Jack (Gilead #4)(34)
Be that as it may. He could think of the hours he had spent with Della without particular regret, not counting that time he had ducked out on her at the restaurant. He felt that he owed this to his father’s sermons on the value of good manners, even without reference to whatever meaning they might have or lack in any particular circumstance. This was a truth arrived at by argument too precarious to be rescued by a truly emphatic conclusion involving a fist flourished in the air, yet too essentially wistful to be discredited by a guffaw or two in the choir. From all his father’s careful instruction this was the one teaching Jack took away. So, on that precious day, when he saw a lady drop an armful of papers on the pavement in a rainstorm, he had crossed the street to help her gather them up. The wind had sent a few of them scudding off, and he had handed her his umbrella and ran a few steps to catch them. There was laughter involved. She had said, “Thank you, Reverend,” out of respect for that dark suit he was honest enough to sell once it had dried out so he could stop deceiving people in that particular way. He knew he would not make it home for the funeral, and besides, he scrupled. His reluctance to toy with what were sometimes people’s better impulses had brought that word to mind. There was little enough to be gained from it in any case. There was an unseemliness in asking a fellow for a dime or a smoke while wearing a suit like that one. Being unshaven was no help. Once or twice he heard out a tirade on the corruptions of the clergy by someone who took his actual, ordinary life for his secret life—a preacher on the bad side of town, abject with drink and general dissolution. That suit made a hypocrite of him. Still, when the lady to whom he had been so courteous said, Thank you, Reverend, it was as if she thought she knew him, as if her opinion of him were favorable beyond the fact of his having lent her an umbrella—which he would have to have back, since the gentle candor of her expression made him certain he had to be rid of that suit, which was depreciating by the minute. So he took the umbrella from her hand and walked her to her door, enjoying the gallantry of the gesture, nicely balanced between apparent and real. He had gotten his umbrella back without quite taking it from her. And when they reached her door, she had asked him in. “The rain might be letting up a little,” she said, “if you have time for a cup of tea—” This was a little bold of her. He thought one of his sisters, Glory maybe, would invite a stranger in off the street on the recommendation of a clerical look and a minor kindness, never thinking to ask whether he had, for example, been released from prison lately. In a couple dozen months he had acquired habits he knew he might never outlive. Even then, taking a chair at a small table by a window, surrounded by the modest good order and general teacherliness of her apartment, he kept searching his memory for a word that rhymed with “scruple.” Quadruple. He was calming himself, which meant he was nervous. Jesus was there among the pictures on the upright piano, the only one in color. “Quintuple” doesn’t rhyme. How can that be? Sweet Jesus, don’t let me say anything strange.
She brought tea in an old-fashioned china pot with a chip in its spout. She gave him a cup and saucer that somehow commemorated Memphis. Sunday things, because he was a minister. He couldn’t see what her cup commemorated, but it was small and ornate like his. Like the cups that lined a narrow shelf in the kitchen at home at once pointedly and futilely out of his reach. Those little handles break off so easily, and they can’t really be glued on again. His sisters tried and tried. Hope, the musical sister, had hands like hers, slender and somehow lively. He said, “Do you play?”
“Not really. Not very well. Do you?”
“‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’” She laughed. Actually, the only part of prison he missed, besides a predictable lunch, was playing piano for chapel services, which were sometimes funerals. He had worked up barrelhouse versions of some very solemn hymns.
She said, “The piano belongs to the woman I share this place with. Her mother left it to her. She doesn’t really play much either.”
He had said, for some reason, “I often regret—” and thought it best not to continue.
She nodded. “They had a terrible time getting me to practice. I told them I wanted to be a poet!”
That was interesting. “Did you ever stop wanting to be a poet?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t stopped yet. I suppose someday I will. I don’t have much to show for it. My grandmother met Paul Dunbar once. I guess that gave me the idea. I have a book he signed for her. It was her treasure. Now it’s my treasure.”
He had said, “That’s very nice,” and he had thought, Don’t show it to me. Don’t put it down anywhere near me. That old fellow dozing on the bench with his umbrella hooked over the back of it, and his cane, too, would have been waked up when the rain began and hobbled off somewhere, cursing himself for his own trusting nature, most likely. Then came that difficult algebra—did the exasperation Jack had caused cancel out the kindness he had done under the inspiration of a handsome umbrella? A kindness done to this particular lady because he was ready to enjoy the courtesy so newly and fortuitously possible for him? She did have a sweet face, a warm laugh. And he hoped he’d have helped her gather her papers, in any case. But the umbrella made a performance of it. As he hurried back to her, she lifted it a little to include him under it. Then he held it over her and walked her to her door. She had called him Reverend and offered him tea, and he had stepped over a threshold into a world where there would of course be a hymnal open on the piano, the odds and ends of a grandmother’s china, no doubt a hundred trifling things not at all worth stealing that he could slip into his pocket, given the chance. She said, “I’ll show you that book.” He had almost said, Please don’t. But in a moment there it was, open in her two hands to the page with the signature. Then she put it down on the table in front of the sofa and came back to her chair. “I’m always afraid I’ll spill something on it.”