Jack (Gilead #4)(12)

“Well,” she said, “maybe you flatter yourself. If you really were a criminal, I think you’d have cost me more than three dollars. And some irritation. And my copy of Oak and Ivy, which you’d better bring back, by the way. It’s a hard book to find. My father gave it to me. His mother gave it to him. It was signed.”

“What can I say? More to regret. I meant to bring it back with Hamlet. But one page has a sort of coffee stain on it. Not coffee, actually. It will be on your doorstep immediately. Such as it is.”

“Did you write in it?”

“Hardly at all.”

“How can you do that? How can you just write in somebody else’s book?”

“In pencil.”

“You know what I mean.”

“My father said that I never quite learned to distinguish mine and thine. He had the Latin for it.”

She laughed. “I love your father. You never talk about your mother.”

“Yes. I don’t.” She was quiet. So he said, “My father thought my deficiencies might be physiological. He hoped they were. He laid them to my difficult birth.”

“Predestination.”

“Strictly speaking, no.”

“Well, I won’t follow you into the swamps of Presbyterianism.”

“It’s all pretty straightforward. Salvation by grace alone. It just begins earlier for us than for other people. In the deep womb of time, in fact. By His secret will and purpose.”

“Then why was your father so worried? If it was true, what could he have done about it, anyway?”

“He saw signs of reprobation in me, hard as he tried not to. Reasonably enough. I kept him pretty well supplied with them. Of course, I knew about, you know, those signs. From his sermons. We all did. I may have been listening more carefully than the others. Or listening differently. He who has ears to hear, and so on. It wasn’t so much the situation that he hoped to change. He just wanted a less drastic understanding of it. So he comforted himself with my difficult birth, which could not have disfigured my eternal soul, that most elusive thing. However it might have depraved the rest of me.” Naked came I from my mother’s womb.

“Well,” she said, “this is all very interesting. But don’t quote Scripture ironically. It makes me very uneasy when you do that.”

“I am the Prince of Darkness.”

“No, you’re a talkative man with holes in his socks.”

“You saw them?”

“No, I just knew they were there.”

After a minute, he said, “I’ll try not to be ironic if you take back what you just said. I am not talkative.”

“All right.”

“These are special circumstances.”

“Yes, they are.”

“I hardly say a word for weeks on end. Months.”

“I couldn’t know that.”

“That’s because you make me nervous. I talk when I’m nervous. Sometimes.”

“You say you’re a thief, you say you’re disreputable, you say you’re the Prince of Darkness, and you object to the word ‘talkative.’”

He said, “It’s a matter of personal dignity.” She laughed.

“It is.”

“I understand. I know what you mean. I would feel the same way, I suppose.”

“Well, you hardly talk at all. You leave it to me. Then you draw conclusions.”

Quiet.

So he said, “That sounded harsher than I meant it to. That was the wrong word. I didn’t mean to be harsh at all. I just meant to say I appreciate it when you talk.”

After a minute, she said, “You know what I think? I think Polonius misreads that letter, the vile phrase. I think Hamlet wrote ‘beatified.’ Not ‘beautified.’ But there’s no way to know.”

“True. Yes. High-minded conversation. Nothing more about socks or shirt buttons. Fraying of the cuffs. Holes in the pockets. Those three dollars.”

Silence.

“Besides,” he said, “Hamlet didn’t write the letter. I mean, there was no letter. There’s only what Polonius says it says.”

“Shakespeare could have wanted the audience to know Polonius gets it wrong. He gets things wrong all the time. But I said there’s no way to know.”

“Yes. That isn’t quite the same.” That sounded cross.

Silence.

He had let himself feel concealed by the darkness, as if only a rough sketch of him, so to speak, the general outline of a presentable man, would be walking along beside her. But she knew what he was and nothing was concealed, and there was the night to get through, an ordeal now. She took her hand from his arm.

She said, “Have you ever thought of using a word like ‘listening,’ or ‘murmuring,’ in that couplet? Instead of a one-syllable word?”

“Yes,” he said. “I have.”

Silence. Then she said, “I offended you. I’m sorry.”

These sensitivities of his. He might have said goodbye and walked away if they had not been together in a cemetery in the middle of the night. He was at least too much a gentleman to leave her there, or even to suggest that he might leave her there, or to remind her that she was indebted to his good nature in keeping her company, though the thought did occur to him. Easy enough to disappear among the headstones. The looming obelisks. That thought occurred, too. He had a way of anticipating memories he particularly did not want to have. That memory would be as unbearable as things ever are when there is nothing else to do but live with them. So he said, “I’m not offended. I don’t want to be. I’ll get over it in a minute.” Then he said, “I’m going to ruin this.”