Marilynne Robinson - Lila

As he was reading, sitting across from her in his robe and slippers with his hair rumpled and his glasses unpolished and a silvery shadow on his jaw, he glanced up at her from time to time. He said, “It’s very rough. I had a thought in the middle of the night, and I had to get up and write it out. Half the time when I write something that way it turns out the next morning to be nonsense. The sobering effects of daylight. But this still makes sense to me. It seems obvious, if anything. I believe. Of course it’s early yet.”

“Well,” she said. “Near as I can tell, you were wanting to reconcile things by saying they can’t be reconciled. I guess I know what you mean by reconcile.”

He laughed. “Yes, clearly you do know. And I see your point. An excellent point.” He was pleased with her. He’d mention it to Boughton.

She said, “You been worrying about Mrs. Ames.” That poor girl.

“Yes. Yes, I have. I had an idea that I would be eternally loyal to her. I said as much to her. That was important to me for many years. The bride of my youth, and so on. After a while it may have been my loyalty I was loyal to. But I did the best I could.”

“Then I come along.”

“Yes, you came along. Thank the Lord.”

She said, “If you thought dead was just dead, then you wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.”

“I guess that’s true. It could be true. When I talk with people who aren’t religious, I’m often surprised by what they tell me, though. I’m not sure anyone has ever said that to me, dead is just dead. They’re loyal, too. Not like I was. But that was unusual. I believe I may have taken a certain pride in it.”

“You’re still loyal. You’re up all night writing to her.”

“Well, yes. In a way I suppose that’s true. And writing to you. You asked me that question.”

“It don’t matter. She must have been a sweet girl.”

He nodded. “She was. She was.” He said, “So you covered her grave with roses. That was a wonderful thing.”

She shrugged. “No folks of my own.”

“I can’t tell you what I felt when I saw that. I don’t think there’s a name for it.”

“You didn’t know it was just me doing it.”

“Just you,” he said. “If it had been a miracle, if an angel had done it, then there’d have been no one to walk with in the evening, no one to give that old locket to.”

“No one to come creeping into your bed.”

He laughed and colored. “True enough.”

“No baby.”

“Also true.”

They were quiet for a while. Then he said, “God is good.”

“Well,” she said, “some of the time.”

“All of the time.”

She said, “I’ve been tramping around with the heathens. They’re just as good as anybody, so far as I can see. They sure don’t deserve no hellfire.”

He laughed. “Well, that baby you talk about, cast out and weltering in her blood, the Lord takes her up. He looks after the strays. Especially the strays. That story is a parable, about how He bound himself to Jerusalem when He told her, ‘Live.’ It’s like a marriage. More than a marriage.”

“And then she takes to whoring.”

“That means she starts worshipping false gods. Idols. And He’s still faithful to her. To their marriage. That’s the important point. Because in the Bible, marriage—” He said, “I used to think it was supposed to be eternal. Like the faithfulness of God.”

“What do you think now?”

He was quiet for a minute. “I think I’m married to Lila now. Extremely married to her. And faithful as I know how to be. Not that that can mean much, I’m so old. And you’ll want to make another life for yourself when I’m gone. I’ll want you to do that. Especially if there’s a child.” He shook his head. “Since there will be a child.”

“No,” she said. “I’m going to have just the one husband.” One was more than she’d ever expected.

“Well, you know, that’s good of you to say, but it’s not always wise to make promises. There can be a lot more involved in keeping them than it seems at the time.”

She said, “That’s not a promise. It’s just a fact.”

He laughed. “Even better.”

And then he went upstairs to make himself into the presentable old preacher all those people had passed on the street every day of their lives, seeing him change and never thinking of it because his life never changed, all those years she was off somewhere or other getting by any way she could. And her life was just written all over her, she knew it without looking, because that’s how it was with all the women she used to know. And somehow she found her way to the one man on earth who didn’t see it. Or maybe he saw it the way he did because he had read that parable, or poem, or whatever it was. Ezekiel. The Bible was truer than life for him, so it was natural enough that his thinking would be taken from it. Maybe it never was normal thinking, since there were preachers in this house his whole life, quarreling about religion and talking to Jesus.

It could be that the wildest, strangest things in the Bible were the places where it touched earth. Doane said once that he saw a cyclone cross a river. It took the water in its path up into itself and crossed on dry ground, and it was just as white as a cloud, white as snow. Something like that would only last for a minute, but it showed you what kind of thing can happen. It would shed that water and take up leaves and branches, cats and dogs, cows if it wanted to, grown men, and it would change everything they thought they knew. Those women in St. Louis, they stepped into a place that looked like any old house and there was Mrs. and the damn credenza and the dress-up clothes that smelled like sweat and old perfume. And all you had to do was pierce your ears and rouge your cheeks and pretend not to hate the gentlemen more than they would stand for. It was as if that house had been picked up by a black cloud and turned around and dropped down again in the very same spot. Everything in it was still there, but it was changed, wrong, and from then on everybody in it knew too much about the worst that could possibly happen, even if they couldn’t say what it was. Then it might be that she seemed to him as if she came straight out of the Bible, knowing about all those things that can happen and nobody has the words to tell you. And I looked, and, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud, with a fire infolding itself, and a brightness round about it, and out of the midst thereof as it were glowing metal, out of the midst of the fire. It says right there that even fire isn’t hot enough to give you any idea.

* * *

It got to be Christmas time. They put a big wreath on the church door. Snow fell. People came to the house with plates of cookies and sat in the parlor for fifteen minutes talking about nothing. Lila’s belly was rounder every day. The women told her that since she carried high it would probably be a boy. That wasn’t how she’d imagined, but all right. One lady brought her two pleated smocks, one red and one green, both with rickrack around the pockets, which made her think of that dress she’d bought cheap, as she thought at the time. She wondered how much Mrs. figured she’d left still owing her. That woman would know down to the dime.

The deacons brought in a pine tree and set it up, so she offered them some of the cookies their own wives had brought the day before, and they sat in the parlor for fifteen minutes. And then the Reverend went up in the attic and brought down a box with ornaments in it. He said, “It’s been — I don’t know how many years!” There was a tree in the church, and that used to be all he needed, those years when he was alone. He spent an hour untangling the strings of lights, and then he plugged them in, and when they didn’t come on he started working through them to find the bad bulbs. He said, “This used to take a lot of the charm out of Christmas for me. When I was young and impatient.” Finally they did light up, and he strung the tree with them and turned off the lamps. “I’d almost forgotten,” he said. The room did look very pretty. “Next year we’ll have somebody here to help us enjoy it.” At the bottom of the box there were ornaments made of thread spools and colored paper and walnut shells. The children. “Nothing here we can use,” he said. “I’ll stop by the dime store tomorrow.” And then he carried the box up to the attic again.