She opened the door. “Jack,” she said, “I was about to give up on you. Come in.” She wondered if she would have recognized him if she had passed him on the street. He was pale and unshaven, and there was a nick of scar under his eye.
“Well, here I am.” He shrugged. “Should I come in?” He seemed to be asking her advice as well as her permission.
“Yes, of course. You can’t imagine how much he has worried.”
“Is he here?”
Where else would he be? “He’s here. He’s sleeping.”
“I’m sorry I’m late. I tried to make a phone call and the bus left without me.”
“You should have called Papa.”
He looked at her. “The phone was in a bar,” he said. He was quiet, matter-of-fact. “I would have cleaned up a little, but I lost the bag that had my razor in it.” He touched the stubble on his jaw with a kind of concern, as if it were an abrasion. He had always been fastidious about such things.
“No matter. You can use Papa’s razor. Sit down. I’ll get you some coffee.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.” She didn’t say it was late for him to start worrying about that. He was distant and respectful and tentative. In this, at least, he was so much like the brother of her memory that she knew one hard look from her might send him away, defeating all her prayers, not to mention her father’s prayers, which were unceasing. If he came and left again while her father was sleeping, would she ever tell the old man he had come and gone? Would she tell him it was her anger that had driven him away, this thin, weary, unkempt man who had been reluctant even to step through the door? And he had come to the kitchen door, a custom of the family from their childhood, because their mother was almost always in the warm kitchen, waiting for them. He must have done it unreflectingly, obedient to old habit. Like a ghost, she thought.
“It’s no trouble,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”
“Thank you. Glory. That’s good to know.”
He hesitated over her name, maybe because he was not absolutely certain which sister he was dealing with, maybe because he did not wish to seem too familiar. Maybe because familiarity required an effort. She started putting water in the percolator. But he said, “I’m sorry about this—could I lie down for a little while?” He put his hand to his face. That gesture, she thought. “This shouldn’t have happened. I’ve been all right for a long time.”
“Sure, you go rest. I’ll get the aspirin.” She said, “It seems like old times, sneaking you upstairs with a bottle of aspirin.” She had meant this as a joke of sorts, but he gave her a startled look, and she was sorry she had said it.
Then they heard bedsprings and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory! I believe we do! Yes!” And then the slippered feet and the cane.
Jack stood up and brushed his hair off his brow and shook down his cuffs and waited, and then the old man appeared in the door. “Ah, here you are! I knew you would come, yes!”
She could see her father’s surprise and regret. His eyes brimmed. Twenty years is a very long time. Jack offered his handand said, “Sir,” and his father said, “Yes, shaking hands is very good. But I’ll put down this cane—There,” he said, when he had hooked it on the table’s edge. “Now,” he said, and he embraced his son. “Here you are!” He put the flat of his hand on Jack’s lapel, caressingly. “We have worried so much, so much. And here you are.”
Jack put his arms around his father’s shoulders carefully, as if he were frightened by the old man’s smallness and frailty, or embarrassed by it.
His father stepped back and looked at him again. He wiped his eyes. “Isn’t it something!” he said. “Here I’ve been wearing a necktie for days, waking and sleeping as Glory will tell you, and you’ve caught me in my nightshirt! And what is it? Almost noon! Ah!” he said, and laid his head against Jack’s lapel for a moment. Then he said, “Glory will help me out a little. I’ll get my shoes on and comb my hair, and pretty soon I’ll be something you can recognize! But I knew I heard your voice and I couldn’t wait to get a look at you! Yes!” he said, and took his cane and started toward the hallway. “Glory, if you could help me a little. After you put the coffee on.” And he set off toward his room.
Jack said, “After all these years I guess he still knows when I’m hungover.”
“Well, the coffee will help. He’s excited now, but he’ll rest after lunch and you’ll be able to get some sleep.”
Jack said, “Lunch.”
Twenty years was long enough to make a stranger of someone she had known far better than this brother of hers, and here he was in her kitchen, pale and ill at ease and in no state to receive the kindness prepared for him, awaiting him, even then wilting and congealing into the worst he could have meant by the word “lunch.” And what an ugly word that was anyway.
“I’ll help Papa shave, and then I’ll bring you the razor. The cups are where they always were, and the spoons. So help yourself when the coffee is done.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I will.” He was still standing, still hat in hand. That’s how he was, all respectfulness and good manners when he knew he ought to have been in trouble. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. She had heard someone say that about him once, a woman at church. He cleared his throat. “Has any mail come here for me?”
“No, nothing.” She went off to help her father put his socks on and shave and get his shirt buttoned, and she thought, as she often did, At least I know what is required of me now, and that is something to be grateful for. She helped him on with his tie and his jacket and parted his hair and combed it straight to one side, which is how he had always combed it himself. Well, no matter, there wasn’t much left of it anyway.
When she was done, her father said, “Now I’ll just look at the newspaper for a little while. I know Jack will want to get cleaned up, too.”
