Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

  * * *

  He spent that week offering to put his shoulder to the wheel of commerce and actually landed a stint in a dance studio. He got a haircut and a shoe shine and went back again to that dance pavilion where he had seen Della, and after an hour or two, there she was, with two young women this time. And this time he walked over to her, tipped his hat, and said, “Miss Miles,” and her friends smiled at each other and him and stepped away. If she could be brave, given all she had to lose, certainly he could, too. He was glad he had nerved himself to read her poem, and avoided the embarrassments of dealing with the fact that estimable people—his sisters, specifically—could write very bad poems. Glory cried once. She was a little kid, for heaven’s sake, and he had subjected her to fairly withering criticism. What a scoundrel he was, before he made a vocation of harmlessness. But people watch your reactions, and try as you might, they are rarely deceived. There was that fellow in prison. A left uppercut before Jack had even gotten to his main point.

  And here was Della, standing beside him as if neither of them could ever be anywhere else. The crowd seemed indifferent to them, talking and joking around enough that they drifted to the edge of it, where they could hear each other if they decided to say anything.

  Finally Jack said, “I thought Methodists didn’t dance.”

  “Do Presbyterians?”

  “This one does.”

  They drifted beyond the light, and they found that there were steps down to a shabby garden and picnic tables. By then he was holding her hand, her smooth, slender hand, more perfect in his than he ever imagined it would be. And she felt perfect in his arms.

  “This is a waltz,” he said.

  She said, “I know.”

  They waltzed through four songs, two fast and two slow, and they waltzed in the time between songs and after the last one had ended. Then she said, “I have to find my friends. People will be talking!” When she was on the second step, she turned and lifted his hat and smoothed back his hair, kissed his brow, and replaced his hat. So he kissed her cheek. Chaste, chaste. The dourest angel in heaven could not find fault. They stood there together, not speaking, not touching. Then she ran up the steps. He followed, to make sure she was with her friends, and then he went down into the dark to sit at a picnic table and think.

  * * *

  He had a job, a very good thing in the circumstances. He would need to practice a few new steps, but that sort of thing came easily. His fox-trot was absolutely solid. He would be paid, and then he would consider his options. His option, more precisely, which was to bring Della upstairs to his room. There would be the smart remark as they passed the desk, then smirks and stares if other inmates of the place happened to be around, then his room with the door closed, his very orderly room with some kind of curtain thing on the window and two chairs he’d find somewhere. He could push the bed to one side to make room for the chairs and put the wobbly little table beside his bed between the chairs so that if he could think of something to offer her to eat or drink he could do that. It would mean moving the little Bible his father had given him when he found him sitting by the river early one Sunday morning and told him he might as well consider himself confirmed. “A full-fledged member of the invisible church,” he said, and laughed, and shook his head. “God willing.” He remembered the feeling of his father’s hand on his shoulder. The day was calm and still, and his father was enjoying it, enjoying the silence, and Jack was, too. It was the Sabbath. The Reverend had to be elsewhere, but he could hardly bring himself to leave. “Well,” he said finally, “dinner will be roast beef. To celebrate,” hoping to lure him home. And he took the little book out of his jacket pocket and set it down on the rock beside him, not presuming even to put it in Jack’s hand. He said, “The Lord bless you and keep you,” to solemnize the moment a little, and then he went away. If Della saw that Bible, she’d know exactly what it was and how many years he had kept it. He had read in it when there was nothing else, which had given it a worn look. It would inevitably redound to his credit with a preacher’s daughter. In his mind he put it away in a dresser drawer. He might let her see it sometime, when she knew him better.

  Bringing Della upstairs to his room. So he could talk with her, show her whatever he could muster in the way of welcome and courtesy, which was so very little that, weighed against the jokes and insults they might expect, it hardly seemed worth the attempt. Still, he would look around for a radio.

  * * *

  The next day was a Sunday, enforced idleness just when he was filled with new resolve. So he made his bed and shaved and went out for a walk. The city was closed, but the doors of churches were open, releasing gusts of music and sociability, and incense and pot luck and perfume. The particular formal intimacy of reunion in these households, as his father called them. Pious obligation satisfied, pious expectation met. He could forget there were so many churches, opening on the cold pavement, then closing their doors for talk about absolute things in words particular and familiar to them, reminding themselves of their life together and the life to come, singing the old songs. Yes, households, where welcoming the stranger arose often as a subject, as if welcome were what every stranger wanted and strangerliness were without comforts of its own, habit, for example, and some others that were not coming to mind just then. He found himself stepping off the curb to keep apart from the intense little crowds that gathered at these doorways. Poe was exactly right—bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.

  He felt a light, fluttering touch of some kind at the back of his neck and swatted at it with his hand. It was a thin strip of fabric, a part of the disintegrating lining of his hat. He took his hat off and was looking into its crown, an odd word for it, thinking whether it would be worth trying to mend the weary satin in some way or glue it down, or if he might as well just tear it out and be done with it. Then a dime dropped into it. He looked up to explain the misunderstanding, but whoever it was, a black man, waved him off, sparing him, as he must have thought, a word of gratitude. When he looked back, there were more nickels and dimes, and an old lady searching her handbag for change. “I was just looking at my hat,” he said.

