The Life of Hope (13 page)

“Ouch,” mumbled Sara, without removing her mouth from mine, and I realized that I had been squeezing her breast overly hard.

“Let’s go,” I mumbled back, “upstairs.”

Sara was eager, and set off for the staircase, and thankfully she never saw the thing contained in the night.

Joseph Benton Hope, some months after his meeting with Theophilius Drinkwater, entered the kitchen of his residence (he and the Quinton twins lived in rooms above the Free Church proper) to find George drinking tea and eating bread and butter. George immediately looked sheepish, because it was late in the afternoon and Martha would disapprove, claiming that George was spoiling his appetite. The truth of the matter was, George Quinton had so healthy an appetite that nothing short of a complete turkey dinner could come close to ruining it. Still, George didn’t like to annoy his twin. He was relieved to see that his discoverer was Joseph Hope, although George still felt guilty in a vague but profound way.

“Bread and butter?” said Joseph. “Whatever would Martha think?”

“I’m sowwy,” mumbled George.

Oddly, Hope laughed, or at least the short birdlike noise that he produced sounded more like a laugh than it sounded like anything else.

“George,” said Joseph Hope, “I was …” Hope searched about for the right word. “I was teasing.”

“Oh!” George was puzzled. “Teasing me?”

“Yes. Go on, eat. I won’t breathe a word of it.”

George Quinton tore off a chunk of bread and buttered it lavishly. He put the whole thing in his mouth and began to chew.

“George,” said J. B. Hope, “I’ve been foolish.”

George began to make protestations, but his mouth was full of bread and butter. He swallowed desperately and said, “Neveh, Wevewend Hope! Not you.”

“Yes, I have.” Joseph pointed his bony backside to the fire
inside the belly of the stove. “I meant to be.”

George must have looked very alarmed, because Hope produced the queer birdlike sound again. “I was with Polyphilia,” Joseph started to explain, but then something occurred to him. “Isn’t that a lovely name? Polyphilia,” he murmured softly.

“It’s vewy nice,” agreed George. “But …”

“We were out for a constitutional, over in the park. And all the leaves were on the ground, you see, and some children had gathered together an enormous pile right in the middle of the walkway. Might I have some bread and butter, please?”

George frantically began to prepare a piece. He was clumsy by nature, even more so because of his agitated state. George got more butter on his finger than on the bread. He handed it to Hope, who said, “Thank you, George.”

“Vewy welcome, Wevewend.”

Joseph Benton Hope looked surprised. “Is that how you call me? Wevewend—that is, Reverend?”

George nodded hesitantly, trying to think of options. “Your holiness” came to mind as a possibility.

“Call me Joseph,” said Hope. “Why, call me Joe!” he decided suddenly.

George didn’t think he was capable of calling Hope “Joe.”

“At any rate,” said Joe, “as I approached the leaves, I turned toward Polyphilia and said something. I disremember what. I always disremember what I’ve said to Polyphilia, although I seem to have perfect and total recollection of what she says to me.” Joseph took a moment to marvel at this truth.

“You tuhned to Miss Polly and said something,” George prompted him.

“Indeed. You see, I pretended to be oblivious to the existence of the pile of leaves. So when we walked into it, I made to be very startled. I shouted ‘Egad!’ and I fell into the leaves.” Once again Joseph produced the short birdlike noise. “Don’t you see, George? I was being foolish.”

George nodded, considering Hope’s story carefully. “I don’t know that it was foolish,” George said slowly. “It seems to me that you wuh making mewwy.”

“That’s it,” agreed Hope with enthusiasm. “I was making merry. Although one has to admit I was being foolish as well.”
Hope sat down at the table with George. “I must say,” he confided quietly, “I enjoyed it. I’ve never been foolish before.”

“No! Not even as a boy, Joe?” George had used the familiar without thinking. He reared back, alarmed by the ease with which it had tumbled out of his mouth. Hope seemed to think nothing of it. Joseph sat across the table, shaking his head in a thoughtful manner. “Not even as a boy.”

George reached for more bread and butter. “I have been foolish many times,” said George Quinton. He licked a gob of butter off his hammerlike thumb. “Martha never has.”

