Saint Maybe

by Anne Tyler

  Two other doctors shared the office: a dermatologist and an ophthalmologist. One morning Doug saw the ophthalmologist talking with a very attractive young woman at the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist must have proposed some time or date, because the young woman shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t make it then.”

  “Can’t make it?” the doctor asked. “This is surgery, not a hair appointment. We’re talking about your eyesight!”

  “I’m busy that day,” the young woman said.

  “Miss Wilson, maybe you don’t understand. This is the kind of problem you take care of now, you take care of yesterday. Not next week or next month. I can’t state that too strongly.”

  “Yes, but I happen to be occupied that day,” the young woman said.

  Then Bee came out of Dr. Plumm’s office, and Doug didn’t get to hear the end of the conversation. He kept thinking about it, though. What could make a person defer such crucial surgery? She was meeting a lover? But she could always meet him another day. She’d be fired from her job? But no employer was that hardhearted. Nothing Doug came up with was sufficient explanation.

  Imagine being so offhand about your eyesight. About your life, was what it amounted to. As if you wouldn’t have to endure the consequences forever and ever after.

  Wednesday their daughter dropped by to help with the heavier cleaning. She breezed in around lunchtime with a casserole for supper and a pair of stretchy gloves she’d heard would magically ease arthritic fingers. “Ordinary department-store gloves, I saw this last night on the evening news,” she told Bee. “You’re lucky I got them when I did; I went to Hochschild’s. Don’t you know there’ll be a big rush for them.”

  “Yes, dear, that was very nice of you,” Bee said dutifully. She already owned gloves, medically prescribed, much more official than these were. Still, she put these on and spread her hands out as flat as possible, testing. She was wearing one of Ian’s sweatshirts and baggy slacks and slipper-socks. In the gloves, which were the dainty, white, lady’s-tea kind, she looked a little bit crazy.

  Claudia filled a bucket in the kitchen sink and added a shot of ammonia. “Going to tackle that chandelier,” she told them. “I noticed it last week. A disgrace!”

  Probably it was Ian’s housekeeping she was so indignant with—or just time itself, time that had coated each prism with dust. She wasn’t thinking how it sounded to waltz into a person’s home and announce that it was filthy. Doug cast a sideways glance at Bee to see how she was taking it. Her eyes were teary, but that could have been the ammonia. He waited till Claudia had left the kitchen, sloshing her bucket into the dining room, and then he laid a hand on top of Bee’s. “Peculiar, isn’t it?” he said. “First you’re scolding your children and then all at once they’re so smart they’re scolding you.”

  Bee smiled, and he saw that they weren’t real tears after all. “I suppose,” he went on more lightly, “there was some stage when we were equals. I mean while she was on the rise and we were on the downslide. A stage when we were level with each other.”

  “Well, I must have been on the phone at the time,” Bee said, and then she laughed.

  Her hand in the glove felt dead to him, like his own hand after he’d slept on it wrong and cut off the circulation.

  The foreigners set their car on fire, trying to install a radio. “I didn’t know radios were flammable,” Mrs. Jordan said, watching from the Bedloes’ front porch. Doug was a bit surprised himself, but then electronics had never been his strong point. He went over to see if he could help. The car was a Dodge from the late fifties or maybe early sixties, whenever it was that giant fins were all the rage. Once the body had been powder blue but now it was mostly a deep, matte red from rust, and one door was white and one fender turquoise. Whom it belonged to was unclear, since the foreigner who had bought it, second- or third-hand, had long since gone back to his homeland.

  John Two and Fred and Ollie were standing around the car in graceful poses, languidly fanning their faces. The smoke appeared to be coming from the dashboard. Doug said, “Fellows? Think we should call the fire department?” but Fred said, “Oh, we dislike to keep disturbing them.”

  Hoping nothing would explode, Doug reached through the open window on the driver’s side and pulled the first wire his fingers touched. Almost immediately the smoke thinned. There was a strong smell of burning rubber, but no real damage—at least none that he could see. It was hard to tell; the front seat was worn to bare springs and the backseat had been removed altogether.