  She said, “Of course you were, honey,” and added a dime. She said, “You come on in. We’re having a nice little dinner afterward. There’s always plenty and to spare.”

  It was a black church, and he would feel like an intruder. That strange embarrassment. On the other hand, he was mortified that he had been taken for a beggar. Whatever depths he might sink to, he generally managed not to sink that far, at least while he was sober. So, to rescue what of himself he could from the ashes of humiliation, he would step into the church to find a place to put the money, a collection plate or something.

  The congregation were all sorting themselves among the pews or seated, but there was a young man standing in the narthex, a fellow with the modest dignity of a minor office, a deacon, an usher. Jack held out his hat to him to show him its contents and said, “There was a misunderstanding. I was just looking at the lining of my hat.” He couldn’t bring himself to actually name the mistake.

  “Yes, I see.” The young man’s tact made Jack aware of what a horrible exposure this was, a nest of satin much stained by use, in partial tatters, the tonic of every previous owner eating away at it. It looked like endless furtive disillusionment, like corrosive thoughts working their way through his skull, dampened a little by habits of embarrassment and regret. And then those pennies and dimes. He said, “I just wanted to give you this.” The young man looked at him. So he said, “The money.” It was pride as well as the thought of clarifying his meaning that made him take a dollar from his own pocket to add to the hat. “I see,” the young man said, and took the hat in his hands, a little gingerly, and then, remembering his office, he said, “Please join us for worship. You’re right welcome to join us,” and walked off with his hat. It had cost Jack a dollar to lose his hat, a dollar plus considerable mortification. He had gone out for a walk, meaning no harm, and
this had befallen him. These little cyphers in the arithmetic of cosmic justice must be as insoluble as the great questions, he supposed. If his error was to imagine that harmlessness was equivalent to insignificance, as if he could elude existence and its consequences by dint of sheer quietism, these thistles sprouted in his solitary path to remind him that meaning could have a decimal point with a thousand 0’s before the cypher and still be what it is, could still permit certain conclusions that begin with There’s no telling, or There’s no escaping. He sat down on the last pew, a few feet from the nearest parishioner.

  The preacher was a small man with a big, warm voice. “My dear friends,” he said, “let us pray. Let us trust our whole hearts to the Father who knows us and loves us.”

  A hundred bowed heads. The thought came to Jack that someone here might know Della, a foolish thought. If the population of St. Louis was half black, that doubled the likelihood that any given black person might know her, but the chance would still be minute. This made no sense. It compared black people to an imaginary “people in general,” to whom the words “white” or “colored” do not apply, and such people don’t exist. Say there were two cities, one black, one white. This was and wasn’t true, and was beside the point in any case. The people he was sitting among were Baptists of some kind, as their friends and kin probably were, too, and Della was a Methodist. People don’t just know each other at random. But he, as a white man in the black city, felt conspicuous, that is, more likely to come up anecdotally somehow, so that this foolish episode would have an echo. Say he did not recover his hat but they kept the miserable thing in case he came back for it, ready on a table or a shelf so that someone could find it for him. Out of place, in other words. And people would say, Who does that old hat belong to? And the answer would be, You remember that skinny white man that was out begging in front of the church last week, last month, last year? And the story would live on and reach her finally.

  He had tried, so far as this calculus of dread permitted attention to what was passing around him, to sway and sing and clap when they did, and to voice the occasional Amen. He was not failing to pass for a Baptist so much as experiencing the fact, whatever this could possibly mean in his case, that he really was a Presbyterian. He had experienced this, though not in so many words, when he realized he had to exchange the double-breasted suit for one that was a little shabbier but which carried no suggestion of bonhomie.

  He was so preoccupied with his anxieties the realization came upon him suddenly that he was not far from Sumner, Della’s school. He had been careful lately not to walk by it, or near it, but his old habit asserted itself when he seemed to be thinking of other things, more or less. A janitor or librarian might very well live in the neighborhood and come to this church. She would know everything. A surge of shame passed through his body. He felt for his handkerchief. Sweet Jesus, how sudden it was that he was daubing at his face, his eyes stinging, the man beside him watching him now with gentle concern.

  Embarrassment overwhelmed him. The preacher had mentioned repentance from time to time without special emphasis. Still, everyone around him must have thought he, Jack, was in the throes of repentance, reconsidering his sullied life. And in fact, he was wondering why he should repent so bitterly when he had done nothing more disgraceful than stop on the pavement to consider the lining of his hat. If the Fall had made sinfulness pervasive and inescapable, then correction might be abrupt and arbitrary, to draw attention to itself as the assurance of an ultimate order without reference to specific wrongs, which, in a post-lapsarian world, must all more or less run together. These are the terms in which he made sense of most bad surprises. They were of little use except in retrospect, which had not arrived yet. And the same young man who had carried off his hat was coming down the aisle, taking the collection, so futile pride compelled Jack to drop his other dollar in the plate. His hat, his two dollars, his personal dignity, and quite possibly any hope he had of maintaining a jot of status in Della’s eyes gone because he had decided to go out for a walk. No wonder he had a drinking problem.

