Marilynne Robinson - Home

“He won’t be offended, Papa. You’ve always sent little checks.”

“Well, I just worry he might not remember, you know, my eccentricities. I should have waited so you could take a look at what I wrote. I just thought we’d want to get it in the mail. He’ll be waiting to hear. If it is ‘not inconvenient.’ Imagine! We certainly don’t want him to worry about that!”

“I’m sure he was just being polite.”

“Very polite. Yes. He might have been writing to a stranger. But here I am finding fault.”

She kissed his cheek. “I’ll take this to the post office.”

“I believe it is quite legible. The address is clear enough, I think.” He said, “I worried about that, the way my hands were trembling there for a while. I should have let you look it over. I hope he’ll be able to read it.”

“It will be just fine,” she said. But she knew he did not want any wholly sufficient, entirely persuasive assurance. If he was disappointed and Jack did not come home, he could tell himself that the fault was his own, taking the bitterness of it all on himself and sparing his miscreant son. He’d have done the same for any of them, had done it for her, she knew. But it was for Jack he had always devised and deployed his greatest strategies of — what to call it — rescue. He used to say, “That boy has really kept me on my knees!” He seemed to have persuaded himself that this was yet another blessing.

Ames arrived and the two of them put their heads together over the checkerboard. There were so many jokes between them. Once when they were boys in seminary they were walking across a bridge, arguing about some point of doctrine. A wind had blown her father’s hat into the water, and he had rolled up his pant legs and walked in the river after it, not gaining on it at all, still disputing, as it sailed along in the current. “I was winning that argument!” her father said.

“Well, I was laughing too hard to keep up my side of it.” The hat finally caught on a snag, and that was the whole story, but it always made them laugh. The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed. In a calm, affectionate way they studied each other.

Ames said, “I understand that boy of yours is coming home.”

“So he tells me. He sent a letter.”

“Will the brothers and sisters be coming, too?”

Her father shook his head. “I’ve made some phone calls.” There it was, the parting of the sea. “They agree it would be best for them to wait until he wants to see them. He was never much at ease with them. I believe I was at fault in that. Of course, it’s good that Glory is here to help,” he said, remembering she was in the room. So she went into the parlor, sat beside the muttering radio, and worked a crossword puzzle. She thought, Is it good that I am here? That might be true. I will have to remember not to be angry. She reminded herself of this because Jack would probably still be insufferable and she had spent all her patience elsewhere.

WHAT FOLLOWED WERE WEEKS OF TROUBLE AND DISRUPtion, dealing with the old man’s anticipation and anxiety and then his disappointment, every one of which made him restless and sleepless and cross. She spent the days coaxing her father to eat. The refrigerator and the pantry were stocked with everything he thought he remembered Jack’s having a liking for, and he suspected Glory of wanting to give up too soon and eat it all on the pretext of avoiding waste. So he would accept nothing but a bowl of oatmeal or a poached egg, while skin thickened on cream pies and lettuce went limp. She had worried about what to do with it all if Jack never came. The thought of sitting down to a stale, humiliated feast with her heartbroken father was intolerable, but she had thought it anyway, to remind herself how angry she was, and with what justification. She had in fact planned to smuggle food out of the house by night in amounts the neighbor’s dogs could eat, since it would be too old to offer to the neighbors themselves, and they would no doubt feed it to the dogs anyway, tainted as it was with bitterness and grief.

Glory had rehearsed angry outbursts in anticipation of his arrival. Who do you think you are! and How can you be so inconsiderate! which became, as the days passed, How can you be so mean, cruel, vicious, and so on. She began to hope he would come so she could tell him exactly what she thought. Well, of course she was angry, with those loaves of banana bread ripening noisomely in the pantry. What right do you have! she stormed inwardly, knowing as she did that her father’s only prayers were that Jack would come, and that Jack would stay.

“He says here ‘for a while’! A while can be a significant amount of time!” They had Jack’s address after the Great Letter came, the one that made her father weep and tremble. Her father sent another note and a little check, in case the first had gone astray. And they waited. Jack’s letter lay open on the breakfast table and the supper table and the lamp table and the arm of the Morris chair. He had folded it away once, when Reverend Ames came for checkers, presumably because he did not want a doubtful glance to fall on it.

“Yes, he will definitely be coming,” he would conclude, as if uncertainty on that point had to do with the language of the letter. Two weeks passed, then three days. Then came the Telephone Call, and her father actually spoke with Jack, actually heard his voice. “He says he will be here day after tomorrow!” Her father’s anxiety turned to misery without ever losing the quality of patience. “I believe it could only be trouble of a serious kind that would account for this delay!” he said, comforting himself by terrifying himself. Another week, then the Second Telephone Call, again with the information that he would arrive in two days. Then four days passed, and there he was, standing in the back porch, a thin man in a brown suit, tapping his hat against his pant leg as if he could not make up his mind whether to knock on the glass or turn the knob or simply to leave again. He was watching her, as if suddenly reminded of an irritant or an obstacle, watching her with the kind of directness that forgets to conceal itself. She was a problem he had not taken into account. He did not expect to find me here, she thought. He is not happy to see me.

She opened the door. “Jack,” she said, “I was about to give up on you. Come in.” She wondered if she would have recognized him if she had passed him on the street. He was pale and unshaven, and there was a nick of scar under his eye.

“Well, here I am.” He shrugged. “Should I come in?” He seemed to be asking her advice as well as her permission.

“Yes, of course. You can’t imagine how much he has worried.”

“Is he here?”

Where else would he be? “He’s here. He’s sleeping.”

“I’m sorry I’m late. I tried to make a phone call and the bus left without me.”

“You should have called Papa.”

He looked at her. “The phone was in a bar,” he said. He was quiet, matter-of-fact. “I would have cleaned up a little, but I lost the bag that had my razor in it.” He touched the stubble on his jaw with a kind of concern, as if it were an abrasion. He had always been fastidious about such things.

“No matter. You can use Papa’s razor. Sit down. I’ll get you some coffee.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.” She didn’t say it was late for him to start worrying about that. He was distant and respectful and tentative. In this, at least, he was so much like the brother of her memory that she knew one hard look from her might send him away, defeating all her prayers, not to mention her father’s prayers, which were unceasing. If he came and left again while her father was sleeping, would she ever tell the old man he had come and gone? Would she tell him it was her anger that had driven him away, this thin, weary, unkempt man who had been reluctant even to step through the door? And he had come to the kitchen door, a custom of the family from their childhood, because their mother was almost always in the warm kitchen, waiting for them. He must have done it unreflectingly, obedient to old habit. Like a ghost, she thought.