Saint Maybe (33 page)

Reverend Emmett waited till Ian had wound down. Then he said, “What grade is Daphne in in school?”

“She’s a junior.”

“So two more years,” Reverend Emmett said. “Maybe less, if she straightens out before she graduates. And I’m certain that she will straighten out. Daphne’s always been a strong person. But even if she doesn’t, in two years she’ll be on her own. Meanwhile, you can start with a few courses here in Baltimore. Night school. Towson State, or maybe community college.”

Ian said, “But also …”

“Yes?”

“I mean, shouldn’t I hear a
call
to the ministry?”

Reverend Emmett said, “Maybe I’m the call.”

Ian blinked.

“And maybe not, of course,” Reverend Emmett told him. “But it’s always a possibility.”

Then he rose and once again shook Ian’s hand, with those long, dry fingers so bony they fairly rattled.

When Ian arrived home, Daphne was talking on the kitchen telephone and her grandmother was setting various dishes on the table. Sunday dinner would apparently be leftovers—tiny bowls of cold peas, soggy salad, and reheated stew from a tin. “Cool,” Daphne was saying. “We can get together later and study for that Spanish test.” Something artificial and showy in her tone made Ian flick a glance at Bee, but Bee missed his point and merely said, “Well? How was church?”

“It was all right.”

“Could you tell your father lunch is on?”

He called down to the basement and then beckoned Daphne from the phone. “I gotta go now,” she said into the receiver. “My folks are starting brunch.”

“Oh, is this brunch?” Ian asked his mother.

She smiled and set a loaf of bread on the table.

Once they were seated Ian said the blessing hurriedly, conscious of his father drumming his fingers on his knees. Then each of them embarked on a different meal. Doug reached for the stew, Ian put together a peanut butter sandwich, and Daphne, who was a vegetarian, dreamily plucked peas from the bowl one by one with her fingers. Bee finished anything the others wouldn’t—more a matter of housekeeping than personal taste, Ian thought.

He missed the two older children. Thomas was away at Cornell and Agatha was in her second year of medical school. Most meals now were just this makeshift, often served on only half the table because Daphne’s homework covered the other half. And most of their conversations felt disjointed, absentminded, like the scattered bits of talk after the main guests have left the room.

“Me and Gideon are going to study Spanish at his house,” Daphne announced into one stretch of silence.

“Gideon and I,” her grandmother said.

Ian asked, “Will Gideon’s mother be home?”

“Sure.”

Ian scrutinized her. Gideon was Daphne’s boyfriend, an aloof, chilly type. Evidently his mother, a divorcee, had a boyfriend of her own. She was often out somewhere when Ian stopped by for Daphne.

“Maybe you could study here instead,” he told her.

But Daphne said, “I already promised I’d go there.” Then she picked up her empty bowl and licked it daintily, like a cat. Everyone noticed but no one objected. You had to select your issues, with someone like Daphne.

It unsettled Ian, sometimes, how much Daphne reminded him of Lucy. She had Lucy’s small face and her curly black hair, although it was cut short and ragged.
She had her froggy voice. Even in voluminous army fatigues, her slender, fine bones seemed so neatly turned that they might have been produced by a lathe. Her eyes were her own, though: still a dense, navy blue. And her own native scent of vanilla underlay the smells of cigarettes and motor oil and leather.

At the end of the meal Ian’s father rose and brought a bowl of instant pudding from the refrigerator. He wiggled it at the others inquiringly, but Bee said, “No, thanks,” and Daphne shook her head. “All the more for me, then,” Doug said cheerfully, and he sat down and started eating directly from the bowl.

Was it because of the Sugar Rule that Daphne had declined? No, probably not. This was a girl who drank beer in parked cars during lunch hour, according to her principal. But she did continue to go to church every Sunday, singing the hymns lustily and bowing her head during prayers, when most other young people lost interest as soon as they reached their teens. And she flung herself into Good Works with real spirit. Whether she was actually a believer, though, Ian couldn’t decide, and something kept him from asking.

