by Anne Tyler
He missed the two older children. Thomas was away at Cornell and Agatha was in her second year of medical school. Most meals now were just this makeshift, often served on only half the table because Daphne’s homework covered the other half. And most of their conversations felt disjointed, absentminded, like the scattered bits of talk after the main guests have left the room.
“Me and Gideon are going to study Spanish at his house,” Daphne announced into one stretch of silence.
“Gideon and I,” her grandmother said.
Ian asked, “Will Gideon’s mother be home?”
“Sure.”
Ian scrutinized her. Gideon was Daphne’s boyfriend, an aloof, chilly type. Evidently his mother, a divorcee, had a boyfriend of her own. She was often out somewhere when Ian stopped by for Daphne.
“Maybe you could study here instead,” he told her.
But Daphne said, “I already promised I’d go there.” Then she picked up her empty bowl and licked it daintily, like a cat. Everyone noticed but no one objected. You had to select your issues, with someone like Daphne.
It unsettled Ian, sometimes, how much Daphne reminded him of Lucy. She had Lucy’s small face and her curly black hair, although it was cut short and ragged. She had her froggy voice. Even in voluminous army fatigues, her slender, fine bones seemed so neatly turned that they might have been produced by a lathe. Her eyes were her own, though: still a dense, navy blue. And her own native scent of vanilla underlay the smells of cigarettes and motor oil and leather.
At the end of the meal Ian’s father rose and brought a bowl of instant pudding from the refrigerator. He wiggled it at the others inquiringly, but Bee said, “No, thanks,” and Daphne shook her head. “All the more for me, then,” Doug said cheerfully, and he sat down and started eating directly from the bowl.
Was it because of the Sugar Rule that Daphne had declined? No, probably not. This was a girl who drank beer in parked cars during lunch hour, according to her principal. But she did continue to go to church every Sunday, singing the hymns lustily and bowing her head during prayers, when most other young people lost interest as soon as they reached their teens. And she flung herself into Good Works with real spirit. Whether she was actually a believer, though, Ian couldn’t decide, and something kept him from asking.
There was a knock at the kitchen door, a single, surly thud, and they looked over to find Gideon surveying them through the windowpanes. “Oops! I’m off,” Daphne said. No question of inviting Gideon in; he didn’t talk to grownups. All they saw of him was the tilt of his sharp face and the curtain of straight blond hair, and then Daphne spun through the door and the two of them were gone. “Daph? Oh, goodness, she’ll freeze to death,” Bee said.
Ian wished Daphne’s freezing to death were the worst he had to worry about.
Doug and Bee went upstairs for their Sunday nap and Ian did the dishes. Scraping the last of the pudding into a smaller container, he thought again about Reverend Emmett’s proposal. Bible School! He had a flash of himself packing the car to leave home—participating in the September ritual that he had watched so often from the sidelines. The car stuffed to the ceiling with clothes and LP records, his parents standing by to wave him off. Maybe even a roof rack, with a bike or a stereo lashed on top. Or a butterfly chair like his former roommate’s. Provided they still made butterfly chairs.
Over the years he had often wondered whatever had become of his roommate. He had imagined Winston proceeding through school and graduating and finding a job. By now he would be well established, probably in some field involving creative thought and invention. He had probably made a name for himself.
Ian glanced down at the pudding bowl and realized he had been eating each spoonful as he scraped it up. The inside of his mouth felt thick and coated. An unfamiliar sweetness clogged his throat.
At work he was training a new employee, a stocky, bearded black man named Rafael. He was giving his usual speech about the importance of choosing your wood. “Me, I always go for cherry if I can,” he said. “It’s the friendliest, you could put it. The most obedient.”
“Cherry,” the man said, nodding.
“It’s very nearly alive. It changes color over time and it even changes shape and it breathes.”
Rafael suddenly squinted at him, as if checking on his sanity.
