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A
FTER TWO DAYS IT WAS CLEAR THAT
J
ACK 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.”

“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.”

T
HE 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.

S
HE PUT
J
ACK
’
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.”

A
FTER 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.”