Marilynne Robinson - Home

He laughed. “Yes, why am I here when I might be in Ankeny? Ottumwa?”

“That strikes me as a fair question.”

“Maybe because I have no sister there.”

“I’d visit.”

He nodded. “Kind of you.” Then he said, “I knew I would need help. I thought the old gent might help me, but I didn’t realize — that he was so old. I couldn’t find work on my own. So I decided to place my hopes in the kindly Reverend Ames. Which brings us to the present moment.” Then he said, “And I just wanted to come home. Even if I couldn’t stay. I wanted to see the place. I wanted to see my father. I was — bewildered, I suppose.” He laughed. “I was scared to come home. It was as much as I could do to get on the bus. And stay on it. I was largely successful at that, all in all. Too bad. Too bad for the old man. It’s amazing to me that I can still disappoint him. I knew I would.” He touched the scar beneath his eye.

“Well,” she said, “he’s worried. I left him at the kitchen table. He’s probably uncomfortable. I should go inside.”

“What will you tell him?”

“What should I tell him?”

“Oh, let me think. Tell him my life is endless pain and difficulty for reasons that are no doubt apparent to anyone I pass on the street but obscure to me, and that I am flummoxed and sitting in the DeSoto but will probably be in for supper.”

“It would be simpler if you just came inside with me now.”

He sighed. “No doubt you’re right. And I do know why my life is the way it is, Glory. I was joking about that. I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t. I’m fresh from a sermon on the subject.” He glanced at her.

Glory said, “I’ll never forgive him.”

Jack said, “Thank you. I’m touched.” Then he said, “I’ll forgive him. Maybe I’ve forgiven him already.” When she looked at him he shrugged and said, “He might take it as a sign of character. It might look like generosity or humility or something. Anyway, neither one of us can risk upsetting the old man by holding a grudge against Ames. I mean, one that he or Ames might be aware of.” He said, “I have thought this over pretty carefully. Either my manly pride insists that I confront him, which even I would not descend to. Or it obliges me to leave town — in a huff of some kind to avoid that whipped-cur impression even I dread. Or else I seize upon the only undamaging choice left to me. Which might also have the look of virtue, I believe.”

“Then I suppose I’ll have to forgive him, too.”

“I would appreciate that. It would make things easier.”

They walked up to the house together. Their father was still at the table, a little fierce with the tedium of his situation, which had compounded his anxiety. “Ah, there you are!” he said, as they came through the door. “I was beginning to think—” and then he saw Jack’s face.

Jack smiled. He said, “A powerful sermon. It gave me a lot to consider.”

“Well, that’s all right,” his father said. “No harm in that, I suppose. I’m sure he must have meant well. Nothing I would have expected. He seems to have squandered a wonderful opportunity.” His voice became softer and his gaze more fixed as realization settled in.

Jack said, “Please don’t worry about it. It really doesn’t matter,” and went up to his room.

Days passed without any word from Ames. Their father read and prayed and brooded, and every time the telephone rang he said, “If it’s Ames, tell him I’m dead.”

HER FATHER HAD SUFFERED A TERRIBLE SHOCK. IT WAS his habit to consider Ames another self, for most purposes. And here his son, for whose spiritual comfort and peace he had prayed endlessly, often enough in Ames’s kitchen, in his hearing, and in full confidence that his friend seconded his prayers — his son had made himself vulnerable to him and had been injured, insulted. That Jack was a wound in his father’s heart, a terrible tenderness, was as fully known to Ames, almost, as it was to the Lord. And here the boy had put on a suit and tie — he had borrowed one of his father’s ties — and gotten himself to church, for heaven’s sake, despite reluctance, despite even fear, to judge by the potency of his reluctance. Glory could read her father’s thoughts as they sat together over their breakfast that morning — the look of vindication, of confidence that things were miraculously about to come right. He had stood at the front of his own church year after year, hoping to be able to preach again about grace and the loving heart of Christ to his aloof, his endlessly lonely son. When he smiled to himself, he was certainly imagining himself in that pulpit, amazed and so grateful. Who better than Jack’s second father, his father’s second self, to say the words of welcome and comfort he could not say? It would never have occurred to him that Ames would not speak to the boy as if from his own heart.

Then this incomprehensible disappointment. The old man muttered and stared, his eyes flickering over the memory of the kindnesses he had done Ames through all those years, the trust he had placed in him. He frowned as he did when he was rehearsing grievance and rebuke. Never since the darkest storms of his retirement had she seen him so morose.

Over the decades there had been actual shouting matches between Ames and her father, set off by matters so abstruse no one dared attempt mediation. Once, when her mother tried to say something emollient about the communion of saints, her father, in the persisting heat of disputation, said, “That’s just foolish!” and she terrified them all by packing a bag. Sometimes the older children tried to soothe, to make peace, but in fact the friendship was not threatened but secured by a mutual intelligibility so profound it enabled them to sustain for days an argument incomprehensible to those around them, to drop it when they wearied of it and then to take it up again just where they had left it. No one could predict when the warmth of their pleasure in argument would kindle and flare into mutual irritation, though weariness and bad weather were factors.

But in all those years neither of them had ever done the other any harm. This particular injury, utterly unexpected, to the old man’s dearest affection — it was without question the costliest of them all, therefore most precious to him — was hardly to be imagined. Her father was in mourning, and Ames stayed away, no doubt waiting for a sign that he had not alienated the Boughtons forever. He would be in mourning, too.

SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE. AMES ALREADY HAD THEIR copies of Life and The Nation , and he had his own subscriptions to Christian Century and the Post . So far as Glory knew, there were no books around the house that he had lent their father, or that he had said he would like to borrow. Every vegetable and flower they grew Lila grew more abundantly. Glory decided to make a batch of cookies. But Jack came downstairs with a faded copy of Ladies’ Home Journal . He tapped the note on the cover: Show Ames . “I’ve been up in the attic a few times. All sorts of things up there. I found an article in here about American religion. Pretty interesting.”

“Nineteen forty-eight. It’s so old he’s probably seen it.”

He nodded. “It’s so old he’s probably forgotten it.”

“Well, I think I’ll just make cookies.”

“Whatever you say.” Jack put the magazine on the table. Then he stood looking at it with his hands on his hips, as if he were relinquishing something that mattered. “Interesting article, though.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll need a minute to comb my hair.”

“Sure.” Then he said, “My idea was that you would give it to the old gent first, before you take it to Ames. Then they’ll have something to argue about. I mean, conversation might be strained. In the circumstances. So I thought this might help.” He shrugged.