  “Maybe we just won’t have radio,” John Two told Ollie.

  “We never had radio before,” Fred said.

  “We were very contented,” John Two said, “and while we traveled we could hear the birds sing.”

  Doug pictured them traveling through a flat green countryside like the landscape in a child’s primer. They would be the kind who set off without filling the gas tank first or checking the tire pressure, he was certain. Chances were they wouldn’t even have a road map.

  One morning when he came downstairs he found Beastie dead on the kitchen floor, her body not yet stiff. It was a shock, although he should have been prepared for it. She was sixteen years old. He could still remember what she’d looked like when they brought her home—small enough to fit in her own feed dish. That first winter it had snowed and snowed, and she had humped her fat little body ecstatically through the drifts like a Slinky toy, with a dollop of snow icing her nose and snowflakes on her lashes.

  He went upstairs to wake Ian. He wanted to get her buried before the children saw her. “Ian,” he said. “Son.”

  Ian’s room still looked so boyish. Model airplanes sat on the shelves among autographed baseballs and high-school yearbooks. The bedspread was printed with antique cars. It could have been one of those rooms that’s maintained as a shrine after a young person dies.

  Danny’s room, on the other hand, had been redecorated for Thomas. Not a trace of Danny remained.

  “Son?”

  “Hmm.”

  “I need you to help me bury Beastie.”

  Ian opened his eyes. “Beastie?”

  “I found her this morning in the kitchen.”

  Ian considered a moment and then sat up. When Doug was sure he was awake, he left the room and went downstairs for his jacket.

  Beastie had not been a large dog, but she weighed a lot. Doug heaved her onto the doormat and then dragged the mat outside and down the back steps. Thump, thump, thump—it made him wince. The mat left a trail in the sparkling grass. He backed up to the azalea and dropped the corners of the mat and straightened. It was six-thirty or so—too early for the neighbors to be about yet. The light was nearly colorless, the traffic noises sparse and distant.

  Ian came out with his windbreaker collar turned up. He had both shovels with him. “Good thing the ground’s not frozen,” Doug told him.

  “Right.”

  “This is probably not even legal, anyhow.”

  They chipped beneath the sod, trying as best they could not to break it apart, and laid it to one side. A breeze was ruffling Beastie’s fur and Doug kept imagining that she could feel it, that she was aware of what they were doing. He made his mind a blank. He set up an alternating rhythm with Ian, hacking through the reddish earth and occasionally ringing against a pebble or a root. In spite of the breeze he started sweating and he stopped to take off his jacket, but Ian kept his on. Ian didn’t look hot at all; he looked chilly and pale, with that fine white line around his lips that meant he had his jaw set. For the first time, Doug thought to wonder how this was hitting him. “Guess you’ll miss her,” he said.

  “Yes,” Ian said, still digging.

  “Beastie’s been around since you were … what? Eight or so, or not even that.”

  Ian nodded and bent to toss a rock out of the way.

  “We’ll let the kids set some kind of marker up,” Doug told him. “Plant bulbs or something. Make it pretty.”

  It was all he
could think of to offer.

  They ended up cheating a bit on the grave—dug more of an oval than a rectangle, so they had to maneuver to get her into it. She fit best on her side, slightly curled. When Doug saw her velvety snout against the clay, tears came to his eyes. She had always been such an undemanding dog, so accommodating, so adaptable. “Ah, God,” he said, and then he looked up and realized Ian was praying. His head was bowed and his lips were moving. Doug hastily bowed his own head. He felt as if Ian were the grownup and he the child. It had been years, maybe all the years of his adulthood, since he had relied so thankfully on someone else’s knowledge of what to do.

  The two younger children came down with chicken pox—first Daphne and then Thomas. Everybody waited for Agatha to get it too but she must have had it earlier, before they knew her. Daphne was hardly sick at all, but Thomas had a much worse case and one night he woke up delirious. Doug heard his hoarse, startled voice, oddly bright in the darkness—“Don’t let them come! Don’t let their sharp hooves!”—and then Ian’s steady “Thomas, old man. Thomas. Tom-Tom.”

