Home

by Marilynne Robinson

  “I’m thinking of reading up on it. Marxism.”

  “DuBois isn’t a Communist. Not really.”

  “I wasn’t hinting,” she said. But she was. She thought if she read his book they might have something to talk about. “I’d go down to the library to see if they have anything, but the MacManus sisters work there and I can’t face talking to either one of them.”

  “You go to church.”

  “Last in, first out. I have to do that. It matters to Papa.”

  THE CHURCH OF THEIR CHILDHOOD WAS GONE, THE WHITE clapboard church with the steeply pitched roof and the abbreviated spire. It had been replaced by a much costlier building, monumental in style though modest in scale, with a crenellated Norman bell tower at one corner and a rose window above the massy entrance. Someone whose historical notions were sufficiently addled might imagine that centuries of plunder and dilapidation had left this last sturdy remnant of grandeur, that the bell tower might have sunk a dozen feet into the ground as ages passed. The building was reconsidered once or twice as money ran out, but the basic effect answered their hopes, more or less. “Anglicanism!” her father had said, when he saw the plans. “Utter capitulation!” His objections startled the elders, but did not interest them particularly, so they drew discreet conclusions about his mental state. Nothing is more glaringly obvious than discretion of that kind, since it assumes impaired sensitivity in the one whose feelings it would spare. “As if I were a child!” her father said more than once, when the decorous turmoil of his soul happened to erupt at the dinner table.

  This was a grief his children had never anticipated. Nor had they imagined that their father’s body could become a burden to him, and an embarrassment, too. He was sure his feebleness inspired condescensions of every kind, and he was alert for them, eager to show that nothing got past him, furious on slight pretexts. The seven of them telephoned back and forth daily for months. He was in graver pain than he was accustomed to, and his dear old wife was failing. He was not himself. Ames sat with him for hours and hours, though even he was not above suspicion. They pooled strategies for softening the inevitable blow of his retirement, which would have been a mercy if it had come about under other circumstances. Ah well. He came back to himself, finally, reconciled to loss and sorrow and waiting on the Lord.

  Now Glory was the family emissary. At holidays they went as a delegation, there to signal reconciliation not quite so complete as to induce her father to struggle up those stone steps. The no longer new pastor was youngish, plump, smiling. His admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr brought him to the brink of plagiarism now and then, but he meant well. She was always the object of his special cordiality, which irritated her.

  For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God’s good world, with God’s good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church.

  SHE PUT JACK’S TEN-DOLLAR BILL IN THE DRAWER WHERE they had always kept cash for household expenses. Every week someone from the bank came by with an envelope. She noticed that the amount it contained had gone from fifty dollars to seventy-five. Another telephone call. Even fifty dollars was never needed. When the week was over, she put whatever remained in the piano bench, for no particular reason except that her father’s arrangements were no business of hers, and the cash drawer would overflow if she didn’t put the excess somewhere else. She put Jack’s ten dollars in an envelope of its own. That he had had it ready must have meant that he had decided how much he could spare. That he had given it to her—well, he always did act as though the house was not quite his, nor the family, for that matter. There was a gravity in the gesture, in the fact that he had intended it for hours or days before he had made it, and that he must have known the amount could not have mattered to anyone but him and yet pride had required him to give it to her. There was an innocence about it all. She felt she should be careful not to spend that bill as if it were simply ordinary money.

  Every day Jack waited for the mail. However else he might while away his time, he was always somewhere near the mailbox when it came, the first to look through it, though it seemed none of it was ever for him, except once, three days after he arrived. It was his birthday, which she had forgotten. There were six cards for him, from the brothers and sisters. He opened one and glanced at it and left it with the others, which he did not open, on the table in the hallway. “Teddy,” he said. “He’s glad I’m here. He’s looking forward to Christmas.”

  “Teddy’s glad I’m here, too,” she said. “They all are.”

  He laughed. Then he asked, “Is it so bad for you, being here?”

  “Let’s just say it isn’t what I had in mind.”

  “Well,” he said, “poor kid.”

