Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

  Jack had noticed many times that anyone with any sort of place in life became, at some point, the exasperated authority. What have you done, Boughton? Why did you do it? He had found he could accept reproof from anybody who was not dead drunk and be no better for it, unless the discomfort involved was actually payment against outstanding debt. This thought may actually have comforted him, since debt can be reduced, unless it involves interest of some kind, which would be a way of understanding the steady accumulation of lesser errors and transgressions also to be atoned for, if there was merit in this view of things. Those fellows who said they were debt collectors, making him turn out his pockets every week or two, he hadn’t seen them for a while. So he had sought out a man of the cloth, he thought, perhaps looking for another version of the same experience.

  Jack said, “I’m sure I couldn’t break off our relationship without causing her a great deal of sadness. Grief. I truly believe this.”

  The minister shrugged. “People recover, generally speaking. They can look back on their sorrows, sooner or later, and be grateful for whatever caused them. Impossible as it may seem at the time.”

  “And she would be grateful. She’d have a better life.”

  “I believe in time she would be grateful.”

  Jack nodded. “Still.”

  The minister leaned back in his chair. “Mr. Boughton, I will be very frank with you. I think I understand what I’m asking you to give up. You strike me as an intensely lonely man, someone for whom life has not gone well. And suddenly a fine young woman has decided she is in love with you. Her life up to this point has been sheltered enough that she doesn’t really know the kinds of things that can happen when laws are violated. And what can you do for her? You can be loyal to her. That’s worse than useless in the circumstances, unless you decide the loyal thing would be to leave her alone.”

  Jack said, “To me it feels like disloyalty even to be thinking about leaving her alone. I believe it would feel that way to her. I know it would.”

  “Well, if you don’t want my advice, why are you here?”

  Jack said, “I’m sorry,” and stood up. “I’ve imposed on your time.”

  “Redeem the time, son! You can pay me back by telling me what you came here for.”

  “It doesn’t matter. A sort of blessing, I suppose.”

  “What? No! Did I hear you right? A blessing? No! Nothing about any of this has my blessing! Surely I have made that clear!”

  “Yes, sir, you have. But you asked me why I had come in the first place. I guess I didn’t realize then that your position was quite so final. I wouldn’t have bothered you if I’d known.”

  “Did you think I would put a little sprinkle of holiness on this arrangement of yours, maybe help you convince that good woman that it really is some kind of marriage?”

  “No, sir. She doesn’t need to be convinced. The blessing would have been for me. As I said, I’m trying to reform, but I lack—moorings. I used that word before. I can’t think of a better one.”

  “And you want to reform for her sake.”

  “I have a wonderful wife, and I want to be very good to her.”

  “We’re speaking of Miss Miles.”

  “Of course. Yes.”

  “She isn’t your wife.”

  “There are varying definitions of marriage. In Scripture—”

  “I know all that. And will there be children of this union? Yes, there will. That’s clear enough. You’d better give some thought to how many people you’re making trouble for.”

  Jack nodded. “I do think about that. I’m not an innocent man, obviously. I’ve done a lot of damage in my life. I’d like to get some control of certain of my impulses. It would be a good thing if I could do that, in any case, married or not. So I thought I’d ask your help.”

  “Well, I suppose you can see that you’re causing trouble right now. And you don’t intend to stop. I don’t know how a blessing’s going to help. How I’m going to help.”

  Jack nodded. “It was just a thought. Thanks for your time.”

  He stepped to the door, but the preacher said, “Mr. Boughton, I can spare a few more minutes, if you want to tell me a little about these impulses you mention.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you. I’m a gifted thief. I lie fluently, often for no reason. I’m a bad but confirmed drunk. I have no talent for friendship. What talents I do have I make no use of. I am aware instantly and almost obsessively of anything fragile, with the thought that I must and will break it. This has been true of me my whole life. I isolate myself as a way of limiting the harm I can do. And here I am with a wife! Of whom I know more good than you have any hint of, to whom I could do a thousand kinds of harm, never meaning to, or meaning to.”

