Saint Maybe

by Anne Tyler

  The street was clear now and they could have crossed, but instead they stood watching him. It was Agatha who finally spoke. “Oh, Ian,” she said. “Oh, damnit. How much longer are you going to be on your own?”

  “Why, not long at all,” he told her.

  They squinted at him in the sunlight.

  “I wasn’t planning to bring this up yet,” he said. “But anyhow. Since you ask. I believe I might be getting married.”

  Somewhere far off, a car honked.

  Agatha said, “Married?”

  “At least, we’re talking it over.”

  Stuart said, “Hey, now!” He punched Ian in the shoulder. “Hey, guy. Congratulations!”

  “Thanks,” Ian said. He was grinning.

  “This is you and Clara,” Agatha said.

  “Who? No, it’s Rita,” he said. He told Daphne, “You know Rita.”

  Daphne’s mouth dropped open.

  “Rita who?” Agatha asked. She tugged Daphne’s jacket sleeve. “Who’s Rita?”

  Their grandfather was the one who answered. “Rita the Clutter Counselor,” he said. “Hot dog!”

  “But who is she?” Agatha demanded. They started crossing the street, with Ian leading the way. “Have you met her, Thomas?”

  Thomas said, “Nope.” But he was grinning too.

  “We’ve only been going out a month or so,” Ian told them. “When I first got to know her I held back, for a while. I was afraid we were too different. But then finally I said, ‘I just have to do this,’ and I called her up. By the end of that first evening it seemed we’d known each other forever.”

  “You must have at least suspected,” Agatha told Daphne.

  “I swear I didn’t,” Daphne said.

  She was in that stunned state of mind where every sound seems unusually distinct. Of course she liked Rita very much, and yet … “This is so sudden,” she said to Ian. “Shouldn’t you go more inch-by-inch?”

  He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned. “Look,” he said. “I’m forty-one years old. I’m not getting any younger. And you all know my beliefs. You know I can’t just … live with her or anything. I want to get married.”

  “Right on!” Stuart cheered.

  “Besides which, you’re going to love her. Aren’t they, Dad?”

  “Absolutely,” his father said, beaming. “She let me keep my workbench just the way I wanted. She let me keep Bee’s lipstick on the bureau.”

  “She’s very tall and slim and beautiful,” Ian told Agatha. “She could easily be Indian. She has beautiful long black hair and she moves in this loose, swinging way, like a dancer.”

  Daphne looked at him.

  As a matter of fact, every word he had said was true.

  “There’s something honest about her, and just … right,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone like her.”

  Agatha stepped forward, then. She put both hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Congratulations, Ian,” she said.

  “Me, too,” Daphne said, and she kissed his other cheek, and Thomas clamped his neck in a rough hug. “Mr. Mysterious,” he said.

  Their grandfather touched Ian’s arm shyly. Ian was trying to get the grin off his face.

  They started walking again. Agatha asked all about the wedding, and Doug described how Rita admired his baby-food-jar system for sorting screws. But Daphne strolled next to Stuart in silence.

  She was thinking about the dream she had dreamed at Thanksgiving. It wasn’t so much a dream as a feeling—a wash of intense, deep, perfect love. She had awakened and thought, For whom? and realized it was Ian. But it was Ian back in her childhood, when he had seemed the most magnificent person on earth. She hadn’t noticed till then how pale and flawed her love had grown since. It had made her want to weep for him, and that was why, at breakfast that day, she had said she hadn’t dreamed any dreams at all.

  10

  Recovering from the Hearts-of-Palm Flu

  She asked if he thought he might ever want children and he said, “Oh, well, maybe sometime.” She asked how long he figured they should wait and he said, “A few years, maybe? I don’t know.”

  They’d been married just four months, by then. He could see his answer came as a disappointment.

  But why should they rush to change things? Their lives were perfect. Simply watching her—simply sitting at the kitchen table watching her knead a loaf of bread-filled him with contentment. Her hands were so capable, and she moved with such economy. When she wiped her floury palms on the seat of her jeans, he was struck with admiration for her naturalness.

