Jack (Gilead #4)(57)
“—and in wanders Jack Boughton, a textbook case of human degeneracy!” He was laughing, painfully, and the minister was laughing a little, too.
“Jack Boughton?”
“Yes. My actual name. Who I really am.”
Hutchins said, “As it happens, you have wandered in on the most respectable family on this round earth. Everybody is a little scared of them.” He said, “I shouldn’t be laughing. They’re fine folks, all of them, their great-aunts and their third cousins, so I’m told. They’d make you quite a set of in-laws. They’d put you on the narrow path, for sure.”
“If the police did not intervene in my choice of in-laws. And, theoretically, their choice of me.”
“Well, yes, of course.”
They were silent. Then Jack said, “I was just out of prison, still a little light-headed from the change. I was carrying an umbrella I stole from an old man dozing on a park bench, and I was wearing a black suit I bought with money my father sent me for my mother’s funeral, which, as it happened, I did not attend.” He looked at the minister for the expression of regret and disapproval, and there it was. He said, “It began to rain, to storm, really. I saw a young woman with an armful of books and papers, trying to pull a scarf up over her head. Some of the papers were slipping out of her arms and falling on the sidewalk, blowing down the street. So I crossed the street and gave her the umbrella and gathered up the papers for her. She said, ‘Thank you, Reverend,’ and invited me in for tea. We talked about poetry.” He laughed. “It was very nice. I let her know I wasn’t a minister, after a while. I mean, she found out. It didn’t seem to matter too much.”
Hutchins had been looking to the side, this tale of small gallantry unfolding before his mind’s eye. “That’s a nice story,” he said. “All in all. I’m telling people all the time, take any chance you get to do a kindness. There’s no telling what might come of it.”
Jack was folding the handkerchief on his knee, fully intending to give it back. “There’s a world of truth in that. In my case, I guess I know what came of it.” He laughed, and the minister just shook his head. When he was almost out the door, he said, “So you’re not going to try to save me.”
“If you ever want me to, I might give it a try. Meantime, the ladies are putting together a dessert this Sunday. Somebody’s birthday.” He came to the door. He said, “You take care. That’s the first thing.”
* * *
He thought sometimes that he might tell Della just enough to let himself feel he had not been entirely dishonest with her. Two years—if that had been his sentence, and he would let her think it was, two years were almost nothing, at least in terms of the degree of criminality that would rouse society to such measured retaliation. It was almost an endorsement of his character. The terrible part was that, on the day of his arrest, he just happened to have been indulging that old thievish impulse, in imagination only, not to the point of acting on it. Palming some trifle, feeling thine dissolving into mine in the damp of his hand, was a familiar pleasure, one he could almost summon at will.
And there was the problem. It was as if his habit of guilt and guile, in the light of official suspicion, had conjured the small storm of larceny that had overwhelmed him, making nonsense of his protestations. To be fair, he was not entirely persuaded by them himself. Then prison, a simpler mystery than the outside world, clearer in its expectations, which were shouted and sometimes underscored with nightsticks. It was frightening that he took a very small comfort from the relative predictability of it all. What was the phrase? A sense of belonging.
What could this mean for the future? What hope of reform? If he was a thief to the marrow of his bones, essentially and, perhaps, everlastingly, what would keep further punishment, random yet condign, from embarrassing him every now and then for as long as he lived? He could never say, I used to be a thief, when any cop on a corner seemed to know otherwise. The plain truth, two years for crimes he did not commit, would be deception. Better to leave things as they were.
If he could get past the word “prison.” “Penitentiary” was worse. He had not been guilty of theft that day, strictly speaking, though another day he might have been. One man’s disorder was the next man’s opportunity, and pawnshops were random assortments of things that might be there one day and gone the next, in any case. Would anyone even bother keeping track of the trifles he considered stealing? No theft was truly harmless, granted. Thou shalt not—a categorical prohibition. A violation of the courtesy we owe one another, his father said. Yet there were gray areas. In a pawnshop everything belonged to someone and was surrendered only conditionally and under duress, which meant anything could have a value far beyond ordinary estimation. A lonely man might be reminded of the intensities of life just by passing an odd few minutes in a pawnshop, gleaning this overplus. Then he would go out on the street with all that anonymous sentiment clinging to him, on which he had no more claim than theft could give him, feeling the vast distance between himself and the web of fraught lives that dealt among themselves in gifts and mementos. There would probably be a policeman across the street, alert to thievishness.
Jack had been leaning against a wall, reading a newspaper, aware of the policeman across the street, who was clearly aware of him. It was true that he had been browsing in a pawnshop, making a little practical use of an idle afternoon. It was true also that he had been curious to see whether the store was the chaos of minor valuables it appeared to be from the street, or whether there was a system behind it all that would draw attention to a minor theft. He wondered whether some of the items awaiting ransom, not the ones displayed in the window like trophies but the playing-card cases, the plated money clips, could be palmed or pocketed without much risk. Shops like this were an aspect of urban life, one thing that made Jack feel he really did belong in a city. These odds and ends could be intimate to the point of pathos, like the things he used to steal at home. There were brides and babies in ornate frames, crystal canisters etched with the dates of anniversaries. There was a long-handled shoehorn inlaid with rhinestones. All these things hovered between redemption by the wretches who had made hostages of them, or else abandonment into the traffic in preposterous things which must undergird the pawnbroking industry. And here they were, in their moment of poignant suspense. Jack had always felt a silent hum, like the nimbus of rubbed amber, around objects that had nothing else to recommend them. And here they were, as if some great thief moved by just the same impulse had found and hoarded them up. Two dozen clocks disputing the time. Chaos in another dimension.