Jack (Gilead #4)(25)

After a week the woman handed him an envelope with money in it. This seemed a bit more like charity than like honest gain, since he had waited on only two customers, neither of whom had bought anything. If some abrupt advantage emerged from the incomprehensible operations of the universe, it was a modest return on their random exactions, the disruptions and defeats. Or so he told himself, though it was clear that the woman had almost as stark use for the money as he had. He might actually be the burden under which their little bark foundered. For weeks he still strolled around by the docks after hours to see if there were dishes to wash, floors to sweep, avoiding places where he’d had trouble before. He imagined the woman might sometime need a loan just to keep him employed, and that he would provide it. He bought two packs of cigarettes, one for her.

And he did not drink! He was not even tempted to drink. He had fallen back on the old habit of imagining that Della might pass him on the street. The shoe store did not serve colored, but Della was so much on his mind that when the bells above the door jangled he was a little slow to look up and see someone who was not her walking in. When he left the cemetery, he had looked down the street in the direction she would have gone, and she was nowhere in sight. After the five minutes, six at most, he had spent accepting the guard’s reproofs. This alarmed him; he couldn’t imagine what it might mean, so after he had slept and shaved and put in what was left of his first day at the shoe store, and loitered until he was sure she’d be home and there’d be less risk of encountering her on the sidewalk, he walked across town, past her door. There was a book in the window, the cover toward the street. It was her sister’s Hamlet.

An actual jolt of relief passed through him. It was as if he’d touched a power line. He had to wonder what he looked like in that half second when every nerve in his startled body was galvanized with joy, probably, though the particulars of the sensation were lost in the force of it. But the street was empty. Thank you, Jesus. He walked on, and then back past her door again, to make the experience milder by anticipation of it, by familiarity. This was indeed the effect, slight but marked enough that he had to persuade himself not to walk past a third time, which would inevitably involve a fourth. What a fool. Know thyself, Boughton. When he had gone a mile or so toward home, he began to doubt he had looked carefully enough to be sure there was not also a sprig of ivy. He knew the peril of relief, which was so welcome sometimes that he gave in to it impulsively and lost his grasp of the reality of the situation. He walked back toward her house half a mile, thought better of it, and went home to his rooming house. At worst, things were not terrible. He could sleep.

Della had said he was more like most people than he realized, so, when after a week or two business had improved enough that the word “business” began to seem appropriate to what went on behind that window, he felt he could actually attribute it to his being there, diluting the balefulness of the woman’s endlessly fresh disappointment. Adding a degree of human warmth, possibly. Passersby no doubt saw them eating their sandwiches together from the little basket she always brought, even sharing a newspaper during the slowest hours. His mere presence might have broken a spell of some kind, disrupted the primal fear that loneliness is contagious, which puts the seal on isolation. So he had concluded. And there they were, chatting for the world to see. When customers came in, there was all that genuflecting to get through. The cost of doing this particular business. He could tell himself there was a kind of gallantry in it. Or he could think of it as an act of reverence, toward souls who would otherwise never enjoy even the outward sign of any such thing. His father would like that.

Della was speaking to him sometimes in his thoughts, or she was quiet, simply there at the edge of his vision. In her gentle way she was making everything easier. What would she find becoming in him? That was what he did. And by putting himself in the way of survival, not to put too fine a point on it, he was doing as she had asked him to do, so forthrightly. Can these bones live? Oh, Lord, you know. But for you, Miss Miles, I am eating this sandwich, for you I am smiling at this stranger, for you I am trying to sleep. He could not imagine an occasion when she might acknowledge any of this. No matter. Their lives were parallel lines that would not meet, he knew that, he would see to that. But they defined each other, somehow. Equidistance was like silence. It had to be carefully sustained to exist at all. He actually allowed himself thoughts like these, making an imaginary something out of literally nothing, finding a kind of reassurance in his successfully forbidding himself to walk down her street, past her door. Silence was one fragile thing he had almost never broken. Distance was another.

It had turned cold. It wasn’t quite the dry, windy cold they had at home. When he first came to St. Louis, he thought the place looked like a corner of Eden where the bad news had not arrived quite yet. All that shiny vegetation, fat with life, untried by weather. At home the winter brought with it a high-minded rigor, every distraction swept away, cold light pouring through bare trees. He still felt as though an unwelcome demand came with autumn, then winter. A habit of dread persisted from his early education, from those years before he had mastered truancy. He had made an early start on a wasted life.

There were always the back porch steps and the kitchen door and the yellow painted table with mismatched chairs around it, and what always seemed at first the too-bright light and the too-warm air, smelling like steam from the rattling radiators and the mittens drying on them, and like cinnamon or yeast, or, if he came in late, like whatever supper had been, his plate of it warm in the oven. He could feel the relief in the house, but they had learned not to ask where he had been, what he had been up to. Even Teddy. They were grateful that he was in out of the cold. His mother would come into the kitchen to put his supper on the table and pour his milk.