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by Marilynne Robinson

  Those grown children had, almost all of them, bent their heads over whatever work she gave them, even though their bodies were awkward and restless with the onset of adulthood, fate creeping through their veins and glands and follicles like a subtle poison, making them images of their parents and strangers to themselves. There was humor in it of a kind that might raise questions about the humorist.

  Why do we have to read poetry? Why “Il Penseroso”? Read it and you’ll know why. If you still don’t know, read it again. And again. Some of them took the things she said to heart, as she had done once when they were said to her. She was helping them assume their humanity. People have always made poetry, she told them. Trust that it will matter to you. The pompous clatter of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” moved some of them to tears, and then she had talked to them about bad poetry. Who gets to say what’s good and what’s bad? I do, she said. For the moment. You don’t have to agree, but listen. Some of them did listen. This seemed to her to be perfectly miraculous. No wonder she dreamed at night that she had lost any claim to their attention. What claim did she have? Could it be that certain of them lifted their faces to her so credulously because what she told them was true, that they were human beings, keepers of lore, makers of it? That it was really they who made demands of her? Her father taught his children, never doubting, that there was a single path from antiquity to eternity. Learn the psalms and ponder the ways of the early church. Know what must be known. Ancient fathers taught their ancient children, who taught their ancient children, these very things. Puritan Milton with his pagan muses. It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself? That was her father humming “Old Hundred” while he shaved. It was John Keats in Cheapside, traveling his realms of gold. No need to be a minister. To be a teacher was an excellent thing. Those vacant looks might be inwardness. The young might have been restless around any primal fire where an elder was saying, Know this. Certainly they would have been restless. Their bodies were consumed with the business of lengthening limbs, sprouting hair, fitting themselves for procreation. Even so, sometimes she felt a silence in the room deeper than ordinary silence. How could she have abandoned that life? For what had she abandoned it?

  Her supposed former fiancé of so many years had told her in a letter that he knew to the penny how much he owed her. He had kept some sort of ledger. He must have kept it from the very beginning, from the time he took her to dinner and then realized he had forgotten his wallet. She blushed when she thought of it. He said he would pay it all back to the last penny, as soon as his situation began to improve. He said, “It will take some time to repay you in full, since the total is quite large.” What horrible, vindictive little streak of honesty had moved him to keep a record of these “debts”? She had not kept anything like an account, had never thought of such a thing, had never even felt she was giving anything away. None of it mattered now. To have been such a fool mattered. In that letter he had said, “I am sorry if I seem to have misled you.” She could not let herself remember the lonely pleasures she found in living so simply, actually enjoying the renunciations and the economies that would some time make possible—what?—ordinary happiness. The kind of happiness she saw in the luncheonette, passed in the street.

  She knew there had to be Shakespeare and Dickens around the house, Mark Twain had to be somewhere. Kipling was on the dresser in Luke and Teddy’s room, as he always was, but she hated Kipling. Finally she asked her father what had become of the books she liked to read; he made a phone call, and within two weeks six boxes arrived from six addresses, full of the good old books and with some sober and respectable new novels included, too, Andersonville, The High and the Mighty, Something of Value. She put ten of them in a stack beside the radio. At this time she could decide nothing about her life. She did not want to think about her life. She opened Andersonville. Her father told her, “The fellow that wrote that is from Iowa. I forget what town. He’s famous now. I forget his name.” She knew about MacKinley Kantor of Webster City. Andersonville was long and notoriously sad. It had broken the heart of greater Des Moines. She decided she would read it to the end. She could weep without upsetting her father.

  Then one day the mail came, a bill or two, a note to her from Hope, and a letter addressed to her father, who had come into the kitchen for a glass of water. “This letter is from Jack,” he said. “I know his hand. This is his hand.” He sat down and placed the letter on the table in front of him. “Quite a surprise,” he said softly, gruffly. Then he was so still she was afraid he might be having a spell of some kind, a stroke. But he was only praying. He put out his hand and touched a corner of the envelope. “I believe I’ll be needing a handkerchief, Glory, if you don’t mind. They’re in that top right-hand drawer.” And there they were, in a neat stack, large and substantial. He had always carried a beautiful handkerchief, since in his line of work he never knew when it might be needed. She brought him one, and he wiped his face with it. “So we know he’s alive. That’s really something.”

  She thought, Dear God, what if he’s wrong? What if this is a mistake brought on by yearning and old age?

  She said, “Do you mind if I look at it?”

  “Well, it’s a letter from your brother! Of course you’ll want to look at it! Thoughtless of me!”

  She took it up. It was slight, no more than a slip of paper, in an envelope with a St. Louis return address and postmark. Reverend Robert Boughton in a small, distinct, graceful hand. “Should I open it?”

  “Oh no, my dear, I’m sorry, but I’d better do that myself, in case there’s anything confidential in it. He might appreciate, you know, consideration for his privacy. I don’t know. At least he’s alive.” He wiped his eyes.

  She put the envelope down on the table, and the old man laid his hand beside it. From time to time he tipped it up to look at the writing on it, and the postmark. “Yes, it’s from Jack, all right. A letter from Jack.”

