could reach for his religion and pull it around him like his preacher’s robe.

When I was in the hospital having Selinda, Reverend Davitt lay dying one floor above me. (Lung cancer: one of God’s little jokes. Reverend Davitt didn’t hold with tobacco.) By the fall of ’61, Saul was pastor of Holy Basis. He wouldn’t be ordained till June but already had his own little flock, his tarpaper church and cubby-sized office where people could discuss with him their various forms of unhappiness. What’s more, he said he would like me to start attending the services now. I refused. I told him I had my rights; and he said, yes, I did, but he hoped I would come anyway because it was very important to him.

Well, I went. That first Sunday I left Selinda in the preschool room downstairs and sat in a pew between Julian and my mother. I wore a powder-blue suit, a pillbox hat, little white gloves. For the sake of the congregation, I tried to look as rapt as I was expected to. I tried not to show my shock when Saul came out in his robes like a stranger and read the morning’s scripture in a firm, authoritative voice. Older members of the congregation said, “Amen”; the others merely kept a hushed silence. Then we all stood up and sang a hymn. We resettled ourselves and Saul arranged various papers on his pulpit. “I have here,” he said finally, “a clipping from last Wednesday’s newspaper: ‘Dr. Tate’s Answer Column.’ ”

His words echoed slightly, as if spoken in a train station.

“ ‘Dear Dr. Tate: I am writing about this problem I have in talking with my physician. I mention this to show what I think of physicians and how much they expect of a person. Every Thursday my doctor has me come in to see him and he wonders why my diabetes is always getting worse. I tell him I just don’t know. Well, Dr. Tate, the fact is that I do eat quite a bit of pastry that I don’t admit to. I just get this urge to stuff
sometimes. Also I overdo on the wine. I know that wine isn’t really liquor but I feel bad anyway drinking in the daytime and so I don’t tell him. Dr. Tate, my husband doesn’t love me any more and goes with someone else and my only son died of a bone disease when he was barely three years old. I weigh two hundred and thirty-one pounds and my skin’s all broken out though they say that stops at twenty and I am forty-four. Yet somehow I can’t tell any of this to my doctor and do you know why? Because a doctor sets himself up so and acts like he won’t even like you if you eat the wrong kind of nutrition. So how does he think I could admit all this to him? And what I want to ask anyway is, Where’s the
fairness
to this, Dr. Tate?’ ”

I was interested. I folded my gloves and looked up at Saul, waiting for Dr. Tate’s answer. But instead of reading it, Saul laid the clipping aside and gazed out over his congregation. “The woman who wrote that letter,” he told them, “is not alone. She could be you or me. She lives in fear of disapproval, in a world where love is conditional. She wonders what the point is. The only one she can think of to ask is a licensed physician.

“Is this what we’ve come to, finally? Are we so far removed from God?”

I yawned, and wove the fingers of my gloves together.

That was the last sermon of Saul’s I ever listened to.

Which is not to say I didn’t go to church. Oh, no, I showed up every Sunday morning, sitting between my mother and Julian, smiling my glazed wifely smile. I believe I almost enjoyed it; I took some pleasure in his distance, in my own dreamy docility and my private, untouchable deafness. His words slipped past me like the sound of a clock or an ocean. Meanwhile I watched his hands gripping the pulpit, I admired his chiseled lips. Plotted how to get him into bed with me. There was something magical about that pew that sent all my thoughts swooning toward bed. Contrariness, I suppose. He
was against making love on a Sunday. I was in favor of it. Sometimes I won, sometimes he won. I wouldn’t have missed Sunday for the world.

I had a lot of foolish hopes, those first few years. I imagined that one day he might lose his faith, just like that, and go on to something new. Join a motorcycle gang. Why not? We’d travel everywhere, Selinda and I perched behind him. I would be hugging his waist, laying my cheek against his black cloth back.

Black cloth?

Oh, it was ingrained, by now: even on a motorcycle, he’d be wearing his seedy suit and carrying his Bible. He would never stop being a preacher. And even if he did, I wasn’t so sure any more that it would make a difference.

Often Saul invited people for Sunday dinner—homeless visitors, sinners from the mourners’ bench. Sometimes they stayed. We had an old lady named Miss Feather, for instance, up on our third floor—evicted from her apartment the spring of ’63, just borrowing a room until she found another. Which she never did. Never will, I suppose. We had soldiers, hitchhikers, traveling salesmen—country people lonesome for their family churches, passing through, glad for a taste of my buckwheat pancakes. And one Sunday, a bearded man in work clothes came to the mourners’ bench while the congregation was singing “Just As I Am.” Saul stopped his singing and descended from the pulpit. He set his hands on the man’s shoulders. Then he hugged him, gripping the dark, shiny head which was—why, of course! An Emory head. Linus Emory, the one who’d had the nervous breakdown, freed by his aunt’s death to wander back. Depressed as ever, but lit by this reunion like a bone china cup held up to a candle. We took him home for dinner. He spent all the mealtime looking around the table at us, staring into Selinda’s face, hanging on our words so closely
that he almost seemed to be speaking them with us. Even Mama—even old Miss Feather, passing him the beaten biscuits—could make his eyes too shiny. It was so good to be home, he told us. Then he went upstairs and claimed another of Alberta’s old beds, and unpacked his cardboard suitcase into a bureau.

Are you keeping track? There were seven of us now, not counting those just passing through. Amos was still in Iowa, teaching music, I believe. And Alberta was someplace in California. But otherwise we’d transplanted that house of theirs lock, stock, and barrel. We had their beds, their hats, their sons, their one-way window eyes. Even my mother appeared to have solidified into someone darker, and Miss Feather had taken on their proud way of standing, and Selinda’s face was as seraphic as something in a locket. “Have you noticed?” I asked Saul. “There seem to be so many Emorys here.”

But Saul only nodded, thumbing through his datebook, no doubt hunting another funeral or Youth Group meeting. “I always did want a place for my brothers to come home to,” he said.

That
was what he’d always wanted?

Oh, I saw it now. Finally I could sum him up: he’d only been a poor, homesick G.I., longing for house, wife, family, church. A common type. Every mourners’ bench has one. “You’re just looking for a way not to be alone,” I told him.

But Saul said, “There
is
no way not to be alone,” and shut his datebook and looked out across the dark hallway. Then I was unsure again, and saw that I couldn’t sum him up after all. Whatever he was once, it had taken me all these years to find it out and now I couldn’t say what he was today. I would be several steps behind forever.

“And the—and the money!” I cried, to keep from being drawn to him. “How can we feed them?” (Thinking meanwhile of the shallow brass collection plates, his only income; of the nickel-and-dime studio; and the radio shop that barely paid
Julian’s gambling debts, which shrank and swelled like something alive according to his lapses.)

“The Lord will provide,” said Saul. He left for his meeting.

I gave up hope. Then in order not to mind too much I loosened my roots, floated a few feet off, and grew to look at things with a faint, pleasant humorousness that spiced my nose like the beginnings of a sneeze. After a while the humor became a habit; I couldn’t have lost it even if I’d tried. My world began to seem … temporary. I saw that I must be planning to leave, eventually. Surely I wouldn’t be with him very much longer. At all times now I carried a hundred-dollar traveler’s check in the secret compartment of my billfold. I had bought my walking shoes. I planned to take nothing else but Selinda—my excess baggage, loved and burdensome. When would the proper current come to bear us away?