She could smell that the coffee had gone a little past ready, and the thought struck her that he might have left, but there he was, washing up at the kitchen sink with a bar of laundry soap. The house had always been redolent of lavender and lye. She wondered if he remembered. He had hung his jacket and tie over the back of a chair and loosened his collar and was scrubbing his face and his neck with a tea towel, one of those on which their grandmother in her old age had embroidered the days of the week. No matter.
He wrung out the towel and began drying himself down with it. And then he realized she was in the room and turned around and looked at her, embarrassed that she should see him so undefended, she thought, since he rolled down his sleeves and buttoned them and pushed his hair off his brow.
“That’s a little better,” he said. Then he shook out the tea towel and hung it on the bar above the sink. It said Tuesday.
“You should drink this coffee if you’re going to.”
“Yes. I forgot the coffee, didn’t I.” He put his jacket back on and slipped the tie into his pocket.
They sipped bad coffee together while their father sat by the window in his Morris chair reading about the world situation. There were five years between them, and Teddy and Grace, and he had never shown much interest in her beyond tousling her hair now and then. It wasn’t her fault that she was the one to have been at home when everything happened. He seemed embarrassed, this man who began to remind her more of her brother as she looked at him. It was hard for her to look away from him, though she knew he would have liked her to. He held his cup in both hands, but it trembled anyway. He spilled coffee down his sleeve and winced with irritation, and she thought how kind her father was to give him time to recover himself. She said, “You couldn’t be more welcome here, Jack. You can’t know what it means to him to have you here.”
He said, “It’s good of you to say that, Glory.”
“It’s just the truth.”
There now. Her thought was that she might be able to worry a little less if an edge crept into her voice or if she lost patience for a minute.
He said, “Thanks for the coffee. I’ll go shave.”
HE HAD TAKEN HIS BAG UPSTAIRS, AND HE CAME BACK down with his jaw polished and his hair combed and smelling of her father’s Old Spice. He was still buttoning his cuffs. He nodded at the towel. “Is it Tuesday?”
“No,” she said, “that towel is a little fast. It’s still Monday.”
He reddened, but he laughed. And from the other room the newspaper crumpled and then they heard the cane and the hard, formal shoes that took a good shine and would not wear out in this world. Their father appeared, a roguish look in his eye, as there always was when he felt at the top of his form.
“Yes, children, lunchtime, I believe. Glory has been so busy getting things ready. She said you hated cream pie, but I was certain I remembered you had a special fondness for it, and she made it on my say-so, despite her reservations.”
“It’s pretty leathery by now,” she said.
“You see, she’s trying to prejudice you against it! You’d think we’d made a wager of some kind!”
Jack said, “I like cream pie.” He glanced at her.
“It’s for supper, in any case,” she said, and she thought he looked relieved. “Jack’s probably too tired to be hungry. He spent last night on the bus. We should give him a sandwich and let him go rest.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
His father looked at him. “You’re pale. Yes, I see that.”
“I’m all right. I’m always pale.”
“Well, you ought to sit down anyway. Glory won’t mind waiting on us this one time, will you, dear.”
She said, “This one time, no.”
“She works me half to death around here. I don’t know what she’d do without me.”
Jack smiled obligingly, and rested his brow on his hand when his father settled into the grace. “There is so much to be grateful for, words are poor things”—and the old man fell into what might have been a kind of slumber. Then he said, “Amen,” and mustered himself, roguish again, and patted Jack’s hand. “Yes,” he said, “yes.”
GLORY TOOK JACK UPSTAIRS TO THE ROOM SHE HAD PREpared for him, Luke and Teddy’s room they still called it. He said, “That was kind of you,” when she told him she had not put him in the room he had had growing up. It was the same kindness her father had showed her. When, half an hour later, she came upstairs with some towels for him, Jack had already hung up his clothes and set a half dozen books on the dresser between the Abraham Lincoln bookends, having stacked the ten volumes of Kipling they had supported for two generations in the corner of the closet. He had taken a little picture out of his old room, a framed photograph of a river and trees, and set it on the dresser beside his books. Insofar as he was capable of such a thing, he appeared to have moved in.
The room was empty, the door standing open, so she stepped into the room just to put the towels on the dresser, and she did pause, noticing things, it was true. And when she turned he was there watching her from the hallway, smiling at her. If he had said anything, it would have been “What are you looking for?” No, it might have been “Looking for something?” because he thought he had caught her prying.
“I brought you some towels.”
“Thank you very much. You’re very kind.”
“I hope you’re comfortable,” she said.
“I am. Thank you.”
His voice was soft as it had always been. He never did raise his voice. When they were children he would slip away, leave the game of tag, leave the house, and not be missed because he was so quiet. Then someone would say his name, the first to notice his absence, and the game would dissolve. There was no point calling him. He came back when he came back. But they would look for him, as if the game now were to find him at mischief. Even their father tried, walking street to street, looking behind hedges and fences and up trees. But the mischief was done and he was at home again before they had given up searching. One time, when his absence had ended an evening game of croquet that she was for once on the point of winning, she was overcome with rage and exasperation. And when she knew he was home she had stamped into his room and shouted, “What right do you have to be so strange!”