  The minister said, “Good Lord.”

  “Yes. So I hoped you might help me. You’re supposed to be a sort of last resort, aren’t you? Who else could I say this to? I don’t even know anybody.”

  “Well, yes, Mr. Boughton. I understand your concern, I do. I’ve wondered why you’ve been coming here, to Zion, when there are plenty of white churches you could go to. But now I see they’d have less sympathy for your situation than I do, little as that is.”

  “It’s like I’m in hell. A destructive man in a world where everything can be ruined or broken—whole avalanches of bitter consequence ready to be set off, my very wife jailed, if things go too wrong, as they do.”

  “Well, yes. Please sit down, Mr. Boughton. Let’s see if we can put some of this in a better light. Sit down for a minute.”

  He did. “I had no particular reason for coming to this church. Some people were kind.” He didn’t mention the business about retrieving his hat.

  “I’m glad to hear it. And of course you’re welcome to come.”

  “I can be calculating, but in this case I was not. Just to clarify.” He did not mention lunch, or that piano.

  “I’m sorry if I seemed to imply that you were.”

  “It’s all right.”

  The minister said, “It might be worth remembering that responsibility for this doesn’t rest on you entirely. I have the impression that Miss Miles has gone along with it.”

  Jack laughed. “We are altogether of one mind. We are conspirators. This is the most wonderful feeling I have ever had in my life. I get no comfort at all from the thought of lightening my burden by reminding myself of her ‘responsibility.’”

  “No, of course not. But to put the matter another way, she must see something in you, since she loves you, apparently.”

  “She has a high opinion of my soul. The first time we met, she thought I was a preacher. I don’t know how she could have thought so. I was wearing a black suit, with brown shoes.”

  The preacher said, “It can happen to the best of us.” He was making a study of his pen.

  “No, I mean, I must have been putting special effort into my respectability, to distract her, or to compensate.” He said, “Her kindness meant a great deal to me at the time. I did not wish to—complicate it. I mean, after I had first let her call me reverend, I couldn’t set it right without explaining myself, which at that time would have been exceptionally difficult.”

  “But you did tell her.”

  “She found out.”

  “And it didn’t matter. She is still impressed with your soul.”

  “Yes, my battered, atheist soul. I’ve been honest about that. Also, she’s an English teacher. I like poetry.” He laughed. “I have no explanation. I don’t think there is one. I’m going to be loyal to her. She has my worse-than-useless fidelity, death do us part. If I am disloyal sometime, because it’s my nature or because I’m persuaded by the soundest, holiest reasons in the world, that will end me, which might be a relief.”

  “Well,” the preacher said, “if I can be any help to you, or if you just feel like talking, I’m usually here. I’m still thinking about that first question you asked me, how to tell faith from presumption, as I recall. An interesting problem.” Then
he said, “You should remember that the part of you that makes you try to avoid doing harm is as much yourself as any of these impulses are. Maybe you should try calling them ‘temptations.’”

  “Yes. There’s a thought.” They shook hands, and Jack went down the stairs and out the door into the bright heat of afternoon. He saw a woman passing on the other side of the street. It couldn’t be Della. If she had come looking for him, how could she have waited for him so long without the risk, the certainty, of drawing attention, stirring gossip? He crossed and followed the woman for a few blocks; then she went into a house, letting herself in with a key. Not Della. Nothing like Della. She glanced at him, he tipped his hat, she stepped through the door and closed it behind her.

