Keeper of Dreams (91 page)

Ryan went.

“Old Braincase is such a snob,” said Var, “but the truth is all the marble in
her
house really
is
faux, but we think the contractor sort of misled her about it and she’s the only one who doesn’t know that there’s not an ounce of real marble in her whole house.” Var cackled uproariously.

“How sweet of you not to break her heart by telling her,” said Lucille. “We’ll keep the secret, too.”

“Guided tour time!” cried Joni. “Please, before we hang the stockings or anything? I want Var to see my room.”

“This is the best time to do it,” Helaman said to Var. “It’ll be the last time her floor is visible till she goes away to college.”

Var smiled feebly at Helaman’s joke, but Tom Boke actually managed to laugh out loud. I’ll count that as my first Christmas present, Helaman said silently. In fact, if you do that again I’ll ask you to marry my daughter, just so I can have somebody to laugh at my jokes around this house.

This house this house this house. He was tired of saying it, tired of thinking it. Six thousand square feet not counting the garage or the basement, and he had to take yet another tour group to see every single square foot of it. The living room, the parlor, the dining room, the kitchen, the pantry so large you could lose children in it, the breakfast room, the library, and back to the main-floor family room—giving the tour was almost aerobic.

Then downstairs to family room B, the big storage room, and the game room with the new pool table and two elaborate computer setups so the boys wouldn’t fight over who got to play videogames. Not to mention the complete guest apartment with a separate entrance, a kitchenette, two bedrooms, and a bathroom, just in case one of their parents came to live with them someday in the future.

Then all the way up two flights of stairs to see the bedrooms—eight of them, even though they only used five right now. “Who knows how
many more we’ll need?” said Helaman, joking. “We’re still young, we’ll have more to fill ’em up.”

But Lucille looked just the tiniest bit hurt and Helaman regretted saying it immediately, it was just a dumb joke and for
that
he had caused her to think about the fact that she’d blown out a fallopian tube in an ectopic pregnancy two years after Ryan was born and even though the doctors said there shouldn’t be a problem they hadn’t conceived a child since. Not that their present crop of children gave them any particular incentive to keep trying.

No, thought Helaman, I must never come to believe my own jokes about my family. Most of the time they’re great kids, I’ve just got the blues tonight and so everything they do or say or
think
is going to irritate me.

“
Will
you have more children?” asked Tom.

It was an appalling question, even from a recently returned missionary who had gone so native that he was barely speaking English. “I think that’s for the Lord to decide,” said Lucille.

They were all standing in the master bathroom now, with Ryan dribbling an imaginary basketball and then slam-dunking it in the toilet. Tom Boke stood there after Lucille’s words as if he were still trying to understand them. And then, abruptly, he turned to Trudy. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’ve got to go.”

“Where?” asked Trudy. “We haven’t even done the stockings yet.”

“I didn’t know it would take so long to see the house,” said Tom. “I’m sorry.”

“
See
, Dad?” said Trudy. “If you’d just learn how to give shorter tours, I might actually someday get to . . .”

But before she could finish affixing blame on Helaman, even though it was Lucille who had insisted on the tour for her daughters’ gentlemen callers, Tom Boke had already left the master bathroom and was heading out the master bedroom door.

“Get him, Father,” said Trudy. “Don’t let him go!”

“If
you
can’t keep him,” said Helaman, “what makes you think he’ll stay for
me
?” But he followed Tom all the same, because the young man had looked quite strange when he left, as if he were sick or upset, and Helaman didn’t feel right about just letting him go back out into the cold.

He caught up with him at the front door—Helaman assumed that the
only thing that slowed Tom down was the fact that it was so easy to get lost when you came down the back stairs. “Tom,” said Helaman. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, sir.”

But the expression on Tom’s face declared his “nothing” to be a lie. “Are you going to be sick? Do you need to lie down?”

Tom shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just . . . I just . . .”

“Just what?”

“I just don’t belong here.”

“You’re welcome under our roof, I hope you know that.”

“I meant America. I don’t know if I can live in America anymore.”

To Helaman’s surprise the young man’s eyes had filled with tears. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Helaman said.

“Everybody here has so
much
.” Tom’s gaze took in the entryway with its marble floor, opening onto the living room, the dining room, the library. “And you keep it all for yourselves.” The tears spilled out of his eyes.

Helaman felt it like a slap in the face. “Oh, and people don’t keep things for themselves down in Colombia?”

“The poor people scratch for food while the drug lords keep every-thing they can get their hands on. Only the mafia have houses as large . . .”

The comparison was so insulting and unfair that Helaman was filled with rage. He had never hit anyone in anger in his life, not even as a child, but at this moment he wanted to lash out at this boy and make him take it back.

But he didn’t, because Tom took it back before he even finished saying it.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “I didn’t mean to compare . . .”

“I earned every penny of the price of this house,” said Helaman. “I built my business up from nothing.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Tom. “Why should you think twice about living in a house like this? I grew up in this ward, I never saw anything wrong with it until I went to Colombia.”

“I
didn’t
grow up in this ward,” said Helaman. “I
earned
my way here.”

“The Book of Moses says that in Zion they had no poor among them. Well, Darlington Heights has achieved
that
part of building Zion, because no poor people will ever show their faces
here
.”

“Why aren’t you home telling your own parents this, instead of troubling
my
house?”

“I didn’t mean to trouble you,” said Tom. “I wanted to meet your daughter.”

“So why don’t you just stay and meet her, instead of judging me?”

