Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

  On the other hand, a wonderful woman loved him. He owed her some feelings of happiness on this account, a spring in his step and so on. But he could not put it out of his mind entirely that her father would not speak her name. His own father would embrace him weeping if given the chance, he was fairly sure. This thought was the thread his life had hung by. It was why he had to give a little thought to his own well-being. But now there was the fact of a colored wife, nothing that had arisen as an issue in Gilead, so far as he knew. His father had never said a word in his hearing about the mingling of races. It might be that his father would turn away from him, dear Jesus, a miserable thing to imagine. He would tell Della once more to consider what she was doing. These men of high principle made him feel pretty harmless, from time to time.

  What he had in mind was not so much a plan as an interesting possibility which had presented itself unexpectedly, a kind of reward for his attempts at being conscientious and unoffending with the thought of keeping his job. He had been early to work a number of days in a row. There were few ways for him to ingratiate himself. This one, fairly useless in itself, signaled good intent but did not oblige conversation. The boss had decided that if Jack was going to be hanging around, anyway, he might as well be inside sweeping up, choosing records for the Victrola, allowing the boss himself to make a dignified entrance. His boss had given him the keys to the front door of the building and to the dance studio on the second floor, a big room with the scars and stains of other use showing through the midnight-blue paint on the walls, and in the dents in the oak floor, which was sanded and polished, and still darkly marred as if by weighty machinery. They danced with feigned grace across this scene of forgotten productivity, avoiding the bad places as they could. The windows were things of great dignity, tall and arched, framed inexplicably in heavy ornamental woodwork. They were hidden behind blinds and drapes to suggest night and to heighten the effect of the mirror ball, since the swooping and swirling in this ballroom occurred during business hours only.

  Jack’s sudden sense of the possible must have been as readable as were his boss’s second thoughts, though possibility was as undefined in that moment as the boss’s suspicions would have been. A pause, a glance of unspecific reproof, and then the keys were in his hand. “Don’t—” the fellow said, and walked away. Jack put the keys in his jacket pocket, the two on one fob. All his conniving was mainly just an exercise of imagination, half of it daydreams about stealing time with Della. But he was open to suggestion. What interesting violations of trust had the boss imagined in the second before he handed over those keys? Downstairs were a barbershop, a failed lawyer’s office, a dentist’s office, the office of an accountant. Jack knew, because he knew such things, that there was hardly anything worth stealing. The dance studio was an empty room, in which even determined malice could hardly be up to much. There was a big, open elevator at the far end of it, for raising and lowering very heavy things from or to an alley. If it had worked, it would have been perfect for bringing up a piano. A lot of the futility of the instructing that went on there came with the problem many of them had really hearing the music, and from the fact that Jack heard it in his head and forgot to make allowances. This was not a problem. The slower their progress, within limits, the longer the ladies came back. Selling shoes, waiting tables, waltzing strangers—there is a craving for courtesy, even when it draws attention to itself as a sort of shared joke. Courtesy was one thing he still did fairly well, especially sober.

  If he stole the Victrola, he would have to change his address and find another way to survive. The interval would no doubt involve selling the cumbersome thing in a back street for a pittance. Or trying to pawn it. Then desperation would prompt one of those shifts that bring jail time. His father called this “thinking things through.” Such considerations had grown tedious because he was still a thief and endlessly obliged to rehearse them to stay on the narrow path. That pious demon Consequence had much diminished his interest in life.

  His actual plan was simply to bring Della there, to the studio, to spend a few hours with her. They could play the Victrola and talk about whatever they wanted to and let the night take its course. Just stealing a few hours together could expose them to much more indignation than would any actual theft. There was a terrible vision that sometimes crossed his mind, of Della led away by police, not speaking, not crying, not looking back, proud as a martyr. And he, back in jail, having no way to find out what had become of her. Dear Jesus, what was he doing? This was not what he had promised himself. This was not harmlessness. He was sure he had no right to involve her in so much potential misery. How often had he thought this? But she had the right to involve herself, or had claimed the right, holding his hand the way she had. She was young, the daughter of a protective family. She might have no idea yet that embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness. Maybe apophatic loneliness. God in the silence. In the deep darkness. The highest privilege, his father said. He was usually speaking of death, of course. The congregant’s soul had entered the Holy of Holies. Jack sometimes called this life he had lived prevenient death. He had learned that for all its comforts and discomforts, its stark silence first of all, there was clearly no reprieve from doing harm.

  Because there was a logic in the tendency of his thinking that made the idea seem reasonable, he decided to spend a night by himself in that building, that room, to make sure there was nothing about it to especially alarm Della. Then he would send his note. Please come by yourself through the unlighted, hostile, judgmental streets to an empty building where the Prince of Darkness will be watching for you, ready to die of shame if it all goes wrong. As if his shame were worth anything to her or anyone else. What would he say to her father? To his own father, for that matter, since he was now amplifying dread by imagining conversations that would never happen.

