Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

  He said this from the pulpit, but he was saying it to Jack, who, to distract him from the parsing of some recent mischief, had almost confided to him that he had certain doubts about his soul. This near-confession was probably meant to stir his father to the kind of gentle exasperation that meant he’d be brooding about him for a week and preaching to him on Sunday, another boyish prank, really, even though what he had told his father was true enough. The whole congregation would have understood when he said good manners were an excellent beginning, a kind of discipline that could lead to actual virtue, given time. Jack could be terribly polite. Everyone in that sanctuary who was old enough to be capable of the slightest cynicism would be thinking, Butter would not melt in that boy’s mouth! He was great at setting teeth on edge. They also understood that a minister had to find hope where he could, like anybody else. Jack would sometimes stand beside his father, grinning, shaking hands as the flock filed out, much more than charming, and his father’s irritation and embarrassment would register as a tremor in the arm he put around him. It was in some part as a courtesy to his father that Jack began to slip out of the house before dawn on Sundays. If he were honest, the attractions of being anywhere else, in the chill and the dark, were also a consideration.

  Be that as it may. He could think of the hours he had spent with Della without particular regret, not counting that time he had ducked out on her at the restaurant. He felt that he owed this to his father’s sermons on the value of good manners, even without reference to whatever meaning they might have or lack in any particular circumstance. This was a truth arrived at by argument too precarious to be rescued by a truly emphatic conclusion involving a fist flourished in the air, yet too essentially wistful to be discredited by a guffaw or two in the choir. From all his father’s careful instruction this was the one teaching Jack took away. So, on that precious day, when he saw a lady drop an armful of papers on the pavement in a rainstorm, he had crossed the street to help her gather them up. The wind had sent a few of them scudding off, and he had handed her his umbrella and ran a few steps to catch them. There was laughter involved. She had said, “Thank you, Reverend,” out of respect for that dark suit he was honest enough to sell once it had dried out so he could stop deceiving people in that particular way. He knew he would not make it home for the funeral, and besides, he scrupled. His reluctance to toy with what were sometimes people’s better impulses had brought that word to mind. There was little enough to be gained from it in any case. There was an unseemliness in asking a fellow for a dime or a smoke while wearing a suit like that one. Being unshaven was no help. Once or twice he heard out a tirade on the corruptions of the clergy by someone who took his actual, ordinary life for his secret life—a preacher on the bad side of town, abject with drink and general dissolution. That suit made a hypocrite of him. Still, when the lady to whom he had been so courteous said, Thank you, Reverend, it was as if she thought she knew him, as if her opinion of him were favorable beyond the fact of his having lent her an umbrella—which he would have to have back, since the gentle candor of her expression made him certain he had to be rid of that suit, which was depreciating by the minute. So he took the umbrella from her hand and walked her to her door, enjoying the gallantry of the gesture, nicely balanced between apparent and real. He had gotten his umbrella back without quite taking it from her. And when they reached her door, she had asked him in. “The rain might be letting up a little,” she said, “if you have time for a cup of tea—” This was a little bold of her. He thought one of his sisters, Glory maybe, would invite a stranger in off the street on the recommendation of a clerical look and a minor kindness, never thinking to ask whether he had, for example, been released from prison lately. In a couple dozen months he had acquired habits he knew he might never outlive. Even then, taking a chair at a small table by a window, surrounded by the modest good order and general teacherliness of her apartment, he kept searching his memory for a word that rhymed with “scruple.” Quadruple. He was calming himself, which meant he was nervous. Jesus was there among the pictures on the upright piano, the only one in color. “Quintuple” doesn’t rhyme. How can that be? Sweet Jesus, don’t let me say anything strange.

  She brought tea in an old-fashioned china pot with a chip in its spout. She gave him a cup and saucer that somehow commemorated Memphis. Sunday things, because he was a minister. He couldn’t see what her cup commemorated, but it was small and ornate like his. Like the cups that lined a narrow shelf in the kitchen at home at once pointedly and futilely out of his reach. Those little handles break off so easily, and they can’t really be glued on again. His sisters tried and tried. Hope, the musical sister, had hands like hers, slender and somehow lively. He said, “Do you play?”

  “Not really. Not very well. Do you?”

  “‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’” She laughed. Actually, the only part of prison he missed, besides a predictable lunch, was playing piano for chapel services, which were sometimes funerals. He had worked up barrelhouse versions of some very solemn hymns.

  She said, “The piano belongs to the woman I share this place with. Her mother left it to her. She doesn’t really play much either.”

  He had said, for some reason, “I often regret—” and thought it best not to continue.

  She nodded. “They had a terrible time getting me to practice. I told them I wanted to be a poet!”

  That was interesting. “Did you ever stop wanting to be a poet?”

  She shrugged. “I haven’t stopped yet. I suppose someday I will. I don’t have much to show for it. My grandmother met Paul Dunbar once. I guess that gave me the idea. I have a book he signed for her. It was her treasure. Now it’s my treasure.”