“I told you,” said Tom. “It’s
me
, not you. I just don’t belong here. Enjoy your new house, really, it’s beautiful. It’s not your fault that I taught so many people whose whole house was smaller than your bathroom. But the Spirit dwelt there in their little houses, some of them, and they were filled with love. I guess I just miss them.” The tears were flowing down his cheeks now, and he looked really embarrassed about it. “Merry Christmas,” he said, and he ducked out the door.

Helaman had no sooner closed the door behind him than Trudy was down the stairs railing at him. “I always knew that you’d drive one of my boyfriends away with all your teasing and the horrible things you say, Daddy, but I never thought you’d send one away in
tears
.”

“What did you
say
to him, Helaman?” asked Lucille.

“It wasn’t anything I said,” Helaman answered. “It was our bathroom.”

“He
cried
because of your
bathroom
?” asked Trudy. “Well thank heaven you didn’t show him your cedar closet, he might have killed himself!”

Helaman thought of explaining, but then he looked at Trudy and didn’t want to talk to her. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that face, anyway. She had never whined and demanded and blamed like this when she was little. Only since the money. Only since the money started happening.

What am I turning my daughter into? What will she become in this house?

Helaman wasn’t feeling the blues anymore. No, it was much worse. He was suffocating. It was desolation.

Helaman’s hand was still on the doorlatch. He looked at Lucille. “Do the stockings without me,” he said.

“No, please, Helaman,” said Lucille.

“Oh, good job, Trudy,” said Joni. “Now everybody’s going to be mad at each other on our first Christmas in the new house.”

“I think I’d better go home now,” said Var.

“
I
can’t help it if my father and my sister both went insane tonight,” said Joni. “Don’t go, Var!”

Everyone’s attention had shifted to Joni’s pleading with Var; Helaman used the break to slip out the front door, Lucille’s remonstrance trailing him out into the cold night air until at last he heard her close the door and Helaman could walk along the sidewalk in the silence.

The houses rose up like shining palaces on either side of him. Mrs. Braincase’s pillared mansion across the street. The huge oversized bi-level two doors down. All the houses inflated as if somebody had been pumping air into them up and down the street. Christmas lights in ever-so-tasteful color-coordinated displays on the trees and along the rooflines. Every house saying, I have succeeded. I have arrived. I am somebody, because I have money.

He imagined that it wasn’t him walking along this sidewalk tonight, but a Colombian family. Maybe a father and mother and their two daughters and two sons. Big as these houses were, would any of them have room for them tonight?

Not one. These houses were all too small for that sort of thing. Oh, somebody might slip them a twenty, if anybody wasn’t too terrified of robbers to open the door in the first place. But there’d be no room for them to sleep. After all, they might have fleas or lice. They might steal.

Helaman stopped and turned around, looking back at his house from a distance. I can’t live here, he thought. That’s why I’ve been so depressed. Like the day I cut out the entry floor and forced them to redo it—I was powerful and strong, wasn’t I! And yet all I had the power to do was get my own way by bullying people. I built this house to prove that I had what it takes to get a house in Darlington Heights. And now I’ll never see this house without imagining that poor Colombian family, standing outside in the cold, praying for somebody to open the door and let them come inside where it was warm.

What am I doing here, living in one of these houses? I hated these people when I was a kid. I hated the way they looked down on my family. The way they could never quite imagine Dad or Mom in a leadership calling, even though they were always there helping, at every ward activity, every service project, bringing food, making repairs, giving rides.
Mom in the nursery, Dad as permanent assistant to four scoutmasters, and all the time Helaman knew that it was because they weren’t educated, they talked like farm people because that’s where
they
grew up, they didn’t have money and their car was ugly and their house was small, while people with nowhere near the kindness and love and goodness and testimony got called to all the visible, prominent callings.

Helaman remembered one time when he was thirteen, sitting there in the office of his bishop, who told him how he needed to set goals in his life. “You can’t separate the Church from your career,” he said. “When Sterling W. Sill had the top insurance agency in the state of Utah, he got called to the First Council of the Seventy. My goal is to have the top agency by the time I’m forty, and then serve wherever the Lord calls me from then on.” The unspoken message was, I’m already bishop and I’m already rich—see how far I’ve come.

Helaman had come out of that interview seething with rage. I don’t believe you, he had insisted silently. The Lord doesn’t work that way. The Lord doesn’t value people by how much money they make, the two things have nothing to do with each other. And then Helaman had gone home and for the first time in his life, at age thirteen he saw his father the way that bishop must have seen him—as a failure, a man with no money and no ambition, a man with no
goals
. A man you couldn’t possibly respect. Helaman’s prayers that night had been filled with rage. He stayed up finding scriptures: It’s as hard for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle as for a rich man to get into heaven; let him who would be the greatest among you first be the servant of all; he who would find his life must lose it; sell all you have and give it to the poor and come follow me; they were not rich and poor, bond and free, but all were partakers of the heavenly gift. All those ideas still glowed in Helaman’s memory as they had that night, and when he finally slept it was with the sure knowledge that it was his father, the quiet servant without ambition for himself, who was more honorable in the sight of God than any number of rich and educated men in the Church. It was the beginning of his testimony, that peaceful certainty that came that night.

What Helaman had never realized until right now, on this cold Christmas Eve, standing on this street of mansions, was that he had also believed the other story as well, the one the bishop told him. Maybe it was because
he still had to see that bishop there on the stand, week after week, and then watch him become stake president and then go off as a mission president; maybe it was because Helaman was naturally ambitious, and so his heart had seized on the bishop’s words. Whatever the reason, Helaman had not modeled his life on his father’s life, despite that testimony he had received that night when he was thirteen. Instead he had followed the path of the people who had looked down on his father. He had built a house in their neighborhood. He had brought his children to dwell among them. He had proved to them that he was exactly as good as they were.