Home

by Marilynne Robinson

  IF JACK HAD MARRIED THAT FRECKLED CHILD, OR AT LEAST if they had managed to bring her and her baby into their household, then he could have gone back to college and the girl could have finished school and gone to college herself, if she wanted to. “She seems bright enough,” Glory’s mother had said. That was her interpretation of the precocious, intractable hostility toward the Boughtons that would not be moved or swayed by any kindness they could contrive. She was a hard, proud, unsmiling girl, and she may well have hated them all for their benevolent intentions, which were indeed condescending, reflecting as they did their awareness that her circumstances could be improved, that she might benefit from being gently instructed in the proper care of an infant even though this would involve overruling her mother.

  Once, Glory had talked that freckled child into coming to her house to pick apples, she said, and bake a pie. Annie was her name. Annie Wheeler. She came out to the gate dressed the way schoolgirls dressed on Saturdays, in dungarees and an oversized shirt. She carried the baby on her hip. They sailed off to Gilead, the girl acknowledging no pleasure at all at having the top down on a bright afternoon, or at stopping for ice cream cones to eat as they drove. The baby gummed at the ice cream and put her hand in it, and her mother said, “Now look at you!” and licked a smear of ice cream off the baby’s chin and the palm of the baby’s hand.

  It was all Glory’s idea. Her parents were gone for the day to a wedding in Tabor. She had not spoken to them about her plan. She drove very carefully.

  They went out to the orchard, and the girl stood silently with the baby on her hip and watched Glory pick apples. When she said she had picked enough for the pie but would pick a few more for the girl to take home, she said, “We got apples.” Well, of course they would have them. There were apple trees everywhere anyone had ever thought to plant them, like lilac bushes and gooseberries and forsythia and rhubarb. She and the girl went into the house and set the baby in the sunlight on the kitchen floor. Her mother gave her a toy she pulled out of her pocket, buttons on a string, and said, “At home she’s got a milk bottle.” So Glory decanted a pint of cream into a drinking glass and rinsed it out and put it on the floor by the baby’s knee. The girl knelt beside her and poured the buttons from her hand into the bottle, then out again, and the baby laughed and did awkward and purposeful things for a while with her toys, and Glory started to make pastry, talking aloud as if to remind herself of the fine points of the process, the need for careful measurement. The girl sat at the table, sipping a root beer.

  Then the baby’s back began to round with the weight of her head, and she pitched over on her side and began to kick and fuss. Glory said, “Oh, poor thing!” and took her up and swayed with her and kissed her teary cheek. And the baby struggled and wept and yearned away from her with a weight and strength that surprised her, holding out her arms to her mother. The girl took her and settled her on her hip, and the baby leaned her head against her shoulder, sucked her hand, and drew her breath in gasps of relief. “You just ain’t her mama,” the girl said. “No use crying about it.” She never gave any sign that Glory’s efforts at befriending her were more than an irritation till that morning when she called her and said, “I wish you’d come over to my house. My baby’s got something the matter with her.” She had walked three miles down the road to ask the use of a telephone.

  It was an infection a little penicillin could have cured, but there was no penicillin then, or for years afterward. No one was at fault, really. Something like it could have happened even if those two children had come to live in Gilead. Every family had a story that would have ended differently if only there had been penicillin. Chimerical grief—now guilt, now blame, now the thought that it could all have been otherwise.

  But how had Jack ever involved himself with that girl? That was where fault lay, impervious to rationalization, finally even to pardon. Such an offense against any notion of honor, her father had said, and so it still seemed to her, and to him, after all those years. She had followed her father’s thoughts back to that old bitterness, and bitterness simmered in his half-closed eyes as he reflected on the inevitability of his disappointment.

  IT WAS LATE EVENING WHEN THEY HEARD JACK COME INTO the porch. He might have expected his father to be in the parlor, reading in his Morris chair. The other evenings he had spoken to Glory as he passed, called good night to his father, and gone up to his room. But this time the old man would not leave the table. “I’m going to wait for him. I’m going to stay right here.”

