‘You missed your dad.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your dad called.’
On his way back to the house Edgar had slowed his heart, calmed the wild pumping of adrenaline by throwing sticks at a pine cone and then pine cones at a stick. He had triumphed in a staring contest with a glum red bird. He had paused on the bridge and tossed pine cones into the brown-stoned stream until a passing car slowed down and a bald man had snapped at him to stop what he was doing. He had killed time until it became a point of honour to kill more of it, to sicken himself back into boredom. And meanwhile his dad had phoned and he’d missed the call. Edgar scratched at the inside of his arm until he was alerted to the fact he was doing so by Warren’s curious, slightly concerned expression.
‘Does he want me to call him back?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure where he is, actually. He says sorry and everything but he’s been delayed. Business to take care of. He’ll be arriving a bit later than he thought.’
‘Tomorrow evening?’
That was Edgar’s furthest projection: the morning was unachievable, the evening made sense, his father driving through the day, birthday gifts carelessly scattered in the back seat of his open-top car, to stay overnight in his mother’s house, his house—they were always saying how much time had passed since his last visit. Edgar and his father wouldn’t want to begin their own drive until the morning, after breakfast: it was a long journey they would be making together.
‘Not quite, Eddie.’
Warren was very good at breaking bad news. He should have had a job as one of those army men who stand at front doors and aren’t allowed to touch or hug the broken women who’ve just been told that their boys have died.
‘He’s been delayed. He won’t be able to make it tomorrow.’
‘The day after?’
‘Probably not till the end of the week. But I’m sure we can keep you entertained up till then. He says, sorry. So. I hope you’re hungry. Fay will be down just after she’s done her exercises.’
At supper, after Warren had checked that Fay had taken her evening medication, he asked Edgar about his walk.
‘It was fine,’ Edgar said, and Fay, seeing something sad in Edgar’s eyes, had the delicacy to prevent Warren enquiring further.
‘These mushrooms are delicious,’ Fay said. ‘Is there garlic in them?’
‘I just stir them around from time to time while they’re cooking, with a fork that has a clove of garlic on its, you know, prongs.’
‘Tines,’ said Fay.
‘Excuse me?’ said Warren.
‘The prongs of a fork. They’re called tines.’
‘Oh yes, that’s right, of course they are.’
Warren seemed to like being corrected by Fay, the passage of wisdom down the generations. Paintings hung on the white walls of the kitchen, most of them Fay’s own watercolours of riverside scenes executed when her sight was still largely intact.
‘Have you found the cat yet?’ Edgar asked.
‘How’s your ankle?’ Warren asked.
‘It’s a lot better. Edward was terrific looking after me. I didn’t miss you at all.’
She dazzled Edgar with her smile.
‘That’s good to hear,’ Warren said. ‘How’s the rash?’
‘I think it’s getting better,’ Fay said, covering her throat and chin with a hand.
‘We should get Newhouse to take a look at it.’
‘No more medication. If you shook me I’d rattle. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll make it through till the Festival.’
‘May I leave the table?’ Edgar said.
‘Of course you can, my dear. I love your manners.’
Edgar escaped to the Music Room, where he compiled a list of cat-napping suspects, which did not exclude his mother—was it accidental only that she had left on the day that Tom disappeared? And then he counted his money, which amounted to seven dollars and forty-nine cents, and went through the record albums, sorting them into separate piles according to likely interest. The interesting pile he further subdivided into those he thought belonged to his father and those to his uncle Frank. He imagined Frank to have a taste for flowery illustration and fanciful covers. His father he allowed all those simply designed albums with the group’s photograph glowering on the front. On the window-ledge, he arranged the ones with girls he wanted to look at on the covers, blocking out the shallow lights of the Mansion House opposite.
8
We believe that Kingdom now coming is the same that was established in heaven at the Second Coming of Christ [70 AD]. Then God commenced a kingdom in human nature independent of the laws of this world. We look for its reestablishment here, and this extension of an existing government into this world is that we mean by the Kingdom of God. I will put the question. Is not now the time for us to commence the testimony that the Kingdom of God has come?
