Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“Daddy?”

But he went on staring at framed squares of blue, with his hands limp on the arms of the chair. His feet in their leather slippers hung side by side, not quite touching the floor, as neat and passive as a well-cared for child’s.

When they had tiptoed out to the hall again Mrs. Stimson said, “Oh, my, I wish you had seen him more at his best.” And then, on the stairs, “He can be so smart sometimes, you wouldn’t believe it. Please don’t judge him by this.”

“No, I won’t,” Elizabeth said.

“You mean you’ll take the job?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” She beamed and squeezed Elizabeth’s arm. Her skin seemed suddenly clearer, two shades lighter. “You don’t know what this means to me,” she said. “Could you start on Monday? Eight o’clock? I’m not due for work till nine, but I’ll want to show you what he eats and all.”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said.

They carried the Kool-Aid in to the men. Mr. Stimson was still talking. He broke off to say, “I was just remarking on the bum, the atom bum. I blame it for the increase in rainfall. Ida can tell you. Used to be we could plan a Sunday drive with some hope of carrying it out. Not any more. Bum’s changed the cloud formations.”

“What does Reverend Abbott care about cloud formations?” Mrs. Stimson asked. She settled herself in her rocker with a tinkling glass. “Jerome, Elizabeth says she’ll come look after Daddy for us.”

“Is that a fact,” said Mr. Stimson. “Well, you surely will be taking a load off my wife’s mind there, young lady.”

“And they hit it off just beautifully, Jerome.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Some people,” Mrs. Stimson told Elizabeth, “seem to irritate him, like. I’ve noticed that. We had a colored girl cleaning up for me on Fridays, he didn’t take to her at all . Then people with a lot of make-up on, he don’t like that. Well, he’s just old-fashioned is all. I notice you don’t wear make-up. I expect that’s from being a preacher’s daughter.”

“Ah well,” said Elizabeth’s father, “I’m glad things worked out. Any time these little problems come up, Mrs. Stimson, that’s what I’m here for.”

“I know that,” Mrs. Stimson said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Reverend. Why, I was about to have a collapse, worrying like I did all the time I was at work. I thought, if I could find someone —but I never dreamed your Elizabeth was back in town. I must’ve missed her in church.”

“I don’t go,” Elizabeth told her.

“Oh?”

There was a silence.

“Elizabeth’s one of these modern young people,” her father said. He laughed lightly. “She’ll get straightened out. We don’t see eye to eye on — what is it this week? Reincarnation.”

“You don’t say,” said Mr. Stimson. “Why, I never knew it was in any question. Don’t you believe in the reincarnation of Christ on the third day, young lady?”

“It’s a thought,” Elizabeth said.

“What?”

“She’ll get straightened out,” said her father.

“Why, of course she will. Of course she will,” Mrs. Stimson said. She beamed at Elizabeth and rocked steadily, holding her Kool-Aid glass level on her knees. Elizabeth’s father cleared his throat.

“Well now,” he said, “I expect we better be moving on. Got a busy day tomorrow.”

“Yes indeed,” said Mr. Stimson. “We surely do look forward to those sermons of yours, Reverend.”

“That one about pride!” his wife said. “Well, I can’t tell you how much it meant to me. And we appreciate this so much, you helping out about Daddy and all.”

“Glad to do it, glad to do it.”

“Be nice to have a young person about,” Mr. Stimson said. “Never had the fortune to have kids of our own.”

“That’s what I said earlier, Jerome.”

“And it takes the burden off Ida some. Old people tend to get difficult sometimes, not that they—” He grinned and rubbed his chin. “Dangedest thing,” he said. “The other day he took me for one of them quack medicine peddlers. Must have been forty years since they been through here last, wouldn’t you say? Believe it was back in ’21 or ’22, I was just a — well, he gave me hell, or heck. Seems I had sold him some little bottle I swore would cure anything. ‘Where’s your conscience?” he asks me. ‘Can you get up in the morning and look yourself in the eye, knowing how you let a man down?’ Well sir, there I stood, wondering who in Hades I was taking the rap for. Probably long dead, by now. Probably died a quarter century ago. Maybe more.”

Nobody said anything. Elizabeth’s father sat sharply forward, as if he were about to speak, but all he did was stare into the diamond formed by his knees and his laced hands. One wisp of hair had fallen over his eyes — a single flaw that made him look haggard and beaten. Elizabeth imagined that all his disappointments could be read in the grooves around his mouth: Why couldn’t his family see him the way his congregation did? Why had his daughter stayed glued to her seat in the revival tent? What gave him the feeling sometimes that his wife viewed God indulgently, like an imaginary playmate, and that she prepared her chicken casseroles as she would tea-party fare for children on a Sunday afternoon? He shook his head. Elizabeth leaned over to lay a hand on his arm. “We should go home, Pop,” she said gently.

He flinched, and she remembered too late that she should have called him Father.

When she went to bed, fragments of last night’s dreams puffed up from her pillow like dust. She lay on her back, clamping her forehead with one hand. She saw a tea-tin spilling out buttons — self-buttons with their fabric frayed, wooden buttons with the painted flowers chipping off, little smoked pearls knocked loose from their metal loops. The self-buttons she cut new circles of material for. The wooden ones she retouched with a pointed paintbrush. She dipped the metal loops in glue and set them into the pearls, holding them there until they dried, pressing them so tightly between thumb and forefinger that she could feel, even in her sleep, the dents they made in her skin.

Dear Elizabeth ,

I don’t understand why you don’t answer. I keep thinking up possible reasons, new ones every time. Are you angry? But when you are you generally say so, you don’t just fade away like this. I’ll keep on writing, anyway. I’ll come down in August even if I don’t hear from you. I would like to see you before then, maybe for a weekend, but for that I’ll wait till you tell me how you feel about it .

Sometimes I imagine you just walking up my path, some sunny morning. It wouldn’t bind you to anything. If you wanted I wouldn’t even make a fuss about it — just say hello and peel you an orange to eat on the front steps for breakfast .

Mother is well. She totaled the car last week, which shook her up a little, but she escaped without a scratch. Now she has a Buick. Walked into the car lot and bought one, on sight — said a friend had told her they were all right. I was sorry to see the old Mercedes go. You wouldn’t like the Buick at all, you always had such fun maneuvering the gear shift. Whatever happened to your chauffeur’s cap? I looked for it in the old car before they took it away. I’d hate to think of it in some auto graveyard .

Andrew has been in a rest home in upstate New York. They expect to release him any day now. I wonder if he shouldn’t come back here, but there would be so many difficulties that I haven’t suggested it. He claims he’d rather be alone now, anyway; he was very insistent about it. I don’t think he has recovered from Timothy. He keeps writing Mother and asking questions and more questions, two letters a day sometimes — all about Timothy, irrelevant things like what he was wearing that day and what he ate and who he was talking to. Mother is very patient about answering him. She says that now that Timothy’s gone she doesn’t worry so much about Andrew. It’s like some quota has been filled .