  Finding the old man still in the kitchen when he came in, Jack paused, reading the situation as he had always done, aware of having fallen into some frail web of intention. He looked at Glory, then he simply stood there, hat in hand, and waited. Distant, respectful and tentative.

  “Jack,” his father said.

  “Sir.”

  “I think we need to have a conversation.”

  “A conversation.”

  “Yes. I think you had better tell me how things stand with you.”

  Jack shrugged. “I’m tired. I hope to sleep.”

  The old man said, “You know perfectly well what I mean. I want you to tell me if there are—obligations that require the help of your family. Things that might have happened there in St. Louis that you haven’t told me about. That trouble you.”

  Jack looked at Glory. There it was, however mild and kindly meant, the aspersion he dreaded. He put his hand to his face and said, very softly, “Another time.”

  “Sit down, son.”

  He smiled. “No.” Then he said, “My obligations are my problem, I’m afraid.” It was his sadness that made him so inaccessibly patient.

  His father said, “Your obligations are your problem if you can meet them. If not, they become my problem. Things must be seen to. It’s only decent.”

  Fealty to kin, actual and imagined, and the protection of them, possible or not, were their father’s pride, his strongest instinct, and his chief source of satisfaction, frustration, and anxiety. He had drawn himself up so that his words would have the force and dignity of their intent, but his eyes were closed and his mouth had turned down and the rectitude of his posture exposed his narrowed shoulders and his fallen throat. Jack gazed at him as if his father were the apparition of all the grief and weariness he had cost him, still gallant in his weakness, ready to be saddened again, ready to be burdened again.

  “No. No, sir. Another time.”

  “You know there won’t be another time. You’re planning to leave now.”

  “I might not be here much longer. I’m trying to make some decisions.”

  His father’s head fell to the side. He said, “I hope very much you will decide to stay. Stay for a while.”

  Jack said, “That’s very kind.”

  “No, it is just a hope of mine. It will be kind of you to give it a little consideration, if you can. Now Glory will help me to bed.”

  THE NEXT MORNING THE OLD MAN POKED HIS SPOON AT his cereal for a little while, and then he said, “I want to talk with Ames. You can take me there in the DeSoto.”

  The car worked well enough for errands, and Glory had used it to drive the Ameses to the river for a birthday picnic. Her father had not felt comfortable enough to go along that day, and when she mentioned it to Jack, he laughed at the idea—“Et ego in Arcadia”—but at least everything had gone well enough with the car to encourage her to make more use of it. Her father thought often about the DeSoto. In his mind it was an open promise of mobility, a puissance that could also be a boon to his good friend. So his thinking about it was generous and agreeable, tonic. He had not, however, consented to ride in it since the day Jack took them out to the country.

  “Mrs. Ames and the boy will be there,” he said.

  “I’ll take them to the matinee.”

  “Very good.”

  Glory arranged the day to her father’s specifications, and after lunch she helped him down the stairs and into the car. There was a ringing loneliness in the hous
e with Jack always away somewhere, and it felt good to her to leave it for a while, to take her father away from it. She drove him past the church and past the war memorial to let him admire the gardens and the trees, and then she took him to Ames’s house and helped him again, out of the car, up the walk, up the steps. Ames seemed startled to find him at his door.

  “Yes,” the old man said, “I thought you and I could look after each other while the women are out at the movies. I came over here in the DeSoto.”

  Ames pulled a chair away from the table. “Unless you would rather sit somewhere else.”