The shop had seven employees now, not counting the high-school girl who came in afternoons to type and do the paperwork. (And they probably shouldn’t count her; sometimes her order sheets were so garbled that Ian had to sit down at the typewriter and place his fingers wrongly on the keys so as to figure out what, for instance, she’d meant by “nitrsi.”) All around the room various carpenters worked on their separate projects. They murmured companionably among themselves but left Ian alone mostly. He knew they considered him peculiar. A couple of years ago he had made the mistake of trying to talk about Second Chance with Greg, who happened to be going through some troubles. Forever after that Greg kept his distance and so did all the others, apparently tipped off. They were polite but embarrassed, wary. As for Mr. Brant, he was even less company than usual these days. It was said that his wife had left him for a younger man. The one who said it was Mrs. Brant’s niece Jeannie, who didn’t work there anymore but sometimes dropped by to visit. Mr. Brant himself never mentioned his wife.
Last spring, Mrs. Brant had paused to admire a bench Ian was sanding and she had softly but deliberately laid a hand on top of his. Her husband was in his rear office and the others were taking a break. Mrs. Brant had looked up into Ian’s eyes with an oddly cool expression, as if this were some kind of test. Ian wasn’t completely surprised (several times, women who knew his religious convictions had started behaving very forwardly, evidently finding him a challenge), and he dealt with it fairly well, he thought. He had merely slid his hand out from under and left her with the sandpaper, pretending he’d mistaken her move for an offer to help. And of course he had said nothing to her husband. But not two months later Jeannie announced that she was gone, and then Ian thought maybe he should have said something after all. “Mr. Brant,” he should have said, “it seems to me your wife is acting lonely.” Or, “Wouldn’t you and Mrs. Brant like to take a trip together or something?”
But telling was what he had promised himself he would never do again.
Oh, there were so many different ways you could go wrong. No wonder he loved woodwork! He showed Rafael the cherrywood nightstand he had finished the day before. The drawer glided smoothly, like satin, without a single hitch.
While the other men took their afternoon break, Ian grabbed his jacket and drove off to fetch Daphne from school. He could manage the round trip in just over twenty minutes when everything went on schedule, but of course it seldom did. Today, for instance, he must have left the shop too early. When he parked in front of the school he found he had several minutes to kill, and even longer if Daphne, as usual, came out late or had to run back in for something she’d forgotten. So he cut the engine and stepped from the car. The air was warm and heavy and windy, as if an autumn storm might be brewing. Behind him, another car pulled up. A freckled woman in slacks got out and said, “What, we’re early?”
“So it seems,” Ian said. Then, because he felt foolish just standing around with her, he put his hands in his pockets and ambled toward the building. Scudding clouds glared off the second-floor windows—the art-room windows, Ian recalled, and Miss Dunlap’s world-history windows, although Miss Dunlap must have retired or even died by now. Two boys in track suits jogged toward him on the sidewalk, separated around him, and jogged on. He wondered if they guessed what he was doing here. (“That’s Daphne Bedloe’s uncle; she’s on suspended suspension and has to go home under guard.”) It occurred to him that Daphne would be mortified if anyone she knew caught sight of him. He circled the school, therefore, and kept going. He passed the little snack shop where he and Cicely used to sit all afternoon over a couple of cherry Cokes, and he came to the Methodist church with
its stained-glass window full of stern, narrow angels. One of the church’s double doors stood open. Almost without thinking, he climbed the steps and went inside.
No lights were lit, but his eyes adjusted quickly to the gloom. He made out rows of cushioned pews and a carved wooden pulpit up front, with another stained-glass window high in the wall behind it. This one showed Jesus in a white robe, barefoot, holding His hands palm forward at His sides and gazing down at Ian kindly. Ian slid into a pew and rested his elbows on the pew ahead of him. He looked up into Jesus’ face. He said, Would it be possible for me to have some kind of sign?
Nothing fancy. Just something more definite than Reverend Emmett offering a suggestion.
He waited. He let the silence swell and grow.
But then the school bell rang—an extended jangle that reminded him of those key chains made from tiny metal balls—and his concentration was broken. He sighed and stood up. Anyhow, he had probably been presumptuous to ask.
