Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

  “Really. You should tell me what you think about that. It’s hard to imagine.”

  He said, “It will be made up entirely of stolen minutes and hours every now and then, for years and years and years, and we will pity all the people whose lives are diluted with time and habit and complacency and respectability until they can hardly savor the best pleasures—we will live for a month on just once passing in the street.”

  She said, softly, “You are the only man in the whole world who could promise me that!”

  “Yes. And consider all the other advantages. You can meet your obligations, and I will remember to shave.”

  She put her head on his shoulder, toyed with his hand. “Now you’re making me sad.”

  He said, “I can make you sad. That’s wonderful, in a way.” He noticed that the thought didn’t really scare him.

  “Before we begin on this future of ours, you should come to my house for dinner Friday. Lorraine is in Charleston. She has family there. School’s out, so she’ll be gone for a while.”

  “What about the neighbors?”

  “They’re sort of used to you. The thought of you. There’s a rumor that you’re worshipping at Mount Zion. That makes you a little interesting.”

  “‘Worshipping.’ You know that’s an overstatement. They’re kind to me. I like the preacher. I like the choir.” He didn’t say, They give me lunch. That would not be interesting. A white stranger with a clerical manner is experiencing a religious stirring, the Spirit acting on his frozen soul here, now, among us. He could see the poetry in their misconception, could see why he might seem interesting to them. To Della. Despite certain attempts at reform, as far as he was concerned, truth versus poetry was really no contest. Yet here he was, being honest with himself, carrying on that endless, secret conversation that was himself, now making him wretchedly aware that, at best, he was allowing Della to be misled. Then he thought about the embarrassing business with the hat, and how that lady had hurried to feed him, as if she saw an extreme of neediness in him that alarmed her. Della might have heard about it all, though here she was, actually nestled against him, speaking so softly, toying with his hand. If she had not heard that story, she might hear it at any time. She would distance herself abruptly, and he would become as withdrawn and indifferent as he could manage without ending things irrevocably, until it was clear to him that that decision had been made. “Then.” “Afterward.” Two terrible words.

  She said, “You’re very quiet. You don’t want to come to my house.”

  “You can’t imagine how much I want to.”

  “Then will you?”

  “I have one question. How can we do this without, possibly, ruining your life?”

  “You’ll arrive at six, sober, bringing flowers, and you will leave at eight, sober. And there won’t be flowers or cats in the shrubbery to embarrass me once you’re gone.”

  “You think it will be that simple.”

  “Not really. Who knows? At least Lorraine won’t be there to glower at us. In a week she’ll be back. Sooner, if her cousins upset her somehow. That happens.”

  He said, “I should tell you that there is more, or less, to my visits to Mount Zion than you might realize. A long story; one that doesn’t reflect well on me. If you don’t know about that, maybe your neighbors do. Or they will. Their interest in me may not be entirely benign. I might not reflect well on you. To say the least.”

  “And my life will be ruined.”

  He nodded. “That’s my point.”

  “I just can’t quite seem to care. Things might go well enough, and after that I promise I’ll be thinking about my life day and night. Lorraine will help me with that.”

  He said, “There’s one more thing I want to make very clear. You might think I’m shiftless, in need of the love of a good woman, as my father used to say. But what you see here, this minimal existence, is actually the fruit of what can fairly be called earnest striving. I do not need to be converted to an ethic of work and frugality. I admire them heartily—I’ve aspired to them off and on for some time. And I’ve learned that I’m just not good at that sort of thing. I’m still more or less dependent on my brother. It’s disgraceful. So you’re involving yourself with a ne’er-do-well. You should think about that.”

  She said, “I have thought about it. I can’t seem to care about that, either.” She laughed. “I couldn’t wait to see you. I was supposed to stay in Memphis the whole week, and I just couldn’t do it. When my mother was putting all these things in my bag, she was too mad to talk to me. And my father! He wouldn’t even come downstairs to tell me goodbye. They knew why I was coming back.”