  That was brotherly, she thought, pleasing in a way, though it came at the cost of allusion to her own situation, which she always preferred to avoid. What did he know about it? Papa must have told him something. She resented the condescension in “poor kid.” But brothers condescend to their sisters. It is a sign of affection.

  The next day there was one more card. It was addressed in print so crude it might have been a child’s. She saw it because the mailman came early, before Jack would have expected him. She took the card up to his room and handed it to him. He glanced at it and his color rose, but he slipped it unopened into the book he was reading, and said nothing to her except, “Thank you, Glory. Thank you.”

  AFTER A FEW DAYS SHE MIGHT FIND HIM SITTING IN THE PORCH, reading a magazine. And sometimes, if she was busy in the kitchen, he would bring his magazine to the kitchen table and read it there. A stray, she thought, learning the terms of domestication. Testing the comforts, weighing the costs. So she was tactful, careful to seem unsurprised. Once when she opened a cookbook on the table he said, “I hope you’ll tell me if I’m in the way.”

  “Not at all. I appreciate the company.” She had been waiting for the chance to tell him that.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t really want to keep to myself so much. It’s just a habit.”

  IT WAS IN FACT A RELIEF TO HAVE SOMEONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE. And it was interesting to watch how this man, gone so long, noticed one thing and another, as if mildly startled, even a little affronted, by all the utter sameness. She saw him put his hand on the shoulder of their mother’s chair, touch the fringe on a lamp-shade, as if to confirm for himself that the uncanny persistence of half-forgotten objects, all in their old places, was not some trick of the mind. Nothing about that house ever did change, except to fade or scar or wear. Miracles of thrift in their grandparents’ generation had meant that the words “free and clear” could be spoken over the house and all it contained by the time it came into the young hands of their father. Those words blessed the stodginess and the shabbiness. All that big, crowding furniture and all that prim and doubtful taste commemorated heroic discipline and foresight, which could be, and must never be, undone by bringing other standards to bear than respectability and serviceability. Their parents often told them how fortunate they were to have all their needs supplied, while their neighbors fitted out their lives as best they could on layaway and the installment plan. The Boughtons bought outright the big wooden radio and the upright piano and the electric refrigerator and stove, because the grandparents in their remarkable providence had left them a number of debt-free acres ten miles out of town which they rented to a farmer for a mutually agreeable sum. So even the things they acquired were in effect gifts from beyond the grave, since, having no needs, they could enjoy certain pleasures and conveniences free and clear. No sooner than their neighbors did, of course. Thrift that was second nature to them in any case was reinforced by care not to seem as prosperous as they were, and was pleasantly coincident with a fondness for familiar things. Why should a pastor’s family run the risk of ostentation? Why should a family with eight rambunctious children bother
owning anything that could be damaged? They sat on the arms of their mother’s overstuffed chair while she read to them, and they hung over the back of it, and they pinched and plucked at its plushy hide. If the nib of a feather poked through, they would pull it out and play with it, a dry little plume of down, sometimes unbroken. As they listened to the story they would turn and turn the painted vellum lampshade till the rim of it was soiled and the stems of the four nosegays on its four sides were nearly worn away. No matter that there were paths in the rugs, no matter that the big plate spoons were out at elbow with use and polishing.

  She learned the word “waft” sitting in her mother’s chair, breathing on a feather. Jack had come into the room, and the stir of air had floated it out of her hand. In those days the boys called her Glory B. or Glory Be or Glory Bee or Glory Hallelujah or Runt or Pigtails. Sometimes instead of Grace and Glory they had called their little sisters Justification and Sanctification, which came near irritating their father. But in general her brothers had ignored her, Jack not so completely as the others. He had stood in the doorway that evening and watched the feather circle against the ceiling in the air he brought in with him, and then he had reached up and caught it lightly in his hand and given it back to her. “It just wafted away,” he said. She might have been seven, so he would have been twelve. He was himself already then, solitary when he could be, gentle when the mood was upon him, a worry to them all as often as he was out of sight. Then there were those other years, after even Grace was gone, those tense years only she and her mother and father had lived through together in that house, when they lost the habit of mentioning Jack by name. She thought more often now, with Jack in the house, of that freckled girl sitting at the kitchen table, shy and bold at once, ignoring what was said to her, impatient to go home. That girl and her baby.