  He had said, “That’s very nice,” and he had thought, Don’t show it to me. Don’t put it down anywhere near me. That old fellow dozing on the bench with his umbrella hooked over the back of it, and his cane, too, would have been waked up when the rain began and hobbled off somewhere, cursing himself for his own trusting nature, most likely. Then came that difficult algebra—did the exasperation Jack had caused cancel out the kindness he had done under the inspiration of a handsome umbrella? A kindness done to this particular lady because he was ready to enjoy the courtesy so newly and fortuitously possible for him? She did have a sweet face, a warm laugh. And he hoped he’d have helped her gather her papers, in any case. But the umbrella made a performance of it. As he hurried back to her, she lifted it a little to include him under it. Then he held it over her and walked her to her door. She had called him Reverend and offered him tea, and he had stepped over a threshold into a world where there would of course be a hymnal open on the piano, the odds and ends of a grandmother’s china, no doubt a hundred trifling things not at all worth stealing that he could slip into his pocket, given the chance. She said, “I’ll show you that book.” He had almost said, Please don’t. But in a moment there it was, open in her two hands to the page with the signature. Then she put it down on the table in front of the sofa and came back to her chair. “I’m always afraid I’ll spill something on it.”

  He had said, “It pays to be careful.” Then he said, “I’ve been reading some poetry lately.” This was actually true. He went to the library most days. There was usually no one in the poetry section, so he could sit there till the place closed, trying to imagine what to do with himself now that all the world lay before him, so to speak. A kindly old librarian noticed him, always with a book open in front of him, of course. She brought him cookies on a napkin with a fraying embroidered flower on it and said, “You’ll be sure to wipe your fingers,” which he did, and he put the napkin on the front desk as he left. Then one time she set a copy of Paterson on the table in front of him, smiled to recommend it, and vanished, a little arthritically, into the stacks. He seemed to bring out the angelic in old ladies. And it was a very great book! It made it seem a profound thing to sit on a bench watching the river, the ships, the gulls, which was another way he had of killing time. He loved that
book, and out of respect for that lady did not steal it, only put it behind shelved books where no one else would find it. He had said, “Have you read Paterson? W. C. Williams?” An actual question, since he wanted her to have read it. “No. I’ve heard of it. My tastes are pretty traditional.”

  “You have to read it. You’ll see what I mean.” He had said, “When I’m down by the river—that bridge seems like some huge ancient thing that has just leapt out of the earth, all mass and clay and fossils, on its way somewhere—everything seems like a metaphor, you don’t need to know for what. After you read that book.”

  She was laughing at him, her eyes shining. “I’ll get me a copy tomorrow, promise. And you have to read W. H. Auden.”

  “He’s on my list!” It was a kind of pact! They laughed, and then they were quiet, and then he had said, “I should be going, now that the rain has eased up.” It hadn’t. “There’s never time enough, in my line of work. Thanks for the tea and the shelter, Miss—”

  “Della Miles.”

  She offered her hand and he took it.

  “And I am John Ames Boughton,” a version of himself which only felt like a lie, called up by the tea and the china, and a certain exuberance at the fact that the afternoon had gone well enough. He had thought of forgetting the umbrella as a pretext for stopping by again, but she handed it to him. He would have to think of another ruse before he got rid of that suit.

  * * *

  He knew better. He would not be leaving books on her step with notes in them, brief but very clever, that would make her think of him for a minute or two every now and then. On one hand, if he did, it would give him a pleasant thing to be thinking about, working out the little messages in his mind, for weeks perhaps, and finding the right books to steal. On the other hand, people do that sort of thing when they imagine something might come of it. She couldn’t be seen walking down the street with him without damage to her reputation, a risk a teacher can’t take. The same would not be true for him, since he hardly had a reputation, properly so called. His old compulsion to do damage as chance offered had seen to that. If anything remained to him that might be called a good name, walking down a street with her would put an end to it. He felt the warm chill of impulse, actually frightened himself a little with the thought that he could do harm so easily, so innocently, really, except in the fact that he knew how grave and final the harm would be to her. A shudder of guilt passed through him, stirring other guilt, of course. There he was on a park bench in the morning sun, among the squawk and gabble and the church bells, to his inner eye naked as Adam to his own scrutiny. Stay away from her, fool. That’s simple enough.

  So the next day he went to the store, or whatever it was, where he had bought the dark suit, a room with harsh window light and festoons of flypaper and tables heaped with discards, and traded it, with his hat and umbrella, for another hat and a double-breasted brown tweed suit with the impersonal smell of cigarette smoke already infused in it and a small stain on the left lapel. He changed in a back room and emerged more or less himself. It was a relief to put all his pretensions down on the counter. The trade was not to his advantage, except in the sense that he had hoped to find something cheap and a little raffish. Fair warning, he thought. And he was somehow relieved that he was no longer wearing a black suit with brown shoes. The man at the counter said, “I always have things that would fit you here. The widows bring them in.” Very funny.

