Saint Maybe

by Anne Tyler

  “They’re okay.”

  “I couldn’t get over it when your mother called and told me. Those poor little tots! And I understand your parents won’t be keeping them.”

  “No, we’re trying to find some relatives,” Ian said.

  “Well, it’s a shame,” Mrs. Myrdal said.

  “I don’t guess you know of any relatives.”

  “No, dear, your mother already asked me. I told her, I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t have an inkling.’ Although just between you and me, I’m pretty near positive that Lucy was, well, not from Baltimore.”

  “Ah.”

  “You could sort of tell, you know,” she said. “I always sensed it, even before we had our falling out. You heard we’d fallen out, I suppose.”

  “Not in so many words,” Ian said.

  “Well!” Mrs. Myrdal said. She folded her sweater caressingly. “One time we went downtown together and I caught her shoplifting.”

  “Shoplifting?”

  “Bold as you please. Swiped a pure silk blouse off a rack and tucked it into the stroller where her innocent baby girl lay sleeping. I was so astounded I just didn’t do a thing. I thought I must have misunderstood; I thought there must be some explanation. I followed along behind her thinking, ‘Now, Ruby, don’t go jumping to conclusions.’ On we march, past the scarf counter. Whisk! Red-and-tan Italian scarf scampers into her bag. I know I should have spoken but I was too amazed. My heart was racing so I thought it had riz up in my throat some way, and I worried we’d be arrested. We could have been, you know! We could have been hauled off to jail like common criminals. Well, luckily we weren’t. But next time she phoned I said, ‘Lucy, I’m busy.’ She said, ‘I just wanted to ask if you could baby-sit.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe I care to, thank you.’ She knew why, too. She didn’t let on but she had to know. Couple of times she asked again, and each time I turned her down.”

  Ian ducked his head and busied himself patting Beastie.

  “Not that I wished her ill, understand. I was sorry as the next person to hear about her passing.”

  From the stairs came the sound of footsteps and his mother’s voice saying, “… juice in that round glass pitcher and—” She arrived in the doorway with the baby propped on her hip. Thomas and Agatha were shadowing her. “Oh! Mrs. Myrdal,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  Mrs. Myrdal rose and reached out in that fumble-fingered, greedy manner that old ladies take on around babies. “Would you look at how this child has grown!” she said. “Remember Mrs. Moo-doe, darlin’?” She accepted Daphne in a rumpled bunch and cocked her head at the other two. “Thomas and Agatha, I’d never have known you!”

  “Now, we shouldn’t be long,” Bee told her. “It’s going to be a very simple … Ian, where’s your father got to?”

  Ian said, “Um …”

  “Isn’t this just like him! Check the basement, will you? Mrs. Myrdal, the tea bags are in the …”

  Ian went out to the kitchen. He thought, She was only shoplifting. He crossed the pantry and started down the basement steps. She wasn’t meeting some man, she was shoplifting. He called, “Dad?”

  “Down here.”

  That dress was not a present from her lover after all.

  His father was tinkering at his workbench. Wearing his good dark suit, his hair still showing the comb lines, he bent over the lamp from the attic bedroom. “Are we set to go?” he asked without turning.

  Why, even I have been known to shoplift. Me and Pig and Andrew, back in fifth grade. It’s nothing. Or next to nothing.

  “Ian?”

  He looked at his father.

  “Are we set to go?”

  “Yes,” Ian said after a moment.

  “Well, then.”

  His father switched off the light above the bench. He started toward the stairs. He halted next to Ian and said, “Coming?”

  “Yes.”

  They climbed the stairs.

  Oh, God, this is the one last little dark dot I can’t possibly absorb.

  In the hall, his mother was putting on her hat. “Why is it,” she asked his father, “that the minute everyone’s ready, you choose to disappear?”

  “I was just looking at that lamp, sweetheart.”

  The three of them left the house and walked to the car. Ian felt bruised all down the front of his body, as if he’d been kicked.

  The last time he’d been in this church was for Danny’s funeral—and before that, for Danny’s wedding. When he stood on the sidewalk looking up at Dober Street Presbyterian, all his thoughts were gathered toward his brother. He could almost believe that Danny had been left behind here, in this peaked stone building with the louvered steeple.