He smiled at her, pushed his hair off his brow, said nothing. But she knew she had jarred him, even hurt him. She must have been nine or ten, still the little sister he teased or ignored. Her question sounded adult to her, perhaps to him. It sounded un-harmless, and that had startled them both. From then on his wariness included her, too—a slight change, inevitable no doubt.
And now here she was, embarrassed to have been found putting towels in a long-empty room she had been at some pains to make ready for him, as if a few shirts, a few books, were an inviolable claim on the place and her crossing the threshold an infraction. There was no use being angry. What could he have thought she was looking for? Of course, alcohol. How insulting to think that of her. But then, how insulting to him if she had actually been searching his room. The thought would not have crossed her mind, but he would not know that. Now she found that she almost assumed there was a bottle concealed somewhere, under the bed or behind the stack of Kipling. She promised herself she would never set foot in that room again.
Did she choose to be there, in that house, in Gilead? No, she certainly did not. Her father needed looking after, and she had to be somewhere, like every other human being on earth. What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be. All those years of work and nothing to show for it. But you make the best of things. People respect that. It is a blessing to know what is being asked of you. And how can this man drift in from nowhere, take a room in the house and a place at the table, and make her feel she was there on sufferance? Though in fact there was no presumption, only deference and reluctance, in his manner. Clearly he, too, did not choose to be there. She found it a little annoying how obvious that was. Of course there was nothing remarkable in the fact of a grown man wanting one room to call his own, especially since he was almost a stranger in the house. Since he was also a member of the family. She went out to the garden. The sun on her shoulders calmed her. The squash were coming up. She would check the rhubarb patch. She stooped to pull a weed or two, and then she got the hoe and began clearing out the plot she would plant in tomatoes. She had always liked the strong smell of the plants in the sun, the beaky little blossoms. The garden gave her a perfectly good reason not to be anywhere else, not to do anything else. And it always needed more time than she could give it.
She came into the house and found Jack washing his shirt at the kitchen sink. He glanced up at her, that look of wariness and mild embarrassment, as if they were strangers sharing too close quarters, seeing behind the shifts meant to maintain appearances. “I’m about finished,” he said. “I’ll get out of your way.”
“You aren’t in my way. But if you want to, you can just put your things in the wash. It won’t make any difference to me. I’ll show you how to use the machine, if you like.”
“Thank you,” he said, and rinsed and wrung out the shirt, careful and practiced. Then he took it outside, shook it out, and pinned it to the clothesline, and sat down on the back porch steps to smoke. Well, let him have his cigarette, out there in his undershirt, blinking in the sunlight, abiding by his boardinghouse notions of privacy. When he came inside he said no thank you to a piece of cake, thank you to a cup of coffee. He took the cup and the newspaper she offered him to his room.
In the town where she used to live she had sometimes seen a man on the street and thought, No, that isn’t Jack. What is it about him that made me think of Jack? The stir of something like recognition lingered after she had thought, It is only his stride, only the tilt of his head. She had sometimes crossed streets to look into strangers’ faces for the satisfactions of resemblance, and met a cool stare or a guarded glance, not so unlike his, a little amused, like his. She always knew how many years it was since she had last seen him, and she corrected against her memory of him because he was so young then. It was as
if she had spent the years preparing herself to know him when she saw him, and here he was, tense and wary, reminding her less of himself than of those nameless strangers.
STARTING ALL OVER AGAIN, SHE MADE A DINNER TO WELcome him home. The dining room table was set for three, lace tablecloth, good china, silver candlesticks. The table had in fact been set for days. When she put the vase of flowers in place, she noticed dust on the plates and glasses and wiped them with her apron. Yellow tulips and white lilacs. It was a little past the season for both of them, but they would do. She had the grocery store deliver a beef roast, two pounds of new potatoes, and a quart of ice cream. She made biscuits and brownies. She went out to the garden and picked young spinach, enough to fill the colander, pressed down and flowing over, as her father would say. And Jack slept. And her father slept. And the day passed quietly, with those sweet savors rising.
When she walked in from the garden, the house had already begun to smell like Sunday. It brought tears to her eyes. That old orderliness, aloof from all disruption. Sabbath and Sabbath and Sabbath. The children restless in their church clothes, the dresses and jackets and shoes that child after child stepped into, out of, put on, took off, as his or her turn came. Too large and then too small, but never ever comfortable. Eight of them, or seven, crowded at that table, three on the piano bench, one on the kitchen stool, practicing their manners—keeping their elbows to themselves, not swinging their legs, for an hour not going on with the teasing and arguing that were endless among them. Waiting for the blessing, waiting for the guests to be served—always ancient men with some ecclesiastical dignity attached to them which entailed special prohibitions against childish behavior. Waiting to speak until they were spoken to, until the meal was finished, out of respect to talk of creeds and synods. Waiting even to begin until their mother lifted her fork, which she would not do until every major sign of impatience among them was suppressed. And Jack so quiet, if he was there at all.
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