  He nodded. “I’m ruining things. I do that. I try to keep to myself, and it happens, anyway. The preacher at Zion said that if I were an honorable man I would leave you alone.”

  “Well, I guess I’ve made that difficult. You talked to him about me?”

  “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have done that. He reminds me a little of my father. I guess I feel at home in a church. Not at ease, but at home.” He said, “I thought we had ended it that night, and I suppose I was looking for comfort or something. Advice. A way to get by.”

  She nodded. “We did end it. You don’t think I’d be outside in my bathrobe and curlers talking to a man I thought I’d ever see again. It just wouldn’t stay ended.” Her fingers were threaded through his. She picked up his hand and kissed it, a little absentmindedly, and said, “I’ll tell you my thinking.”

  “All right.”

  “We all have souls, true?”

  He laughed. “Please go on.”

  “We do. We know this, but just because it’s a habit to believe it, not because it is really visible to us most of the time. But once in a lifetime, maybe, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world. And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You’ve seen the mystery—you’ve seen what life is about. What it’s for. And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it.”

  Her eyes were lovely with seriousness, he knew, though she didn’t look at him. Still, he had to laugh. “Am I to understand that you are speaking here of one Jack Boughton?”

  She nodded. “I learned this from you. From meeting you. It wasn’t as immediate as I’ve made it sound, but I began to realize—”

  “So I am immune from all judgment, on account of my celestial nature?”

  “Other people are, too, or they should be. But since it’s your soul I’ve seen, I know better than to think about you the way people do when they judge. The Lord says ‘Judge not,’ because when He looks at people, He just sees souls. That’s all. I suppose I’ve seen a few others. Kids at school. Yours is the brightest.”

  “A mystic.”

  “Think what you like.”

  “I think the sun is coming up. And I am worried about the propriety of kissing you. I might singe your lips.”

  She laughed. “You very well might.”

  A fine, solid kiss, and another one. Then she said, “By six o’clock Friday. I don’t mean twelve twenty-five. But it’s all right if you’re late. You don’t have to bring flowers.”

  “I do have to be sober.”

  “I’d appreciate it.” She stood up and began wrapping things in waxed paper to leave on the table for him. Light was leaking into the room around the edges of the window blind. She said, “I really should go now.” He took her coat from her and helped her on with it and handed her her gloves. He watched her settle her hat in place expertly, by touch. “You don’t have to be sober,” she said.

  He stepped away, to look at her face. “You don’t really think I’ll show up.”

  “You don’t want to ruin my life. And I could ruin yours. You’ll think of reasons not to come. You’ll make reasons.”<
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  “I don’t need to invent anything. If they decide we’re cohabiting, we could both go to jail. You could go to jail.”

  “I know that. My father got a copy of the statute and made me read it to him. So he’d be sure I was paying attention.”

  “I found it in the library.”

  “I don’t think they’d really do that, do you?”

  “I’m pretty sure they’d really do that.” He had dealt with law enforcement, though he still couldn’t bring himself to tell her. “I do want to be honorable. Where you’re concerned. The preacher said I should leave you alone. He’s right. But I will come to your house Friday if you want me to. Unchaperoned. In broad daylight. With flowers. Neighbors be damned.”

  “I just want one ordinary evening. Before we start out on this lonely marriage of ours.”

  “To celebrate our lonely nuptials.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Whom God hath joined—”

  “I’m serious.”

  He said, “Ah, Della, so am I.”

  She had a small suitcase and the carpetbag, which he carried for her down the stairs. The clerk was already at his desk, early as it was. He said, “Next time, I call the cops, Boughton. You can’t start bringing colored gals in here.” She took the bags from him; he opened the door for her and followed her a little way into the street. She said, “Go inside now.”