  Inside, his parents stopped to greet Mrs. Jordan while Ian continued down the aisle. He passed Aunt Bev and her husband, and Cousin Amy, and a couple of the foreigners from the neighborhood. He caught sight of Cicely’s blond curls gleaming like fresh pine shavings, and he slid in next to her and took hold of her hand, which turned out to contain a knob of damp Kleenex. Her lashes and her cheeks were damp too, he saw when she smiled at him. She had told him when he telephoned that she wouldn’t think of not coming to this, even though it meant a two-hour train ride. She just needed to say goodbye, she told him. She had always thought Lucy was special.

  The organ started playing softly, and Dr. Prescott entered through a side door and took a seat behind the pulpit. Below the pulpit lay the casket, pearly gray, decorated with a spray of white flowers. The sight of it made Ian feel cold. Something like a cold blade entered his chest and he looked away.

  Now the others were filing down the aisle—his father solemn and sheepish, his mother wearing an expression that seemed less grief-stricken than disappointed. “I’m not angry; just disappointed,” she used to tell Ian when he misbehaved. (What would she say now, if she knew what he had done?) Behind came Claudia and Macy with Abbie, who was evidently considered old enough now for funerals. She had on her first high heels and wobbled slightly as she followed the others into a pew. This wasn’t the front pew but the one just behind. Maybe the front pew was reserved for Lucy’s blood relations, if any showed up.

  But none did. The organ music dwindled away, Dr. Prescott rose and announced a prayer, and still no one arrived to fill that empty pew.

  The prayer was for the living. “We know Thy daughter Lucy is safely by Thy side,” Dr. Prescott intoned, “but we ask Thee to console those left behind. Comfort them, we pray, and ease their pain. Let Thy mercy pour like a healing balm upon their hearts.” Like a healing balm. Ian pictured something white and semiliquid—the bottle of lotion his mother kept by the kitchen sink, say—pleasantly scented with almonds. Could the balm soothe not just grief but guilt? Not just guilt but racking anguish over something impulsively done that could not be undone?

  Ordinarily indifferent to prayers (or to anything else even vaguely religious), Ian listened to this one yearningly. He leaned forward in his seat as if he could ride the words all the way to heaven. He kept his eyes tightly shut. He thought, Please. Please. Please.

  In the pews around him he heard a rustling and a creaking, and he opened his eyes and found the congregation rising. Struggling to his feet, he peered at the hymnbook Cicely held in front of him. “… with me,” he joined in belatedly, “fast falls the eventide …” His voice was a creak. He fell silent and listened to the others—to Cicely’s clear soprano, Mrs. Jordan’s plain, true alto, Dr. Prescott’s rich bass. “The darkness deepens,” they sang, “Lord, with me abide!” The voices ceased to be separate. They plaited themselves into a multistranded chord, and now it seemed the congregation was a single person—someone of great kindness and compassion, someone gentle and wise and forgiving. “In life, in death, O Lord,” they finished, “abide with me.” And then came the long, sighed “Amen.” They sat down. Ian sat too. His knees were trembling. He felt that everything had been drained away from him, all the grief and self-blame. He was limp and pur
e and pliant as an infant. He was, in fact, born again.

  Through the burial in Pleasant Memory Cemetery and the car trip home, through the flurry of reclaiming the children, setting up the coffeepot, and greeting the guests who stopped by afterward, Ian wandered in a dreamlike state of mind. He traveled around the living room with a plate of butterscotch brownies, failing to notice it was empty till his brother-in-law pointed it out. “Earth to Ian,” Macy said, guffawing, and then Mrs. Jordan relieved Ian of the plate. Cicely came up from behind and slipped a hand into his. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  “Yes, fine,” he said.

  Her fingertips were soft little nubbins because she bit her nails. Her breath gave off the metallic scent of Coca-Cola. Mrs. Jordan’s craggy face had a hinged and plated look, like an armadillo hide. Everything seemed very distinct, but also far away.

  “It’s been too much,” Mrs. Jordan told Cicely. “Just too much to take in all at once. First Danny, and now Lucy!” She turned to draw one of the foreigners into the conversation; he was hovering hopefully nearby. “Why, I remember the day they announced their engagement!” she said. “Remember, Jim?”

