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by Marilynne Robinson

  “Nineteen forty-eight. It’s so old he’s probably seen it.”

  He nodded. “It’s so old he’s probably forgotten it.”

  “Well, I think I’ll just make cookies.”

  “Whatever you say.” Jack put the magazine on the table. Then he stood looking at it with his hands on his hips, as if he were relinquishing something that mattered. “Interesting article, though.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll need a minute to comb my hair.”

  “Sure.” Then he said, “My idea was that you would give it to the old gent first, before you take it to Ames. Then they’ll have something to argue about. I mean, conversation might be strained. In the circumstances. So I thought this might help.” He shrugged.

  She put away the mixing bowl and the measuring spoons. “Any further instructions?”

  “Not at the moment. Well, he’s awake and dressed. I thought maybe you might read it to him over breakfast. I’ve eaten. I’m—” He made a gesture toward the door that suggested he had some sort of intention to act upon. Some hoe blade to whet. He had already oiled the horse collar.

  “All right,” she said. “Should I tell him this is your idea?”

  “Yes. Tell him that. Say I’m afraid I might have offended Ames, and I’d like to put things right.”

  “Why don’t you tell him yourself? I suppose he’d want the particulars.”

  “Bright girl,” he said. “Thanks, Glory.” And he left.

  HER FATHER TOOK INSTANTLY TO THE IDEA OF RECONCILiation. He relaxed visibly at the very word. There was nothing improbable in the idea that Jack was somehow at fault, though, after allowing himself the thought a few times, he still had no specific notion of how he could have been. A skeptical look, perhaps, but that was to be expected. Still, Jack was Jack, and there was nothing disloyal about accepting that Jack might be at fault in some degree, since forgiving him was deeper even than habit, since it was in fact the sum and substance of loyalty. Yes. The old man always interpreted any pleasing turn of events as if he were opening a text, to have a full enjoyment of all reassuring implications and all good consequences. “It’s very kind of Jack to recognize his part in this, and to want to make amends. Christian of him. I believe he may be doing this to please his old father, too. So I have something to think about that might not have been so clear to me otherwise.” He laughed. “That sermon was for my benefit. Yes. The Lord is wonderful.” He said, “Old Ames says he remembers me in skirts and a lace bonnet, and that could be true. My grandmother took my infancy in hand and she made it last as long as she possibly could. Longer, I guess. She meant well. My mother’s health failed after I was born. That was Mother’s opinion, anyway. But you just can’t give up a friendship that goes back as far as that!” He loved to reflect on the fact that grace was never singular in its effects, as now, when he could please his son by forgiving his friend. “That is why it is called a Spirit,” he said. “The word in Hebrew also means wind. ‘The Spirit of God brooded on the face of the deep.’ It is a sort of enveloping atmosphere.” Her father was always so struck by his insights that it was impossible for him to tell those specific to the moment from those on which he had preached any number of times. It had made him a little less sensitive than he ought to have been to the risk of repeating himself. Ah well.

  So she read the article to her father, and he chuckled over the passages by which Ames was certain to be exasperated, his eyes alight with the pleasure of knowing he and the Reverend were, for Jack’s purposes, entirely of one mind. “Very thoughtful of him to find this for us,” he said.

  When they had finished reading it, Glory took the magazine to Ames’s house and left it with Lila, since the Reverend was out calling. A day passed. Jack came in from the garden to ask if she had delivered it, then to ask if there had been any response. Finally, weary of all the anxiety, she went again without gift or pretext and found Ames at home. He opened the door, and when he saw her there, his eyes teared with regret and relief. “Come in, dear,” he said. “I’m very glad to see you. How is your father doing these days?”

  “As well as can be expected. Jack helps me take care of him. Or I help Jack.” She said, “We’ve missed you.”

  Ames rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. “Yes. I know it has been wonderful for Robert to have him home again.” He looked tired and moved and as if he needed to recover himself, so she said that her father had asked her to look in but she really couldn’t stay.

  “I haven’t been sleeping very well so I’m not worth much right now, but I’ll come by tomorrow or the next day.” He said, “Give Jack my regards.”

  He seemed so robust beside her father that it was hard to remember Ames was old, too.

  The next day Ames strolled up the street with Robby tagging after him, running ahead of him, pouncing at grasshoppers. “Like a puppy,” her father said. “Into everything.” Glory went inside to make lemonade and allow the two old gentlemen time to follow out the protocols of renewed cordiality. Jack came downstairs to the kitchen and leaned against the counter with his arms folded. Together they listened for a while to the voices, firmer as talk proceeded. There was laughter and the creaking of chairs, and there were silences, too, but there were always silences. When she was no longer afraid of disrupting any delicate work of reparation, Glory took them their lemonade and sat with them a while. Robby went to the garden and came back with a toy tractor he had brought on another visit and forgotten to take home with him. He drove it here and there around the porch floor, under his father’s chair and around his shoes.