  “Friday,” he said. Then he stood on the stoop and watched her out of sight. There were not many people on the sidewalks yet, but the ones likely to be there were not of the best sort or in the best state of mind, since daylight would have waked them out of oblivion into unassuageable surliness, into a small hell of watery eyes and personal squalor. He knew all this as well as he knew anything. It was perfectly possible that he had stepped out of an alley sometime to bother a passing woman for a dime or a little conversation, possible, too, that he had cursed at her back for shunning him. Della walked near the curb, away from the mouths of alleys and doorways, where taunting voices and reaching hands would be at some small distance from her. Drunkards could be especially serious about enforcing local standards—“What’re you doing here! You got your own side of town!” She would be walking toward her side of town as quickly as she could, to escape the threat of insult or harm, to find safety, the blessed comfort of familiarity. He had not brought up with her an article he had seen in the newspaper announcing that the city had decided to demolish her side of town, churches and all, to replace it with something or other at some point in time, these decisions pending. She would know, no doubt, that she was hurrying toward a doomed refuge. And in this treacherous world he was the straw she grasped at. Unfathomable. He thought, Once again I am a person of consequence. I am able to do harm. I can only do harm. If I walk down her street tonight just to see if her lights are on, someone will see me, someone will talk. I’ll be feeding the rumors that will sooner or later burst into scandal and break her father’s heart. Ah, Jesus, get her home, keep her safe. Keep her safe from me.

  * * *

  Jack had gone to Chicago years before, just on the chance that he might come across that girl. He couldn’t find her, strictly speaking, because he had no idea where to look for her. He had a little money he could give her, in an envelope with a letter of apology. Very difficult to write, a disappointing piece of work. But he knew, if he did find her, he might not actually say anything to her, or he might say something even more disappointing than the letter. The money was from his father, and the pretext was that he was buying that convertible—“For a while there we thought you might be coming back for it.” The car wasn’t exactly his, and it wasn’t worth half the money the old man had sent. But that would be all right if he could send a note back to his father that said he’d found that girl, that he’d given her the money. And told him about whatever happened next. He might mention the apology.

  When people have wearied of life in Gilead, when they want another life altogether, they mention Chicago. She had told him once that she would go to Chicago to see all the movies. She had the impression that movies all pre-existed in Chicago and were eked out to the provinces a few a year. Even for someone so young, it was amazing how little she knew and how much she believed. He blushed to remember. These jolts of realization stayed with him undiminished, try as he might to smother them, drown them, even conjure cynicism enough to attempt excuses or indifference.

  He was getting used to St. Louis. Chicago couldn’t be so different. One problem was that she had been young, and the last few years would inevitably have changed her. Even in those days her freckles were fading, little smudges half worn away. She could be tall now, or plump. Women dye their hair. She could be changed by the ways she might have managed to survive in a city alone. Jesus, don’t let me think about that. He had almost told his father that she was not an innocent girl, when that would only have meant she was unsheltered, uncared for, and he was cad enough to make it all worse. When he remembered that he had almost said this, he could imagine he saw what he had never really seen, contempt in his father’s eyes. Teddy had said, “What’s wrong with you, Jack?” A real, sad question. And Jack took in the fact that his brother’s unshakable loyalty to him was illusionless compassion, the kind he would see in prison chaplains, the Salvation Army. What is wrong with me?

  A problem of finding that girl in Chicago was the near-certainty that he would not know her if he saw her. But she might recognize him. He believed that he had gone through certain things with her, but at such a remove they could hardly have changed him. Damned Glory, his sheltered and sanctimonious sister, had sent him photographs, which actually seemed to him to prove that his family were looking after the girl and her baby and nothing was needed from him. Then came the letters from his sister and his mother about the baby’s death, his mother’s distant and gentle, Glory’s full of heartbroken wrath and exasperation. Once, she had sent him a baby picture of himself, pried from a locket, and one of his daughter at the same age, her point being that the two of them were for all purposes identical. Years later, after all that, he had put the two pictures in a cigarette case he had pocketed at a bar, a rather nice one with working hinges and a clasp, a little wear on the corners. He took it to Bellefontaine, to the monument of the infant and the angel, pried some turf away from its base, slipped the cigarette case into the space he had made, and tamped it down with his foot. He had no right to take any comfort from the sentimentality of the gesture, which in fact appalled him a little. But how better to be rid of these pictures? All the others he had sent back to Glory, without comment. He had hardly glanced at them.