  “Jack,” the foreigner said.

  “Jack, I was there when he brought her home. I’d come over to borrow the pinking shears and in they walked. Well, I knew right away what was what. Pretty little thing like that, who wouldn’t want to marry her?”

  “Woe betide you,” Jack told Ian.

  “Um …”

  “O lud lud! Please to accept my lamentations.”

  This must be the foreigner who was so devoted to Roget’s Thesaurus. Bee was always quoting choice remarks. Mrs. Jordan gave him a speculative stare. “I suppose in your culture, Lucy wouldn’t have lasted even this long,” she said. “Don’t they throw themselves on their husband’s pyre or something?”

  “Pyre?”

  “And now I reckon Doug and Bee will have to take on those poor children,” she told Ian.

  Ian said, “Well, actually—”

  “Just look at that little one. Did you ever see anything so precious?”

  Ian followed her gaze. In the doorway to the hall, Daphne stood rocking unsteadily. Her dazzling white shoes—hard-soled and ankle-high—no doubt helped to keep her upright; but still, standing alone at ten months was quite an accomplishment, Ian suspected. Was this the first time she’d tried it? He thought of all the fuss that would have been made ordinarily—the applause and the calls for a camera. But Daphne went unnoticed, a frail, wispy waif in an oversized dress, looking anxiously from face to face.

  Then she spotted Ian. Her eyes widened. She grinned. She dropped to the floor and scuttled toward him, expertly weaving between the grownups’ legs and pausing every now and then to wrench herself free from the hem of her dress. She arrived at his feet, took hold of his trousers and hauled herself to a standing position. When she beamed up at him, she had to tip her head so far back she nearly fell over.

  Ian bent and lifted her into his arms. She nestled against his shoulder. “Oh, the darling,” Mrs. Jordan said. “Why, she’s crazy about you! Isn’t she, Ian? Isn’t she? Ian?”

  He couldn’t explain why the radiance left over from church fell away so suddenly. The air in the room seemed dull and brownish. Mrs. Jordan’s voice sounded hollow. This child was far too heavy.

  Back in school, he kept trying to recapture that feeling he’d had at the funeral. He hummed “Abide with Me” under his breath. He closed his eyes in hopes of summoning up the congregation’s single, melting voice, the soft light from the pebbled windows, the sense of mercy and forgiveness. But nothing came. The bland brick atmosphere of Sumner College prevailed. Biology 101 progressed from nematodes to frogs, and King John repudiated the Magna Carta, and Ian’s roommate dragged him to see Devil-Women from Outer Space.

  At night, Danny stood at the blackboard in front of Ian’s English class. “This is a dream,” he announced. “The word ‘dream’ comes from the Latin word dorimus, meaning ‘game of chance.’ ” Ian awoke convinced that there had been some message in this, but the harder he worked to decipher it, the farther away it drifted.

  He phoned home Saturday afternoon and learned that Mrs. Jordan, of all people, had cleverly uncovered the name of Lucy’s ex-husband. “What she did,” Bee told Ian, “was sit Agatha down beside her and run through a lot of everyday, wife-ish remarks. She said, ‘Don’t forget the garbage,’ and, ‘Suppertime!’ and, ‘You’re late.’ Her theory was, the name would sort of swim into Agatha’s memory. She thought Thomas was too young to try it on. But all at once Thomas pipes up, ‘You’re late with the check again, Tom!’ he said. Just out of nowhere!”

  “Well, that would make sense,” Ian said. “So Thomas must be Tom Junior.”

  “I said to Jessie Jordan, I said, ‘Jessie,’ I said, ‘you’re amazing.’ Really I don’t know what I’d have done without her, these past few days. Or any of the neighbors. They’ve all been so helpful, running errands for me and taking the children when my legs are bad …”

  What she was saying, it seemed to Ian, was, “See what you’ve gone and done? See how you’ve ruined our lives?” Although of course she didn’t mean that at all. She went on to say the Cahns, next door, had lent her their sitter, and the foreigners had brought over a pot of noodle soup with an aftertaste resembling throw-up. “People have been just lovely,” she said, “and Cicely’s mother called to say—”

  “But what about Thomas Senior?” Ian broke in.

  “What about him?”