  “I had been wondering about sooner,” she told him.

  “Well, no need to decide this instant,” he said.

  He watched her oil a baking pan, working her long, tanned fingers deftly into the corners, and he thought of a teacher he had had in seventh grade. Mrs. Arnett, her name was. Mrs. Arnett had once been his ideal woman—soft curves and sweet perfume and ivory skin. He had found any number of reasons to bicycle past her house. Her front bow window, which was curtained off day and night by cream-colored draperies, had displayed a single, pale blue urn, and somehow that urn had come to represent all his fantasies about marriage. He had imagined Mrs. Arnett greeting her husband at the door each evening, wearing not the bermudas or dull slacks his mother wore but a swirly dress the same shade of blue as the urn; and she would kiss Mr. Arnett full on the lips and lead him inside. Everything would be so focused. No distractions: no TV blaring or telephone ringing or neighbors stopping by.

  Certainly no children.

  You couldn’t say Ian and Rita lived that way, even now. They were still in the house on Waverly Street—partly a matter of economics, partly to keep his father company. (Daphne had a place of her own now.) His father still occupied the master bedroom, and Rita’s widowed mother was forever dropping by, and Rita’s various aunts and cousins and a whole battalion of woman friends sat permanently around the kitchen table waiting for her to pour coffee. Where would children fit into all this?

  “Next birthday, I’ll be thirty,” Rita told him.

  “Thirty’s young,” Ian said.

  Next birthday, Ian would be forty-two.

  Forty-two seemed way too old to be thinking of babies.

  At the wood shop, one of the workers had a daughter smaller than his own granddaughters. He was on his second wife, a manicurist named LaRue, and LaRue had told him it wasn’t fair to deprive her of a family just because he had already had the joy of one. He had reported every detail of their arguments on the subject; and next he’d discussed the pregnancy, which seemed so new and exciting to LaRue and so old to Butch, and finally the baby herself, who cried every evening and interrupted dinner and caused LaRue to smell continually of spit-up milk. Now the baby was two and sometimes came along with her mother to give Butch a ride home after work. She would toddle through the shavings, crowing, and hold out her little arms until he set aside his plane and picked her up. “Ain’t she a doll?” he asked the others. “Ain’t she a living doll?” But the sight of his grizzled cheek next to that flower-petal face was disturbing, somehow, and Ian always turned away, smiling falsely, and grew very busy with his tools.

  Ian and Rita went to church on foot that next Sunday because the weather was so fine. Besides, Ian liked the ceremony of it: the two of them holding hands as they walked and calling out greetings to various neighbors working in their yards. Rita wore a dress (or at least, a long black T-shirt that hit her above the knees), because she’d grown up at Alameda Baptist and considered jeans unsuitable for church. Her braid was wound in a knot at the nape of her neck. Ian couldn’t help noticing the unusually attractive way her hair grew, hugging her temples closely and swooping down over her ears in ripples.

  “Did I tell you Mary-Clay went in for her ultrasound?” she asked. “Her doctor said she’s having twins.”

  “Twins! Good grief,” he said. A shadow fell over him.

  “Two little girls, her doctor thinks. Mary-
Clay is just tickled to bits. Girls are easier than boys, she says.”

  “Rita,” Ian said, “neither is easy.”

  She glanced at him. He hadn’t meant to sound so emphatic.

  “At least,” he said, “not according to my limited experience.”

  They turned onto York Road. Ahead they could see a cluster of worshipers standing in front of the church, enjoying their last few moments of sunshine before they stepped inside. Rita said, “Well, now that you mention it, your experience was limited. Those children weren’t your own. You weren’t even solely responsible for them!”

  “Right,” Ian told her. “I had both my parents helping, and still it wasn’t easy. A lot of it was just plain boring. Just providing a warm body, just being there; anyone could have done it. And then other parts were terrifying. Kids get into so much! They start to matter so much. Some days I felt like a fireman or a lifeguard or something—all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.”

