Jack (Gilead #4)(50)
“John Ames,” Jack said, for some reason, and shook his hand.
“You’re a son of the church, I take it.”
“Yes. Not really. My father is a minister. Was. He’s still alive. The last I heard. He lost his church. My fault, I believe.” He cleared his throat, which is a thing people do sometimes to sound reasonable when otherwise they might not.
“You certainly know the songs. I believe I heard you playing last Sunday.”
He said, “They’re hard to unlearn.” Then, “I have great respect for my father. I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“No, I understand that. It can be difficult, being a minister’s son. I see that fairly often. Maybe the admiration is part of the problem.”
“I’m not at all like him. I look like him. People used to say that. But I know age has been hard on him. Then my mother died. And I am”—he shrugged—“what I am.”
The minister was watching him from that calm distance of kindly appraisal, probably because Jack was talking a little too fast, for one thing. He said, “Maybe you’re looking for someone to tell you to go home and spend a little time with your father. I’d be happy to do that for you. Say the word.” He said, “You look to me like you could use a little forgiving.”
Jack said, “He’s forgiven me every day of my life from the day I was born. Breach birth.” He wished he could smoke. Where was all this candor coming from? He said, “Forgiveness scares me. It seems like a kind of antidote to regret, and there are things I haven’t regretted sufficiently. And never will. I know that for a fact.”
The minister removed his glasses, heavy lenses and gold wire frames that had settled into his face like one more feature. When he took them off, the skin around his eyes looked tender, like a private self. He rubbed his eyes with a finger and thumb and polished the lenses with the corner of a very large handkerchief—“I have to be ready for grief,” Jack’s father had said once. “You don’t always see it coming.” He was meticulously ironing, then folding, a dozen big handkerchiefs.
The minister put his glasses on again and smiled as if he were just back from a brief absence. He said, “Mr. Ames, if the Lord thinks you need punishing, you can trust Him to see to it. He knows where to find you. If He’s showing you a little grace in the meantime, He probably won’t mind if you enjoy it.”
Jack said, “I’m not sure that’s what’s happening. It’s not always clear to me how to tell grace from, you know, punishment. Granting your terms.” If the thought of someone sweetened your life to the point of making it tolerable, even while you knew that just to be seen walking down the street with her might do her harm, which one was that? He said, “I don’t actually believe in God. I’m sorry. That probably means I’ve been wasting your time.”
“No, no.” The minister said quietly, reflectively, “That’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it. The great question.”
“I’ve never even understood the difference between faith and presumption. Never.” He noticed a slightly aggressive urgency in his voice that he would not have expected to hear from himself.
The minister glanced at his watch. He said, “I have a meeting in three minutes. So I have three minutes to answer your question, or you can come back next Sunday, when I’ve had a week to think it over.”
“Next week. I’ll try to be here.” Such a busy man.
“I’d take it as a kindness. I’m going to be thinking about this. Your word was ‘presumption’? Don’t get up.”
But he did, and they shook hands. When he picked up his plate, a young woman said, “Let me take care of that for you!” with that particular warm emphasis of a kindness that means more than itself—nobody cares how much you don’t belong here, at least I don’t. Jack nodded and went up the stairs before anyone else could speak to him. But there was the minister, coming back down. “I was looking for you, Mr. Ames. I just wanted another word or two, if you don’t mind.” He said, quietly, “You’re all right?” A question without that irritating lilt.
“Yes. Fine.”
The minister, half a head shorter than he and two steps above him, studied his face. “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Sometimes when people come to me with, you know, big questions, I find out that there’s something else on their minds. Besides that question.”
“What? Suicide? I can’t do that. Not while he’s alive. My father. So I’m all right.” Jack saw a startled tenderness in the man’s eyes and looked away. He thought, If I told the truth more often, I might be better at it.
The minister rested his hand lightly on Jack’s shoulder. “Well, that’s good to know. That you’re all right,” as if he had put his doubts aside. “That’s good,” he said. “You take care now,” and Jack stepped past him into the foyer and out the door.
Once out on the pavement, he set his hat at a tilt that meant he was not the sort of man who would find himself in a church. Rakish. He lit a cigarette. He felt himself assuming himself again, and it was almost a relief. Those handkerchiefs, white, identical except for the tiny mending his mother made in them where the fabric might wear through. No telling which one had wiped sweat off the face of the woman dying in labor, which one had blotted an orphan’s tears. When his father took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe milk from Jack’s chin, it felt like an induction into intolerable mysteries. He did not let himself inhale. This minister was polishing lenses that shone already with a corner of Lazarus’s shroud, carefully laundered for its next use. These ministers were far too familiar with absolute things. Jack was startled when he heard the word “suicide,” though he was the one who said it. Well, another thing to worry about.