  “Did you look for him in the Cheyenne phone book?”

  “Oh, we’d already called all the Deans in Cheyenne, but now we have a name to give the officials. They ought to be able to track something down—driver’s license, marriage license … I remember Lucy said once he’d remarried.”

  That night Ian dreamed that Lucy sat in her living room among bushel baskets of mail—letters and fliers and magazines. Then Danny walked in and said, “Lucy? What is this?”

  “Oh,” she said, “I just can’t open them anymore. Since you died it seems I haven’t had the heart.”

  “But this is terrible!” he cried. “Your bulks and your flats I could understand, but first-class, Lucy! First-class envelopes lying untouched!”

  “Then talk to Ian,” she said in a wiry, tight voice.

  “Ian?”

  “Ian says I’m not a bit first-class,” she said, and her mouth turned down at the corners, petulant and spiteful looking.

  Ian awoke and blinked at the crack of light beneath the door. Winston was snoring. Someone’s radio was playing. He heard the scrape of a chair down the hall and carefree, unthinking laughter.

  Sunday morning he rode into town on the college’s little blue church bus. Most of the passengers were students he’d never laid eyes on before, although he did recognize his lab partner, dressed in a hard-surfaced, voluminous gray coat. He pretended not to see her and proceeded toward the long seat at the rear, where he settled between two boys with haircuts so short and suits so tidy that they might have stepped out of the 1950s. Really this was a sort of losers’ bus, he realized, and he had an impulse to jump off while he still could. But then the senior class secretary boarded—a poised, attractive girl—and he felt reassured. He rode through the stubbled farmlands with his eyes fixed straight ahead, while the boy on his left fingered a rosary and the boy on his right whispered over a Bible.

  At the courthouse square in Sumner, the bus stopped and everyone disembarked. Ian chose to follow the largest group of students, which included the senior class secretary and also a relatively normal-looking freshman named Eddie something whom he’d seen around the dorm. He and Eddie fell into step together, and Eddie said, “You on your way to Leeds Memorial?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so.”

  Eddie nodded. “It’s not too bad,” he said. “I go every week on account of my grandmother’s paying me.”

  “Paying you?”

  “If I don’t miss a Sunday all y
ear I get a check for a hundred bucks.”

  “Gosh,” Ian said.

  Leeds Memorial was a stately brick building with a white interior and dark, varnished pews. The choir sounded professional, and they sang the opening hymn on their own while the congregation stayed seated. Maybe that was why Ian didn’t have much feeling about it. It was only music, that was all—something unfamiliar, classical-sounding, flawlessly performed. Maybe the whole church had to be singing along.

  The theme of the day was harvest, because they were drawing close to Thanksgiving. The Bible reading referred to the reaping of grain, and the sermon had to do with resting after one’s labors. The pastor—a slouching, easygoing, just-one-of-the-guys type with a sweater vest showing beneath his suit coat—counseled his listeners to be kind to themselves, to take time for themselves in the midst of the hurly-burly. Ian felt enormous yawns hollowing the back of his throat. Finally the organist began thrumming out a series of chords, and the sermon came to an end and everyone rose. The hymn was “Bringing in the Sheaves.” It was a simpleminded, seesawing sort of tune, Ian felt, and the collective voice of the congregation had a note of fluty gentility, as if dominated by the dressed-up old ladies lining the pews.

  Walking back to the bus, Eddie asked if he’d be coming every Sunday.

  Ian said he doubted it.

  His Thanksgiving vacation was fractious and disorganized; Lucy’s children had still not been claimed. By now they had moved in upon the household in full force. Their toys littered the living room, their boats and ducks crowded the bathroom, and Daphne’s real crib—much larger than the Port-a-Crib—cramped his bedroom. He was alarmed at how haggard his mother looked, and how heavy and big-bellied. The waistband of her slacks was extended with one of those oversized safety pins women once decorated their kilts with. And the holiday dinner she served was halfhearted—no hors d’oeuvres, not even beforehand, and the turkey unstuffed and the pies store-bought. Even the company seemed lacking. Claudia snapped at her children, Macy kept drifting away from the table to watch a football game on TV, and the foreigners had to leave before dessert in order to meet the plane of a new arrival. All in all, it was a relief to have the meal over with.