In the doorway, looking out, he saw the first of the school crowd passing. He saw Gideon with a redheaded girl, his arm slung carelessly around her neck so they kept bumping into each other as they walked.
Gideon?
There was no mistaking that veil of blond hair, though, or the hunched, skulking posture. Almost as if this were Ian’s love, not Daphne’s, he felt his heart stop. He saw the redhead crane upward for a kiss and he drew his breath in sharply and stepped back into the shadow of the door.
By the time he reached the car, Daphne was waiting in the front seat. The car’s interior smelled of breath mints and tobacco. “Where’ve you been?” she squawked as he got in, and he said, “Oh, around.” He started the engine and pulled into the crawl of after-school traffic. “No Gideon?” he asked.
“It’s his day to go to his dad’s.”
“Oh.”
Daphne slid down in her seat and planted both feet on the dashboard. It appeared she was wearing combat boots—the most battered and scuffed he had ever laid eyes on. He hadn’t realized they came that small. Her olive-drab trousers seemed intended for combat too, but the blouse beneath her leather jacket was fragile white gauze with two clusters of silver bells hanging from the ends of the drawstring. Any time she moved, she gave off a faint tinkling sound and the grudging creak of leather. How was it that such an absurd little person managed to touch him so?
He thought of Gideon’s blond head next to the coppery, gleaming head of the girl in the crook of his arm.
Daphne, he should say, there’s something I have to tell you.
But he couldn’t.
He pulled up in front of their house and waited for her to get out, staring blankly through the windshield. To his surprise, he felt a kiss on his cheekbone as light as a petal. “Bye,” she said, and she slipped away and shut the car door behind her. He could almost believe she knew what he had spared her.
One day last summer, while sitting with Honeybunch in the veterinarian’s waiting room, Ian had noticed a particularly sweet-faced golden retriever. “Nice dog,” he had told the owner, and the owner—a middle-aged woman—had smiled and said, “Yes, I’ve had a good number in my day, but this one: this is the dog of my life. You know how that is?”
He knew, all right.
Daphne, he felt, was the child of his life. He wondered if he would ever love a daughter of his own quite so completely.
It was true the older two were easier. In a sense, he even liked them better. Thomas was so merry and winsome, and Agatha had somehow smoothed the corners off that disconcerting style of hers—the bluntness transformed into calm assurance, the aggressive homeliness into an intriguing, black-and-white handsomeness. He enjoyed them the way he would enjoy longtime best friends who found the same things funny or upsetting and didn’t need every last remark explained for them. In fact, you could say they were his only friends. But Daphne was the one who tugged at him most deeply.
And Daphne had always relied on him so, had taken it for granted that he would stand by her no matter what. He still had an acute physical memory of the weight of her infant head resting in the cup of his palm. Even now, sometimes, she would lean against him while they watched TV and artlessly confide her secrets and gossip about her classmates and recount her hair-raising adventures that he had had no inkling of, thank heaven, while she was undergoing them. (She knew the city inside out, and slipped without a thought through neighborhoods that Ian himself avoided.) But if he showed any concern she would say, “I knew I shouldn’t have told you! I should never tell you anything!” And when her friends came over she grew visibly remote from him, referring to him as “my uncle” as if he had no name and rolling her eyes when her girlfriends tried to make small talk or (on occasion) flirt with him. When he said he was off to Prayer Meeting, she told her friends he was “speaking metaphorically.” When he enforced her curfew, she announced she was running away to live with her mother’s people, who—she claimed—were worldly-wise and cosmopolitan and wouldn’t think of making her return to their mansion at the dot of any set time. Ian had laughed, and then felt a deep, sad ache.
That was what Daphne brought out in him, generally. Laughter and an ache.
Reverend Emmett invited him to supper. “Just the two of us,” he said on the phone, “to talk about the matter of your vocation.” Ian gulped, but of course he accepted.
Reverend Emmett warned him that he wasn’t much of a cook (his mother had died the previous fall) and so Ian asked if he could bring something. “Well,” Reverend Emmett said, “you know that cold white sauce that people serve with potato chips?”
