Jack (Gilead #4)(47)
Bringing Della upstairs to his room. So he could talk with her, show her whatever he could muster in the way of welcome and courtesy, which was so very little that, weighed against the jokes and insults they might expect, it hardly seemed worth the attempt. Still, he would look around for a radio.
* * *
The next day was a Sunday, enforced idleness just when he was filled with new resolve. So he made his bed and shaved and went out for a walk. The city was closed, but the doors of churches were open, releasing gusts of music and sociability, and incense and pot luck and perfume. The particular formal intimacy of reunion in these households, as his father called them. Pious obligation satisfied, pious expectation met. He could forget there were so many churches, opening on the cold pavement, then closing their doors for talk about absolute things in words particular and familiar to them, reminding themselves of their life together and the life to come, singing the old songs. Yes, households, where welcoming the stranger arose often as a subject, as if welcome were what every stranger wanted and strangerliness were without comforts of its own, habit, for example, and some others that were not coming to mind just then. He found himself stepping off the curb to keep apart from the intense little crowds that gathered at these doorways. Poe was exactly right—bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.
He felt a light, fluttering touch of some kind at the back of his neck and swatted at it with his hand. It was a thin strip of fabric, a part of the disintegrating lining of his hat. He took his hat off and was looking into its crown, an odd word for it, thinking whether it would be worth trying to mend the weary satin in some way or glue it down, or if he might as well just tear it out and be done with it. Then a dime dropped into it. He looked up to explain the misunderstanding, but whoever it was, a black man, waved him off, sparing him, as he must have thought, a word of gratitude. When he looked back, there were more nickels and dimes, and an old lady searching her handbag for change. “I was just looking at my hat,” he said.
She said, “Of course you were, honey,” and added a dime. She said, “You come on in. We’re having a nice little dinner afterward. There’s always plenty and to spare.”
It was a black church, and he would feel like an intruder. That strange embarrassment. On the other hand, he was mortified that he had been taken for a beggar. Whatever depths he might sink to, he generally managed not to sink that far, at least while he was sober. So, to rescue what of himself he could from the ashes of humiliation, he would step into the church to find a place to put the money, a collection plate or something.
The congregation were all sorting themselves among the pews or seated, but there was a young man standing in the narthex, a fellow with the modest dignity of a minor office, a deacon, an usher. Jack held out his hat to him to show him its contents and said, “There was a misunderstanding. I was just looking at the lining of my hat.” He couldn’t bring himself to actually name the mistake.
“Yes, I see.” The young man’s tact made Jack aware of what a horrible exposure this was, a nest of satin much stained by use, in partial tatters, the tonic of every previous owner eating away at it. It looked like endless furtive disillusionment, like corrosive thoughts working their way through his skull, dampened a little by habits of embarrassment and regret. And then those pennies and dimes. He said, “I just wanted to give you this.” The young man looked at him. So he said, “The money.” It was pride as well as the thought of clarifying his meaning that made him take a dollar from his own pocket to add to the hat. “I see,” the young man said, and took the hat in his hands, a little gingerly, and then, remembering his office, he said, “Please join us for worship. You’re right welcome to join us,” and walked off with his hat. It had cost Jack a dollar to lose his hat, a dollar plus considerable mortification. He had gone out for a walk, meaning no harm, and this had befallen him. These little cyphers in the arithmetic of cosmic justice must be as insoluble as the great questions, he supposed. If his error was to imagine that harmlessness was equivalent to insignificance, as if he could elude existence and its consequences by dint of sheer quietism, these thistles sprouted in his solitary path to remind him that meaning could have a decimal point with a thousand 0’s before the cypher and still be what it is, could still permit certain conclusions that begin with There’s no telling, or There’s no escaping. He sat down on the last pew, a few feet from the nearest parishioner.
The preacher was a small man with a big, warm voice. “My dear friends,” he said, “let us pray. Let us trust our whole hearts to the Father who knows us and loves us.”
A hundred bowed heads. The thought came to Jack that someone here might know Della, a foolish thought. If the population of St. Louis was half black, that doubled the likelihood that any given black person might know her, but the chance would still be minute. This made no sense. It compared black people to an imaginary “people in general,” to whom the words “white” or “colored” do not apply, and such people don’t exist. Say there were two cities, one black, one white. This was and wasn’t true, and was beside the point in any case. The people he was sitting among were Baptists of some kind, as their friends and kin probably were, too, and Della was a Methodist. People don’t just know each other at random. But he, as a white man in the black city, felt conspicuous, that is, more likely to come up anecdotally somehow, so that this foolish episode would have an echo. Say he did not recover his hat but they kept the miserable thing in case he came back for it, ready on a table or a shelf so that someone could find it for him. Out of place, in other words. And people would say, Who does that old hat belong to? And the answer would be, You remember that skinny white man that was out begging in front of the church last week, last month, last year? And the story would live on and reach her finally.