  The conversation turned to the article Jack had found, “God and the American People.” It was contemptuous of the entire enterprise of religion in the United States. But it was awkwardly reasoned, so the two old clergymen could enjoy refuting it. They had labored earnestly at propagating the true faith, which had never seemed to them to have national traits or boundaries. Nor did they feel directly implicated in whatever eccentricities and deficiencies in the local practice of it they might be obliged to grant.

  Jack came out on the porch with a glass of lemonade and took a chair. There was a little silence. “Reverend,” he said.

  Ames said, “Jack, it’s good to see you,” and he glanced away, at Boughton, at the glass in his hand.

  Jack watched him for a moment. Then he said, “I heard you two laughing about that magazine. It’s pretty foolish, all in all. Could I see it for a second? Thanks. I thought he made one interesting point in here somewhere, though. He said the seriousness of American Christianity was called into question by our treatment of the Negro. It seems to me there is something to be said for that idea.”

  Boughton said, “Jack’s been looking at television.”

  “Yes, I have. And I have lived in places where there are Negro people. They are very fine Christians, many of them.”

  Boughton said, “Then we can’t have done so badly by them, can we? That is the essential thing.”

  Jack looked at him, and then he laughed. “I’d say we’ve done pretty badly. Especially by Christian standards. As I understand them.” Jack sank back into his chair as if he were the most casual man on earth and said, “What do you think, Reverend Ames.”

  Ames looked at him. “I have to agree with you. I’m not really familiar with the issue. I haven’t been following the news as closely as I once did. But I agree.”

  “It isn’t exactly news—” Jack smiled and shook his head. “Sorry, Reverend,” he said. Robby brought the tractor to show him, let him work the steering wheel, ran the tractor along the arm and over the back of his chair.

  Boughton said, “I don’t believe in calling anyone’s religion into question because he has certain failings. A blind spot or two. There are better ways to talk about these things.”

  Ames said, “Jack does have a point, though.”

  “And I have a point, too. My point is that it’s very easy to judge.”

  That was meant to end the conversation, but Jack, who was studying the ic
e in his glass, said, “True. Remarkably easy in this case, it seems to me.”

  “All the more reason to resist that impulse!”

  Jack laughed, and Ames looked at him, not quite reprovingly. Jack’s gaze fell.

  Boughton said, “If there is one thing the faith teaches us clearly it is that we are all sinners and we owe each other pardon and grace. ‘Honor everyone,’ the Apostle says.”

  “Yes, sir. I know the text. It’s the application that confuses me a little.”

  Ames said, “I think your father has shown us all a good many times how he applies that text.”

  Jack sat back and held up his hands, a gesture of surrender. “Yes, sir. Yes, he has. For which I have special reason to be grateful.”

  Ames nodded. “And so have I, Jack. So have I.”

  There was a silence. Her father averted his face, full as it was of vindication and conscious humility.

  Lila came up the walk. Jack saw her first and smiled and stood. Ames turned and saw her and stood, also. When she came through the screen door, Boughton gestured toward his friend and his son and said, “I’d stand up, too, my dear, if I could.”

  “Thank you, Reverend.” She said, “I can’t stay. I just come to tell John I fixed a supper for him. It’s cold cuts and a salad, so there’s no hurry about it.”

  Boughton said, “Join us for a few minutes. Jack will get you a chair.”

  Jack said, “Please take mine, Mrs. Ames. I’ll bring one from the kitchen.” And he seated her beside his father with that gallantry of his that exceeded ordinary good manners only enough to make one wonder what was meant by it.

  Glory thought Jack might have made an excuse to have a word or two with her about how she thought things were going, so she went into the kitchen after him. She was ready to tell him it might be time to mention the weather, baseball, even politics. But he pointedly did not meet her gaze and went out to the porch again.

  Ames said to his wife, “We were just talking about the fact that the way people understand their religion is an accident of birth, generally speaking. Where they were born.”

  Jack said, “Or what color they were born. I mean, that is a subject of the article. Indirectly. It seems to me.”

  Lila could never really be drawn into these conversations, though Ames tried to include her. She seemed more interested by the fact that people talked about such things than she was by anything they talked about, and she watched the currents of emotion pass among them, watchful when they were intent and amused when they laughed.

  Boughton said, “Yes, that’s very interesting.” Then he fell back on his experience of Minneapolis, his closest equivalent to foreign travel. “Mother and I went up to the Twin Cities from time to time, and we saw Lutheran churches everywhere. Just everywhere. A few German Reformed, but the Lutherans outnumber them twenty to one, I believe. That’s an estimate. Minneapolis is a large city. There may be Presbyterians in areas we didn’t visit.”

  Jack said, rather abruptly, “Reverend Ames, I’d like to know your views on the doctrine of predestination. I mean, you mentioned the accident of birth.”

  Ames said, “That’s a difficult question. It’s a complicated issue. I’ve struggled with it myself.”

  “Let me put it this way. Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?”

  “I’m afraid that is the most difficult aspect of the question.”

  Jack laughed. “People must ask you about this all the time.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “And you must have some way of responding.”

  “I tell them there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God—omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.”

  “You say it in those very words.”