“Martha? No. Heavens, no, I should think not!” Hope’s face was twisted oddly. George, staring into it, realized that Joseph was grinning.

Suddenly, George Quinton was filled with a vast sadness. For a moment he was not sure why, and then his thoughts caught up with his emotions. Joe was in love with Polyphilia Drinkwater, George understood with a quick pain. George understood further that the love was a tragic one, for various reasons. One reason was, Polyphilia was a trollop. Every month or so George Quinton would sneak out of the house and take his monstrous body over to The Sailor’s Wife, a groghouse down by the docks. George would drink ale and whiskey, buckets of it, but he wouldn’t get drunk. Drinking made most men dullheaded, but not George. Alcohol seemed to give his thoughts clarity and precision; often it seemed to give George insight and even scraps of knowledge he hadn’t had before.

George Quinton would actually converse at The Sailor’s Wife, talking with men about politics, religion, whatever subject wanted discussing, which more often than not was the subject of ‘Woman.’ George Quinton therefore knew that Polly Drinkwater had lain with many men. He’d learnt about it at The Sailor’s Wife, drinking and talking. George didn’t understand all of what the men said—a fellow once told him, for instance, that Polyphilia enjoyed it “in the back door,” which George found a baffling statement; another man said that Polly’s favorite food was “the living sausage, covered in cream.” When the men said things like this they winked and chortled hellishly. If half of them—even three-quarters—were lying about it, Polyphilia Drinkwater would still have had, at her eighteen years of age, scores of lovers.

Now, even if Polyphilia were pure and virginal (and, George reflected, it was very unchristian to think the worse of her for not being) Hope’s love would still be tragic because her father hated him. In all of Boston only one man seemed ignorant of Theophilius’s immense dislike for J. B. Hope, and that one man was Joe himself. The other thing that Joseph didn’t know was how vicious and underhanded Drinkwater could be and, sadly, how powerful.

The reason Hope was ignorant of all this is that on a superficial level nothing in his relationship with Drinkwater had changed. If anything, it had improved. Joseph still sent his small articles to be published in
The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War
and Theophilius still published them. In the past few months, Drinkwater had given Hope’s articles front-page prominence, often summarizing their contents in bold type at the head. J. B. HOPE SAYS THAT HE LIVES WITHOUT SIN or HOPE PROCLAIMS HIMSELF PERFECT. Joseph interpreted this as some indication of professional respect; even George could see that Theophilius only meant to get Hope into deeper trouble with the established church.

George realized that Joseph Hope, while sitting at the kitchen table eating bread, had been recollecting his boyhood. George felt a burning shame, because he had not been listening. He’d been thinking of these other things, and now knowledge that might have enriched and enlightened him was lost to George forever. Quinton shook his massive head and concentrated on listening.

“Apparently,” Hope was saying, buttering bread in a quick, efficient manner, dividing the pieces between George and himself, “I spoke not at all until I was three and a half years of age. And when finally I did speak, it was to quote Scripture. Do you know, George, I’d memorized the Bible, cover to cover, by the time I was nine? I was made quite an exhibition of. My father would have me at his side as he preached, and when he came to quoting, he’d tap me on the head, tell book, chapter and verse, and I would speak them. Go ahead, George.”

“Pahdon?”

“Try one. Book, chapter and verse.”

For a long while George could think of nothing, not even one of the books. Then he remembered—slowly the story came
back, Jesus and his apostles —“St. Peter,” George said happily.

“The first or second Epistle?”

“Fust,” George decided arbitrarily. And then he selected some numbers. “Chaptuh thwee. Vuss fowah.”

“ ‘But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is, in the sight of God, of great price.’ ”

“Vewy well done, Joe.” George clapped his hands together enthusiastically, producing cannonworks in the small kitchen. “Vewy impwessive.”

“I suppose,” agreed Hope. “At any rate, it impressed at the revival meetings.”

