Jack (Gilead #4)(33)
Lovely Della, hanging her head, weighing things, keeping her thoughts to herself.
Delia said, “Of course I’m here to ask you to stop seeing her. I’m sure you know that. She knows it, too. She told me if I insulted you she’d never speak to me again! So I’m trying very hard not to do that. You can probably tell. And I did want to meet you. I know she’s spoken to you about many things, maybe things she’s never said to anyone else. She told me that once you two talked together the whole night. She told me how kind you were to her. How respectful.” This was true. Still, he blushed. He could feel his brow dampen.
“I want to assure you—”
“No need. She’s assured me already.”
After a minute, he said, “Let me assure you of this. I know I should stay away from her. I’m an unsavory character. No, that makes me sound interesting. I’m a bum, without aspirations or illusions. My father is a preacher, and I know she sees that in me, the manners and so on, and it makes her more—at ease with me than she might be with another bum. But I’ve been honest with her.” He checked his memory and decided this was true enough. If he hadn’t mentioned the stint in prison, he had never found the right moment. Or looked for it, particularly. This also was not the right moment.
She said, “You don’t owe me any account of yourself. I believe you when you say you’ll stay away from her. That’s what I needed to know. So I can speak to her father for her.”
He said, “May I ask who brought me to her father’s attention? Lenore?”
She nodded. “Lorraine. She’s very protective of Della.”
He laughed. “I bring that out in people.”
She said, “Well, dear, maybe you do. And maybe you’re a little too hard on yourself. I’m glad we’ve had a chance to talk. I feel much better now.” She glanced at the clock. It was five minutes before three. She stood up and took his coffee cup and handed him his hat and newspaper and began the little fluster of polite farewell. “Thank you so much for stopping by.” She was trying to be not too abrupt about getting him out of the house when the front door opened and Della walked in. In a burst of afternoon light, as it happened. “Mr. Boughton,” she said softly, and made a brief study of his face. Her aunt looked at her with unconcealed exasperation. And there he stood, hat in hand, wondering what could possibly be expected of him. He said, “Miss Miles.” And then there was a silence. Della took a step toward him, so that she was standing almost beside him, and he could actually feel her loyalty to him like a sort of heatless warmth emanating from her. He had to leave, but he couldn’t move. Delia was looking at them with her head cocked and her hands on her hips. She said, “Mr. Boughton was just leaving.” So he took a step, then another one, and turned to thank the aunt again, who was by then ushering him toward the door. When they were out on the steps, she said, “You’d be the great-grandson, I guess. This might not be as painless as I hoped, but it will be all right. We don’t forget our friends, even very old friends.” He’d meant to clarify that, if it ever seemed to matter.
* * *
He’d decided he should reconsider his life again. He was sitting on a bench by the river watching ducks and gulls and pigeons and the occasional squirrel. They were watching him, eyeing him, as if he owed them something. He had never departed by more than a cigarette butt from his refusal to be coerced, but there they were, like expectation gone sour, every time he came to the bench he thought of as his, the one just beyond the shadow of the great bridge, season and hour obliging. Now that he had Mrs. Beverly to consider, he came only on Sundays. He stayed from the time the clangor of bells, that dread summons, stopped shuddering in the air, to the arrival of the droves of kempt and restless children, running through and beyond the procession of strolling parents, then rejoining it, the adults with that fleeting atmosphere of church about them, of having been schooled again as to some aspect of the meaning of life. He was wearing his tie, and his shoes were polished. Some impulse to blend in. His father would say, You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn’t even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying, matters to those around you. So there is good you can do and can always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.
He said this from the pulpit, but he was saying it to Jack, who, to distract him from the parsing of some recent mischief, had almost confided to him that he had certain doubts about his soul. This near-confession was probably meant to stir his father to the kind of gentle exasperation that meant he’d be brooding about him for a week and preaching to him on Sunday, another boyish prank, really, even though what he had told his father was true enough. The whole congregation would have understood when he said good manners were an excellent beginning, a kind of discipline that could lead to actual virtue, given time. Jack could be terribly polite. Everyone in that sanctuary who was old enough to be capable of the slightest cynicism would be thinking, Butter would not melt in that boy’s mouth! He was great at setting teeth on edge. They also understood that a minister had to find hope where he could, like anybody else. Jack would sometimes stand beside his father, grinning, shaking hands as the flock filed out, much more than charming, and his father’s irritation and embarrassment would register as a tremor in the arm he put around him. It was in some part as a courtesy to his father that Jack began to slip out of the house before dawn on Sundays. If he were honest, the attractions of being anywhere else, in the chill and the dark, were also a consideration.