  “Yes, I do. More or less those very words. It’s a fraught question, and I’m careful with it. I don’t like the word ‘predestination.’ It’s been put to crude uses.”

  Jack cleared his throat. “I would like your help with this, Reverend.”

  Ames sat back in his chair and looked at him. “All right. I’ll do my best.”

  “Let’s say someone is born into a particular place in life. He is treated kindly, or unkindly. He learns from everyone around him to be Christian, say. Or un-Christian. Might not that have an effect on his—religious life?”

  “Well, it does seem to, generally. There are certainly exceptions.”

  “On the fate of his soul?”

  “Grace,” his father said. “The grace of God can find out any soul, anywhere. And you’re confusing something here. Religion is human behavior. Grace is the love of God. Two very different things.”

  “Then isn’t grace the same as predestination? The pleasanter side of it? Presumably there are those to whom grace is not extended, even when their place in life might seem suited to—making Christians of them.” He said, “One way or the other, it seems like fate.”

  Jack had put his glass down and sat slumped, with his arms folded, and he spoke with the kind of deferential insistence that meant he had some intention in raising the question.

  His father said, “Fate is not a word I have ever found useful.”

  “It is different from predestination, then.”

  “As night and day,” his father said authoritatively. Then he closed his eyes.

  Glory thought she saw trouble looming. Ames and her father had quarreled over this any number of times, her father asserting the perfect sufficiency of grace with something like ferocity, while Ames maintained, with a mildness his friend found irksome, that the gravity of sin could not be gainsaid. Could Jack have forgotten? She stood up. She said, “Excuse me. I hate this argument. I’ve heard it a thousand times and it never goes anywhere.”

  Her father said, “I hate it a good deal, too, and I’ve never seen it go anywhere. But I wouldn’t call it an argument, Glory.”

  She said, “Wait five minutes.” She looked pointedly at her brother. He smiled. She went into the house. Then she heard him say, “I was thinking about your sermon last Sunday, Reverend. A fine sermon. And it seemed to me another text very relevant to your subject would have been the story of David and Bathsheba.”

  Glory thought, Dear God in heaven.

  There was a silence while the old men pondered this. Then Ames said, “Robby, you’d better run along. Go find Tobias. Take your tractor now, and run along.”

  There was another silence. Jack cleared his throat. “As I read that story, the child died because his father committed a sin.” Glory thought she heard an edge in his voice.

  Ames said, “He committed many grave sins. Not that that makes the justice of it any clearer.”

  “Yes, sir. Many grave sins. Still. I’m not asking about the justice of it. I’m asking if you believe a man might be punished by the suffering of his child. If a child might suffer to punish his father. For his sins. Or his unbelief. If you think that’s true. It seems to me to bear on the question we were discussing before. Predestination. The accident of birth.” Jack spoke softly, carefully, touching the tips of his fingers together in the manner of a man whose reasonableness approached detachment. Glory thought, Either he has forgotten that Ames also lost a child all those years ago, or he is implying that Ames was being punished when he lost her, that he was a sinner, too. Jack’s impulse to retaliate when he felt he had been injured was familiar enough, and it always recoiled against him. She coughed into her hand, but he did not look up.

  After a moment Ames said, “David’s child returned to the Lord.”

  Jack said, “Yes, sir. I understand that. But you do hope a child will have a life. That is what David prayed for. And you hope he will be safe. You hope he’ll learn more than—bitterness. I think. You hope that people will be kind.” He shrugged.

/>   Ames said, “That is true. In the majority of cases.” His words seemed pointed.

  There was a silence.

  Then her father said, “Oh!” and covered his face with his hands. “Oh! I am a very sinful man!”

  Lila made a low sound of commiseration. “Dear, dear.”

  Jack said, “What? No, I—” He looked up at Glory, as if she could help him interpret the inevitability, the blank certainty, of painful surprise.

  His father said, “The night you were born was such a terrible night! I prayed and prayed, just like David. And Ames did, too. And we thought we’d pulled you through, saved your life, didn’t we? But there’s so much more to it than that.”

  Jack smiled with rueful amazement.

  Ames leaned over and patted Boughton’s knee. “Theology aside, Robert, if you are a sinful man, those words have no meaning at all.”

  Boughton said, from behind his hands, “You don’t really know me!”

  This made Ames laugh. He thought it over and he laughed again. “I think I know you pretty well. I remember when your granny still pushed you up the road in a perambulator. Of course your arms and legs might have been hanging out of it. You might have been ten or twelve at the time. With that lace bonnet sitting on the top of your head. My mother used to say it would make more sense if the old lady was in the perambulator and you were pushing.”

  “Oh, now, it wasn’t as bad as all that. I think I climbed out of that contraption when I was about six. I used to run when I saw it coming. God bless her, though. She meant well.”

  The two old men sat for a moment gazing at nothing in particular, as they did when memory arose between them. Jack watched them, the privilege of ancient friendship enclosing them like a palpable atmosphere. “We pulled him through, Robert, and he’s here with you. He’s back home.”