  But staying there by himself was a mistake. The very first night he had the keys, as soon as it was late enough that the streets were empty, he rolled up his blanket, walked out past the bemused glance of the desk clerk, through the streets, pausing only to buy a hot dog from a malodorous cart still open for business in the hope of selling that last sausage. Jack had never learned to share the local love of sauerkraut, but it was free, as were mustard and ketchup. He was relieved to have stepped into the deeper darkness of the entry and to have turned the key in the lock without attracting any attention, so far as he knew.

  Buildings dream at night, and their dreams have a particular character. Or perhaps at night they awaken. There is nothing cordial or accommodating about buildings, whatever they might let people believe. The stresses of simply standing there, preposterous constructions, Euclidian like nothing in nature, the ground heaving under them, rain seeping in while their joints go slack with rot. They speak disgruntlement, creaks and groans, and less nameable sounds that suggest presence of the kind that is conjured only by emptiness. Grudges, plaints, and threats, an interior conversation, not meant to be heard, that would startle anyone. Jack had never realized before that the city, the parts he knew of it, might despise its human infestation. He went up the stairs nevertheless and into the studio, as they called it, as it was listed in the yellow pages. It was vast in the absolute darkness. It smelled like Chicago.

  The memory of that wretched pilgrimage, that frustrating, humiliating experience of drunkenness, of course made him crave a drink. He was suddenly sure that one small whiskey would give fluency to his thoughts and clarity, as well. How he could find himself persuaded of this again and again, despite all evidence to the contrary, he could not imagine, but so it was. Considered choice seemed suspect by comparison. He could wander the streets till he came upon some dive furtively alight and astir, where he could squander his pocket money, the whole of his worldly wealth, on a few watered drinks. Then those debt collectors would probably find him and pound him a few times for having nothing to give them, and he would congratulate himself inwardly on havi
ng spent it all before they found him, which would make sense to him because he was drunk. He had thought this through, and still he craved, still he was tempted.

  He did find his way to a bench. It was actually his shin that found it. He sat down, then lay down, with the blanket roll under his head. He closed his eyes, then he put his hat over his face to make the darkness smaller. Then he took it off his face to feel less defenseless against sounds that were for all the world like stealthy approach. This was becoming a test of his conscience, to give him a sense of how much he had to dread. It wasn’t theology that told him this, it was experience. Theology simply rationalized those nights he spent walking the streets, exhausted and glassily alert, a dull weight in his chest, thinking, Macbeth does murder sleep, or I have been one acquainted with the night, which was better suited to his situation. Why should a man with no other expectation of an afterlife than adding his bit of clay to verdant Iowa experience dread? His father told him once that the more scrupulous a conscience is, the heavier the burden it carries. He had decided at the time that Jack had a low estimation of himself because his conscience was so delicate it seemed to truly condemn him in his own eyes. Its stores were not so remarkable, after all, and if he could realize this, he could stop, so to speak, touching the wound. He worked this into a sermon, apologizing for the mixed metaphor and generalizing the thought to describe the whole of humankind. No one was deceived. And not so long afterward, Jack had mooted this comforting argument by adding a burden to his conscience that his gentleman father could never call unremarkable. Common is somehow indeed the opposite of unremarkable. Hamlet.

  Being there alone was a bad idea. For one thing, he realized instantly that the big freckled mirrors would be reflecting that darkness, and he could not tell if he could see any difference between the reflected darkness and the darkness itself. Those unapproachable spaces beyond this bewildering emptiness. It would be altogether different if Della were there. If he imagined her sitting across the room from him, taken up with some thought that had nothing to do with him, the silence would be so gentle, so replete, that courtesy would oblige him to lie still. While I think on thee, dear friend. It might be infidelity of a kind to wonder how it was that his heart, as they say, had settled on Della, absolutely and exclusively, before he really knew her at all. He could have wondered to what extent she was the creature of his imagination, but he didn’t, because the thought would be disloyal and because she was Della, far beyond the reach of his imagination. As a proof of some kind, they two seemed more and more to “mix irradiance,” like the angels in Paradise Lost. He had used that phrase once to make an English teacher blush, and again to confound his father, a straitlaced man if one ever lived. “Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace, / Total they mix.” He must have been fourteen. His father, who knew his Milton, had looked at him, a serious, inward question apparent in his face, What does this child know? Jack had come into the world trailing clouds, certainly, which must have had another origin than glory, one that would account for a grating precocity uncannily predicting a jaded adulthood. So, at least, he construed his father’s sad gentleness, the allowance always made for behavior that would have sent any other child Boughton to bed without supper. This anxious indulgence had scared Jack half to death. Now it seemed to him that he and Della were mixing irradiance whenever they were in the same room. Intimacy at a distance. So he was glad the grand poet and the irksome boy had supplied him with the phrase.