  Rita gathered a breath, but by then they’d reached the others. Sister Myra said, “Why, hello, you two!” and kissed them both, even Ian. She had never kissed Ian before he was married. Marriage changed things a good deal, he had learned.

  They were the church’s only newlyweds at the moment, and almost the only ones ever. Their wedding had taken place at Alameda Baptist, but most of Second Chance had attended and Reverend Emmett had helped officiate, even donning one of Alameda’s flowing black pastoral robes so when he raised his arms to pray he had resembled a skinny Stealth bomber. Now they were passed from hand to hand like babies in an old folks’ home, with Rita saying those just-right things that women somehow know to say. “Brother Kenneth, how’s that sciatica? Why, Sister Denise! You’ve gone and lightened your hair.” Ian was impressed, but also disconcerted. This never seemed to be his Rita, who spent her weekdays bluntly informing customers that most of their lifelong treasures belonged in the nearest landfill.

  They went inside and took two seats halfway up the aisle. Sister Nell was passing out hymn pamphlets. When Ian opened his he found the top corner of each page torn off as if gnawed by a mouse, and he smiled to himself and looked around for Daphne. (She must have some kind of deficiency, Agatha always said, to eat paper the way she did.) But he didn’t see her. The fact was that she attended less and less, now that she lived downtown. Just about all you could count on her for was Good Works on Saturday mornings.

  Rita was talking with her neighbor on the other side, Brother Kenneth’s son Johnny, who used to be a little pipsqueak of a boy but now was studying for the ministry. Sometimes lately he had assisted with the services. Today, though, Reverend Emmett rose alone to deliver the opening prayer. Rita faced forward obediently and bowed her head, but Ian sensed she wasn’t listening. She failed to straighten when Reverend Emmett said, “Amen,” and she chewed a thumbnail edgily during the Bible reading. Ian reached over and captured her hand and tucked it into his, and she relaxed against him.

  “Thus concludes the reading of the Holy Word,” Reverend Emmett said. “We will now sing hymn fourteen.”

  The little organ wheezed out the first notes and Ian let go of Rita’s hand. But she didn’t draw away. Instead she looked directly into his face as they stood up, ignoring the hymnal he held before them.

  “Listen,” she said in a low voice. “I think I might be pregnant.”

  He had already opened his mouth to start singing. He shut it. The congregation went on without them: “Break Thou the bread of life …”

  “It wasn’t on purpose,” she said. And then she whispered, “But I intend to be glad about this, I tell you!”

  What could he say?

  “Me, too, sweetheart,” he said.

  They faced front again. Stammering slightly, he found his place and joined the other singers.

  That was in July. By September, she was having to leave the waistband of her jeans unsnapped and she wore her loosest work shirts over them. She said she thought she could feel the baby moving now—a little bubble, she said, flitting here and there in a larking sort of way. Ian set a palm on her abdomen but it was still too early for him to feel anything from outside.

  She bought a book that showed what the baby looked like week by week, and she and Ian studied it together. A lima bean. A tadpole. Then finally a person but a clumsily constructed one, like something modeled in preschool. They were thinking of Joshua for a boy and Rachel for a girl. Ian tried the names on his tongue to see how they’d work in everyday life. “Oh, and I’d like you to meet my son, Joshua Bedloe …” His son! The notion brought forth the most bewildering mixture of feelings: worry and excitement and also, underneath, a pervasive sense of tiredness. He told Rita about everything but the tiredness. That he kept to himself.

  Now it seemed the household was completely taken over by women. Rita’s batty mother, Bobbeen, spent hours in their kitchen, generally seated not at the table but on it and dangling her high-heeled sandals from her toes. With her crackling, bleached-out fan of hair and snapping gum and staticky barrage of advice, she seemed electric, almost dangerous. “You’re insane to go on working when you don’t have to, Rita, stark staring insane. Don’t you remember what happened to your aunt Dora when she kept on? You tell her, Ian. Tell her to quit hauling other folkses’ junk when she’s four and a half months gone and all her pelvic bones are coming off their hinges.” But she didn’t actually mean for Ian to say anything; she didn’t leave the briefest pause before starting a new train of thought. “I guess you heard about Molly Sidney. Six months along and she phones her doctor, says, ‘Feels like somebody’s hauling rope out of way down low in my back.’ ‘Oh,’ her doctor says, That’s normal.’ Says, ‘Pay it no mind,’ and the very next night guess what.”