The Spiritual Moralist, John Prindle Stone, 1845
Mary is gone, in zealous spirit, to accompany Captain Carter on a missionary visit to an infant Perfectionist congregation in Greencastle. Little Georgie is with Mary’s sister in Rochester. George spends his hermitry in work upon the land and studies of the Bible. He has never felt quite so lonely. His spirits and vitality are sinking. He can hardly rouse himself to go to the general store on Turkey Street. Even blind Jess grows peevish with lack of use. In compensation he feeds her too many turnips.
He had not realized how dependent his energies are upon Mary’s. In the absence of his wife, he is without initiative, petulant and doltish. His beard grows. His clothes are dirty. Each day he resolves anew to abandon this place, to follow the missionaries to Greencastle, to join his child in Rochester, to visit John Prindle Stone in Vermont, or else return to New York City, where he might taunt his sluggish spirits with the sin he has left behind. Each night he falls sleepless into bed, the day ahead of him stretching out as empty and useless as the previous one. He sets himself small tasks that seem, in their midnight contemplation, manageable. Each morning he fails to accomplish or even begin any one of them. He has become accustomed to rising late, to sit out the lethargic death of the morning at the table in the parlour, still in his night-clothes and sleeping cap.
He can play the violin, that at least he is capable of: the sounds he coaxes from it, the action of the strings beneath his fingers, bring the image of his wife closer.
They had met for the first time on the Bowery. George was walking back to his lodgings from the newspaper office to wash and change before setting out for the weekly meeting of the Moral Reform League at Mr Green’s townhouse on Fifty-Third Street. An Irish urchin running pellmell through the crowd collided with George Pagan, who held him, looking for the purse in his pale hand, the pursuing robbed gentleman. The boy’s hands were empty and the only pursuer was a young lady, who smiled at George as she took hold of the urchin. The child twisted and struggled and wept and surrendered. George asked if he should fetch an officer. Her amused eyes reached straight into George to a place that he had no prior acquaintance with or even knowledge of. She told him she was the child’s teacher, bringing her charge home.
‘This happens at the end of every day. He tries to run back to school. It is my task to persuade him home.’ She stroked the child’s hair and brow. His shoulders relaxed. She wiped the tear tracks off his face. She whispered to him, comforting words to the melody of a Congregationalist hymn, and George was startled by a stab of jealousy for this child, who could so unthinkingly provoke such actions of heart and hand.
‘This is surely a novelty,’ George said. ‘I would have thought it a unique case, a schoolboy that cannot bear to be absent from school.’
‘We fail the ones who love us best. Education affords a glimpse of somewhere else, a preferable place, without always offering a way there.’
And then, with that quality of quickness that would always so enchant George Pagan, she interrupted his considerations of a reply with a curtsy, as if the drab crowded street
were a débutante ball. ‘Mary Johnson,’ she said.
‘George Pagan. At your service.’
‘Good afternoon, George Pagan,’ she said, and, businesslike, she led the spent, unresisting child to his unwelcome door.
Mary lived, as Mr Stone would later remark, in the perpetual now. Everything moved fast with her as if without precedence or consequence: her decisions, her wit, her curiosity. Where George’s understanding crabbed from ignorance to knowledge, dimly inching through objections and inconsistencies like a blind man tapping along a nighttime street, the speed of her attention annihilated the distance between darkness and light.
Her pastoral task achieved, she seemed unsurprised to be walking in step up Second Avenue with George Pagan, and her consent to accompany him to the meeting at Mr Green’s was only slightly more miraculous than his boldness in issuing the invitation.
At Mr Green’s townhouse on Fifty-Third Street, the congregants drank tea and lemonade from Mrs Green’s pale blue china. Marriage rights were discussed, and the liquor question, and universal suffrage was allowed, and slavery abolished, and faith-healing argued for and against, while Mrs Green poured tea, and the philanthropist Mr Green blinked merrily at the enthusiasm in his parlour, but for Mary this was never going to be quite enough. Speed of progress, if only in talk, had to keep up with the quickness of her heart.
