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by Marilynne Robinson

  “This is wonderful,” his father said. “So much going on and me right in the middle of it. In the way, too, I suppose. It was kind of you to set me up like this, Jack. You’re very good to me.”

  Jack laughed. “You deserve it,” he said.

  His father said, “Yes, the pleasures of family life are very real.”

  “So I understand.”

  “Well, you would remember them yourself, Jack. Your mother was always baking something. Ten of us in the house, and there were people dropping by all the time in those days. She felt she had to have something nice to offer them. The girls would be out here helping her, making cakes and cookies. All the talking and laughing. And a little fussing and scuffling now and then, too. Yes. But you were always off somewhere.”

  “Not always.”

  “No, not always. That’s just how it seemed to me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, we missed you, that’s all.”

  And now here he is, Glory thought, haggard and probationary, with little of his youth left to him except the wry elusiveness, secretiveness, that he did in fact seem to wear on his skin. He stood propped against the counter with his arms folded and watched his father while his father pondered him, smiling that hard, wistful smile at what he knew his father saw, as if he were saying, “All those years I spared you knowing I wasn’t worth your grief.”

  But the old man said, “Come here, son,” and he took Jack’s hands and caressed them and touched them to his cheek. He said, “It’s a powerful thing, family.”

  And Jack laughed. “Yes, sir. Yes, it is. I do know that.”

  “Well,” he said, “at least you’re home.”

  WHEN THE PIE WAS DONE AND THE ROAST WAS IN THE OVEN AND the biscuits were made and set aside and the old man had nodded off in the warmth of the kitchen, Jack went upstairs and Glory sat down to read for a while. The table was set, the kitchen was in reasonable order, Lila was bringing a salad.

  She heard Jack washing up, shaving again, no doubt. That was how he nerved himself. By shaving and by polishing his shoes. He ironed his own shirts, very carefully, though not as well as she could have done it for him. He never let himself be a burden to her if he could avoid it, or accepted help he did not immediately repay with help. When she laundered her father’s shirts for him, he in return mopped the kitchen floor and waxed it, too. He did such things with a thoroughness and flair he always quite plausibly ascribed to professional experience. She tried to assure him that it wasn’t necessary to maintain this careful reciprocity, but he only raised his eyebrows, as if to say he might know more about that than she did. She realized it was not only proud but also prudent in a man so disposed as he was, by habit and experience, to doubt his welcome. It calmed him a little to know he had been useful.

  And his self-sufficiency was also guardedness, as if his personal effects could be interpreted, or as if, few as they were, worn as they were, they were saturated with the particulars of his secretive life and could mock or accuse him, or expose old injury, or old happiness, which seemed to be the same thing, more or less. Once, when he had been home for a week or so, she had gone out to hang the laundry and had found two of his shirts on the line, already dry. So she took them in to iron them, since she would be ironing anyway. Collar, yoke, sleeves—this was the proper order of things, so her mother had said, and she did not depart from it. When she began to iron the first of the sleeves, she noticed that it was spangled with stars and flowers, an elaborate embroidery of white on white from the cuff to the elbow, and one final flower near the shoulder.

  Jack came into the porch, stopped abruptly when he saw what she was doing, and smiled at her.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I guess I’ve intruded again.”

  He said, “Careful. That’s my best shirt.”

  “I’m always careful. The embroidery on it is really beautiful.”

  “A friend of mine said she would mend it for me, and that’s what she did instead. It was a kind of joke.”

  “Very pretty, though.”

  He nodded.

  She said, “You can finish. You’ve made me nervous.”

  He shrugged. “I’m touchy. I know that.”

  “No, this is beautiful. You’re right to worry about it.”

  He said, “I almost never wear it. But I lost that other suitcase.” He came just close enough to look sidelong at the flowers and stars, pressed smooth, softly bright like damask. “I never expected anything like that. She did it years ago. Years ago.” That was the first she had heard of Della.

  JACK CAME DOWNSTAIRS TO HELP PREPARE THEIR FATHER for his dinner, wordlessly, since the old man slept on in the vapors and perfumes of Sabbath. He polished the old man’s shoes and brushed his jacket and rummaged through his ties. He brought out two, one a dark blue stripe and one maroon and ruby. Glory touched the gorgeous one, Jack nodded and draped it over the shoulder of the jacket. Then he rummaged again and found the tie clasp that looked like a dagger with a St. Andrew’s cross on the hilt, and the matching cuff links. She shrugged. Allusions to Scotland aroused in their father a wistful indignation, and a readiness to defend the proposition that history in general ought to have unfolded otherwise, with that one sad instance as case in point. Ames, being no Scot, nor much interested in history after the sack of Rome and before the Continental Congress, heard him out with a patience their father found trying. “Then what does matter?” their father would ask the air, once Ames was out the door. So Jack returned them to the dresser. He came back with the Masonic set, Scottish Rite, of course, but a reminder of power and prosperity won despite all. Ames was no Mason, either, so their father’s vows of secrecy forbade conversational forays that might otherwise have become tedious. She nodded.