  She could recite the most bizarre stories: umbilical cords kinked off like twisted vacuum-cleaner hoses, babies arriving with tails and coats of fur, deluges of blood in the lawn-care aisle at Ace Hardware. If Rita’s two married girlfriends were around they would tut-tut. “Hush, now! You’ll scare her!” they’d say. But their own stories were nearly as alarming. “I was in labor for thirty-three hours.” “Well, they had to tie me down on the bed.” Serenely, Rita circulated with the coffeepot. Ian retreated to the basement, where his father was repainting the family high chair. “Women!” Ian said. “They’re giving me the chills.”

  “You want to close that door behind you, Ian,” his father said. “It was paint fumes caused your cousin Linley’s baby to have that little learning problem.”

  In October Ian started building a cradle of Virginia cherry—a simple slant-sided box without a hood because Rita wanted the baby to be able to see the world. He obtained the materials at no cost but of course he had to contribute his own time, and so he fell into the habit of staying on in the shop after it closed. His metal rasp, zipping down the edge of a rocker slat, said careen! careen! Often he seemed to hear the other workers’ voices echoing through the empty room. “Drove a spindle wedge too hard and split the goddamn …” Bert said clearly, and Mr. Brant asked, “Why the hell you choose a plank with the sapwood showing?” Ian stopped rasping and ran a hand along the slat’s edge, trying to gauge the curve. All his years here, he had worked with straight lines. He had deliberately stayed away from the bow-backed chairs and benches that required eye judgment, personal opinion. Now he was surprised at how these two shallow U shapes satisfied his palm.

  And all his years here he had failed to understand Mr. Brant’s prejudice against nails, his insistence on mortise-and-tenon and dovetails. “You put a drawer together with dovetail, it stays tight a century no matter what the weather,” Mr. Brant was fond of saying, and Ian always thought, A century! Who cares? It was not that he opposed doing a thing well. Everything that came from his hands was fine and smooth and sturdy. But you could manage that with nails too, for heaven’s sake; and if it didn’t last forever, why, he would not be there to notice. Now, though, he took special pride in the cradle’s nearly seamless joints, which would expan
d and contract in harmony and continue to stay tight through a hundred steamy summers and parched winters.

  Early in December Rita and Ian went with Daphne and her new boyfriend, Curt, to a bar downtown that featured pinball machines. Daphne had developed a passion for pinball. Rita was beginning her seventh month and she had lately cut her work hours in half, which left her with too much time on her hands. Any outing at all struck her as preferable to staying home. This was why Ian agreed to go to the bar, even though he didn’t drink. And Rita, of course, couldn’t drink, and Curt turned out to belong to A. A. So there the three of them sat with their seltzers while Daphne, merrily sloshing her beer, toured the various games. Her favorite, she said, was the one called Black Knight 2000, which she wanted the four of them to try if only the others would give them half a chance. She hoisted herself onto a stool and glowered at the crowd. There were so many people here that Ian couldn’t even see what kind of room it was.

  Curt was telling Rita about his sister’s breech baby. (Did people actively collect these tales?) He didn’t look like much, in Ian’s honest opinion—a bespectacled and bearded type in clothes too determinedly rustic. Also, something unfortunate had happened to his hair. It stuck out all over his head in rigid little cylinders. Ian said, “What …?” He leaned closer to Daphne and said, “What would you call that kind of hairdo, exactly?”

  “Do you like it? I did it myself,” she said. “You braid dozens and dozens of eentsy braids and dunk them in Elmer’s glue to make them last. The only problem is when he jogs.”