Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

  Jack said, “It’ll do,” feigning an indifference he could not actually feel. When he got to his room and closed the door, he examined the creature for any distinguishing features that would prove it was not his cat, but it had none, which proved absolutely nothing. How could this be? That part of his mind was off searching for equivalences again. Every defect is singular, but a perfect cat is indistinguishable from a million others, in theory, even though in fact there might be just one perfect cat. Well, he’d call this his cat and put a mark on it, a nick in an ear, a missing toe, so he would not be tricked into wasting sardines on a cat that had no claim on him. It disgusted him to think of marring the creature. So he patted aftershave on it, to distinguish it from the street cats if this was necessary again. It ran under the dresser and hissed at his shoe. He fetched it out and set it on the windowsill. It jumped down. He put it back again. It jumped down.

  The clerk usually went wherever he went about nine o’clock and came back in forty minutes smelling of an unenviable supper. When Jack heard the front door close behind him, he reached under the dresser for the cat, doused it with aftershave, reasoning that it was very likely to attempt an escape, and bundled it into that brown V-neck sweater with the leather elbow patches and antique buttons Teddy had left for him, which was kindly intended certainly but which could only mean his earnest and loyal brother had, unbeknownst to himself, forgotten him. Through the loose fabric he felt the prickle of tiny fangs and still transparent claws far longer than he expected to, and then it fell asleep. He walked for miles. Never allowing himself a doubt about whether wisdom or decent manners should have intervened, he came to Della’s house and sat down on her stoop. To sit there in the dark was his whole intention. What the hell, anyway. It would be his adieu. She would know this somehow. A reeking stray might cross her path, and she would think of Jack, suddenly, unaccountably. He almost laughed.

  The porch light flicked on, then off, and the door opened. Della stepped out. “I thought it was you,” she said, and she sat down beside him. Furry slippers, a puffy robe, hair in curlers tied up in a kerchief. Dear Lord, she was still warm from a bath. She said, “No one doesn’t make any noise like you don’t make any noise.”

  Wonderful. The sound of her voice was more than a relief to him, quintessentially companionable, as if the two of them were together in the world, uniquely, like two strayed angels, despite anything and everything. He said, “I thought you might want a cat.” He caught it before it could escape the bundled sweater and handed it to her, hissing. Why did he do that? He knew in the dark it was making a fiend of itself, bared teeth, flattened ears, slitted eyes, hind legs digging at her hand. “My landlord doesn’t want me to keep it. Here, you’d better let me hold it.”

  It bit and struggled against her hands and fetched up wailing growls from its tiny body, but she pulled the sleeves of her robe down over her hands and kept hold of it. She began to laugh. “It smells like Old Spice,” she said. “A lot of Old Spice.”

  “I can explain that,” he said, though he’d rather die.

  “Now I have to go in, smelling of aftershave! Aftershave all over me! I’ll just say—what am I going to say? The house will smell like this for a month.” There was laughter in her voice, thank God, because she had every reason to be mad at him. He should have thought this through, but he hadn’t expected to actually see her.

  “I didn’t really expect to see you,” he said.

  “You were just going to sit here in the dark? You and your cat? You couldn’t spare me a knock on the door?”

  He said, “Della, I’m ridiculous. It never changes. Every day is a new proof. An entirely sufficient proof. This probably isn’t even my cat. For example.” No point getting into that. He said, “It would be like a curse, the everlastingness of it, except that it is so trifling, so meaningless. Half the time, when something happens, I’m thinking, Thank God Della didn’t see that. I wanted to say goodbye to you. In my mind, anyway. And I knew it would calm me, just being here for a few minutes. One last time.” He said, “‘All losses are restored, and sorrows end.’ One last time.”

  “I love that poem,” she said softly. “‘Dear friend.’”

  “Yes.”

  They were quiet.

  Then she said, “Is this the only time you’ve come here like this? Because there have been other times when I thought you were here, but when I looked, you weren’t, and I thought you’d slipped away and I’d missed you. So here I am in my bathrobe with curlers in my hair, because I didn’t want to miss you this time.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “That means a great deal to me.”

  After a minute, she said, “It’s real. That peace.”

  “‘The peace that passes all understanding.’ Sorry. I shouldn’t joke—”

  “No, it really does pass understanding. That has to mean something.”

  “Nothing has to mean something. So far as I can tell. Well, it does mean I’m much too happy to be where I shouldn’t be. Which is here on your stoop. But that is its effect, which is not the same as its meaning, if it has one, I realize.” The light from the streetlamp shone softly on her eyes, the planes of her face. She had taken to rubbing the cat’s belly. Pensive.

  After a while, she said, “If you make a sound it’s just a sound, unless it belongs to a language, and then it’s a word. It means something. It can’t not mean something.”

  “‘Day to day pours forth speech, / and night to night declares knowledge. / There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; / Yet their voice goes out through all the earth, / and their words to the end of the world.’ Is that what you mean? I used to memorize things. I was pretty good at it. I’ve forgotten the rest. The sun, ‘like a strong man runs its course with joy.’ And so on.” He said, “Did you just come up with that? The thing you were saying about words? It was pretty interesting.”