“Sauce? You mean dip?”
“It has little bits of dried onion scattered through it.”
“You mean onion soup dip?”
“That must be it,” Reverend Emmett said. “Mother used to make it whenever we had guests, but I haven’t been able to find her recipe. I thought maybe you could ask your mother if she might fix it for us.”
“Shoot, I’ll fix it myself,” Ian said. “I’ll bring over the ingredients and show you how it’s done.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Reverend Emmett told him.
So Tuesday evening, when Ian rang the doorbell, he was carrying a pint of sour cream and an envelope of the only brand of onion soup mix on the market that didn’t contain any sugar. He had washed up after work but (mindful of the sin of superficiality) kept on his everyday clothes, and Reverend Emmett answered the door in jeans and one of his incongruously jaunty polo shirts. “Come in!” he said.
Ian said, “Thanks.”
To tell the truth, he felt a bit apprehensive. He worried that Reverend Emmett labored under some false impression of him, for how else to explain his plans for Ian’s future?
The living room was small but formal, slightly fussy—the mother’s doing, Ian guessed. He had seen it on several occasions but had never gone beyond it, and now he looked about him curiously as he followed Reverend Emmett through a dim, flowered dining room to a kitchen that seemed to have been turned on end and shaken. “I thought I would make us a roast of beef,” Reverend Emmett told him, and Ian said, “Sounds good.” He wondered how a roast could have required all these pans and utensils. Maybe they’d been used for some side dish. “Would you like an apron to work in?” Reverend Emmett asked.
“It’s not that complicated,” Ian said. “Just a mixing bowl and a spoon will do.”
He emptied the sour cream into the bowl Reverend Emmett brought him and then stirred in the soup mix, with Reverend Emmett hovering over the whole operation. “Why, there’s really nothing to it,” he said at the end.
“A veritable snap,” Ian told him.
“Would you mind very much if we ate this in the kitchen? I’ll need to keep an eye on the roast.”
“That’s fine with me.”
They pulled two stools up to the counter, which was puddled with several different colors of liquids, and started on the chips and dip. Reverend Emmett gobbled chips wolfishly, a vein standing out in his tem
ple as he chewed. (Had his doctor not warned him off fats?) He told Ian to call him Emmett. “Oh. All right … Emmett,” Ian said. But he could force the name out only by imagining a “Reverend” in the gap, and he thought, from the way Reverend Emmett paused at each “Ian,” that he was mentally inserting a “Brother.”
“The fact is, um … Ian, hardly anyone I know calls me just plain Emmett anymore,” Reverend Emmett said. “The fact is, this is a lonely profession. Oh, but not for you, it wouldn’t be. You would be training among our own kind from the start. You would be making your friendships among them, and whoever you marry will know she shouldn’t expect a half-timbered rectory and white-glove teas.”
“But … Emmett,” Ian said, “how can I be certain I’m cut out for this? I’m nothing but a carpenter.”
“Our Lord was a carpenter,” Reverend Emmett reminded him. He rose and went to peer inside the oven.
“Maybe so,” Ian said, “but that might have been made a little too much of.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, we don’t seem to hear about anything He built, do we? I wish we did. Sometimes when I look at paintings of Him I try to see what kind of muscles He had—whether they’re the kind that come from hammering and sawing. I like to think He really did put a few bits of wood together; He didn’t just stand around discussing theology with His friends while Joseph built the furniture.”
Reverend Emmett set the roast on the counter and cocked his head at him thoughtfully.
“Or camel barns, or whatever it was,” Ian said. “I hope I don’t sound disrespectful.”
“No, no … Could you bring in that salad, please?”
“But anyhow,” Ian said. He picked up the salad bowl and followed Reverend Emmett into the dining room. “I’m getting off the track here. What I’m trying to say is, I’m not sure someone like me would be able to give people answers. When they had doubts and serious problems and such. All those ups and downs people go through, those little hells they go through—I wouldn’t know what to tell them.”