  A MONTH BEFORE JACK AND TEDDY LEFT FOR SCHOOL, Grace had gone to live with Hope in Minneapolis so that she could study piano with a real teacher. They had all been instructed by Mrs. Sweet, a soft-bodied woman with a petulant smirk who was very deft at smacking hands without actually interrupting the performance of a scale or an etude. She sat on the bench beside them, reeking of lily-of-the-valley, and turned an injured look on the keyboard. Alert as a toad, Hope said, and quick as a toad, too. Whack! when a note offended, and then the return to sullen watchfulness, then again Whack! Six of them soldiered through, played their recitals, and emerged at the end of high school modestly competent and relieved to have one more tedious initiation into adulthood behind them. Sometimes Jack went along to lessons with Teddy, to laugh with him afterward about the horrible Mrs. Sweet. But Grace actually liked piano. She practiced more than she needed to and learned more than was exacted of her. Once she told her parents, weeping, that the hand smacking distracted her, so their mother went to speak to Mrs. Sweet, who asked, indignant, “How else will she improve?” But from then on she restrained herself, barely, when Grace played and vented her pedagogical method on Glory.

  Hope, who was newly married, brought her sister-in-law on a visit to Gilead. That lady heard Gracie playing and was charmed, and mentioned the benefits for such a gifted child of life in Minneapolis. Glory still remembered the day and hour that thought settled itself in the minds of her family. All of them looked at Grace as if some ring or amulet had been discovered that identified the foundling as a royal child. It would be wonderful, Hope said, and their mother relented, and bags were packed, and Glory sat in her room, absorbing the fact that there was no argument to be offered, no appeal to be made. It was Jack who noticed her. He said, “Poor Pigtails will be all alone.” When he saw he had brought tears to her eyes, he said, “Sorry,” and smiled, and tousled her hair.

  It might have been those words that allowed her to believe for years that a special bond existed between them, that she understood him as others could not. They were the unexceptional children, she thought—slighted, overlooked. There was no truth in this notion. Jack was exceptional in every way he could be, including, of course, truancy and misfeasance, and yet he managed to get by on the cleverness teachers always praised by saying “if only he would put it to some good use.” As for herself, she was so conscientious that none of her A’s and A-pluses had to be accounted for otherwise than as the reward of diligence. She was good in the fullest and narrowest sense of the word as it is applied to female children. And she had blossomed into exactly the sort of adult her childhood predicted. Ah well.

  Still, when she was thirteen and miserable and Jack was away at school, she could imagine whatever she liked and find comfort and satisfaction in it, a mistake she could never really regret. When she believed better of him than he deserved, she was also defending him, and she could not regret that either. Years later she had heard her father say, in the depths of his grief, “Some things are indefensible.” And it was as if he thought a great gulf had opened, Jack on the far side of it, beyond rescue or comfort. She felt she could not allow that to be true, especially since it was her father who seemed to be in hell. He had come to the last inch of his power to forgive, and there was Jack, still far beyond his reach. So he stood at the verge of despair, despite whatever her mother might say to talk him away from it and despite every prayer and text old Ames could muster.

  Her mother said to her once, “I believe that boy was born to break his father’s heart.” And once she said, “I have never seen Robert so afflicted. It frightens me”—speaking to her as to an adult. That evening Glory wrote the first of her letters to Jack, having no clear sense of what she should ask of him, except that he call or make a visit home for their father’s sake.

  Already she had driven her father out across the river into the country, tense with responsibility because she had only begun to drive, and excited and protective because suddenly her parents seemed to depend on her. She had waited in the car with her father outside the gate until a woman appeared in the door of the disheveled little house and called the dogs in. Her father got out of the car and waited beside it, hat in hand. Then a man walked out to the gate and stood with his hands on his hips eyeing the car. It was Jack’s convertible, after all. He said to her father, “Who are you? What do you mean, coming around here?”

