The Distinguished Guest (21 page)

“Hey,” he said, sounding not entirely pleased. He was wearing half-glasses. They made him look spinstery.

“Hey, yourself,” she said. “I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d just painfully
throw
myself up your very steep staircase, drag my
bo
dy through your
pitch-black hallway, and drop in.” She tried a warm smile. She hoped it was warm.

“Well, hi.” He hadn’t moved.

“May I come in?”

He stepped back. “Sure. Sorry. Come on in.” He shut the door behind her as she moved forward, and then he strode past her and pulled a modern, rolling desk chair from under the table
by the window. Linnett looked around. The walls and woodwork were all painted white. The room was flooded with light from a large bay window in the front. The tables—there were three of
them—were white Formica, the lamps white too. There were four of the desk chairs, in blue and green wool, and against the wall, a blue wool loveseat. Everywhere on the walls were hung
architectural drawings and photographs of buildings.

Linnett took off her pack and swung it, and then her crutches, to the floor. She sat in the blue chair Alan had pulled out for her, and leaned back, looking around. Alan had sat at one of the
tables, facing her. It was as though she were a client. “I’ll be straight,” she said after a moment’s silence. “I wanted to ask you a little about Lily.”

“I suspected as much.” He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “But I told you, I don’t want to talk about Lily.”

“Well, I know that, and I wouldn’t, I
won’t
quote you or anything. It’s just that I’m feeling, a little, at sea, at the moment. I can’t seem to get . .
. ” She frowned and looked out the bay window in the direction of the voices rising past: all she could see from here were the trees across the street, the spire of the church. “Umm. A
footing, journalistically speaking. So to speak.” She looked at him. “As it happens. As it were.”

He looked back, a long steady gaze. Blue eyes, thought Linnett. Nice.

He lifted his hands. “No,” he said. He smiled, as though to soften the blow.

“Oh, pretty please,” she said.

He shook his head, looking slightly embarrassed—for her? for himself?

“Okay,” she said. “Look. Let me apologize anyway. For my part in Friday night’s little . . . insult, whatever. Somehow, I guess, I got Lily going. Or I felt she used me.
Anyway.” Linnett shrugged. “I thought she was unpleasant. And I was surprised that she was unpleasant. In that particular way. And, tired as I was Friday night, I went home and reread
some stuff of hers and saw in it, this time, I guess, some new possibilities.”

He had begun tapping his pencil. “Such as?”

“Such as. Such as. Well, for instance, she talks about being angry with your father over the church stuff. At Blackstone. Obviously. But she kind of points, herself, to a wish for
you—for
me
, I mean: ‘the reader’ ”—Linnett made quote marks with her fingers—“to understand how their anger worked, to, like, picture their fights.
And she draws them as these very lofty discussions, really. Tearful, but lofty as hell. But while I was reading it, I was thinking of her tone to you on Friday night. And I wondered if maybe there
wasn’t a more . . .
explosive
quality there. If it ever got down and dirty, maybe.”

He smiled, a small, grim lifting of the corners of his mouth, and shook his head. “Nope. It never did.”

“Do you remember them? The fights?”

“There were no fights. That’s what I’m saying.”

“The discussions, then. That whole breaking up thing with the church at the time.”

He shook his head. “I don’t really. I was only twelve, thirteen then. I didn’t really care about it, frankly.”

“Well, didn’t they talk to you about it?” she pushed. “Explain it to you?”

“Nope.” His face was closed. “Not until the end, until they were splitting up. And even then it was very . . . summarial. ‘This has happened, we have disagreed, Dad is
moving out,’ that sort of thing.”

“Well, when did you understand it then?” Linnett leaned forward on the edge of his table and rested her face in her hand.

He sat back. He raised his light eyebrows. He grinned at her, teasing. “Did I say I understood it?”

“Don’t you?”

“I have my theories. I didn’t, though, at the time. At the time, I recall, I was concerned exclusively about me. About whether I’d be considered weird or be dropped socially
somehow, because my parents were divorced.”

“And?”

“No. It didn’t really work that way. I was actually able to parlay it into sympathy, in fact, in some quarters. But that was my fear. There were only a few kids I knew whose parents
were divorced—or the father had died or something. And—of course we never thought of this, that their lives were economically fragile. To us, to me, they just seemed strange.
Unattractive. And that’s what I cared about. That’s all I cared about. That somehow I would become similarly, I don’t know, marked.”

