Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

He practiced saying the date aloud: “Nineteen sixty-seven. January first, nineteen sixty-seven.” Monday was his birthday; he’d be nineteen years old. Daphne would be one. He shivered and pulled his collar up.

That night he dreamed Danny came driving down Waverly Street in Sumner College’s blue church bus. He stopped in front of home and told Ian, “They’ve given me a new route and now I get to go anywhere I like.”

“Can I ride along?” Ian asked from the sidewalk.

“You can ride along after you learn Chinese,” Danny told him.

“Oh,” Ian said. Then he said, “Chinese?”

“Well, I like to call it Chinese.”

“Call what Chinese?”

“You understand, Chinese is not what I really mean.”

“Then what do you mean?” Ian asked.

“Why, I’m talking about … let us say … Chinese,” Danny said, and he winked at Ian and laughed and drove away.

When Ian woke, Daphne was crying, and the room seemed moist as a greenhouse from her tears.

Agatha’s school reopened Tuesday, and Thomas’s nursery school Wednesday. This should have lightened Bee’s load, but still she looked exhausted every evening. She said she must have a touch of the flu. “Ordinarily I’m strong as a horse!” she said. “This is only temporary, I’m positive.”

Ian asked, “What’s the word on Tom Dean, Senior? Any sign of him?”

“Oh,” his mother said, “I guess we’ll have to give up on Tom Dean. It doesn’t seem he exists.”

“Then what’ll you do with the children?”

“Well, your father has some ideas. He’s pretty sure from something Lucy once mentioned that she came from Pennsylvania. Maybe her first marriage was recorded there, he says, in which case—”

“You’re stuck with them, aren’t you,” Ian said.

“Pardon?”

“You’re stuck with those children for good.”

“Oh, no,” she told him. “I’m certain we’ll find somebody sooner or later. We’ll just have to. We’ll have to!”

“But what if you don’t?” Ian asked her.

Her face took on a flown-apart, panicked look.

Two of the children weren’t even Bedloes, and he wondered if it occurred to his parents that those two could simply be made wards of the state, or whatever — popped into some kind of foster home or orphanage. But he suspected that with Daphne, they wouldn’t feel free to do that. Daphne was their dead son’s child, and an infant besides. She wasn’t already formed, as the other two were. She hadn’t yet reached the knobby-kneed, scabby stage that only a mother could love; she was still full of dimples, still tiny and beguiling.

Thomas, on the other hand, could cause a serious puncture wound if he accidentally poked you with his elbow. Holding him on your lap was like holding a bunch of coat hangers. Which didn’t prevent his trying to climb up there, heaven knows. He had the nuzzling, desperate manner of a small dog starved for attention, which unfortunately lessened his appeal; while Agatha, who managed to act both sullen and ingratiating, came across as sly. Ian had seen how grownups (even his mother, even his earth-mother sister) turned narrow-eyed in Agatha’s presence. It seemed that only Ian knew how these children felt: how scary they found every waking minute.

Why, being a child at all was scary! Wasn’t that what grownups’ nightmares so often reflected — the nightmare of running but getting nowhere, the nightmare of the test you hadn’t studied for or the play you hadn’t rehearsed? Powerlessness, outsiderness. Murmurs over your head about something everyone knows but you.

• • •

He finished moving a family into a row house on York Road and went home from there on foot, passing a series of shabby stores. The job had run unusually late. It was after seven on a dismal January evening, and most places had closed. One window, though, glowed yellow — a wide expanse of plate glass with CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE arching across it in block letters. Ian couldn’t see inside because the paper shade was lowered. He walked on by. Behind him a hymn began. “Something something something lead us …” He missed most of the words, but the voices were strong and joyful, overlaid by a single tenor that rose above the rest.

He paused at the intersection, the arches of his sneakers teetering on the curb. He peered at the DON’T WALK sign for a moment. Then he turned and headed back to the church.

A shopkeeper’s bell jingled when he opened the door. The singers looked around — some fifteen or twenty people, standing in rows with their backs to him — and smiled before they looked away again. They were facing a tall, black-haired man in a tieless white shirt and black trousers. The pulpit was an ordinary store counter. The floor was green linoleum. The lights overhead were long fluorescent tubes and one tube flickered rapidly, giving Ian the impression that he had a twitch in his eyelid.

“Blessed Jesus! Blessed Jesus!” the congregation sang. It was a tender, affectionate cry that sounded personally welcoming. Ian found his way to an empty spot beside a woman in a white uniform, a nurse or a waitress. Although she didn’t look at him, she moved closer and angled her hymnal so he could follow the words. The hymnal was one of those pocket-sized pamphlets handed out free at public sing-alongs. There wasn’t any accompaniment, not even a piano. And the pews — as Ian realized when the hymn came to an end and everyone sat down — were plain gray metal folding chairs, the kind you’d see at a bridge game.

“Friends,” the minister said, in a sensible, almost conversational tone. “And guests,” he added, nodding at Ian. All over again, the others turned and smiled. Ian smiled back, maybe a little too broadly. He had the feeling he was their first and only visitor.

“We have reached that point in the service,” the minister said, “when any person here is invited to step forward and ask for our prayers. No request is too great, no request is trivial in the eyes of God our Father.”

Ian thought of the plasterer who’d repaired his parents’ bathroom ceiling, NO JOB TOO LARGE OR TOO SMALL, his panel truck had read. He brushed the thought away. He watched a very fat young woman heave herself to her feet just in front of him. The width of her sprigged, summer-weight skirt, when she finally reached a standing position, completely blocked his view of the minister. “Well, Clarice as you may have heard is down real bad with her blood,” she said breathily. “We had thought that was all behind her but now it’s come on back, and I asked what I could do for her and she says, ‘Lynn,’ says, ‘take it to Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, Lynn, and ask them for their prayers.’ So that’s just what I’m doing.”

There was a silence, during which she sat down. As soon as she left Ian’s line of vision, he realized the silence was part of the program. The minister stood with both palms raised, his face tipped skyward and his eyelids closed and gleaming. In his shirtsleeves, he seemed amateurish. His cuffs had slipped down his forearms, and his collar, Ian saw, was buttoned all the way to the neck, in the fashion of those misfits who used to walk around high school with slide rules dangling from their belts. He wasn’t so very old, either. His frame was lanky as a marionette’s and his wrist bones boyishly knobby.

Ian was the only one sitting erect. He bowed his head and squinted at the billow of sprigged skirt puffing out the back of the fat woman’s chair.

“For our sister Clarice,” the minister said finally.

“Amen,” the congregation murmured, and they straightened.

“Any other prayers, any other prayers,” the minister said. “No request is beyond Him.”

On the other side of Ian’s neighbor, a gray-haired woman rose and placed her purse on her seat. Then she faced forward, gripping the chair in front of her. “You all know my son Chuckie was fighting in Vietnam,” she said.