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by Marilynne Robinson

  The dining room was immutable, like the rest of the house. But it was oppressive in ways that could easily have been changed. If she could have taken down the plum-colored drapes that hung over the lace curtains that covered the window shades, she’d have done it in a minute. If she could have taken up the plum-colored carpet with lavender fins or fans or fronds in a border around it. She’d have cleared the sideboard of the clutter of knickknacks, gifts displayed as a courtesy to their givers, most of whom by now would have gone to their reward. Porcelain cats and dogs and birds, milk-glass compote dishes. But in this place of solemn and perpetual evening, every family joy had been given its occasion, and here they would celebrate Jack’s homecoming, if he woke up in time. When her father had been up and dressed for half an hour, he said, “You might just go knock at his door,” and then they heard him on the stairs.

  He stepped through the doorway and paused there. He was wearing his jacket and tie. He looked tentative, as if he were afraid he might presume, and as if he would be happier somewhere else. He looked like the old Jack. Her father must have thought so, too, because he was clearly moved to see him. A moment passed before he said, “Come in, son. Sit down, sit down.”

  Glory said, “You can light the candles, Jack.” She went into the kitchen for the roast and came back to find the two of them silent in the candlelight, her father lost in thought, Jack toying with a matchbook. Twenty years before, they had had a quiet conversation in that room. She should have thought of that. She should have served dinner in the kitchen.

  When the biscuits were on the table and she had taken her place, the old man rose from his chair to address the Lord. “Dearest Father,” he said, “Father whose love, and whose strength, are unchanging, in whose eyes we too are unchanging, still your beloved children, however our fleshly garment may soil and wear—”

  Jack smiled to himself, and touched the scar beneath his eye.

  “Holy Father,” the old man said. “I have rehearsed this prayer in my mind a thousand times, this prayer of gratitude and rejoicing, as I waited for an evening like this one. Because I always knew the time would come. And now I find that words fail me. They do. Because while I was waiting I got old. I don’t remember those prayers now, but I remember the joy they gave me at the time, which was the confidence that someday I would say one or another of them here at this table. If I lived. I thought my good wife might be here, too. We do miss her. Well, I thank you for that joy, which helped through hard times. It helped very much.” He paused.

  “But when I think what it is that brings us to our Father, it might be grief or sickness—trouble of some sort. Weariness. And then there we are, and it’s a good thing at such times to know we have a Father, whose joy it is to welcome us home. It really is. Still, humanly speaking, there is that trouble, that sorrow, and a Father has to be aware of it. He can’t help it. So there is a sadness even in great blessing, which can be a hard thing to understand.” He seemed to ponder.

  “Lord, put the veil of time and sorrow aside for us. Restore us to those we love. And restore the ones we love to us. We do long for them—”

  Jack said softly, “Amen.” His father looked up at him, so he shrugged and smiled and said, as if by way of explanation, “Amen.”

  “Yes, well, I was finished, really. I’m sorry I went on.”

  “No, sir. I’m sorry—I didn’t—” He put his hand to his face and laughed.

  His father said, “No need to apologize, Jack! Here you’ve only been home a few hours and I have you apologizing to me! No! We can’t have that, can we now!” He put his hand very gently on Jack’s shoulder. “And here I am letting our dinner get cold! Do you want to carve, Jack?”

  “Maybe Glory wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” she said, and she cut the roast, and gave the first piece to her father, the second to herself, and the third to Jack. “There’s still a little pink to that one,” she said.

  And he said, “It looks wonderful. Thank you.”

  Her father strove manfully to generate conversation at a level of undamaging abstraction. “I believe the threat of atomic war is very real!” he said. “This is a point on which Ames and I do not agree! He has never made a proper estimate of the force of sheer folly in the affairs of nations! He pretends to be mulling it over, but I know he will vote Republican again. Because his grandfather was a Republican! That’s what it comes down to for people around here. Whose grandfather was not a Republican? But there is no way to reason with him about it. Not that I’ve stopped trying.”

  “I’m a Stevenson man, myself,” Jack said.

  “Yes. That’s excellent.”

  She ought to have closed her eyes during that prayer, or lowered them, at least. But there was Jack, just across the table from her, studying his hands, then glancing up at the oddnesses of the room, the overbearing drapes and the frippery glass droplets on the light fixture, as if the sound of the old man’s words were awakening him to the place. When he met her eyes he smiled and looked away, uneasy. Why did it seem like an elegance in him, that evasiveness? How would he look to her, seem to her, if he had not been, for so many years, the weight on the family’s heart, the unnamed absence, like the hero in a melancholy tale? It seemed to her as if he ought to have been beautiful, and he was not. He had the lank face that was to be looked for in a Boughton, and weary eyes, and the coarsened skin of middle age. He put his hand to his brow as if to shield himself from her attention, then he dropped it to his lap, perhaps because it trembled. She was glad when he said “Amen,” grateful. When her father spoke to the Lord he spoke in earnest—out of the depths, as he said sometimes. Out of a grief so generous it embraced them all.