  Boughton said, “No, this has always been my chair, hasn’t it. My pew.” He sat down and hung his cane from the edge of the table and closed his eyes. Lila and Robby came downstairs, Robby with his hair neatly parted and his cheeks pink with scrubbing. Glory took them off to the musty little movie theater, where they watched good triumph over evil by means of some six-shooters and a posse. “Say your prayers!” said the bad guy to the harmless citizen trapped against a canyon wall. And in the moment he so graciously allowed his captive, horses came clattering up from behind him and he was made to drop his gun. Robby was amazed and gratified by this turn of events, which was as much as Glory could hope for. With previews and newsreels and a cartoon, and a short second feature in which good triumphed once again, more than two hours had passed by the time they came blinking out into afternoon sun.

  The old men were still sitting at the table, and Jack was with them. He looked at Glory and smiled. “There was no one at home, so I thought something must be the matter. I came here—” She had not seen him for three days, except when he walked past her on the way to the door, saying nothing, tipping his hat as he left, or walked through the kitchen on the way to his room, saying only good night. It had never crossed her mind that he would come looking for them. If they had been there, it might have been the beginning of better times. Just the thought gave her a twinge of blighted joy. She wanted to look at him, to see how he was, but his smile was cool. He might be angry. He must think she had betrayed him. Well, she had betrayed him. Dear God, she hadn’t meant to, and what did that matter, when her father was here confiding in Ames again, telling him under the seal of old friendship what he suspected and what he feared, just as he had done in the endless, excruciating past. It was bad enough last night, the way he spoke to Jack. And now this. If her brother had had one surviving hope, she knew it was that he could find some way to speak to Ames himself, in his own right. She was so glad to get her father out of the house, to give him the comfort of a visit to Ames’s kitchen—how long had it been? She hadn’t thought it through. Her father just sat there with his eyes closed.

  Ames was visibly relieved to see the three of them. Robby scrambled into his lap full of the unspent energy the movie had summoned up in him. “You should’ve gone, Papa. You should’ve seen it.” He slapped the bottom of his Cracker Jack box and a few sticky morsels fell out on the table in front of his father. “I’m saving some for Toby.” Then he said, “Here,” and slid off his lap and went to Jack and dug out a few morsels for him. “There’s supposed to be a prize in here,” he said. “Do you see any prize?”

  Jack took the box and tilted it to the light and looked into it. He said, “I believe you must have eaten it.”

  Robby laughed. “No, I didn’t.”

  “You were so interested in that movie you didn’t notice. It could have been a silver dollar and I bet you wouldn’t have noticed it.”

  “Oh yes, I would. I’d notice a silver dollar!”

  “It was probably a rubber snake. I bet it was a tarantula.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Robby said. “Let me see,” but Jack held the box away from him, peered into it, then extracted something between two fingers. “You’re a pretty lucky kid,” he said. “I’d like to have one of these.”

  “What is it? What?”

  Jack laid the little toy on the table. “That,” he said, “is a magnifying glass.”

  Robby looked at it. “It isn’t very big.”

  “Well, you have to start somewhere.”

  “Start what?”

  “Looking for clues. Here. I think I have a spot on the cuff of my shirt. What does it look like to you?”

  Robby peered at it through the little lens. “It just looks like a spot.”

  Jack shrugged. “Well, there you are. Case closed.”

  Robby laughed, and so did Lila.

  Ames said, “Robby, why don’t you run off and find Tobias. He’ll want to see what you’ve got there. Maybe you can find a bug to look at. Now run along.” The boy hesitated, and then he left.

  Jack turned to look at Ames, a bland, weary look that meant, “I understand why you do that, why you send your child away.” No doubt Ames and Boughton had just prayed for his soul, probably slandering before heaven whatever life he had had, and had lost, the life he mourned. Deploring it under the name of sin, or some milder word they had agreed on. Transgression. Dishonor. Unmet obligation. He had walked in upon this conjuration of himself in the bleak light of his father’s suspicions, which were innocent and uninformed and therefore no doubt exaggerated to ensure the sufficiency of his intercession. Jack had walked in on a potent thought of himself, like Lazarus with the memory of cerements about him no matter how often he might shave or comb his hair.