A warm wind from the open window passed into the room, ruffled the papers on the desk and the corners of a few of the drawings tacked to the walls. Both of them looked over at the leafy noise
for a moment.

“But that didn’t happen,” Linnett said after a few seconds.

“No. I was entrenched enough socially, I guess. And Lily had the family money which she tapped into then, so there were no big changes. We did move, but the new apartment was closer,
actually, to school and my friends than our house had been. So that seemed even a benefit.”

“Wow, lucky you.”

Alan shrugged. “As I said, I was really mostly concerned with myself at that age. You were no doubt a selfless humanitarian at thirteen or fourteen.”

Linnett raised her hands, palms up, as though to deny she’d been accusing anyone of anything. “Hey,” she said. And after a moment, “Well, so what are your theories?
Now?”

“Theories of . . . ?”

“You said you had some theories about your parents’ divorce. About why they broke up.”

“Oh. Well.” He began to slide his glasses around on the table’s surface. “You’re not using this.”

“Not directly, no.”

“How, indirectly, then?”

“Just . . . to help me define my own stance toward Lily. I just feel
enclosed
with her at this point. With her version of things.” She looked out the window for a moment.
“I need help.” She slipped into a Southern accent. “I’d be mighty grateful, suh. While just downright reverential, if you wish, about your privacy.”

“No quotes? None?”

She crossed her heart.

“Okay. It’s pretty harmless anyway, I think. But here it is. My theory. It has to do with their whole earlier relationship too.” He looked at her. “I assume you remember
all that—her upbringing, hermetically sealed off, nearly, and then the experience of meeting my father, true love, deep faith, da
duh
, da
duh
.”

Linnett smiled at him. “Sure, that’s about how I remember it.”

“Well, my idea is . . . Actually it’s not just mine, my sister’s too. We both think that Lily’s conversion experience, as it were, centered really on my father. That he
was her God, her Christ, whatever. He sort of embodied that for Lily. He had a kind of virtually papal infallibility. And when he began to fall into error, as Lily saw it, it wasn’t as though
it was just a human being making a mistake, it wasn’t like the disappointments the rest of us have in our marriages, you know?”

Linnett nodded, thinking she’d ponder this revelation later.

“That teach us how to love another human being. Because Lily, frankly, isn’t interested in loving another human being.” He heard how his voice had hardened and he stopped.
After a moment, he smiled. “This is my
theory
, understand.”

“Oh,
I
do,” she said, with one of her odd inflections.

He smiled again, hearing in this way of emphasizing it—would she have intended this? he couldn’t tell—her opinion that others wouldn’t. “Anyway, my father, as I see
it, didn’t have a chance. I mean, yes, the issue was incredibly important to Lily, and yes, she did feel he was wrong, that the whole black power thing was a dead end. And she felt in her
heart, I think—wherever that vestigial organ may be in old Lil—that her friendships with some of the people in church, some of the black women in particular, were true. Were real, you
know. So she
did
feel that he was, what? ‘Invalidating her experience,’ I guess. She did have those kinds of”—he changed his voice, became a pompous
announcer—“prefeminist intimations of feminist anger.” Changed back. “I’ll grant all that. But I think the basic truth and the reason the marriage ended was that she
saw he was human, that he could make mistakes. What she thought were mistakes. Remember, she’d turned her life completely around for him, because she believed in him. And now he was betraying
that belief. And I think she found that, literally, unforgivable.”

Linnett had been watching his face carefully while he spoke. After a moment, she said. “And you think that’s pretty unforgivable of her.”

“Don’t you? Wouldn’t you like to imagine that your husband, if you’re married . . . ?” She shook her head. “If you got married, or even your . . . boyfriend,
your beloved, would find a way to love you even after he discovered you weren’t perfect?”

Linnett sat up. “Hey, you think I’m not perfect?”

He laughed. “Only because you’re wearing a cast, of course.” He gestured at her leg. “I took that as a kind of . . . hint. A metaphor.”

“There are some times, my friend, when a cast is just a cast. Don’t forget it.”

They smiled at each other.

She angled her head to see what was on the table in front of him. “What’s this?” She tapped the edge of the sheet, and rolled her chair closer to the table. To him.

“Ah. Just doodling. It’s a maybe, could-be church. In Vermont.”

