Marilynne Robinson - Home

He came inside, washed up, and made himself a peanut butter sandwich. “Want one? I’ll give you half of mine. All of it. I washed my hands.” He said, “What is the French for sandwich?”

“I’m pretty sure the French for sandwich is sandwich.”

He nodded. “I was afraid of that. So I am at a loss to make this slightly gaseous object more appealing to you. To me, for that matter.”

“Jelly?”

“Hate the stuff. It can be good in doughnuts.” He lifted the top slice of bread and looked under it. “An ugly food, peanut butter. If I struck a match, perhaps I could serve it to you flaming, madame. As they do in the finer restaurants. Mademoiselle.”

“No, thanks. I’m having soup. Want some?”

He shook his head. “I am hungry in general. It is the particulars that discourage me.”

“Then you might as well just eat your sandwich.”

“True.” He said, “Do we still have that baseball mitt?”

“Yes, we do. I put it in my closet. I was afraid you might find some way to swap it for a hair shirt.”

He nodded. “That was prudent of you. I was thinking, if you still had it, I might borrow it back.”

She said, “Sure. As soon as you finish your sandwich.”

“I do this,” he said, “only because I trust you to have my best interests at heart.” He ate it in eight bites and washed it down with a glass of water. “Well, now I’ve fed the beast,” he said. “It should stagger through till supper. It is an oddly patient beast, my carnal self. I call it Snowflake. For, you know, its intractable whiteness. Among other things. A certain lingering sentiment attaches to it. It reminds me of my youth.”

She brought him the mitt. He said, “Kids his age are always losing things, so I bought another baseball. I mean, I was always losing things. At his age.”

“That’s fine.”

He put the mitt on his hand and popped the ball into the pocket with a flick of his wrist. That ancient gesture. “I thought Ames might appreciate — A kid ought to learn how to play catch. I was good at baseball. I thought he might remember that.”

“It’s a good idea, Jack. I don’t think you need to worry so much about what Ames thinks of you.”

“I know what he thinks of me. It can’t get much worse. So that doesn’t worry me.”

“Then what does?”

“You’re right. Deranged by hope. I guess I thought he might look down upon me from his study window and say to himself, ‘He’s a cad and a bounder, but I appreciate his attention to my son.’” He laughed. “That won’t happen. No need to worry about that. What a stupid idea.”

Glory said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you to take the new Life and The Nation over to the Ameses’. They don’t subscribe. Ask Lila if Robby might like to play a little ball. If she says yes, the Reverend won’t object.”

He nodded. “All right. I’ll do it. Nothing ventured and so on.”

AFTER HALF AN HOUR SHE WALKED OUT JUST FAR ENOUGH to see Jack and Robby in the road in front of Ames’s house, Robby encumbered with the big stiff glove, scrambling after the ball when Jack tossed it and throwing it back halfway and in something like the right direction. “That’s the idea!” Jack called. The child squared off and punched his mitt, ready for anything. The next toss bounced off his shoe. Jack laughed, very kind laughter that she had not heard for decades if she had ever heard it. He ran forward to field Robby’s throw, and when he turned around he saw her. He waved. “Home soon,” he called.

She called back, “No hurry,” sorry she had distracted him. He looked like a man full of that active contentment that makes even ordinary movement graceful. He looked at ease in sunlight. She hoped old Ames had indeed gazed down upon him. He might have seen him as his father did, for once.

After another half hour Jack came in through the porch. He smiled when he saw her. “That was all right,” he said. “What a funny kid. He’s a nice kid. I don’t think I’m grooming him for the majors, though. He wants to play for the Red Sox. I’m not saying he has no chance at all. You have to be black to have no chance at all.”

“There’s Jackie Robinson.”

“Ah yes. Jackie Robinson of Dodger fame. There’s Larry Dobie, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson. Roy Campanella, Ernie Banks. Satchel Paige. I’ll give you a nickel if you can tell me which one plays for Boston.”

“I confess, I haven’t given much thought to baseball lately.”

“Clearly. There are those in St. Louis who think of little else. I have had many earnest conversations on the subject.”

She looked at him. “With Della?”

“One or two of them with Della. She knows what matters in this world.”

Glory laughed. “Well, I’m pretty sure I don’t. Here I’ve been wasting my time worrying about radioactive fallout. About strontium 90.”

He said, “Believe me, she worries about that, too.”

JACK LET A DAY PASS, AND THEN IN THE AFTERNOON HE took his ball and glove and went to Ames’s again. When he came back he seemed pleased. “The kid’s shaping up. He actually caught one on the first bounce.” He said, “It was all right. They even asked me to stay for supper. Lila asked me. But I don’t think the Reverend objected. He didn’t seem to.”

“Why didn’t you stay?”

He shrugged and smiled. “They were being polite.”

“Of course they were being polite. That doesn’t mean they weren’t really inviting you.”

After a moment he said, “I have learned, in the tedious course of my life, that it is safer not to presume on these courtesies. I have taken the bait often enough to know how it feels when the trap shuts. Better to forgo the pleasures of, you know, pot roast and mashed potatoes.”

She said, “You want to get yourself on better terms with Ames. How can you do that if you don’t let him — well — treat you like a friend? Ask you to supper? It’s the most ordinary thing in the world.”

He nodded. “There it is. My lifelong exile from the ordinary world. I have to learn the customs. And somehow persuade myself that they pertain to me.” He looked at her. “That’s where it gets tricky.”

“No, you just have to relax a little and remind yourself that you are dealing with a very kind old man.”

He said, “It really is more complex than that, Glory. The other day I gave his kid my glove to use, so he ran upstairs and took that old glove Ames keeps on his desk and brought it down to me. I guess it once belonged to the long-departed Uncle Edward. It seemed harmless enough to me to put it on. I mean, it wasn’t as if I were going to be catching anything with it. But, you know, I stole it once. Temporarily. I don’t know why. And Ames knew I had stolen it, because who else would bother. And I was the town thief. So today when he came up the road from church there I was with that thing on my hand and nothing to do but stand there. He looked at it and looked at me and he didn’t say anything about it and neither did I, but I could tell that he was reminded of all that, my troubled youth, and it was embarrassing. For him, too.”

“I think you forget how long ago all that happened.”

“Yes, and here I am today, John Ames Boughton, solid citizen. A miraculous transformation.” He laughed. He was thoughtful for a while, and then he said, “If I had it all to do over again, I mean adolescent criminality, I’d try to restrict myself to doing things that were explicable. Or at least appeared to be explicable. I’m serious. It’s the things people can’t account for that upset them. The old gent used to ask me, ‘Why did you do that, Jack?’ And I couldn’t even tell him I did it because I felt like it. Even that wouldn’t have been true. What did I want with an old baseball mitt? Nothing. But there wasn’t really much to steal in this town. It would have been hard to find anything to want, anything that might make it seem as though I had a motive. So all my offenses were laid to a defect of character. I have no quarrel with that. But it is a problem for me now.”