  “Mrs. Ames,” he said, “did you enjoy the movie? I’ve seen it a few times myself. The newsreel was interesting. A little strange for a matinee, I thought.”

  Lila said, to Boughton and Ames, “The newsreel was terrible. It showed an atom bomb going off, and all the buildings that would have been burned down by it. There were dummies inside, like families eating their supper. They shouldn’t be showing that to children.”

  “They shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Boughton said. “They love those mushrooms. All that racket.” He still had not opened his eyes. “Dulles.”

  Jack said, “Yes, Dulles. A Presbyterian gentleman, as I understand.”

  Boughton snorted. “So he says.”

  Jack had settled back in his chair and folded his arms, as he did when he wanted to seem at ease. He said, “They make it hard to bring up children these days. Hard to protect them. I suppose. Fallout in the milk they drink. You’d expect a Presbyterian gentleman to give these things a little more thought. In St. Louis they did a study of what they called ‘deciduous teeth.’ Baby teeth. There was radioactive material in them. It was alarming. To people trying to bring up children. So I have read.”

  Ames looked at Jack, a little reprovingly. “Your father certainly has no brief to offer for John Foster Dulles. Neither have I.”

  Boughton muttered, “But he’ll vote for Eisenhower.”

  After a moment Jack cleared his throat. “Granting that responsibility is not a standard I myself have adhered to, particularly—”

  His father opened his eyes.

  “Granting that I have been a disappointment. Worse than a disappointment. Still.”

  His father looked at him. “No, you haven’t. What’s your point?”

  Lila said, “I know what he means. Things don’t make much sense. It’s hard to know who you’re supposed to look up to. That’s true.”

  “Yes. No disrespect intended. I just feel I should put in a word for the reprobate among us. For their relative harmlessness. Being their sole representative, of course.” He smiled. “I’m not making excuses. But those of us who take a moment from our nefarious lives to read the news can find it all a little disorienting. Our fault, no doubt.” Then he said, “Reverend Ames, I would appreciate any insight you could give me.”

  Ames glanced at him to appraise his sincerity, as if surprised by the possibility that it might be genuine. He said, “That’s a lot to think about.”

  “It comes up fairly often. Among people I know. People living at close quarters, with time on their hands—” He laughed.

  There was a silence. Boughton had closed his eyes again. His head fell. After a mome
nt Glory said, “I think Papa must be getting tired.”

  “I’m right here. You can ask me. I still exist in the first person.”

  “Are you tired?”

  “Yes, I am. I will want to go home soon. Not just yet.” No one said anything for a minute, and then the old man lifted his head. “Yes, we should be going home.”

  Glory would have expected Jack to come with her, hoped he would, but he stayed where he was, as if at ease in his chair, and did not meet her eyes. She walked her father to the car and helped him into it, with Lila, who went along to help him out of the car and up the steps of his own house. After she had settled the old man for a nap, Glory phoned Ames to tell him that Lila would stay and help her make dinner. Robby was having supper with Tobias. Dinner would be ready in an hour or so, but he and Jack could walk over whenever they felt like it. In half an hour Ames came in by himself. He said Jack would be along in a little while, and they waited dinner until it was slightly ruined, and ate in silence.

  Her father asked, “Did you and Jack have any kind of talk, the two of you?”

  Ames said, “Not really. I think he wanted to talk, but he couldn’t bring himself to say what he had on his mind. He only stayed for a few minutes after you went home.”

  “He didn’t give any indication where he might be going?”

  “He said he might be late.”

  GLORY LISTENED ALL NIGHT FOR THE SOUND OF THE DOOR opening. Twice she put on her robe and shoes and went outside to look in the barn, in the car, the shed, the porch, but her father heard her and called out, called to Jack, thinking, no doubt, that it was Jack he heard. Better to let him think so. She crept upstairs and stayed in her room until morning.