Jack (Gilead #4)(74)
“Now or an hour from now. It won’t really make any difference. I’d like it if you’d stay a little while.” She said, “My sister can sit here with us, so she’ll have some impressions to share with the people in Memphis. They might as well start getting used to us, the two of us.”
Julia said, “I’m not here to carry tales back to Memphis. I’m here to tell you that you’re causing a whole lot of unhappiness to your family. And I’m telling you, myself, what I think about that. I think it’s a pure disgrace. When I heard about what was going on here, I couldn’t believe it. I thought I knew you better than that.” She glanced at Jack. “I don’t mean to be rude. But you keep him sitting there. So he’s just going to hear what I have to say.”
“I’ve gone over this in my mind a thousand times. You know I would have done that, Julia. I am sorry that I’ve disappointed you.”
“Not just me.”
“I know.”
“All of us.”
“I know.”
“We deserve better.”
“I’m not so sure about deserving. I mean, there are some things you just can’t owe to other people.”
“Some things! You’re ruining everything! You’ve got your boss worrying about your morals, for heaven’s sake!”
“He suspects me of sleeping with my husband. Which I have done.”
“Oh, don’t talk to me like that!”
“You know it, anyway. So does my boss. We are one flesh. The cops have nothing to say about that. Whom God has joined, let no man put asunder. Scripture. The only time I feel immoral is when I’m lying about it.”
“What do you even know about this—Jack?” A dreadful question. “How many women is he one flesh with? You’ve never even asked him, have you? I bet you wouldn’t dare. Just look at him!”
The naked man in his clothes was suddenly, starkly exposed. Slick was no longer a refuge. He was an indictment, a false but telling testimony against himself, an attempt to look hard because he was not, wise in the ways of the streets because he was not, dissolute because this could not be helped, anyway. There was no John Ames Boughton to step out of this disguise, this carapace. There was hardly even a Jack Boughton. He offered that name to people sometimes as if it opened him to some kind of familiarity, but he was familiar with no one, not even Della, he thought, who did not look at him though she held firmly to his hand.
“Don’t you leave!” she said to him softly, forbidding what anyone on earth would have wanted to do in the circumstances.
He found enough voice to say, “I won’t,” and wiped his brow with his free hand and wiped his hand on his pant leg, and thought he had felt wretched before but never, never like this. If Della had turned against him, taking as true the worst her sister was implying, he would have felt the betrayal as a kindness, on balance. It would be a cruel change, terrible to remember, impossible to forget, but so welcome in that moment that he could almost feel the calm of the evening air and accept the finality of the door closed behind him.
“You want him to be the father of your children?”
Della’s hand in his tightened a little. “Yes,” she said, “I do.”
What a question. What an answer.
“You’ve lost your mind. There’s no use talking with you.”
Della said, “I’m pretty sure I told you that two days ago. Just after you got off the train.”
Julia said, “I’m going outside for a minute. If I don’t cool down, I’m going to start saying things I’ll regret.”
“You’ve done that already, Julia. So you might as well tell me the rest.”
But by then Julia was crying. She sat down again and covered her face with her hands. Jack had Reverend Hutchins’s handkerchief in his pocket, despite his fairly explicit intentions, and he stood and offered it to her. It was so immaculate and ample it was like a credential of some kind, to certify him as someone prepared to show compassion or gallantry whenever occasion arose. Julia took it and buried her face in it, and she said, “Thank you.”
When he sat down beside Della again, she smiled at him and took his hand in both of hers, as if every good thing she might think of him had been confirmed. There was no end to deception. He had meant well enough, presumably. But he had stolen not only the handkerchief but the act it allowed him, that intimate courtesy to another soul despite anger or injury or estrangement. “You’re welcome,” he said, in a tone of tactful solicitude that reminded him of his father—this while the mention of his fathering Della’s children brought back to him the thought of the worst he had not told her, the worst he had done. Julia was saying, “They shouldn’t have asked me to do this. They thought I could talk to you because we used to be close. But that just makes it harder.”
“We can still be close.”
“I can’t see how. You don’t realize how upset they are with you, Della. Papa won’t speak your name. He won’t hear it. If I take your side, he’ll never forgive me. I really believe that.”
“Well, maybe with time—”
“Don’t tell yourself that, Della. If you think time is going to end this, then you don’t understand the situation!” She searched her sister’s face. Della was calm under her scrutiny. “Well, I’m done. I’ve said what I have to say.” Julia stood up and went to the hallway and the back door, blotting tears with that handkerchief he himself had wept into at the words “intensely lonely” and “life has not gone well.” His mind was at work on this concatenation. Concatenation. There he was, destroying Della’s world just by being who he was, where he was. Look at him! Guilt in his bearing, fraudulence in his attempts to seem like a fairly ordinary man. All this apparent to anyone, as he knew without any Julia, any Hutchins, to tell him. Still, Della held his hand.