Home (26 page)

Lila said, “I like waltzes.” So Jack plunged into a brief and distinctly Viennese “There’s a Garden Where Jesus Is Waiting.”

Ames looked on without expression. Her father’s expression was statesmanlike.

And then Jack played, “‘I want a Sunday kind of love, a love that lasts past Saturday night.’ I’ve forgotten the words. ‘I’m on a lonely road that leads to nowhere. I want a Sunday kind of love.’”

Lila said, almost sang, “‘I do my Sunday dreaming, and all my Sunday scheming, every hour, every minute, every day. I’m hoping to discover a certain kind of lover who will show me the way.’”

Jack said, “Why, thank you, Mrs. Ames!” and she smiled.

His father said, “I thought we might enjoy something a little more in keeping with the Sabbath.”

Lila said, “That’s a good song, though.”

“If you wouldn’t mind, Jack.”

He nodded. He played “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past” and “Faith of Our Fathers” with a kind of exuberant solemnity, and they sang, and then Ames said he was weary after a long day and it must be after Robby’s bedtime, too. The boy had climbed up on the
piano bench beside Jack and was shyly touching the keys. Jack went to see the guests to the door, but Robby stayed behind, plinking tentatively. When his mother called him and he climbed down from the bench, he noticed that the seat could be lifted, and he opened it. He said, “There’s money in here!”

Ames reflexively took Boughton’s arm. Glory said, “Oh, I put it there,” but her father crept toward the bench to peer into it as if it were a chasm opening. Glory said, “It’s just leftover money from the household allowance. I take it out of the other drawer so I can keep track of what I’m spending,” but her father, with Ames holding his arm, continued to stare at it. Jack looked in at it, too, and then he started to laugh. “Good try, Glory. A likely tale!” He said, “If there are thirty-eight dollars in there I will have to believe in—something.” And he put his hands to his face and laughed.

His father was bewildered to the point of indignation. “Now that,” he said, “is a remark I simply do not understand!”

Robby said, “Well, it is kind of funny to have all those dollar bills in there!”

Ames smoothed the boy’s hair. “Yes, it is. You’re right about that. Now, you go home with your mother. I’ll be along pretty soon.”

When Lila and the boy were out the door, Glory slammed the piano shut, so hard that the strings rang. “Everyone is ignoring me!” she said. Her anger startled all of them. “Wait.” She went into the parlor and came back with the big Bible. She closed the bench and set the Bible on it. “Now watch. Everyone watch.” And she knelt and put her right hand on the Bible. “I solemnly swear, so help me, God, that I personally put that money in the piano bench. It looks as if I were hiding it, but it was just a lazy kind of bookkeeping. That’s all it was. And I did it. No one else. If I’m lying, may God strike me dead.”

Her father said, “That kind of language isn’t really necessary, dear,” but he was clearly impressed, and also relieved. “You’re
good to your brother,” he said, and Jack laughed. “I only meant—” he said, and looked so weary that Ames took him into his room and helped him lie down. Before he left, Reverend Ames said goodbye to them both, and shook Jack’s hand again. His cordiality seemed heavily compounded with regret, with suppressed irritation. Still, Jack was clearly grateful for it.

When he was gone Jack said, “That thing you did with the Bible was great. I’m going to have to remember that.” And he laughed. Then, “If you hadn’t rescued it, the whole thing would have been a disaster, but as it was, I thought, well, I didn’t think it was a disaster, all in all.” He looked at her as though he had asked her a question.

Amazing, she thought, but she said, “No, it went well enough.”

He nodded. “I believe it did. My expectations were low. Reasonable in the circumstances. Still. His kid seemed to like me. And the Mrs. That part of it went pretty well.” He went upstairs and came back down again in one of his own shirts and began to help her clear the table.

She said, “Jack, can I ask you something? No, I’ll tell you something. I’m beginning to think your Della can’t be worth all this misery.”

“What? She’s worth it. If I could be any more miserable, she’d be worth that, too. You’ll have to take my word for it.”

“She doesn’t write to you—”

He smiled at her, stung.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what the problem is.”

He said, “That’s true. You don’t.”

“But I know you a little now, and you’re really not so hard to forgive.”

“Why, thank you.” Then he said, “But you don’t know how much she’s had to forgive. You can’t even imagine. And there’s more every damn day.” He looked at her. He said, “And I think that’s enough about Della.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
G
LORY WENT TO THE HARDWARE STORE
and bought two pairs of the tan cotton pants and three of the blue denim shirts local men wore when they were not farming or fishing or dressed for a funeral. They were folded over cardboard, stiff when they were new, but she would put them through the wash twice and press them a little and they would be fine. She guessed at Jack’s size. Anything long enough was too wide, but he would have to make the best of that.

While she was hanging them on the clothesline, he walked over from the garden and stood with his hands on his hips, watching. He said, “Those for me?”

“If you think you can use them.”

He laughed. “I’m pretty sure I can.” He said, “Thanks, Glory,” and he reached over and touched a sleeve appreciatively. There was no irony in the gesture. “I’ll have to owe you for this.”

“You don’t owe me for anything. I took some money out of the piano bench. I’m as broke as you are.”

“I lost that other suitcase.”

“I know.”

He was quiet for a minute. “You had a pretty good job.”

“I did.”

“That bastard took your money.”

She shrugged. “I gave it to him. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t have any real plans for it.”

He nodded. “The old fellow thinks you had to quit teaching because you got married.”

“And you know differently.”

“Yes. None of my business.” He took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and tapped it on his thumbnail.

“What?”

“I’ve often thought—” he said. “I mean, it’s been my experience—that women can be too kind. Too kind for their own good.”

She laughed. “I’ve thought so, too, from time to time.”