  She brought out his best new shirt. Jack touched the sleeve and whispered, “Very nice!” Their father had always said it was a false economy to buy clothes of poor quality because he was, in his decorous, ministerial way, a dandy. From time to time, in their childhood, boxes arrived from Chicago. Suits and shirts and ties emerged from them, ordinary enough to pass unnoticed, except as they gave his lanky body an air of composure and grace. A new dress or suit, which also arrived from Chicago, was the reward for the child who gained the most height as a percentage of his or her height the previous Easter. This began as a ploy of their mother’s to get them to eat vegetables. The figuring of percentages was added as a concession to Teddy’s notions of equity. It was he who reflected on the fact that the girls would be sure to grow less than the boys did in absolute terms. Jack never turned up for the measuring ceremony, which was a boisterous business of cake and cocoa and argumentative calculation. But that one year the suit was for him anyway and he did come to Easter service. Looking so beautiful, his father said when he mentioned it.

  SO SHE AND JACK MADE A SORT OF PIECEMEAL SIMULACRUM of their dozing father. Jack played solitaire beside him while Glory dressed, then Jack went upstairs while Glory finished the vegetables and the gravy. Half an hour before the Ameses were to arrive, Glory roused her father and helped him into his clothes, washed his face and brushed his hair into a fine white tousle that went handsomely with his glorious tie and the irascible look he assumed to conceal his pleasure at these attentions to his vanity.

  “Jack is here,” he said, as if to exclude other possibilities.

  “He went upstairs a few minutes ago.”

  “He will be back downstairs in time for dinner.”

  “Yes.”

  Then Ames arrived with Lila and Robby, the three of them in their church clothes, and she took her father into the parlor with them, the company parlor, where they sat on the creaky chairs no one ever sat on. It had been almost forgotten that they were not there just to be dismally ornamental, chairs only in the same sense that the lamp stand was a shepherdess. Ames was clearly bemused by the formality her father had willed upon the occasion. The room was filled with those things that seem to exist so that children can be forbidden to touch them—porcelain w
indmills and pagodas and china dogs—and Robby’s eyes were bright with suppressed attraction to them. He leaned at his mother’s knee, lifting his face to whisper to her now and then, bunching and twisting the hem of her dress in his hands. There were remarks on the weather. Her father said, “Egypt will have consequences,” and she went into the kitchen to sauté the morels, since Jack had still not appeared.

  Just when his absence began to seem conspicuous and awkward, when she had gone into the parlor to tell them that Jack would certainly be down in a minute or two, they heard him on the stairs, and then there he was, standing in the doorway. He was dressed in one of his father’s fine old dark suits. There was a silence of surprise. He brushed at his shoulder. He said, “The cloth is a little faded. It looks like dust.” Then no one spoke until his father said, “I was quite a tall fellow at one time.”

  Jack was wearing one of the creamy shirts she had brought down from the chest in the attic and the blue striped tie, and his hair was parted high and combed straight to the side. He looked very like his father in his prime, except for the marked weariness of his face, his mild and uninnocent expression. Aware of the silence, he smiled and touched the scar beneath his eye. But he would have looked elegant, after a decorous and outmoded fashion, if he had not been Jack, and if they had not thought, therefore, What does this mean? what might he do next? And there was something moving in the fact that the suit fit him almost perfectly, or would have if he were not quite so thin. He was the measure of the failure of his father’s body, and also perhaps a portending of the failure of his own.

  Ames said, “Well,” and looked at him for a moment before he remembered to rise.

  Glory had noticed that men who were on uncertain terms with each other will take one step forward, leaning into a space between them as if the distance had been arrived at by treaty and could be breached only for the moment it took them to shake hands. “Jack,” he said.

  Jack said, “Reverend. Mrs. Ames.” And then he laughed and smoothed his lapels and looked at Glory sidelong, as if to say, “Another bad idea!” He was wearing the dagger tie clasp. The brightness in his face meant anxiety. When he was anxious a strange honesty overtook him. He did understandable things for understandable reasons, answering expectation in terms that were startlingly literal, as if in him the skeletal machinery of conventional behavior, the extension and contraction of the pulleys of muscle and sinew, was all exposed. And he was aware of this, embarrassed by it, inclined to pass it off, if he could, as irony, to the irritation of acquaintances and strangers, and, she could only imagine, employers and police.

  She said to her guests, feigning the same slight strangerliness they feigned, too, “Please come into the dining room. Jack will help me serve.”

  “Oh, good,” Jack said. “I was feeling a little at a loss.” Then to Lila he said, “No gift for small talk, polite conversation. None at all.”

  Lila smiled. “Me neither.” She had a soft, slow, comfortable voice that suggested other regions, and suggested, too, in its very gentleness, that she knew a good deal more about the world than she would ever let on. Jack looked at her with pleasant interest, with a kind of hopefulness, Glory thought. Clearly Ames noticed, too. Poor Jack. People watched him, and he knew it. It was partly distrust. But more than that, the man was at once indecipherable and transparent. Of course they watched him.