  “Oh no. I believe I came up with that about a week ago. You and I argue in my mind all the time. Often I win.” She laughed. “I’m serious, though.”

  “So if I were to grant what I can’t grant, everything would begin to make sense.”

  “Well, put it the other way. If, certain things being granted, the world began to make sense, that would be a reason to have some respect for the—hypothesis.”

  He truly did respect the hypothesis, and yet, feeling that old thrill of dread and compulsion, he knew circumstance had once again put him too close to a fragile thing. He said, “Look at the life we live, Della. I have to sneak over here in the dark just to steal a few words with you. Is that language, or is it noise?”

  She said, “It’s noise that you have to do it, and language that you do it, anyway.” She said softly, “Maybe poetry.”

  Well, he would be thinking about that for a while, conjuring a memory of the flush of happiness that startled him at the time. Why should an emotion like that be as sudden as fear is? What use is it, when there’s nothing to be done with it? The body imposes on itself a few seconds of pleasurable confusion, of vulnerability. Why? He stood up and stepped away from her, mainly just to look at her, her kerchiefed head and slender neck and that big robe falling around her. Chenille, sisterly and commonplace, probably pink, but so elegant in the faint light.

  She stood up, too, abruptly. She said, “I have to keep this cat. He’s my alibi.” And she went up the steps to her door and went inside. He heard her speak to Lorraine, “I’m sorry if we kept you from sleeping. I know, Lorraine, I’m sorry.” And the door closed. But it didn’t lock. So he took off his hat and he opened the door and stepped into that room, the little table by the window, the picture of Jesus on the piano, all of it so familiar, or at least so precisely remembered, that he almost felt as though he had some right to be there.

  Lorraine said, “Now, what do you think you’re doing in here, walking in like that. You go away. I’m about to start yelling.”

  But, what the hell, anyway, he went to Della
and put his arms around her.

  “Just a second,” she said, and put the cat on the couch, and then she came back into his arms, and there they were.

  Lorraine said, “They’re going to be hearing about this in Memphis, I can tell you that for sure,” and more to the same effect, but he held Della, and he kissed her lips. And she kissed his lips. It was entirely mutual, perfectly simultaneous, he was sure of it. There was no one to blame. He was about to say, I love you very much, thinking he might expect a reply of some kind. She said, “Goodbye” and stepped away from him, turned away from him.

  And then he was out on the stoop, adjusting his hat. The door opened again wide enough for Lorraine to nudge the kitten out after him with the toe of her slipper. He leaned against a fence a few houses down and lit a cigarette. Della came out onto her stoop with a coat over her robe and in street shoes. She saw him, he smiled and lifted his hat, turned his back and walked away. He thought he might hear her following him, but she really did just let him walk away.

  * * *

  Sunday night. Everything was dark, everything was closed. He was walking just to be walking. Did he want to show up for work tomorrow to help a few ladies improve their mambo? No. Would he? Yes. What a ridiculous life. But having a little money was good, and he got along with those ladies better than he usually did with people. Of course, sometimes they brought him a wedge of cake or half a batch of fudge. That was part of the economics of the universe. There were big freckled mirrors on the walls of the studio. Sometimes he could not avoid catching a glimpse of himself, seeing that strange excess of grace that looked like parody, and that now and then drew a cold glance from the manager of the place. Ah well. He might get an hour or two of sleep, pull himself together, and show up for work. The ladies would be glad to see him. They were flattered by his courtesy, somehow delighted when he made a joke of it—“You’re looking unusually lovely today”—and her name, if he remembered it.

  When payday came, he would spend the money drinking himself to death, more or less, and wake as wretched in mind and body as he already was in spirit. He would let himself think of Della, and rage and grieve from his very depths, and let himself feel his regret and embarrassment and his dreadful loneliness. After that, who knows. That one motive he had for going on was beginning to seem a little inadequate.

  He lay on his bed without sleeping until almost dawn. Then he decided to rouse himself, to do some other kind of nothing until the sun was up. He put his feet on the floor and switched on the light, and then he saw a letter, which someone had apparently slid under the door. The envelope had the mark of a shoe print on it, no doubt his. So it had been there all night, maybe most of the previous day. The desk clerk let mail accumulate in a drawer until he had a better reason to come upstairs. Teddy seemed to accept the other rooming house as his address. His boss knew where he lived. Della knew. So he was probably being fired. He left it lying there. Reproof has its sting, no matter who has taken it upon himself to administer it. His boss had bow legs and no sense of rhythm. No one brought him cake. And he was the one who got to do the firing. The very smallness of it all loomed over Jack gigantically.

  But, just in case, he did finally pick up the letter, and he saw the lucid script and the return address. This set off a storm of emotions he waited out flat on his back with his pillow over his face. When he sat up again and opened it, he saw the words Dear Friend. Sweet Jesus, when she saw him last night, she must have thought he had read her letter. “Dear friend,” she had said. “While I think on thee.” She had not said that. Still, how painful could any letter be that began with those two words? On Monday I leave for Memphis. Oh. That was painful.