  Then he began thinking seriously about Chicago, even planning to go there. His father’s money came, which felt like an affirmation, a fatherly nudge. He could buy a ticket, pay for a room, and still have something to give her, and the letter of apology, if he had the nerve to give her that. So sorry to have visited such utter grief on you, to have done you such terrible harm, before you had even lost your freckles. Words to that effect. Well, he’d get a haircut, shorter on the sides, and a very close shave. Painful as it was to remember, besides the convertible, the girl was much impressed with a sweater he took from Teddy’s closet, bright gold with a big black I on the chest. Teddy was varsity. He had lettered in baseball. The girl thought it belonged to Jack and that it meant he was a college man. She wanted her cousins to see him in it, though he always talked her into long drives farther into the country. When Jack was packing to leave Gilead, after that talk with his father, Teddy came into his room with the sweater and stuffed it into his suitcase, and the corduroy slacks he wore with it. He did this without a word. Jack said nothing. Sometimes they understood each other perfectly.

  He was glad he had kept the things for a while, because it occurred to him that she might notice him, wandering the streets in his Joe College attire. The sweater was absurdly bright. Teddy never wore it.

  So he had taken the train to Chicago, carrying the sweater rolled up in a paper sack. At the station he
put his jacket in a locker, pulled on the sweater, and walked into the men’s room to comb his hair. Overhead lights. His pallor against that yellow was downright alarming. His face was thinner than he expected, and his hair. His closely shaved jaw was blue. Daylight might be even crueler. Oh well. He thought he had an idea. In the ranks of phone booths he found an empty one with a phone book in it, two things that were not often to be found together. He thought he might come across her name. What was it? Walker? Turner? Wheeler? Why didn’t he remember? And that’s another thing about women that changes, anyway. It was a very large directory. He had turned to Boughton, which made no sense at all. An inconsiderable lot, he noticed, so few of them in such a large city. He wasn’t thinking clearly, so he went to a bench and sat down. A vast, echoing room, baronial, civic, neglected. Sparrows flying across the ceiling, pigeons burbling around his feet. The great male voice of Announcement moving the crowds, trains shaking the building. His cigarettes were in his jacket pocket. He checked to be sure he hadn’t lost the locker key. Well, he shouldn’t be sitting there, anyway. He had to make the most of his time. He went out into the bright street. Pavement, trolley tracks, beyond them cheap hotels.

  He walked and walked, bought a hot dog from a cart, and walked some more, waiting for any sign of recognition. It was foolish, far worse than hopeless. He had failed to consider that Teddy’s sweater might stir a sudden bitterness in that girl’s mind, that woman’s mind, since by now she would understand how cheap a fraud had been committed against her childishness. It was that turbulence he carried with him, that black wind. She might see his yellow sweater and suffer a sting of memory, and curse the thought of him for all the grief he had brought her. She would turn away from the sight of him, and he would never know he had been so close to her. Maybe it was really a hope of comforting his father that lay behind it all, so Jack could walk into the old house again, so much at home there that his father would hardly look up from his newspaper.

  Since he had gone that far with the idea, he might as well go on with it. His darkest thoughts about what was liable to be the girl’s present life would have led him down some dismal streets, and he did not look for her there, coward that he was. Another cause of regret. He’d certainly have been noticed in that sweater, which said in effect he had a life that allowed him to parade meaningless attainments, to expend effort just for the sake of a little sweat and sunshine on a grassy field, effort having nothing at all to do with shelter or food. Why did this thought make him more ashamed that it wasn’t even his sweater?