  * * *

  Here was his first thought. He would write the Old Gent a letter. It might be preparation for a visit home. His father would certainly write back, which would give Jack some sense of what he might expect, beyond the usual fondness and pardon and groundless hope. There would be a check, too, which Jack would not cash for ten or twelve days as a way of assuring his father that his straits were not especially dire. It was true of his good father that he allowed himself only virtuous words and behavior, which meant virtue in some form must be put to every use, even those best served by barbs and edges. This was not Jack’s impression only. Teddy would smile and shrug, almost imperceptibly, when a crack seemed about to open in their father’s determined patience—“If you could help me understand your reasoning here, Jack”—parsing some youthful dereliction that obviously made no sense at all, gently acquainting Jack with the fact that he wandered an inward terrain that was without pole or polaris, to put entirely too fine a point on the matter. And after the truth had sunk in, that Jack was as confounded by himself as his father was by him, Teddy would say, “Want to play a little catch?” or “It rained this morning. Let’s see if the fish are biting.” “Jack is with Teddy”— To the Boughtons, Jack, too, this meant Jack is all right, and the neighbors’ setting hens and pumpkin patches are all right, together with whatever other movables his attention might have drawn him to.

  Jack would say, “You always worried that I was alone. So you will be pleased to know that I consult from time to time with a pastor. He is not unkind, though he is sometimes remarkably candid, and of course this can be disturbing, the pain involved overriding the benefit I take from it only if, for example, I get drunk, which I cannot do because it is Sunday, a fact which also prevents me from buying a pad of stationery and a pen, also no doubt for the best in my present state of mind. I just might find myself writing to him.”

  “Dearest Della, my life, my love. The thought of you brings peace to my unquiet spirit.” He could write letters to her at long intervals, weeks rather than days, since mailmen are not always perfectly discreet. But he would use the time to make the letters very fine. He’d include sketches in them, and poems. He could write out musical notes, and they would be like a code. I don’t want to set the world on fire. / I just want to start a flame in your heart. She would laugh. He imagined her touching out the notes on Lorraine’s piano. He might make a tasteful display of his intellect if he had read a good book lately. He would read only very good books.

  “Dear Reverend Hutchins, I am writing to tell you that I resent your word ‘arrangement’ and all that it implies. A Presbyterian by birth and rearing, I respect candor, even when I find it patronizing, stinging, as in this case. My reverend father often said that the kind of emphasis given the sacrament of baptism in your denomination tends to elevate the minister toward a status he called priestly, by which he meant, fairly or not, that some random Reverend Hutchins might feel himself to be invested with a degree of authority relative to a fellow Christian that the covenant honored among Presbyterians would not countenance, to the point, it seems, of denying a man a simple blessing. So presumably I must forgive you for assuming authority over me as you did in intruding so bluntly into my personal life, of which you know almost nothing. An intensely lonely man for whom life has not gone well—I believe that was your language. And how has life gone for you? I have read about eminent domain, a yet higher authority. A wrecking ball will break in on your parish, Reverend Sir, and the sheep will be scattered!”

  Terrible, desperate malice, which, sweet Jesus, arose in him only after any rhetorical use could be made of it, leaving him grateful for the near-miss. He was shamed nevertheless that he had entertained such thoughts, less for their meanness than for their blatant desperation. They arose just before the passions of embarrassment passed and the foolishness of his wrath became overwhelmingly clear to him. Presbyterian, indeed. His father would be mortified to know that, even in imagination, his son would send a wrecking ball against a house of prayer. True, being Jack, there was that in him that had to wonder how it would look to demolish a steeple. Closing the world down once a week to frustrate some percentage of bad impulses was Moses’ best gift to humankind.

  Wyoming doesn’t rhyme with anything, but it would make a good title. Della told him at their wedding supper that when she was a child there was an old man in her father’s church who had retired from the railroad. She asked him if he had ever been to Wyoming. He nodded. “Nothing there,” he’d said. “Just a bunch of half-wild white folks doing whatever they damn well please. No need to leave Memphis to see that. You got no business with Wyoming.” She said, “Well, it’s part of America,” because she’d read about it in school. He said, “It is. You ain’t.”