“You’re kind.”

“Case in point.”

He studied her face, wincing against the smoke from his cigarette. Then he said, “Could you forgive him?” He glanced away. “Sorry. None of my business.” He said, “You brought it up last night. I was just wondering.”

She smiled at him.

“Right,” he said. “You don’t like to talk about it.”

There was something that charmed her in the fact that her brother, the one true worldling in the whole tribe of Boughtons, seemed to be asking her for advice, or for wisdom, standing there in the sunlight with the wind hushing in the dusty lilacs of their childhood and laundry swaying on the lines where their school clothes used to hang. He looked older in sunlight. It brought out a sort of toughened frailty in him. But, standing at a little distance, looking away at nothing in particular, he had that oblique and hesitant persistence about him that meant he was in earnest, so far as she could tell.

So she said, “Could I forgive him? I’m not sure I understand the question. But the answer is no.”

He nodded.

“I don’t wish him any harm, and I’m glad I’ll never see him again. I don’t enjoy being reminded of him.”

“Sorry. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but you did bring it up. You said I’m not hard to forgive. Something like that.”

“Were you good to her?”

“I tried to be.” He shrugged.

“Then if she’s a kind woman she’ll probably forgive you. Of course I don’t know what you did, what she’d have to forgive you for.”

He laughed and tossed away his cigarette. “I’m not sure I do, either. There were so many things she put up with—it’s what I am, as much as anything. What I’m not. She got tired of the problems. I should have been more protective somehow.” He said, “I
tried that. Once I sort of defended her honor. Not wise in the circumstances.” Then, “It probably wouldn’t matter if she did forgive me. I thought she might write, though.” He said, “You get used to kindness. After a while you begin to count on it. You miss it when it’s gone.”

She said, “I know a little bit about that,” and he nodded, and the lilacs rustled, and the sun shone, and there was quiet between them, a calm that came with being of one mind. So she had to say, “You shouldn’t lose hope.”

He laughed. “Sometimes I really wish I could.”

She said, “I know about that, too.”

Why hadn’t she bought clothes for him weeks ago? Because he was a stranger she was afraid of offending with so personal an attention. Because her buying clothes for him would allude to his poverty and offend him. Because it might seem like a subject of conversation for people who saw her buying them and this would embarrass and offend him. Because he was vain, and particular, and Jack. Cheap, sturdy work clothes were not the kind of thing he thought he should wear, and they would offend him. But in fact she saw him check the shirts on the line several times, and when one of them was dry enough, he brought it in and ironed it and put it on. The pants were heavier and took longer to dry. She saw him check them, too, then walk over by the orchard, pick a fallen apple off the ground, throw it up on the barn roof, and wait and catch it when it came down, and throw it again. Her brothers all did that when they were boys. Jack looked a little stiff, as if he were making an experiment in attempting this lonely game after so many years. Tentative as he was, it might have meant happiness.

A
MES STROLLED OVER THAT EVENING AFTER SUPPER, FOR
a game of checkers, he said, but he and their father sat in the porch with the board between them and talked quietly together,
the way they did when advice of some kind was being sought and given. Glory brought them ice water and left them to themselves. It was a courtesy Ames paid to his friend to seek out pastoral wisdom even though he must have had wisdom of his own to spare after so many years, and since he was, by temperament, the more obliging of the two and therefore seldom in particular need of wisdom, his own or Boughton’s. All the same, he would offer up some soul to her father’s contemplation and then they would consider together, as they did in the old days, how to mollify, comfort, instruct. Boughton had resigned his pulpit ten years earlier, under circumstances that made Ames especially careful to respect his views. The Sunday-school children were marrying, and the married couples had settled into difficult, ordinary life, and the grave old men and women who had taught the Sunday-school children about bands of angels and flying chariots were themselves crossing over Jordan one by one. So he helped Ames think through whatever question might have arisen among the Congregationalists, whom he knew better than his own former flock now, through these murmured consultations. “Yes,” he would say, “a good deal of tact will be called for in dealing with that fellow,” and Ames would say, “That’s for sure.” During these conversations her father’s expression assumed its old sagacity, that gentle shrewdness of the practiced shepherd of souls. “But I’d tell him where matters stand. I’d be frank about it.” His eyes would kindle with the thought of firmness and candor, the memory of those old pleasures. Ames always watched him with a kind of bemused and wistful respect, as if he were now the younger man and his friend had aged past him into a venerability he might never attain. “Yes,” he would say, “I will certainly be frank.”

Jack came upon them there, talking together. She heard them greet him, and a word or two, and then he came into the kitchen with cucumbers from the garden. His shirt bloused and his pants gathered a little under his belt, but she was pleased all in all with the way he looked and she could tell he was, too. He managed to
seem a little dapper, somehow, a thing his pride required. She knew this was a relief to him. He washed the cucumbers. “Cucumbers smell like evening,” he said. “Like chill. Need any help?” When she said no he went to the piano and sat down and began to play “Softly and Tenderly,” a favorite hymn of his father’s. He played it softly, and, she thought, very tenderly. She went into the hallway to listen, and he glanced up at her sidelong, as if there were an understanding between them, but he played on pensively, without a hint of detachment or calculation. “Come home, come home, ye who are weary, come home.” The old men fell silent. “Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me.” Her father sang, Ames with him. Then “Rock of Ages,” then “The Old Rugged Cross,” and when that song was over, it was night. It had begun to thunder and rain, one of those storms that come after dark and change the weather. The old men sat there, silent for a long time. She brought Ames an umbrella, and after a while she heard him take his leave. She was afraid the damp might make her father uncomfortable, but he asked her, very kindly, to leave him alone for a little while. He said, “Tell Jack that was wonderful. I was proud of him.”