He would buy a suit. In St. Louis he used to wonder how many of the best suits went into the ground with their owners, as if their clothes could recommend them to that Dread Tribunal which, as Jack read the Text, would have found merit in a second-best suit, the better one left behind as a courtesy to the necessitous shopper. So many of earth’s grievances could be soothed by a little consideration. These were the thoughts of a man settling into a life of comfort, more or less. He found sheet music for Chopin’s Etudes in the piano bench, and he studied them, softly exploring them on the parlor upright to the inexpressible delight of the landlady. His manners were not too refined for any occasion, as far as she was concerned, at least. Nor was his grammar too precise. He gave the place a certain tone, clearly, frayed cuffs notwithstanding. Still, he needed a new suit like a snake needs a new skin. There was a kind of itching involved.
At work he mastered the cash register. He was very much an adept at dealing with change. That old courtesy that had stood him in good stead as a shoe salesman and dance instructor had to be tempered a little, made slightly conversational, but he did well enough. He forgot customers’ names but remembered their interests, which flattered them. He got a raise. On quiet days he stepped out to lunch with the boss’s daughter. He had not yet found the moment to tell her that he was married, though he was always imagining that he would show Della this pleasant life he had wandered into. He imagined her sitting in that overstuffed chair in the evening lamplight, reading while he read, listening while he told her how long the days would be if he did not almost believe she was with him there. “This is our marriage,” she would say. “This is what we promised each other.”
On Sundays he would walk to black neighborhoods. He had looked in the phone book for the streets where their churches clustered, A.M.E., Baptist, Pentecostal. There were people in the streets on Sundays, dressed up, convivial. The idea was to find, to hear, even a word that reminded him of her voice, a timbre that he now and then did hear, that confirmed his memory. He could not summon it in his mind the way he could almost hear notes of a song, but he heard the unlikeness of other voices, the likeness of a rare few voices, there and gone in a phrase. She had to have sent him a letter. Her gentleness would have compelled her to.
Until further notice he was a married man. He found the idea bracing, stabilizing. The savings that had accumulated in a dresser drawer would go first toward a suit, but this was part of a larger intention. He had learned the practical value of a reputable life, not only its health benefits, but also the presumptively good opinion that came with expecting to be well thought of. A rope of sand. The trick was simply to think about the rope and forget the sand.
Having erased the last marks of pathos and distress from his appearance and manner, he would go to Memphis, to that A.M.E. church, and speak to Della’s father. He would bring a letter, carefully thought out, addressed to him. He hadn’t thought it out yet, but it would take a little time to make himself as presentable as he ought to be, so there was no urgency. If that went well, if her father accepted the letter, he would ask if he, Jack, might be put in touch with her, understanding, of course, that she might not want any contact with him. He would basically repeat the contents of the letter, but this was not to be avoided, since her father might refuse to speak with him and the letter would be one last chance, hope, really, to get all this said. Once, he had imagined telling her father that his relationship with Della had been entirely honorable. Now, while this was still absolutely true, it was no longer true in the sense he had meant it then or that her father would understand it now. We are married. No, you are not married. Both true, both false. I have been honorable. He could imagine himself sweating, wincing, under her father’s contempt. He was a liar, but not at that moment.
Just the same, he adhered strictly to his plan. No drinking, no cigarettes. So he had a little something to add to his savings every week. He did not steal anything, no matter how negligible it was, no matter how thoughtlessly it had been abandoned to the whims of the light-fingered. He did buy a sketch pad and some pencils, thinking he would try to draw her face from memory and expecting to fail at it. Memory would be less engrossing if it were more sufficient. He spent an evening making drawings that looked nothing like her, no matter the care he took over the curve of her cheek, her brow, the set of her eyes. The landlady came in with an arm full of fresh bedding and saw the pages he had left on the dresser. “An artist, too!” she said, and stopped to admire them. “She looks like a Negro woman.”