  In that short-story course, Doug had read a story about an experiment conducted by creatures from outer space. What the creatures wanted to know was, could earthlings form emotional attachments? Or were they merely at the mercy of biology? So they cut a house in half in the middle of the night, and they switched it with another half house in some totally different location. Tossed the two households together like so many game pieces. This woman woke up with a man and some children she’d never laid eyes on before. Naturally she was terribly puzzled and upset, and the others were too, but as it happened the children had some kind of illness, measles or something (maybe even chicken pox, come to think of it), and so of course she did everything she could to make them comfortable. The creatures’ conclusion, therefore, was that earthlings didn’t discriminate. Their family feelings, so called, were a matter of blind circumstance.

  Doug couldn’t remember now how the story had ended. Maybe that was the end. He couldn’t quite recollect.

  In the dark, Bee’s special white arthritis gloves glowed eerily. She lay on her side, facing him, with the gloves curled beneath her chin. The slightest sound used to wake her when their own three children were little—a cough or even a whimper. Now she slept through everything, and Doug was glad. It was a pity so much rested on Ian, but Ian was young. He had the energy. He hadn’t reached the point yet where it just plain didn’t seem worth the effort.

  Ian invited his parents to a Christian Fellowship Picnic. “To a what?” Doug asked, stalling for time. (Who cared what it was called? It was bound to be something embarrassing.)

  “Each of us invites people we’d like to join in fellowship with,” Ian said in that deadly earnest way he had. “People who aren’t members of our congregation.”

  “I thought that church of yours didn’t believe in twisting folkses’ arms.”

  “It doesn’t. We don’t. This is only for fellowship.”

  They were watching the evening news—Doug, Bee, and Ian. Now Bee looked away from a skyful of bomber airplanes to say, “I’ve never understood what people mean by ‘fellowship.’ ”

  “Just getting together, Mom. Nothing very mysterious.”

  “Then why even say it? Why not say ‘getting together’?”

  Ian didn’t take offense. He said, “Reverend Emmett wants us to ask, oh, people we care about and people who wonder what we believe and people who might feel hostile to us.”

  “We’re not hostile!”

  “Then maybe you would qualify for one of the other groups,” Ian said mildly.

  Bee looked at Doug. Doug pulled himself together (he had a sense of struggling toward the surface) and said, “Isn’t it sort of early for a picnic? We’re still getting frost at night!”

  “This is an indoor picnic,” Ian told him.

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “Reverend Emmett’s mother, Sister Priscilla, has relatives out in the valley who own a horse farm. They’re in Jamaica for two weeks and they told her she could stay in the house.”

  “Did they say she could throw a church picnic in the house?”

  “We won’t do any harm.”

  Bee was still looking at Doug. (She wanted him to say no, of course.) The bombers had given way to a moisturizer commercial.

  “Well, it’s nice of you to think of us, son,” Doug said, “but—”

  “I’ve invited Mrs. Jordan, too.”

  “Mrs. Jordan?”

  “Right.”

  “Jessie Jordan?”

  “She’s always wanting to know what Second Chance is all about.”

  This put a whole different light on things. How could they refuse when a mere neighbor had accepted? Drat Jessie Jordan, with her lone-woman eagerness to go anywhere she was asked!

  And then she had the nerve to make out she was being so daring, so rakish. On the way to Greenspring Valley (for they did end up attending, taking their own car which was easier on Bee’s hips than the bus), Mrs. Jordan bounced and burbled like a six-year-old. “Isn’t this exciting?” she said. She was dressed as if headed for a Buckingham Palace garden party—cartwheel hat ringed with flowers, swishy silk dress beneath her drab winter coat. “You know, there are so many alternative religions springing up these days,” she said. “I worry I’ll fall hopelessly behind.”