  My family is concerned that I might be losing my way. They think I may have forgotten who I am, and the hope they have placed in me. I regret all the worry I have caused them, of course. And truly, sometimes I do wonder who I am. I believe this is a question I must try to answer for myself. Not long ago I thought I had answered it, and so did they. I truly hope they will help me to feel that way again. I have such respect for them, and I hate the thought that they might lose respect for me. There is really nothing I fear more.

  You have been a gracious companion through this long night, and I will always be grateful.

  Della

  * * *

  He was swooping his way through “The Tennessee Waltz,” a little inattentive to the very small woman who was trying to keep up with him and growing winded from the effort, when he realized that he could talk things over with Reverend Hutchins. He had an idea that he thought might be worth acting on. He would go to Memphis, find Della’s father’s church, sit through a sermon, and on his way out the door, as they shook hands, he would say, “Reverend Miles, I want to assure you that my relationship with your daughter was entirely honorable.” If he saw Della, he would do no more than nod to her. And he would nod to her brothers, unembarrassed by the fact that he had once appeared disreputable to them. It would be the humble act of a proud man, as it would have to be in order to be believed. The point of it all must be to seem capable of offering such an assurance for Della’s sake, to defend her honor, as they say. The fact that what he would say was absolutely true was almost a problem. Being believed when disbelief is only reinforced by the effort to persuade, by the fear of failing to persuade, this is a problem he had encountered thousands of times. He could not calibrate his sincerity when he hoped to make an impression with it. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, they said or thought, when he was still young enough to have made the experiment and to have been relieved by the result.

  He knew his awareness that a thousand things could go wrong made it certain that they would. There was no recovering that moment of purpose and optimism. But Reverend Hutchins might help him see things in a better light. This still seemed possible. So, once he was done with work, once he had led the last winded lady back to the bench where she had left her handbag, he was down the stairs and out the door and down the street on his way to Mount Zion Baptist Church.

  It was a Tuesday. But he thought this plan would have its best effect if he carried it out promptly, before he lost the last of his resolve, before his motives began to shift into self-protectiveness—Your daughter and I were never close, nothing to worry about there, nothing at all—this with a worldly smile. He might have paused to light a cigarette. A hard man, probably not the type to trifle with a schoolteacher.

  There was a light on in the church on the second floor, no doubt the minister’s study. It was one of those big urban churches built in a spirit of optimism that passing years and eminent domain had failed to justify, a hulk trimmed with wooden fretwork losing its paint to the rain. He tried three doors before he found one that opened and stepped into the darker evening of a hallway and a stairway. There was a smell of recent popcorn in the air that aroused memories of youth, but the building was quiet now. He walked up the stairs, scuffing his shoes enough, he thought, to seem not at all furtive. Still, when he stepped through the half-open study door, the minister startled and dropped his book. Another plan he had not thought through.

  But the minister was laughing. “Mr. Ames, isn’t it? Come in, come in. I guess I was just lost in my reading.” Convincing affability, and at the same time that tactful glance of appraisal, reasonable in the circumstances, since Jack could be deranged, for all he knew. “Take a seat,” he said. “Please.”

  Jack the potential suicide. That was where matters had been left the previous Sunday. Sometimes his father would come back from some urgent conversation, plainly exasperated that someone’s sanity or survival was thrust into his hands, suddenly a problem he should solve, comfort and assurance ready at the shortest possible notice. These attempts at rescue would keep him awake the whole night, thinking what he really should have said and how he might have been misinterpreted. “They keep doing it!” he said. That was the year a hailstorm stove the corn crop. But so much despair must have more than one cause. “If this was growing on him, he could at least h
ave given some sort of warning!” Jack’s mother would say, “He’ll be down at the store, shooting the breeze with all the other suicides.” And this was almost always true.

  And here was this poor Hutchins, trying to figure out whom or what he was dealing with. The study was a small room, mustard yellow, furnished with the scantest odds and ends, no doubt in deference to a thousand higher claims on the church’s resources. Books were stacked on the desk and floor. The room was lit by a single bulb hanging by its cord from the ceiling, the kind of light that brings out the full pallor of a pallid man and makes shadows of his eyes. I should leave, Jack thought, but his only hope of seeming rational was to muster a little conversation first. Short of that, he would be embarrassed to show up for beans and rice and “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” though he knew he would do it, anyway.

  “I’m sorry I’ve disturbed you, Reverend. I saw your light.”

  “Sit down, please, Mr. Ames. I have three grandbabies at my house just now, so I’m here for the quiet.”

  “I’ve disturbed you.”

  “No, that’s all right. And since you’re here, you might as well tell me what you have on your mind.”

  “Well, I’m not quite sure.”

  “All right. Think about it. There’s no rush.” After a minute spent fiddling with a pencil, he said, “You did mention a problem you have telling the difference between faith and presumption.”