  When dinner was over, Jack helped her clear away the dishes, and he washed them, too, while she was helping her father to bed. She came into the kitchen and found him almost done, the kitchen almost in order. “Amazing,” she said. “This would have taken me an hour.”

  He said, “I have had considerable professional experience, madam. I share the Boughton preference for the soft-handed vocations.” She laughed, and he laughed, and their father called out to them, “God bless you, children! Yes!”

  GLORY HAD OFTEN REFLECTED ON THE FACT THAT Boughtons looked very much like one another. Hope was the acknowledged beauty of the family, which is to say the Boughton nose and the Boughton brow were less pronounced in her case. All the rest of them, male and female, were, their mother said, handsome. They all passed from cherubic infancy to unremarkable childhood to gangling youth to that adult state of Boughton-hood their mother soothed or praised with talk of character and distinction, Hope being the one exception. So adolescence was a matter of watching unremarkable features drift off axis very slightly, of watching the nose knuckle just a little and the jaw go just a bit out of square. So Glory’s face had transformed itself in its inevitable turn. She remembered her alarm.

  And then the brow. Their grandfather had once happened upon a phrenologist who found, in the weighty pediment of brow resting upon the tottered pillar of his nose, so much to praise that over the next few months he had dabbled in metaphysics and even considered running for public office. Fortunately, he was the sort of man who noticed the absence of encouragement and drew conclusions from it. But he did have his photograph taken, three times, in fact, twice in profile and once full face. This sepia triptych hung in the parlor in a gold frame with laurel wreaths in the corners, like a certificate of merit, and also like a textbook illustration. From the full-face portrait the sepia eyes still burned with a gleeful and furious certainty—he in his own prudent person bequeathing a higher solvency to his descendants, a remarkable soundness of spirit and of intellect. One might suspect that there was also visible a joy in the fact of discovering that the features he presented to the world were not simply heavy and irregular, whatever the uninformed observer might have thought of them. It was many years before he had even one heir, their father, the only child of a marriage approached with a caution and deliberation o
n both sides that was the clearest proof the parties to it ever gave of being suited to each other, or so the story went. In any case, genius might well make its abode in so spacious a cranium, though in his case as in theirs, the tenant had so far been competence, shrewd in one case, conscience-racked in another, highly refined in another, but always competence. He might have found his hopes dwindling in the moderated forms his visage took in the course of generations. His offspring were all grateful to be spared, to the degree they felt they had been spared, what was sometimes called his slight resemblance to Beethoven, though they did find comfort when needed in the thought that it might be a predisposition to genius that had put its mark on them all. Phrenologically speaking, physiognomically speaking, Jack was as plausible a claimant to character and distinction as any of the rest of them, as he must have known. Perhaps that is why he seemed mildly sardonic when he looked at her, knowing with what interest she looked at him. Yes, he seemed to say, here it is, the face we all joked about and lamented over and carried off as well as we could, the handsome face. Does its estrangement disturb you? Are you surprised to see how it can scar and weary?

  AFTER TWO DAYS IT WAS CLEAR THAT JACK WOULD STAY IN his room until his father woke up, and then he would come down, presentable, respectfully affable, and attend on the old man. He said no more to her than courtesy required. He must have listened for his father’s voice, or the sound of the slippers and the cane, because it was never more than a few minutes before he appeared. The thought that he listened, that he remained upstairs while his father was asleep, while it was only she who came and went and swept and dusted, played the radio—softly, of course—in short, the thought that he avoided her, was more than an irritation. He makes me feel like a stranger in my own house. But this isn’t my house. He has the same right to be here I have. So she decided to take him the newspaper as soon as her father had finished with it. His interest in the news surprised her a little. Time and Life and the Post had drifted up the stairs and gathered in a stack by his bed, and he came down in the evening to listen to Fulton Lewis, Jr. So she would take him the newspaper and a cup of coffee. With a cookie on the saucer. She thought, I’ll give him these things and go away, and he’ll see it as a simple kindness, and that will be a beginning. There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding. Her father had said this more than once, in sermons, with appropriate texts, but the real text was Jack, and those to whom he spoke were himself and the row of Boughtons in the front pew, which usually did not include Jack, and then, of course, the congregation. If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.

  Everyone was fairly interested in these sermons, though they recurred, in substance at least, more frequently over time, and though they told them all not to expect the grand exertion of paternal control that people always take to be possible and effective in other households than their own, and especially in parsonages. Seven paragons of childhood, more or less, all learners of times tables, all diligent at the piano, their greatest transgression the good-natured turbulence their father seemed to enjoy. And Jack. When did he begin to insist on that name?

  His door stood open. The bed was made, and the sash of the window was up so the curtains stirred in the morning air. He was neatly dressed, in his stocking feet, propped against the pillows, reading one of his books.