  He imagined her sitting across the room beside the Victrola, all drawn into herself, still with dreaming, and at the thought of her, the darkness became an atmosphere he could breathe. He was a creature at home in its element, more or less. The thought of a benign presence takes the curse off loneliness, for some reason that is as natural as loneliness, a necessary mediation that made the human situation less an embarrassment. A snatch of vapor between earth and that raging star. The inward privilege of belief that a kindly intent had not forsaken him, and would not. It could not be altogether different if the presence were Jesus. His father could make something of this, a theological proof. Intending no disrespect by the thought, he said inwardly, to Della. Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd, the plant that grew up overnight to shade him. Even his father used to laugh at that. Jack was exceeding glad of that hand holding his, an unaccountable loyalty, while those searing words were said out loud that were always in his mind. Just look at him.

  After a while, light will reveal itself in a very dark room, not quite as a mist, as something more particulate, as if the slightest breath had lifted the finest dust into the stillest air. Then he could see the place where Della was not sitting, and where the walls must be. This bench reminded him of other benches, so he sat up. He might as well leave. Everything was about as he might have expected. Cars and trucks passed at long intervals, sending thin streaks of light across the ceiling. This was why he could not risk any light inside the room. There were a few voices in the street, then there were none.

  But one mind by itself can fill a room. In such a large space there were no strategies of concealment, neither of him from his thoughts nor of his thoughts from his unguarded awareness of them. So there they were, that girl and the child. Glory had seen them playing in the river together, and told him so in one of those terrible little notes he had hardly glanced at. That one had made him wish he had been a third child, harmlessly there with them. Kneeling in the river, barefoot, soaking his dungarees to the pockets, he would rear up on his knees to throw a rock and be pleased at how far away it hit the water. He would ask, “You live around here?” The formalities of child acquaintance, tentative, oblique, shy. “I’ve caught some catfish just down by that bend. Pretty good-sized.” She would say, “I just call her Baby. Seems like I can’t make up my mind.” And the baby kept stooping into the water, trying to pick up stones for him to throw. She never gave them to him. He never saw her face.

  No, he was a college man, trying his hand at cynicism. He had the use of a convertible and a letter sweater. Ah, Jesus. “Give me a cig, Jackie. Just ’cause you puked the first time don’t mean I will.” He hated that fellow, always had. Thief, liar, worse, defrauding his father of every ordinary hope. And what was he doing now after so many years of penitential attrition? He was, day by day, depriving his father of his last hope. He knew exactly how the water and stones and silt felt in that baby’s hands, under her feet. The West Nishnabotna was the river that circled Eden. He thought sometime he might get off the bus a stop early and walk to it, and kneel and wash his face in it, and then he would feel ready to go home.

  But for now, here he was, entrusted again, by whatever it is that does the entrusting, with another human soul. He had not even bothered to promise himself this would not happen, since every single thing about his life had made it impossible. When the Lord shows you a little grace, the man said, he won’t mind if you enjoy it. She had looked up at him that day, tiny droplets of rain in the puffs of hair that had escaped her hat. Then they were laughing, like girl and boy enjoying the accidental flirtatiousness of escaping the rain together. Tea from that chipped pot. Tea! It brought tears to his eyes. A moment of grace, truly, that ended with his slipping her book into his pocket, the one signed by the poet, and the slim Hamlet in the other pocket, so that the first one would not have so much effect on the hang of his coat. When she realized what he had done, she would never want to see him again, which would have likely been true in any case. He was just introducing himself—I am Jack Boughton, thief. He meant to leave the books on her step with a rose or something when he was done with them.

  He had long recognized in himself a nagging urge to confess, which he sometimes indulged. To be forthright about his dishonesty, for one thing, could be a relief. To speak about his impulse to harm was much harder. So it should not have surprised him that the darkness had conjured that girl, so strongly that he was afraid to think what he might say to Della if she were there, what confession he might make to her. Della fallen silent in the d
ark, he unable to see her face, not daring to take her hand. Receding from him, while the river slid through its shallows, braiding and pooling.

  He had to be gone from that room. He felt a kind of pressure of attention, something watching him closely when he could not see himself. Himself being the wretch that lived in his clothes. Look at him. But he did find his way to the door, found the doorknob. Then he remembered he had brought his blanket, so he had to try to find where he had been when he had it, groping along the benches, increasingly upset that he could be so wrong, that his sense of things could itself be a complication, a snare. He’d have risked turning on the lights just for a second, to orient himself, if he could have found the switch. It wasn’t much of a blanket, but the difference between a blanket, however thin and short, and no blanket is absolute. In the morning the miserable thing would be there, anomalous as anything a windstorm leaves behind. If he left it there and came back early, he could find a place to stash it, surely, and if not, he could disclaim it. If he said it wasn’t his, that would mean someone else had been there while he, Jack, had the keys. So not only would the lie be obvious, but the thing itself would be incriminating—why, after all, would he have a blanket there if not because he meant to bring in a lady friend? Jack might say, My wife, actually. And the boss would smile at the ridiculous transparency of the lie and fire him, anyway.