There was a knock at the kitchen door, a single, surly thud, and they looked over to find Gideon surveying them through the windowpanes. “Oops! I’m off,” Daphne said. No question of inviting Gideon in; he didn’t talk to grownups. All they saw of him was the tilt of his sharp face and the curtain of straight blond hair, and then Daphne spun through the door and the two of them were gone. “Daph? Oh, goodness, she’ll freeze to death,” Bee said.

Ian wished Daphne’s freezing to death were the worst he had to worry about.

Doug and Bee went upstairs for their Sunday nap and Ian did the dishes. Scraping the last of the pudding into a smaller container, he thought again about Reverend
Emmett’s proposal. Bible School! He had a flash of himself packing the car to leave home—participating in the September ritual that he had watched so often from the sidelines. The car stuffed to the ceiling with clothes and LP records, his parents standing by to wave him off. Maybe even a roof rack, with a bike or a stereo lashed on top. Or a butterfly chair like his former roommate’s. Provided they still made butterfly chairs.

Over the years he had often wondered whatever had become of his roommate. He had imagined Winston proceeding through school and graduating and finding a job. By now he would be well established, probably in some field involving creative thought and invention. He had probably made a name for himself.

Ian glanced down at the pudding bowl and realized he had been eating each spoonful as he scraped it up. The inside of his mouth felt thick and coated. An unfamiliar sweetness clogged his throat.

At work he was training a new employee, a stocky, bearded black man named Rafael. He was giving his usual speech about the importance of choosing your wood. “Me, I always go for cherry if I can,” he said. “It’s the friendliest, you could put it. The most obedient.”

“Cherry,” the man said, nodding.

“It’s very nearly
alive
. It changes color over time and it even changes shape and it breathes.”

Rafael suddenly squinted at him, as if checking on his sanity.

The shop had seven employees now, not counting the high-school girl who came in afternoons to type and do the paperwork. (And they probably
shouldn’t
count her; sometimes her order sheets were so garbled that Ian had to sit down at the typewriter and place his fingers wrongly on the keys so as to figure out what, for instance,
she’d meant by “nitrsi.”) All around the room various carpenters worked on their separate projects. They murmured companionably among themselves but left Ian alone mostly. He knew they considered him peculiar. A couple of years ago he had made the mistake of trying to talk about Second Chance with Greg, who happened to be going through some troubles. Forever after that Greg kept his distance and so did all the others, apparently tipped off. They were polite but embarrassed, wary. As for Mr. Brant, he was even less company than usual these days. It was said that his wife had left him for a younger man. The one who said it was Mrs. Brant’s niece Jeannie, who didn’t work there anymore but sometimes dropped by to visit. Mr. Brant himself never mentioned his wife.

Last spring, Mrs. Brant had paused to admire a bench Ian was sanding and she had softly but deliberately laid a hand on top of his. Her husband was in his rear office and the others were taking a break. Mrs. Brant had looked up into Ian’s eyes with an oddly cool expression, as if this were some kind of test. Ian wasn’t completely surprised (several times, women who knew his religious convictions had started behaving very forwardly, evidently finding him a challenge), and he dealt with it fairly well, he thought. He had merely slid his hand out from under and left her with the sandpaper, pretending he’d mistaken her move for an offer to help. And of course he had said nothing to her husband. But not two months later Jeannie announced that she was gone, and then Ian thought maybe he should have said something after all. “Mr. Brant,” he should have said, “it seems to me your wife is acting lonely.” Or, “Wouldn’t you and Mrs. Brant like to take a trip together or something?”

But
telling
was what he had promised himself he would never do again.

Oh, there were so many different ways you could go wrong. No wonder he loved woodwork! He showed Rafael the cherrywood nightstand he had finished the day before. The drawer glided smoothly, like satin, without a single hitch.

While the other men took their afternoon break, Ian grabbed his jacket and drove off to fetch Daphne from school. He could manage the round trip in just over twenty minutes when everything went on schedule, but of course it seldom did. Today, for instance, he must have left the shop too early. When he parked in front of the school he found he had several minutes to kill, and even longer if Daphne, as usual, came out late or had to run back in for something she’d forgotten. So he cut the engine and stepped from the car. The air was warm and heavy and windy, as if an autumn storm might be brewing. Behind him, another car pulled up. A freckled woman in slacks got out and said, “What, we’re early?”