  She thought he might be waiting for her to leave the room, and yet she was afraid to leave. He might be disappointed, or the note might really be from Jack, but upsetting somehow, written from a ward for the chronically vexatious, the terminally remiss. From jail, for heaven’s sake. He had better have a good reason for rousing these overwhelming emotions in his father. He had better have a good excuse for exposing the old man to the possibility of inexpressible disappointment. Even if he was dead.

  “Glory, I think you will have to help me. I was waiting till I got a little steadier, but I guess that’s not going to happen. You’ll want to use a penknife. We don’t want to damage that return address.”

  She found a paring knife and sliced the envelope, removed a folded slip of paper, and handed it to him. He cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. He found the handkerchief in his lap and set it on the table. “Let’s just see what he has to say.” And he opened the note and read it. “Well. He says he’s coming home. He says here, ‘Dear Father, I will be coming to Gilead in a week or two. I will stay for a while if that is not inconvenient. Respectfully, Jack.’ Inconvenient! What an idea! We’ll have to write to him. I’ll do it myself, but I have to rest a little first. I don’t think I could hold a pen right now.” He laughed. “This is quite a day!” he said. “I wasn’t always sure I’d live to see a day like this.” She helped him into his chair in the bedroom, slipped off his shoes, and covered him with a quilt. She kissed his forehead. He kept the letter in his hand. He said, “Ames will want to know.”

  So while he napped, prayed, composed himself, set aside grievances and doubts, suffered the pangs of anticipation, sought footing in the general blessedness of his life for a posture of heroic and fatherly grace, and perhaps skirted dangerously near rupture of some part of the sensorium given over to grand emotion—her father’s silences w
ere never merely silences—she walked over to Ames’s house.

  The place looked exactly as it always had, but swept, polished. It was built in the style of any modest farmhouse in that region, with nothing in the way of ornament about it except the spindle shape of the porch pillars and bannisters. For all the years of her childhood old Ames had seemed to live in his study on the second floor. At night she always saw light in that window, and in the daytime when she was sent with a note or a book for him she stood in the kitchen and waited until he heard her voice, finished a paragraph he was writing or reading and came down the stairs. The kitchen had smelled of cleanliness, never of use, as though an essence emerged from the linoleum to fill a vacuum left by the idle stove and the empty pantry.

  Now there were geraniums in the kitchen window and there was something like glee in the whiteness and crispness of the kitchen curtains. New gardens had been planted along the walk. The Boughtons had all come home for Ames’s wedding, except for Jack, of course. It was the last wedding at which her father would ever officiate, he said, and the most joyful of them all. He relented a few times, married six or seven other couples he felt a special affection for. He had expected to marry Glory, but she had sent a letter explaining that, on impulse, just to get things settled, they had gone to a justice of the peace. Her father performed a few more baptisms besides those of his own grandchildren. Still, he called the Ameses’ marriage the culmination of his pastorate. Lila, the improbable bride, in her yellow satin suit and pillbox hat, had stood smiling with gentle embarrassment, tolerating their photographs, humoring them. Her arms were full of roses she had grown and gathered herself. Her roses were her particular pride. They still teased her because she had refused to toss her bouquet. Like his parsonage, old Ames seemed to have been transformed without being changed. Now he was not only fatherly but a father, not only courteous but squire to a wife who seemed to be always aware of his courtesies to her and to be wryly touched by them.

  He was sitting on the porch swing reading a book, but when he saw Glory coming he eased himself up and stood waiting for her with the gallant deference he showed to anyone over the age of twelve, and by which she had always felt flattered. Now she sensed a kind of condolence in it, though she tried not to. She tried not to wonder what he knew.

  “Splendid afternoon,” he said. “How are you? How is your father? Would you like to sit down?”

  She said, “We’re fine, I think. I can only stay for a minute, though. This morning Papa got a letter from Jack. He wanted me to tell you. I mean from Johnny.”

  “Oh yes. A letter from Jack.”

  “He says he’s coming home.”

  “Hm. Does he. How is your father taking this?”

  “It’s hard for him, I think. To know what to expect. Jack has never been the most reliable person in the world.”

  Silence again. “Did he say when he was coming? Did he say why?”

  “He said he would come in the next week or two. That’s about all.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful.” He said this without a trace of conviction. “Would your father feel up to a visit this afternoon?”

  “I think he would.”

  As he followed her down the walk to open the gate for her, he said, “It might be best if he doesn’t get his hopes too high.” Then they laughed. He said, “Well, there’s not much we can do about that.” But Glory had her own hopes, which were also too high—that this visit would happen at all, that it would be interesting, and that Jack would not remember her as the least tolerable, the most officious, the least to be trusted of his brothers and sisters. She thought and hoped he might hardly remember her.

  WHEN SHE CAME HOME SHE FOUND THAT HER FATHER had written his letter, addressed it, and sealed it. “Yes, I put a little check in there just to be sure. Travel is expensive these days. I hope it won’t offend him, but I thought it was a way to emphasize how eager we are to see him. I thought it was a good idea on balance. I’ll take it out if you think I ought to—”

  “He won’t be offended, Papa. You’ve always sent little checks.”