  He would not let his mood be dampened. He bought a newspaper and a pack of cigarettes at a dark little shop crowded with pipe racks and souvenir humidors and ashtrays and cans of tobacco and cigars that smelled something like tar and licorice. Somewhere in it all was a radio blaring a baseball game. The little man at the cash register watched him intently, as if theft were a card trick and he was going to catch him at it this time. The effect of the suit, he thought, since he was pretty sure he’d never been in that particular shop before. He startled the fellow with a dollar bill, slipped the change in his pocket, and went out to the street. The baseball game was close—it was the eighth inning—so he leaned against the wall in the sun to listen and folded the paper to the crossword puzzle. He pushed his hat back on his head, hung a smoke from his lip, and worked the puzzle, thinking that if anyone noticed him, he would seem to be playing the horses. Clothes do make the man.

  He glanced up because he was thinking—six letters, the second one d—and there was Della. Flinch. That look in her eyes—surprise, realization, maybe rebuke. She was with another young woman. It seemed to him she paused for some part of a second, long enough that the other woman glanced at him, a little mystified at the almost nothing that had passed between them. And then they went on, arm in arm, heads together, laughing. Not at him or about him, dear Jesus.

  This was misery enough to justify a drink. A binge, in fact. But for some reason he just spent most of the night lying on his bed, feeling an elemental loneliness pour into his bones, that coldness that inheres in things, left to themselves. When the heart rests from its labors, for example, that excruciating push of blood. What had happened was just what he had intended, but he had not thought it would catch him off guard like that, all in one instant, without a word to say for himself, though what that word might have been he couldn’t imagine. He had done her no harm at all. One lie that was more her fault than his. No, it wasn’t. She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely. He puts on one suit of clothes, a fraud is what he is. He puts on another suit of clothes—a bum, a grifter. A draft dodger was what he was. Even that was a lie. His name was a lie, no matter who had dampened his brow with it. Also his manners and the words he used and the immutable habits of his mind. Sweet Jesus, there was no bottom to it, nothing he could say about himself finally. He was acquainted with despair. The thought made him laugh. He had to admit that he found it interesting, which was a mercy, and which made it something less than despair, bad as it was.

  I have been one acquainted with the night.

  I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

  Much of the time this was his favorite poem. The second line seemed to him like very truth. It was on the basis of the slight and subtle encouragements offered by despair that he had discovered a new aspiration, harmlessness, which accorded well enough with his habits if not his disposition. Keeping his distance was a favor, a courtesy, to all those strangers who might, probably would, emerge somehow poorer for proximity to him. This was his demon, an eye for the most trifling vulnerabilities. He was doing fairly well until he saw that umbrella. Not true. He had bought that suit to wear to his mother’s funeral. His brother Teddy had found the rooming house where he had been staying and left an envelope of money and a note. This had put Jack to the bother of finding another rooming house. Teddy seemed to have contented himself that the man at the counter was not entirely dishonest and left money with him from time to time, enough so that the man could appropriate half of it and Jack would have something to get by on. Cash meant that Teddy had been there, had once more traveled whatever distance in whatever weather, at intervals that were long but regular enough that Jack could have been there, sitting on the steps, when that brown sedan pulled up. The embraces, the tears. Jack had thought about it, which did not mean he had considered it. In any case, there was the chance, the likelihood, that Teddy, ever the gentleman, was making himself easy to avoid. And he persisted, leaving money on the chance that Jack was alive and got some of the money, accepting the assurances the desk clerk offered him.

  For two years the clerk might not have known where Jack was or that he was alive, but he saved up half the money that Teddy left, which was notably honorable. When Jack appeared again, he handed him a note from his father that said, “Your dear mother is failing. She yearns to see you,” and so on, and the note from his
brother that said, “I can come for you. Or you can buy a bus ticket. At least try to come home in time for the funeral, which we expect will be soon.” So, the dark suit. Half an intention, fought to a draw by a dozen considerations, the chief one being that he no doubt still had something of prison about him, sullen acquiescence and the rest. They might expect him to see his mother in her coffin, maybe with his father looking on, which would confront him with the meaning of his life, which had no meaning at all but was terrible in its consequences. He had learned to seem hardened against rebuke, and that would be unacceptable in the circumstances.

  Terrible thoughts would get him out of bed, out into the weather where the trees and the people were, all, everything, indifferent to his sins and omissions. Why wash, why shave. He went to his bench by the bridge and dozed dreamlessly in the sun. Someone passed behind him and sat down at the other end of the bench. It was Della. He knew it before he had even opened his eyes, and he could hardly believe his eyes when he saw her, sitting there quietly, reading a book. Worse and worse. She glanced at his face, saw whatever she saw, and went back to her book.

  He said, “I want to apologize.”

  And she said, “No need.” It had to appear that they weren’t there together, so she turned a little away from him. “I was rude.”

  A white couple passed arm in arm, talking together in those voices people use when they seem to want to be overheard. The woman—“I’ll tell you what I think!” The man—“I think I already know!” Laughter.

  Then Jack said, softly, “No. Not at all.”