“So it seems,” Ian said. Then, because he felt foolish just standing around with her, he put his hands in his pockets and ambled toward the building. Scudding clouds glared off the second-floor windows—the art-room windows, Ian recalled, and Miss Dunlap’s world-history windows, although Miss Dunlap must have retired or even died by now. Two boys in track suits jogged toward him on the sidewalk, separated around him, and jogged on. He wondered if they guessed what he was doing here. (“That’s Daphne Bedloe’s uncle; she’s on suspended suspension and has to go home under guard.”) It occurred to him that Daphne would be mortified if anyone she knew caught sight of him. He circled the school, therefore, and kept going. He passed the little snack shop where he and Cicely used to sit all afternoon over a couple of cherry Cokes, and he came
to the Methodist church with its stained-glass window full of stern, narrow angels. One of the church’s double doors stood open. Almost without thinking, he climbed the steps and went inside.

No lights were lit, but his eyes adjusted quickly to the gloom. He made out rows of cushioned pews and a carved wooden pulpit up front, with another stained-glass window high in the wall behind it. This one showed Jesus in a white robe, barefoot, holding His hands palm forward at His sides and gazing down at Ian kindly. Ian slid into a pew and rested his elbows on the pew ahead of him. He looked up into Jesus’ face. He said,
Would it be possible for me to have some kind of sign?

Nothing fancy. Just something more definite than Reverend Emmett offering a suggestion
.

He waited. He let the silence swell and grow.

But then the school bell rang—an extended jangle that reminded him of those key chains made from tiny metal balls—and his concentration was broken. He sighed and stood up. Anyhow, he had probably been presumptuous to ask.

In the doorway, looking out, he saw the first of the school crowd passing. He saw Gideon with a redheaded girl, his arm slung carelessly around her neck so they kept bumping into each other as they walked.

Gideon?

There was no mistaking that veil of blond hair, though, or the hunched, skulking posture. Almost as if this were Ian’s love, not Daphne’s, he felt his heart stop. He saw the redhead crane upward for a kiss and he drew his breath in sharply and stepped back into the shadow of the door.

By the time he reached the car, Daphne was waiting in the front seat. The car’s interior smelled of breath mints and tobacco. “Where’ve you
been
?” she
squawked as he got in, and he said, “Oh, around.” He started the engine and pulled into the crawl of after-school traffic. “No Gideon?” he asked.

“It’s his day to go to his dad’s.”

“Oh.”

Daphne slid down in her seat and planted both feet on the dashboard. It appeared she was wearing combat boots—the most battered and scuffed he had ever laid eyes on. He hadn’t realized they came that small. Her olive-drab trousers seemed intended for combat too, but the blouse beneath her leather jacket was fragile white gauze with two clusters of silver bells hanging from the ends of the drawstring. Any time she moved, she gave off a faint tinkling sound and the grudging creak of leather. How was it that such an absurd little person managed to touch him so?

He thought of Gideon’s blond head next to the coppery, gleaming head of the girl in the crook of his arm.

Daphne
, he should say,
there’s something I have to tell you
.

But he couldn’t.

He pulled up in front of their house and waited for her to get out, staring blankly through the windshield. To his surprise, he felt a kiss on his cheekbone as light as a petal. “Bye,” she said, and she slipped away and shut the car door behind her. He could almost believe she knew what he had spared her.

One day last summer, while sitting with Honeybunch in the veterinarian’s waiting room, Ian had noticed a particularly sweet-faced golden retriever. “Nice dog,” he had told the owner, and the owner—a middle-aged woman—had smiled and said, “Yes, I’ve had a good number in my day, but this one: this is the dog of my life. You know how that is?”

He knew, all right.

Daphne, he felt, was the
child
of his life. He wondered if he would ever love a daughter of his own quite so completely.

It was true the older two were easier. In a sense, he even liked them better. Thomas was so merry and winsome, and Agatha had somehow smoothed the corners off that disconcerting style of hers—the bluntness transformed into calm assurance, the aggressive homeliness into an intriguing, black-and-white handsomeness. He enjoyed them the way he would enjoy longtime best friends who found the same things funny or upsetting and didn’t need every last remark explained for them. In fact, you could say they were his
only
friends. But Daphne was the one who tugged at him most deeply.