  He almost left the church without asking after his hat, but he loitered a few minutes, looking around for the young man. The lady who had invited him to come for lunch, dauntlessly cordial, took him by the crook of his arm and led him down some stairs to a basement, more specifically, a church basement, which resembles everything of its kind and nothing else in the world. His heart sank with nostalgia. Chairs and tables battered by merciless use, a frieze of child art on scriptural subjects. An upright piano. There was a kitchen, too, big pots on the stove and the smell of beans cooked with a ham bone, and corn bread. The lady said, “You sit here and I’ll bring you a plate. Everybody gets in line and then they start visiting and forget why they’re in line in the first place, and folks waiting behind them, getting hungry.”

  Jack said, “That’s very kind of you, ma’am. I seem to have lost my hat.” She said, “One thing at a time.” And she did bring him beans and corn bread, with a promptness that seemed to suggest she saw him as an emergency. He knew it was his lean and hungry look that rallied old ladies, galvanizing their compassion, making him, in their eyes, a middle-aged orphan. The beans were wonderful, so he ate them even though this would encourage the notion that he was a beggar, not simply a gentleman betrayed by circumstance. The corn bread was also very fine.

  She filled his plate again. All that nutrition settled his nerves. Surrounded by so much talking and laughter, he began to feel a little conversational, though he could not think of anything to say to anybody. He went to the piano and touched some keys. I would be true, for there are those who trust me; / I would be pure, for there are those who care. This came from the heavy heart of his nostalgia, the anthem of a childhood aspiration he did not himself share.

  Somebody said, “Play the song!” So he played it from the beginning, with a few little flourishes. They clapped, and one or two said, “All right!” Then someone said, “Now you play something, Miss Jones. Show him how it’s done!” That little woman shook her head, seemed to demur, then sat down and played a most spectacular “Rock of Ages.”

  “Your turn now, honey,” she said.

  “I can’t do anything like that.”

  She laughed. “I doubt anybody expects you to.”

  So he played “The Old Rugged Cross,” not quite as he had done for those convict funerals since he was in a church, but close enough. They clapped and said, “Now you, Miss Jones.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got things to do. I’ve got to get home.”

  Jack said, “Yes, if I can find my hat, I’ll be on my way. And thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “Well, you come back any time. I could teach you a few things!”

  She was laughing, but he said, “That would be very kind.”

  “Here comes your hat.”

  The young man came down the steps carrying it upside down on the tips of his fingers, a weightless vessel, the money still in it. He felt a shock of embarrassment when he saw it. He considered saying, This is a mistake. I was trying to give the money back, I’m not a beggar, but even the thought of the denial embarrassed him. He could hear the civilities through the thrum of blood in his ears—he should come back again, always a nice dinner, that piano doesn’t get enough use. Yes, yes, he said, goodbye, certain he would never step through that door again, where everyone would think of him as the beggar out on the pavement, the stranger who wiped away tears at the mere mention of repentance. Where someone might know who he was and carry the piteous tale back to Della, none of it true, but all of it, he knew, entirely believable.

  * * *

  He came back the next Sunday for two reasons. Actually three. He could drop those coins into the collection plate, putting various things right even if no one noticed he had done it. A metaphysics is a great help in rationalizing scruple-driven behavior. Then there was dinner. And there was the fact that that whole week he had been feeling “Blessed Jesus” and “Sweet Hour of Praye
r” and even “Holy, Holy, Holy” in his fingers. So he had thought he might as well go back the next Sunday and put himself in the way of some moral edification. He remembered glorious soprano voices rising out of the congregation to second the choir. He even liked the feeling that he stirred that tentative interest, that bated warmth, church people feel toward a stray in their midst.

  Things were going well enough at the dance studio. The instructors came early to sprinkle a powdery wax on the floor and walk or waltz it slippery, playing at elegance in preparation for feigning it when customers appeared. They studied charts and followed them out till they could do the steps with a little ease and flair. He would repeat them all day long with his arms around perfumey women. One two three, one two three. It was an innocuous proof of the oddness of the world, and there was music. On his way home one evening, he bought a small geranium plant with a red blossom on it and set it on his windowsill. This was a first step toward improving the impression his room would make on Della, if he ever actually nerved himself to bring her into it. But the plant deeply changed his own impression of the room. He even dreamed one night that he heard those heavy shoes on the stairs, the police, but this time when they came through the door they were distracted by the sight of the geranium, as if it refuted suspicion, dispelling the mild aversion felt toward him and his kind by the constabulary. Assuming he had a kind. Its implications seemed so great to him, even by light of day, that leaving it where it was was an actual decision. It had its effect when he set it on the dresser and on the bedside table.