  She’d gone to her father, crying, and he had said comforting things to her. She had so much to be thankful for, the Lord wouldn’t want her to be crying over Wyoming, of all things, which might as well be another planet for all it had to do with her life. Then he went off to talk to that man about what it was useful or appropriate to say to children, what it was kind to say to them.

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she told Jack, her eyes mild in the candlelight. “My Wyoming was all wind in the grass and mountains off in the distance and nobody to say, You don’t belong here. It was like stepping off this world, the way I dreamed of it.”

  He almost said, That’s a little like Iowa. No mountains, of course. He had often thought of walking with her among those fields, undulant as dunes, and the vast, reaching oaks, and the flickering cottonwoods shadowing the rivers. A modest, open, sunny place, at peace with itself. So many bird songs, such a thrum of crickets. It could be that no one would put those hard questions, that no great eye of custom and expectation would find the two of them on some nameless road through endless country and ask, even silently, Why are they here? Should they be walking along together, arm in arm? He couldn’t tell her he had dreams of Iowa, that shining star. People might say, Did you hear about what Jack Boughton has done now? About the wife he brought home to his poor old father? Always up to no good. He had a history, nothing to be done about it.

  He walked and walked, and ended up at Eads Bridge. He had dressed for church that morning, but tilt his hat a little, hang a cigarette from his lip and he was Slick. Who was he kidding, he was always Slick. He could lean against the wall and smile too wide if some pretty colored woman passed, maybe tip his hat to get a laugh. The usual effrontery nobody noticed. He thought of her seeing him there, fossils constellated around him in those great stones, the lore of the place a secret between them. And then it was evening and he walked back to the rooming house, back to his room.

  * * *

  The next day a note arrived from Della. “Come by my house tomorrow evening. My sister is here for a visit. She wants to meet you. She isn’t as nice as Aunt Delia, but it should be all right. It has to happen sooner or later, anyway, and it will give me a chance to see your dear face. (I haven’t mentioned anything to her about marriage. So—discretion.)” He actually checked his shaving mirror to see what about his face, its off-center aquilinity, its blue jaw, might be called dear. He attempted a smile. Then he thanked the Lord for the eye of the beholder, that perjured witness. His existence had begu
n to take on some qualities of a life. This is a well-known effect of marriage, not the most attractive feature of it. He could be very nice to the sister-in-law, who was not herself very nice. He would put the little volume of Frost in his pocket—“I have been one acquainted with the night. / I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.” An honest account of himself, yet somehow romantic. Poetry does that, another perjured witness. Maybe he liked poetry because it also could not help lying. Oh well. There would be that moment when he stepped through her door, when he would study her face, if he let himself, to see how welcome he was, preparing always for some sad shock. He would not conclude anything from her formality and distance. Memphis has sent a chaperone, an informant. He would not watch for signs that she had been half persuaded of the foolishness of putting so much at risk for mere him. If he did see a sign, he would leave. There would be no recovery if she once began to doubt.

  On the way to work he bought a pad of stationery, some envelopes, and a pencil. He spent the afternoon waltzing abstractedly, forgetting to accommodate his long stride to a short lady until she began gasping a little. Aside from that, his employment was far from his thoughts. His boss glanced at him twice at least, as if to remind him that there are such things as expectations. Point taken. He waltzed the last lady to the bench where she had left her purse, sat down with the pad of stationery on his knee, and wrote, “Dear Reverend Hutchins, Thank you again for your time and insight, and your candor. Sincerely, John A. Boughton (Jack),” and slipped it into an envelope. This was a pretext for going by the church, saving himself a stamp, giving himself a chance to lay the flat of his hand against a shingled wall of the place to feel its solidity. The paint was parched, and some of it would come away on his hand, but there would be no tremors yet, no colossal impact of metal against old wood, no splintering yet. Sweet savors, of popcorn, baked beans, peach cobbler, could still rise to the heavens from that corner for a little while, or a long while, condemnation idling in another street, coming when it would.