  “Don’t get up,” she said. “I don’t mean to bother you. I just thought you might want the newspaper.”

  “Thank you,” he said. She wondered what it was that made him stand when she or her father came into a room. It looked like deference, but it also seemed to mean, You will never see me at ease, you will never see me unguarded. And that thank-you of his. It was so unfailing as to be impersonal, or at least to have no reference to any particular kindness, as if he had trained himself to note the mere fact of kindness, however slight any instance of it might be. And of course there was nothing wrong with that. Certainly not in his case.

  She said, “You’re welcome.” And then she said, “Papa would like us to talk.”

  “Ah,” he said, as if the motive behind her coming into his room were suddenly clear. He brushed back his hair. “What would he like us to talk about?”

  “Anything. It doesn’t matter. He just worries that we don’t talk. He hates a silent house.”

  Jack nodded. “Yes. I see. Sure. I can do that.”

  A minute passed. “So—” she said.

  “There actually is something I wanted to talk to you about.” He went to the dresser and took up a bill that had been lying there and handed it to her. Ten dollars.

  “Why are you giving me money?”

  “I don’t suppose the Reverend has much to get by on. I thought that might help with the groceries.”

  “It will help, of course. But he’s all right. He gets some income from the farm. Mrs. Blank retired when I came, so he doesn’t have to pay a housekeeper. And the others look after him. And the church.”

  “The church.” He said, “And the church knows I’m here.”

  “Well, yesterday there were those two pies on the porch, and today there was a casserole and six eggs.”

  “So the word is out, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “They won’t come by, though.”

  “Not unless they’re invited.”

  “Good,” he said. “That’s good.” He looked at her. “You won’t invite them.”

  “No.”

  “Good. Thank you.” Then, as if by way of explanation, “I need a little while to get used to this place. To try to.”

  It had occurred to her more than once that his thank you had the effect of ending conversation. He might not intend it that way. And just now, when the conversation had gone reasonably well, she decided not to take it that way. So she said, “What are you reading?”

  Jack glanced at the worn little book he had left lying on the bed. “Something a friend gave me.” He said, “It’s pretty interesting.” And he smiled.

  “That’s fine,” she said, and turned and went down to the kitchen. She did not care what he was reading. She had only tried to make conversation. Her father had not said in so many words that he noticed the silence between them and that he worried about it, but she knew it must be true, and she felt no real regret about mentioning it to Jack, even though it surprised her a little when she did. Papa was asleep so much of the time. It would be good to have someone to talk to. It was rude of him to shun her. Even if his memories of her were irritating to him. There is so much more to courtesy than Thank you, That’s kind of you! This was among those thoughts she hoped she would never hear herself speak out loud. She went back up the stairs.

  He was still standing there, with the book in his hand. “W.E.B. DuBois,” he said. “Have you heard of him?”

  “Well, yes, I’ve heard of him. I thought he was a Communist.”

  He laughed. “Isn’t everybody? I mean, if you believe the newspapers?” He said, “Now I suppose you’ll think I’m up here reading propaganda.”

  “I don’t care what you’re reading. All I really care about is whether we can live in this house like civilized people.” They heard the creak of bedsprings, and they heard the clack of a cane falling to the floor. “Coming, Papa!”

  Jack said, “It’s hard, Glory. I know what you think of me.”

  “Well, that’s more than I know.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m completely serious.”

  They heard a clatter. She shouted, “I’m coming!” and ran down to the kitchen, and there was her father standing beside a chair that had fallen on its back. He was wearing his robe and one slipper and his hair was awry. He regarded them with anxiety that was in some part irritation. He was holding the Monopoly set. “I thought we might amuse ourselves with this
. A game or two. I’d better sit down now.” She helped him into a chair. “You know how it is when you jump up from a sound sleep. I thought something bad had happened—” and he fell into that doze of his that might have been prayer.

  Jack took out the board, the money, and the dice. “I’m the top hat,” he said.

  Their father said, “Well, I’m something. I don’t know quite what I am.” He closed his eyes. “I guess I’m going to finish that nap anyway, so I might as well get comfortable.” Jack helped him to his armchair. Then he came back to the kitchen.

  Glory said, “I’m the shoe.”

  “The shoe?”

  “I know. But it’s lucky for me.”

  He laughed. “You play a lot of Monopoly?”

  “About a thousand times more than I ever thought I would.”

  After four turns she had bought two utilities.

  “Well,” Jack said, “that looks pretty insurmountable. I see what you mean about the shoe.”

  “You’re ready to concede?”

  “More than ready.”

  Jack put the game away, squaring up the deeds and the money as if it mattered.

  Glory said, “How do you know I’m not a Communist?”

  He laughed. “You’re too nice a girl.” Then he said, “Not that that means anything. I’m not a Communist either.”