George Quinton experienced another shock of understanding. He saw that Joseph Hope’s Christianity, a stately refined thing, was a direct attack against the brand of religion that was currently all the rage. George Quinton had gone to revival meetings, he knew what went on there. First of all there was singing, at the outset calm and harmonious, and then a demonic, black-clothed man would appear in front of the crowd. This man’s first word was always
you
and it was always shouted, and it was always accompanied by an accusatory, all-inclusive sweep of the forefinger. “
You
”—and then the voice would fall away to a mere whisper—“sorry, sinful people.” The man would next begin to catalog their sins, speaking as if it were common and public knowledge what they’d all been up to. “There is
lust
in your hearts, there is
anger
in your bones, there is
pride
in your haughty spirits!”

Everyone would nod, secretly hoping to sneak one by the nightclad preacher, though no one ever did. “Gluttony! Sloth! Lechery! Drunkenness!” The people would turn red, try to take their eyes away from the preacher. By this time the man’s voice had risen again, and the list of sins was accompanied by a fine mist of spit.

This wasn’t even the worst part. Once he’d gotten through all that, the preacher would tell them what they could expect in the Hereafter due to this astounding amount of wickedness. Eternal damnation, and the preacher seemed to have firsthand experience of Hell and could describe it very graphically. “Have you ever put your finger into candleflame? Well, recollect that
pain—but do not confine it—oh, no!—do not confine it to a fingertip, because it will consume the whole of your body, from the hair on your head to the ends of your toes!! And it shall be the flame of a thousand
thousand
candles!! And it shall be everlasting.”

This was something George Quinton had never done, stuck his finger into candleflame, until he’d heard a preacher suggest the analogy. Then George had gone home and tried it. “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!” Gnashing of teeth, upon first hearing, didn’t seem too bad to George, until he’d spent a few minutes gnashing his own late one night. The sensation made his skin crawl, made him feel as if serpents, snakes and eels shared his bed. He couldn’t sleep after that.

Once the people were all profoundly terrified, the preacher would announce the existence of “Good news and glad tidings!” If he’d done his job well he’d have to spend several minutes harping on the announcement before the people were inwardly settled enough to listen. The good news was, of course, that you could accept Jesus as your Savior, something all of them had been doing on a weekly basis for years. The preacher would read to them from the Bible, words repeated countless times. Then it was singing again, only this time the singing was frenzied, all hand-clapping and thigh-slapping, full of desperate jubilation. The people would sing until they were exhausted, and then they’d fall back into their seats to wonder how many days, hours or minutes it would be until they sinned again.

Again, George was guilty of not listening to Joseph Hope. George shook his head, dug a finger into his ear as if some plug of wax had been hampering him.

“So,” Hope said, “by the time I was fifteen and attending Harvard, my boyhood was spent, and I’d never been foolish. I had done nothing even vaguely boyish, with the possible exception of fishing. But fishing always seemed to me a very serious pursuit.”

George Quinton nodded for a long time, much longer than he wanted to in case Joseph suspected that he hadn’t been listening. “Joe,” said George finally, “do you want to be foolish now?”

“Here in the kitchen?”

“Yes. Wight heah.” George himself had a profound wish to be foolish and, moreover, knew that tonight he’d make one of his secret nocturnal expeditions to The Sailor’s Wife.

“Shall I pretend to lose my balance?” asked Hope.

“No, Joe.” Later that night George would marvel at how many times he’d addressed Hope as “Joe.” “Let’s dance, Joe. That would be vewy foolish indeed.”

“Dance?”

George Quinton nodded.

Joseph Hope thought about it, then sprang to his feet energetically. “Let’s do, George! It’s very foolish. Very, very foolish!”

George Quinton rose and folded Joseph into his arms. Hope’s face met George’s belly, his hands wrapped around the giant at waist-level. George began to hum a waltz. The two turned about the kitchen, George bumping the table, knocking over chairs, Joseph lightly hopping from one foot to the other. They danced until an all-too-familiar voice demanded, “What are you doing?”

George gently pushed Joseph away. “Sowwy,” George said.

Martha stood in the kitchen doorway, her shoulders hunched so that her bonnet wouldn’t be knocked askew. She looked red and windy; leaves clung to her enormous boots. Martha carried bags and parcels, minuscule in her arms. She asked once more, “What are you doing?”