No photograph could picture her. In photographs—taken at the end of the Prince Street school year, three short lines of pupils and staff, or at the penultimate meeting of the Reform League at Mr Green’s, or at their wedding, with her preacher father already standing aloof from his unmanageable daughter—her slim face looked pinched and narrow, her chin and brow too mannishly strong, her eyes wide and impatient. George looked at his best in photographs. His strongly carved features became sculptural, implying all the power he knew he lacked in life. Mary’s vivacity charmed and beautified everything around her. Later, he would encounter the ferocity of her temper, which—until events gave her greater opportunity for remorse—was the ashamed subject of her largest self-reproach, flaring with a sudden heat, but then, as abruptly, it would dampen, abate, the flames clearing, her true nature revealed again, unscorched, her good fellowship and ardour and sympathy reestablishing themselves as the ruling agents of her passions.
At the final meeting on Fifty-Third Street, the newly married Mrs Pagan was already with child, and Mrs Green was carrying an equivalent secret proudly beating within: she had been converted to Stone’s Perfectionism. She was without sin; she had been reborn in Christ. The philanthropist’s wife had not yet announced the news of her salvation, out of deference perhaps to her husband, whose perpetual good cheer belied an unpredictable theology, and out of deference too to those members of her husband’s circle who had no favour for the liberty views of Mr Stone’s group.
‘They greet each other with a kiss!’ a poetical young Methodist complained, pushing back his dark curls in outrage. ‘Loose talk! Wanton behaviour! They announce their opposition to marriage!’
‘Paul prophesied that in heaven there’d be neither a giving nor taking in marriage,’ Mrs Green said.
‘They prophesy an overcoming of death!’
‘Is that so impossible?’
The ardent Methodist shook his curls sadly. ‘Desire untrammelled and decency forsworn. Can we have confidence in men who claim they need no laws to live by? Is that the sincere protestation of the saint? Or merely the sophistical philosophy of the criminal?’
Breathing heavily, in a rapture of self-adoration, the Methodist sat down and took a draught of Mrs Green’s summer lemonade. Replacing the beaker on the table, he looked belligerently around, daring any of the company to oppose him. Opposition he found. In her musical voice, Mary asked: ‘Have you read their pamphlets?’
The Methodist had to admit that he had not. Correspondents of impeccable probity had reported their contents to him.
‘Have you visited any of their sequestrations?’
Again, the Methodist had to answer in the negative. But witnesses of unimpeachable correctness had delivered to him descriptions of the scandalous home lives of the Perfectionists.
‘We ourselves are the subject of ill-informed gossip,’ Mary said. ‘Should that not teach us forbearance in the case of others?’
George’s boundless love for Mary stretched again, infinite. In his love for her he felt at its purest and grandest God’s perfect love for his creatures. George would always deny there was anything in the nature of falling about their love; he had not fallen in love with Mary—rather, with him, it was a rising, a leaping.
To the consternation of the company Mrs Green chose this moment to deliver her fresh-born Perfectionist views. The Methodist was silent. And Mr Green, for once, unbenevolent. Mr Green shortly afterwards declared an adherence to Shakerism, where no such liberty views held sway, and there he was joined by his wife, who would be renamed by gossiping former friends as Chastity Green. But as Mary was leaving the Greens’ house that night, Mrs Green slipped several of Mr Stone’s tracts to the ardent, dissatisfied Mrs Pagan.
It was an end and it was a beginning. In her reading of Mr Stone’s words Mary at last found what she was looking for: a promise that heaven was not a carrot to tempt children into acting well, but a heartfelt possibility, a sincere way to live.
‘It is in high seriousness but never solemn. All life is contained in here.’
Whereas, for George, all life was contained in her. The carnal side of their marriage had been a revelation to him. Never had he conceived of physical pleasures as heavenly as these.
‘It is Godly,’ she assured him, as, without shame or darkness, Mr and Mrs Pagan conjoined in union of fellowship.
She accused him of idolatry and the charge was no doubt true.