  “Well, I just worry he might not remember, you know, my eccentricities. I should have waited so you could take a look at what I wrote. I just thought we’d want to get it in the mail. He’ll be waiting to hear. If it is ‘not inconvenient.’ Imagine! We certainly don’t want him to worry about that!”

  “I’m sure he was just being polite.”

  “Very polite. Yes. He might have been writing to a stranger. But here I am finding fault.”

  She kissed his cheek. “I’ll take this to the post office.”

  “I believe it is quite legible. The address is clear enough, I think.” He said, “I worried about that, the way my hands were trembling there for a while. I should have let you look it over. I hope he’ll be able to read it.”

  “It will be just fine,” she said. But she knew he did not want any wholly sufficient, entirely persuasive assurance. If he was disappointed and Jack did not come home, he could tell himself that the fault was his own, taking the bitterness of it all on himself and sparing his miscreant son. He’d have done the same for any of them, had done it for her, she knew. But it was for Jack he had always devised and deployed his greatest strategies of—what to call it—rescue. He used to say, “That boy has really kept me on my knees!” He seemed to have persuaded himself that this was yet another blessing.

  Ames arrived and the two of them put their heads together over the checkerboard. There were so many jokes between them. Once when they were boys in seminary they were walking across a bridge, arguing about some point of doctrine. A wind had blown her father’s hat into the water, and he had rolled up his pant legs and walked in the river after it, not gaining on it at all, still disputing, as it sailed along in the current. “I was winning that argument!” her father said.

  “Well, I was laughing too hard to keep up my side of it.” The hat finally caught on a snag, and that was the whole story, but it always made them laugh. The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed. In a calm, affectionate way they studied each other.

  Ames said, “I understand that boy of yours is coming home.”

  “So he tells me. He sent a letter.”

  “Will the brothers and sisters be coming, too?”

  Her father shook his head. “I’ve made some phone calls.” There it was, the parting of the sea. “They agree it would be best for them to wait until he wants to see them. He was never much at ease with them. I believe I was at fault in that. Of course, it’s good that Glory is here to help,” he said, remembering she was in the room. So she went into the parlor, sat beside the muttering radio, and worked a crossword puzzle. She thought, Is it good that I am here? That might be true. I will have to remember not to be angry. She reminded herself of this because Jack would probably still be insufferable and she had spent all her patience elsewhere.

  WHAT FOLLOWED WERE WEEKS OF TROUBLE AND DISRUPtion, dealing with the old man’s anticipation and anxiety and then his disappointment, every one of which made him restless and sleepless and cross. She spent the days coaxing her father to eat. The refrigerator and the pantry were stocked with everything he thought he remembered Jack’s having a liking for, and he suspected Glory of wanting to give up too soon and eat it all on the pretext of avoiding waste. So he would accept nothing but a bowl of oatmeal or a poached egg, while skin thickened on cream pies and lettuce went limp. She had worried about what to do with it all if Jack never came. The thought of sitting down to a stale, humiliated feast with her heartbroken father was intolerable, but she had thought it anyway, to remind herself how angry she was, and with what justification. She had in fact planned to smuggle food out of the house by night in amounts the neighbor’s dogs could eat, since it would be too old to offer to the neighbors themselves, and they would no doubt feed it to the dogs anyway, tainted as it was with bittern
ess and grief.

  Glory had rehearsed angry outbursts in anticipation of his arrival. Who do you think you are! and How can you be so inconsiderate! which became, as the days passed, How can you be so mean, cruel, vicious, and so on. She began to hope he would come so she could tell him exactly what she thought. Well, of course she was angry, with those loaves of banana bread ripening noisomely in the pantry. What right do you have! she stormed inwardly, knowing as she did that her father’s only prayers were that Jack would come, and that Jack would stay.

  “He says here ‘for a while’! A while can be a significant amount of time!” They had Jack’s address after the Great Letter came, the one that made her father weep and tremble. Her father sent another note and a little check, in case the first had gone astray. And they waited. Jack’s letter lay open on the breakfast table and the supper table and the lamp table and the arm of the Morris chair. He had folded it away once, when Reverend Ames came for checkers, presumably because he did not want a doubtful glance to fall on it.

  “Yes, he will definitely be coming,” he would conclude, as if uncertainty on that point had to do with the language of the letter. Two weeks passed, then three days. Then came the Telephone Call, and her father actually spoke with Jack, actually heard his voice. “He says he will be here day after tomorrow!” Her father’s anxiety turned to misery without ever losing the quality of patience. “I believe it could only be trouble of a serious kind that would account for this delay!” he said, comforting himself by terrifying himself. Another week, then the Second Telephone Call, again with the information that he would arrive in two days. Then four days passed, and there he was, standing in the back porch, a thin man in a brown suit, tapping his hat against his pant leg as if he could not make up his mind whether to knock on the glass or turn the knob or simply to leave again. He was watching her, as if suddenly reminded of an irritant or an obstacle, watching her with the kind of directness that forgets to conceal itself. She was a problem he had not taken into account. He did not expect to find me here, she thought. He is not happy to see me.