He said, “That’s what she is.” He watched her leafing through the pages. She said, “I like this one the best,” holding up what happened to be a fair likeness. “It’s very realistic. You know, you could make money drawing pictures of people.”
“Lots of people don’t want to know what they look like.” Another truth he had learned in prison. “They think they do, till they see the picture.” Then you might get your fingers busted. This amounted only to a minor sprain and a very alarming threat, but it had persuaded him that there might be little profit in portraiture.
“Well, you’re a man of many talents,” she said.
Not all of them strictly legal. The petty thievery was surprisingly hard to give up. “Thank you.” He could not help being aware of the drawers full of silverware. Some vagrant spoon might yet be his undoing. He knew the landlady trusted him, not on the basis of any presumed insight into his individual character, but as a being of a higher order, too devoted to books and music to check the back of a fork for a sterling mark. The old impulse was still there to remind him that he was Jack, after all, defrauding people of their good opinion, if nothing else. A new suit would help, since the material benefits of respectability were made so clear to him every day. Enhanced, they would no doubt overwhelm temptation, offering inducements far more lucrative, though he was not sure calculations of this kind had any significant part in determining his actions. His father had observed, even dwelt on, the fact that the laws of Moses actually treated theft as debt. No hanging, no branding, only, in effect, a very steep rate of interest—steal one sheep, restore two. That was the Old Dispensation. Under the New Dispensation, debt was to be forgiven, as every Christian knew. Jack would stand by his father at the church door to see the pointedly blank expression of whatever parishioner he, Jack, had trespassed against recently, and whom his father, with homiletical legerdemain, had relieved of the right even to grumble. From boyhood he had schooled his poor father, staunch and doctrinal as he was by nature, in a kind of metaphysics of inversion and dissolution. The distinction “mine and thine” collapsed altogether, at least in his sermons. Even “good and evil” were held up to scrutiny. It had seemed to Jack that his father proposed a sort of Promised Land where troublesome categories did not apply. “Night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light.” Those words nullified a very primary distinction. “God separated the light from the darkness,” in the very first moments of creation. Verse 4. Then how was anyone to believe that any distinction was absolute, not secondary to a more absolute intention, the luminous reality concealed behind the veil of experience? He thought he should write this down, to show it to Della, maybe to her father. He and Della had been there, in that luminous absence of distinctions, in that radiant night.
He found a shop that sold ready-made suits with cuffs unfinished, to be tailored to fit the purchaser. Wonderful. Jack excused himself from lunch with the boss’s daughter twice to stand in a shadow of chalk dust and basting threads while a man with a mouth full of pins made and unmade minute adjustments. The pant leg should touch the shoe and break a little. The sleeve should allow for a quarter inch of shirt cuff to show. It was a very muted tweed, gray blue, a good choice for his coloring, the man said, with the suspect objectivity that always complicates decisions of this kind. It was a fine suit, inexpensive, but tasteful in a way that concealed the fact. Jack had put a deposit on it, the balance due when this maddeningly meticulous tailor actua
lly finished it. Meanwhile, he found the Moonlight Sonata in a stack of sheet music the landlady brought down from the attic and tried his hand at parts of it that looked possible. People had started calling him professor again, this time without any sign of malice.
It might not end! There might be no joke, no trapdoor, no banana peel. He had found himself in a highly congenial life that broke no laws. It took him a minute or two to remember the last time he had been seriously embarrassed. Then, to top it off, the landlady came to his door and told him that the young couple who had stayed in the largest room were leaving. It was in effect two rooms with sliding doors between them and a little balcony. She was beaming. “You could bring your wife here!” she said, gesturing at the flounces on the vanity, the cushion on the rocking chair. “You see, there’s a writing desk in the alcove.” She opened the desk to show him its hidden drawers and the tiny key that locked them. “It’s a little too dainty for a man. Perfect for a lady.”
“I’m not sure I could afford it,” he said.