‘I am here George. It’s me.’
After Mary went into confinement with little Georgie—a most painful undertaking—the parlour of the Pagans’ apartment on Lower Broadway became the meeting place of the survivors of the wreckage of the Greens’ Wednesday nights. The ardent Methodist was a frequent visitor, and even when the group shifted further towards Stonian Perfectionism, the Methodist companioned it on this journey also. Which was the occasion of the first unquiet words issued by Mr to Mrs Pagan.
‘I doubt his sincerity,’ he said. ‘I suspect the motor of his enthusiasm is more carnal than spiritual.’
She suspected this too, and was guiltily aware of her own response, which came from a place before language and conscience.
Knowing herself deceitful, duplicitous, George’s incapacity to see what was in her brought rise to shame and, shamefully, Mary responded to his attentions as if he was the cause of the shame. Meekly, always meekly, he bowed his head and took fellowship with his violin.
They had uprooted to Rondout on the river, in obedience to a rest cure prescribed by her doctor, who was concerned at her feverishness after Georgie’s weaning. The invitation was issued by Captain Carter, a recent missionary of Stone’s to their group, to live away from the temptations of the city, to work the land, enact the truths of Biblical Communism. Here she might leave her trespasses behind.
Abram Carter, complacent of his spiritual rank, kissed Mary’s doubts away. The rightness of what they were doing was self-evident, their alchemical conjoining: it mixed water with earth and air, spirit and body, Eve and Adam, and—this could not be admitted, because it would pass too dangerously close to Manichaeanism, but often, by Mary, it was glimpsed—God and the Devil. If something felt this good, who could say it was wrong?
A letter from Mr Stone charged Captain Carter to travel to Pennsylvania to act as missionary to a group of converts in Greencastle. The commission would require a two-week absence.
‘I shall go with him,’ Mrs Pagan told Mr Pagan. ‘They are sheep without a shepherd surrounded by beasts of prey.’
And how she wanted him to say no, to fight for her, to announce his unsureness, his jealousy, to remind her of her wifely, motherly
duties, to reproach her. Instead, his fingers bruised and earthy, he picked up his violin.
When George Pagan practised the violin he heard the songs of the heart and the spirit most plainly. Performance was not the aim of the practice—he had no desire to impress others with his virtuosity, and in truth he played better when he thought he was playing unheard, but performance was the price he would pay for his talent: in it he perceived the strivings of his heart towards Christly union.
She came close to hating him then. She waited for him to say something more, to do something. A hypocrite, a whited sepulchre, she accompanied his music with the plainsong of domestic arrangements.
‘If you take Georgie to stay with my sister in Rochester, then you may return to work and study here without interruption.’
‘So be it,’ he said, shutting his eyes, sliding his bow across the strings, playing a foxtrot as if it were a dirge.
As she made a pile of her clothes to take on the journey, as she packed a suitcase of little Georgie’s things, and as she sat with the child, kissing and petting him, promising that she would not be gone longer than two weeks and how he would enjoy life at his cousins’—it would be a holiday, an adventure—and praising his pictures of sailboats on the river, thin little masts, sails decorated with infant attempts to draw stars, how she hated herself for despising her husband, for blaming him for her weakness.
Poor George. Poor Mary. Happy Captain Carter. They did not go to Greencastle to shepherd the flock. Instead of boarding the train at Onyataka Depot they walked down to the Rondout landing, the Captain at ease with the sailors on the jetty, discussing the Eerie Canal, the sturdiness of the crafts coming in to dock, the poundage of their loads. A construction gang of Onyataka Indians waited for embarkation, eyes closed against the speech of the miracle-oil salesman who was dressed as a preacher. Captain Carter made an offer for a handsomely time-and weather-worn little schooner before they climbed on board the steam vessel that would take them to Manhattan. They placed their bags on the aft-deck, went to stand unsheltered on the bow as the steamship pulled away from the jetty. Mary huddled inside her clothes, looking out at the shore, tasting the sweet heaviness of the air, hoping her conscience would not follow her.
The Pagan House Page 8