“Mmm.” She bent over it, frowning. “Interesting.”

“Can you read it?” he asked.

She sat back. “No. Not a bit. I just said that, actually. I was being officially interested.”

He put his glasses back on and traced it through for her, floor plans and elevations, porch, nave, choir, sanctuary. He showed her where the windows would be, the doors, the skylights, and
described the way light would enter the space, the sight lines the congregation would have out the windows. Bent close to her over the table, he could smell her perfume, the faint animal odor of
her hair. If he leaned a little toward her, wisps of it tickled his cheek.

She looked up. “It’s lovely. I hope it gets to be.”

“Well, thank you.”

She tilted back again, rocking in the chair a bit, and looked out the window, saw the finger of the church spire, the belling clouds above it. She looked back at him, squinting her eyes a
little. “It’s curious, isn’t it, that you’re working on a church?”

“Well, no, honestly. I see the connection you’re trying to make, but lots of people with not a trace of religion in their backgrounds do churches. Anyone offered one would. Would be
happy to.” He gestured. “A church, a mosque, a temple, a shrine. We don’t discriminate. Or I wouldn’t. So it isn’t connected. And I’m not even a believer, after
all that.”

“But you were brought up that way. You went to church each Sunday to hear your father.”

“Oh Lord, yes. Sunday school, church, church choir, church sports, the works.”

“So. Um.” She leaned forward over the table again, resting her chin in her hands. “You were sort of part of that, then, that attempt to integrate Blackstone too. I mean, what
were your experiences? Were yours anything like Lily’s? I mean, I guess I’m asking how you’d vote, in terms of what the reality of the situation was.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I really don’t. As I said, I didn’t think about it the way they did.”

“But how
did
you? That’s what I’d like to know.”

“I don’t know. I was confused, that’s probably about the sum of it. About race.”

“Because your parents disagreed.”

“No, no. God no. I mean, as I said, I really didn’t understand the nature of their disagreement at all. Until later. No, it was just . . . Well, Lily and my father came to the
question of race as adults, having had virtually no experience of it in their lives growing up. You remember that passage about Lily’s first seeing a black person, about how amazed she
was?”

Linnett nodded.

“Anyway, they came to Chicago, and the church was in flux. And they made their decisions about what the right way to feel was, and they felt it. That is the kind of people they were. They
were good people. They saw life—Lily still does to some extent I think—in terms of right and wrong. Good and evil. It makes things kind of thrilling in a way, I imagine.”

Was there something wistful in his voice? Linnett couldn’t tell.

“And the black people who came into our church—which had been after all, a white church at one time—were . . . Well, they rewarded those feelings. They were, you know, aspiring
to the middle class, or they were middle class. And they were interested in being among white people, or they wouldn’t have joined that church. And that was my experience in the church
too.

“But I was also going to public school, where from kindergarten on, the number of black kids slowly increased with that whole migration north. And these kids were different from the kids I
knew in church.”

“How?”

Linnett saw Lily in the way the line of concentration deepened between his eyebrows. “Poorer. Fresh up from the South. Not particularly interested, or even aware, at first, of integration,
of what was happening around us all. God,
with
us all. Older than we were, because they’d been so badly educated they couldn’t perform at grade level. Also sexually
sophisticated. If not active. Rough. Profane. Scary. To me.” He lifted his hands. “I was scared. That was it, basically. I was scared all the time around them. They embodied all the
things I’d been taught to be scared of. Ashamed of. Never to mention or show understanding of. But on the other hand, being scared of black kids was utterly taboo. The biggest taboo of all.
That was not a thing I was allowed to feel in my house. With my parents.” His lips firmed against each other in a tight smile. “And if I so much as hinted at it, they’d point out
how well I got along with kids at church, at Sunday school. But the fact was, I didn’t. Those kids seemed, somehow,
too
good to me. Maybe because they
were
conscious that we
were being integrated. Anyway, I felt that they were sort of pious, holier than thou. Than I anyway. I suppose, in my confusion, I thought they were all secretly like the kids at school, that they
were somehow
pretending
to be this other way.” He paused and frowned. “No, that’s wrong. Nothing was that clear to me. Here’s what I felt actually. That there was a
kind of authenticity—though I would never have used the word—about the kids at school that there wasn’t about the black kids at church.” He shook his head, slowly.
“And as for myself, I felt inauthentic everywhere. Completely false.”