  Her father said, “I am Robert Boughton. I understand that my family has some responsibility toward your daughter and her child. I have come to let you know we are aware of our obligation and ready to assume it—” And he offered an envelope, apologetically, almost diffidently, but the man spat on the ground and said, “What’s that? Money? Well, you can keep your damn money.” But the woman appeared in the doorway again, this time holding the baby, and when the man had walked off toward the barn she came out to the gate and said, “You can just leave it on the post there.” Then she folded back the blanket that had concealed the infant’s face.

  A moment passed. Her father said, “Yes. I am Robert Boughton. This is my daughter.” The woman nodded, turned away from them, and walked back to the house. A girl in a blue nightgown came out on the stoop and took the baby into her arms. She nuzzled its cheek, watching them until they drove away.

  JACK DID COME HOME TO SPEAK WITH HER FATHER. GLORY thought this might have been an effect of her letter because when after half an hour of quiet talk behind a closed door he left the dining room and saw her in the parlor, sitting in their mother’s chair, he had said, “Do you have another sermon for me?” He might have meant that his father had just preached to him, but he might also have meant he had felt the weight and seriousness of her letter, which did indeed draw upon every resource her sixteen-year indoctrination in moral sincerity had conferred on her, and upon all the certainty of her youth. She had spoken mainly of her father’s grief, since all the rest of it was too delicate and complicated. But she had settled on the solution to it all. She had arrived at one great hope.

  So she asked him, “Are you going to marry her?”

  He was very pale. He smiled—that strange, hard shame of his—and said, “You’ve seen her.”

  She said, �
�Well, what is Papa going to do—”

  “Do to me? Nothing. I mean, he’s going to forgive me.” He laughed. “And now I have a train to catch.”

  “You won’t even stay for supper?”

  He said, “Poor Pigtails,” and smiled at her and walked out the door.

  And twenty years passed. There was no way of knowing that day that anything absolute had happened. Her mother had been so upset she stayed in her room, no doubt waiting for him to come to her seeking reconciliation. She would never see him again in this life. When evening fell no lights were put on, and supper-time came and went unremarked. Her father stepped out of the dining room and saw her in the dark parlor. He said, “Yes, Glory,” as if reminding himself of something, and went upstairs. She toasted two pieces of bread and ate them dry because she dreaded the sound she might make spreading butter on them. Then she went up to her room. Never had it entered her mind that their household could contain so desolate a silence.

  NOW SHE WAS HOME AGAIN, JACK WAS HOME AGAIN. THE furniture and the damage done to it in the course of the old robust domestic life were all still there. And the old books. Their grandfather had sent a significant check to Edinburgh, asking a cousin to assemble the library needed for instruction in the true and un-corrupted faith. He had received in response a trunk full of large books, bound in black leather, in which they all assumed the true faith did abide. Sometimes they pondered the titles and wondered about them together. On Predestination, an Answer to an Anabaptist; On Affliction; The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women; Booke of the Universall Kirk of Scotland; De Vocatione, a Treatise of God’s Effectual Calling; The Hind Unloos’d; Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himselfe. Or A Survey of our Saviour in his soule-suffering, his lovelynesse in his death, and the efficacie thereof. They were respectfully proud to have these books in the house, as if they had been given the Ark of the Covenant for safekeeping and knew better than to touch it, except, of course, for Jack, who took down a volume from time to time and read or seemed to read a page or two, perhaps only to worry his father, who was as respectful of the Edinburgh books as they all were, and as little inclined to open them, and who clearly dreaded the thought that they might be damaged. “Are you finding anything of interest there, Jack?” he would say, and Jack would answer, “No, sir, not yet,” and seem to read on, and then, after a few minutes, set the book on its shelf again. Whether he had found occasion to mar a page no one would know. There were tens of thousands of pages. And their father would not have wanted to know, since, even more than the other inexplicable and irremediable damage her brother left behind him, this might exasperate him beyond patience. Everything the rest of them treated with tacit reverence Jack found his way to. Poor old Ames. For many years he bore the brunt of it, uncomplainingly. Many things must have passed between him and the boy that Ames never spoke of, and this was a gentleness toward their father, a wordless, palpable, patient regret very much like their father’s own. Those became the good days in retrospect, the days of their father’s happiness.