“Oh, nonsense! Another dollar a week.” The landlady was in love with him, in some sense of those words. To her mind the absent wife was the elegant consort he deserved, and her face glowed with the thought of their happiness. He certainly could imagine Della in these rooms, their bridal excesses a tribute to female loveliness. He would add a geranium. Fool that he was, or wasn’t, since he knew that in this world there are limits to reasonable expectation, he said, “My wife is a colored lady.”
She said, “That isn’t possible. It’s against the law.” She turned her back to him. She said, “Just when you think you know somebody!”
So, just like that, it had ended. He knew there was no appeal to be made. But he said, “She’s a wonderful, gentle woman. She’s educated. She’s a minister’s daughter, an English teacher.”
“She’s a Negro. I don’t want her coming around here.”
“Well then, I’m leaving!” he said, as if this were a threat. So much had he come to assume.
She turned and looked at him, eyes bright with wrath. “You damn well bet you’re leaving! Now! I took you for a decent man!”
Dear Jesus, don’t let me lay a hand on this woman! He waited for the outrage that flooded him to recede enough to allow him to move or speak, but it was clearly apparent to her, and she was alarmed.
She said, “I’m going to call the cops!”
He stepped aside to let her leave the room, to ease her panic. This meant she could get to the telephone, with what consequences he could hardly bear to think. He went to his room and grabbed everything he could stuff into his valise, including certain cautious purchases that meant the catch wouldn’t close. He did remember his hat and what remained of his money. As for anything else, hell with it.
He had money enough for a bus ticket to Memphis or to St. Louis. St. Louis was where it seemed Della would be, but in Memphis he might find out where she really was. Out on the street again, he felt a sharp yearning for the meager comforts of the old room in the old flophouse, only a long walk away from what used to be Della’s house. That would be capitulation. He would just be looking for memories. So he would go to Memphis, where she might not be, and then he would have the trouble and expense of following her, if they told him where she was, and in any case of getting himself back to St. Louis. While I think on thee, dear friend. It was the thought of her that made all this tolerable, the hope of finding her, just seeing her. He would sleep on a bench, sitting upright with his arms around his valise to protect it, buy his ticket, hope for a tolerable seat, and let himself be delivered to Memphis, stale, rumpled, and unshaven. His new suit, half paid for, would hang forever where he saw it last, and he would present himself to Della’s father exactly the old white bum of that man’s deepest fears. All losses are restored, and sorrows end. So long as he thought of her, and it was somehow really her he thought of. He knew that with use even memories wear.
He arrived on a Sunday, found the address of the church in a phone book, was pointed in its direction by a porter, and walked. Churches everywhere; chatty crowds at open doors, perfume, wafts of organ music, bells. The great Sabbath and its festivals. He walked on into the black city. By then doors were closing for the hour or two the worshippers variously pondered life and its implications. The church he was looking for finally came into sight. It was a big stone building with an urban, prosperous look, two squared-off towers with a stained-glass window between them. The wide doors at the base of each tower were still closed, so he loitered in a doorway across the street, wishing, pointlessly, that he had shaved and that there was anything he could spare, to abandon in some corner so the valise, which was a decent enough thing in itself, would close. But he couldn’t risk being seen rummaging in it. If he didn’t stop trying to force it, the catch would break. This felt inevitable. He wished he had a cigarette. Then the doors opened to a robust postlude and the bishop came out and took his place, ready to greet his congregation. He was a large man, attired in that episcopal finery Jack’s father, in the black weeds of true Protestantism, sometimes took a moment to deplore. A wind stirred his vestments. Good Christ, he was imposing.
There was nothing else to do—he had spent his last dime getting there—so Jack began to saunter, a little obliquely, toward the edge of the crowd that mingled on the broad steps and on the sidewalk. The bishop looked up and saw him. It was a look like a rifle shot, aimed at him precisely. Jack stopped where he was. He decided to remove his hat. The bishop excused himself to the gathering and crossed the street, stopping at a distance from him of several feet.