  “And wouldn’t that be a shame,” Bee said sourly. She wore an ordinary gray sweat suit, not her snazzy warm-up suit with the complicated zippers; so her hands must be giving her trouble today. Doug himself was dressed as if for golfing, carefully color-coordinated to compensate for what might be misread as sloppiness on Bee’s part. He kept the car close behind Second Chance’s rented bus. Sometimes Daphne’s little thumbtack of a face bobbed up in the bus’s rear window, smiling hugely and mouthing elaborate messages no one could catch. “What did she say? What?” Bee asked irritably.

  “Can’t quite make it out, hon.”

  They traveled deeper and deeper into country that would be luxurious in the summer but was now a vast network of bare branches lightly tinged with green. Pasturelands extended for miles. The driveway they finally turned into was too long to see to the end, and the white stone house was larger than some hotels. “Oh! Would you look!” Mrs. Jordan cried, clapping her hands.

  Doug didn’t like to admit it, but he felt easier about Second Chance now that he saw such a substantial piece of property connected to it. He wondered if the relatives were members themselves. Probably not, though.

  They parked on the paved circle in front. Passengers poured from the bus—first the children, then the grownups. Doug fancied he could tell the members from the visitors. The members had a dowdy, worn, slumping look; the visitors were dressier and full of determined gaiety.

  It occurred to him that Bee could be mistaken for a member.

  Carrying baskets, coolers, and Thermos jugs, everyone followed Reverend Emmett’s mother up the flagstone walk. They entered the front hall with its slate floor and center staircase, and several people said, “Ooh!”

  “Quite a joint,” Doug murmured to Bee.

  Bee hushed him with a look.

  They crossed velvety rugs and gleaming parquet and finally arrived in an enormous sun porch with a long table at its center and modern, high-gloss chairs and lounges set all about. “The conservatory,” Reverend Emmett’s mother said grandly. She was a small, finicky woman in a matched sweater set and a string of pearls and a pair of chunky jeans that seemed incongruous, downright wrong, as if she’d forgotten to change into the bottom half of her outfit. “Let’s spread our picnic,” she said. “Emmett, did you bring the tablecloth?”

  “I thought you were bringing that.”

  “Well, never mind. Just put my potato salad here at this end.”

  Reverend Emmett wore a sporty polo shirt, a tan windbreaker, and black dress trousers. (He and his mother belonged in Daphne’s block set, the one where you mismatch heads and legs and torsos.) He p
ut a covered bowl where she directed, and then the others laid out platters of fried chicken, tubs of coleslaw, and loaves of home-baked bread. The table—varnished so heavily that it seemed wet—gradually disappeared. Streaky squares of sunlight from at least a dozen windows warmed the room, and people started shedding their coats and jackets. “Dear Lord in heaven,” Reverend Emmett said (catching Doug with one arm half out of a sleeve), “the meal is a bountiful gift from Your hands and the company is more so. We thank You for this joyous celebration. Amen.”

  It was true there was something joyous in the atmosphere. Everyone converged upon the food, clucking and exclaiming. The children turned wild. Even Agatha, ponderously casual in a ski sweater and stirrup pants, pushed a boy back with shy enthusiasm when he gave her a playful nudge at the punch bowl. The members steered the guests magnanimously toward the choice dishes; they took on a proprietary air as they pointed out particular features of the house. “Notice the leaded panes,” they said, as if they themselves were intimately familiar with them. The guests (most as suspicious as Doug and Bee, no doubt) showed signs of thawing. “Why, this is not bad,” one silver-haired man said—the father, Doug guessed, of the hippie-type girl at his elbow. Doug had hold of too much dinner now to shake hands, but he nodded at the man and said, “How do. Doug Bedloe.”

  “Mac McClintock,” the man said. “You just visiting?”

  “Right.”

  “His son is Brother Ian,” the hippie told her father. “I just think Brother Ian is so faithful,” she said to Doug.

  “Well … thanks.”

  “My daughter Grade,” Mac said. “Have you met?”

  “No, I don’t believe we have.”

  “We’ve met!” Gracie said. “I’m the one who fetched your grandchildren from school every day when your wife was in the hospital.”

  “Oh, yes,” Doug said. He didn’t have the faintest memory of it.

  “I fetched the children for Brother Ian and then Brother Ian closed up the rat holes in my apartment.”