  He followed her into the kitchen. He said, “Maybe I should go change.”

  “No, no. You’re just fine. You look nice.” She put serving dishes into his hands. “I’ll bring the condiments. Come back for the roast.”

  He carried in the huge, chipped semi-porcelain platter on which roasts and hams and turkeys had always made their entrances in that house and, after a moment’s hesitation, set it down in front of his father, in keeping with what was once family custom. But the old man was still a little grimly bemused by the apparition he had seen of himself in his relative youth. He said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that. It might as well still be on the hoof for all the luck I’d have with it. Give it to Ames.”

  Jack said, “Yes, sir,” and after Lila had rearranged the serving dishes, he set the roast in front of Ames, who said, “I’ll do my best.”

  Jack took the chair next to his father, and then Robby left his mother’s side and came around the table and leaned into the chair beside Jack’s.

  “I could sit here,” he said shyly.

  Jack said, “You could, indeed. Please do,” and helped him pull the chair a little way from the table. Ames glanced up from the roast.

  Lila said, “He’s taken to you. He don’t often act that friendly. Doesn’t.”

  Jack said, “I’m honored,” as if he meant it. Then he stood up from the table. “Excuse me. One minute. An oversight,” and left the room. They heard him leave the porch.

  His father shook his head. “He’s up to something, I suppose. No idea in the world what it could be.”

  They sat waiting for him, and in a few minutes he came back with a handful of sweet peas in a water glass, which he put down in front of Lila. “We can’t have Mrs. Ames as our guest and no flowers on the table!” he said. “It’s not much of a bouquet. A little better than nothing, I hope.”

  Lila smiled. “They’re nice,” she said.

  Ames cleared his throat. “Well, Reverend Boughton, since I have carved, maybe you could offer the blessing.”

  Boughton said, “I was thinking you might do that, too.”

  There was a silence.

  Jack took a slip of paper from his pocket. “In case of emergency,” he said. “I mean, in case this should fall to me, the grace. I’ve written it out.”

  His father looked at him a little balefully. “That’s excellent, Jack. Perhaps it won’t be necessary.”

  Jack glanced at Ames, who shrugged, and he began to read. “‘Dear Father,’” he said. He paused and studied the paper, leaning into the candlelight. “My handwriting is very poor. I crossed some things out. ‘You are patient and gracious far beyond our deserving.’” He cleared his throat. “‘You let us hope for your forgiveness when we can find no way to forgive ourselves. You bless our lives even when we have shown ourselves to be utterly ungrateful and unworthy. May we be strengthened and renewed, to make us less unworthy of blessing, through these your gifts of sustenance, of friendship and family.’” And then, “‘In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.’”

  Again there was a silence. He looked at Ames, who nodded and said, “Thank you.”

  “Jack, that was fine,” his father said.

  Jack shrugged. “I thought I’d give it a try. I should have noticed I had the word ‘unworthy’ down twice. I thought ‘sustenance’ was good, though.” He laughed.

  After a moment Boughton said to Ames, “We have had some conversation about family over the last few days, and I believe Jack has brought the conversation to a point here. It is in family that we most often feel the grace of God, His faithfulness. Yes.”

  Jack nodded. He murmured, “Amen.”

  Heartened, his father launched into an account of his views on Dulles’s policy of containment. “It is provocation!” he said. “Pure and simple!” Ames thought Dulles might be proved right in the long term, and Boughton said “the long term” was just a sort of feather pillow that was used to smother arguments.

  Ames laughed. “I wish I’d known that sooner.”

  Boughton said, “You’ve always enjoyed a good quarrel as much as anybody, Reverend.”

  Jack asked his father if he thought the long-term consequences of the violence in Montgomery would be important, and his father said, “I don’t believe there will be any consequences to speak of. These things come and go. The gravy is wonderful, by the way.” Jack absently spindled the slip of paper in his fingers. When he realized Ames had noticed, he smiled and smoothed it out again and slipped it into his pocket. Ames cut Robby’s roast for him, and Jack split and buttered a biscuit and set it on the boy’s plate.

  Whatever
part of her father’s hopes for the evening could be satisfied by fragrance and candlelight and by food consecrated to the rituals of Boughton celebration, that part at least had been seen to. The roast beef was tender, the glazed beets were pungent, the string beans were as they always were so early in the year, canned. But she had simmered them with bacon to make them taste less like themselves. She waited for someone to remark on the biscuits, but it was the gravy they admired, and she was proud of that, too.

  Still, there was something strained about it all, as if time had another burden, like humid air, or as if it were a denser medium and impervious to the trivialization which was all they would expect or hope for on an evening like this one, now that grace was said. Her father gazed at Jack from time to time, pondered him, and Jack was aware of it. His hand trembled when he reached for his water glass, and ordinarily the old man, gentle as he was, would have looked away. But instead he touched Jack’s shoulder and his sleeve. Ames, his expression pensively comprehending, watched his friend take the measure of his erstwhile youth.