“John Boughton,” Jack said.
“Yes.” The man was studying his face the way people do when they’re about to say, How could you! Then he said, “You can wait inside,” and walked off briskly toward the big stone house beside the church, the parsonage. Jack took this to mean he should follow, uneasy at the thought that he might have misunderstood, that something else was meant by “inside” and he was tagging along for no reason. But he followed him up the steps and into a big room with a public feeling about it. There were two pictures of Jesus, the one in Della’s apartment but larger, and on another wall the one where He is holding a lamb in His arms. There was an upright piano and a chalkboard on an easel. The minister gestured at a chair, said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” and went away. And Jack sat there, thinking he would be much more comfortable on one of the couches but loath to presume. How had Della’s father known who he was? He could not have been expected. Surely if Della described him she would not have described him as he was then, exhausted and so visibly out of luck. He was being treated like the embarrassing relative, to whom something both minimal and absolute is owed, respect having no part in it. Well, at least that would put him within the family circle. There might be some frayed version of those mystical bonds that attach relatives, if magazine poetry speaks true. This impressive man, he thought, is in some way or degree my father-in-law. He had to be careful what he thought. It might affect what he said. He had to laugh at the horrible possibility of his seeming in any way familiar.
The bishop was gone a good deal longer than a few minutes. Jack’s carnal self had learned to expect breakfast. Chicago seemed more and more like an episode in Pilgrim’s Progress, an enchanting byway where the hero’s soul is imperiled by excesses of sound sleep and personal hygiene. What would John the Baptist have to say about all that? Jesus Himself, for that matter, before He was translated into the figure in the calming portraits. Jack had his hunger and the rest in common with the primitive church, who would stream into this room, impressed by the mismatched lamps and the wilted doilies, clamoring for some explanation of Methodist Episcopal, while his own reverend father stood by, hoping to offer a few words on the meaning of Presbyterian. He was falling asleep on that comfortless chair. He began to wonder if the delay meant that he should take offense and leave. And go where? And do what? He would be lurking around the next day, having come so far, having spent his last dime. The cops would
get him for loitering and keep him for seeming deranged. This was life at its lowest ebb. But Julia brought him a tuna-fish sandwich with sweet pickle along the edge of the plate, a napkin, and a newspaper. These little attentions were an almost unbearable relief, though all she said to him was “I’ll bring you some coffee” and “He’ll be back soon.”
When he did come back soon, Della was with him. Her father shook his head, absorbing a difficult fact, and said, “She’s been waiting for you. I hoped you might not come, but here you are.”
Della came and stood beside him in that way she had, somehow affirming every vow he could ask of her, as if every promise was as good as kept before it was ever made. Forsaking all others, remarkably enough. Her father walked out of the room. Della sat down on a couch and patted the place next to her. She said, “I meant to just come here for a visit. But then after a few days I started feeling bad in the mornings. And my mother knew what that was.” She smoothed the lap of her dress with both hands.
“Oh,” he said.
“Yes.”
He was glad she did not look at him. Shame and embarrassment overwhelmed him before he had time to think, and he was ashamed and embarrassed to realize that this was true. His wife was expecting a child. This was a blessing, pure and simple. But shame was a very old habit with him. He had long considered it penitential, payment extracted in the form of steady, tolerable misery, against a debt he would never settle. He was even a little loyal to it, as if it assured him there was justice in the universe. Shame stirred in him when he felt disapproval, like an ache in bad weather, and here he was, the center of scandal, and of outrage pent up on grounds of religion and good manners. That big room they sat in was conspicuously empty. All the wear of endless, impersonal hospitality meant emptiness, as if someone had shouted “Fire!” Word had gone out. This good family would be spared at least the crudest effects of scandal. He took Della’s hand and she leaned against him. Well, that was wonderful.
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