Jack (Gilead #4)(77)
Being there alone was a bad idea. For one thing, he realized instantly that the big freckled mirrors would be reflecting that darkness, and he could not tell if he could see any difference between the reflected darkness and the darkness itself. Those unapproachable spaces beyond this bewildering emptiness. It would be altogether different if Della were there. If he imagined her sitting across the room from him, taken up with some thought that had nothing to do with him, the silence would be so gentle, so replete, that courtesy would oblige him to lie still. While I think on thee, dear friend. It might be infidelity of a kind to wonder how it was that his heart, as they say, had settled on Della, absolutely and exclusively, before he really knew her at all. He could have wondered to what extent she was the creature of his imagination, but he didn’t, because the thought would be disloyal and because she was Della, far beyond the reach of his imagination. As a proof of some kind, they two seemed more and more to “mix irradiance,” like the angels in Paradise Lost. He had used that phrase once to make an English teacher blush, and again to confound his father, a straitlaced man if one ever lived. “Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace, / Total they mix.” He must have been fourteen. His father, who knew his Milton, had looked at him, a serious, inward question apparent in his face, What does this child know? Jack had come into the world trailing clouds, certainly, which must have had another origin than glory, one that would account for a grating precocity uncannily predicting a jaded adulthood. So, at least, he construed his father’s sad gentleness, the allowance always made for behavior that would have sent any other child Boughton to bed without supper. This anxious indulgence had scared Jack half to death. Now it seemed to him that he and Della were mixing irradiance whenever they were in the same room. Intimacy at a distance. So he was glad the grand poet and the irksome boy had supplied him with the phrase.
He imagined her sitting across the room beside the Victrola, all drawn into herself, still with dreaming, and at the thought of her, the darkness became an atmosphere he could breathe. He was a creature at home in its element, more or less. The thought of a benign presence takes the curse off loneliness, for some reason that is as natural as loneliness, a necessary mediation that made the human situation less an embarrassment. A snatch of vapor between earth and that raging star. The inward privilege of belief that a kindly intent had not forsaken him, and would not. It could not be altogether different if the presence were Jesus. His father could make something of this, a theological proof. Intending no disrespect by the thought, he said inwardly, to Della. Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd, the plant that grew up overnight to shade him. Even his father used to laugh at that. Jack was exceeding glad of that hand holding his, an unaccountable loyalty, while those searing words were said out loud that were always in his mind. Just look at him.
After a while, light will reveal itself in a very dark room, not quite as a mist, as something more particulate, as if the slight est breath had lifted the finest dust into the stillest air. Then he could see the place where Della was not sitting, and where the walls must be. This bench reminded him of other benches, so he sat up. He might as well leave. Everything was about as he might have expected. Cars and trucks passed at long intervals, sending thin streaks of light across the ceiling. This was why he could not risk any light inside the room. There were a few voices in the street, then there were none.
But one mind by itself can fill a room. In such a large space there were no strategies of concealment, neither of him from his thoughts nor of his thoughts from his unguarded awareness of them. So there they were, that girl and the child. Glory had seen them playing in the river together, and told him so in one of those terrible little notes he had hardly glanced at. That one had made him wish he had been a third child, harmlessly there with them. Kneeling in the river, barefoot, soaking his dungarees to the pockets, he would rear up on his knees to throw a rock and be pleased at how far away it hit the water. He would ask, “You live around here?” The formalities of child acquaintance, tentative, oblique, shy. “I’ve caught some catfish just down by that bend. Pretty good-sized.” She would say, “I just call her Baby. Seems like I can’t make up my mind.” And the baby kept stooping into the water, trying to pick up stones for him to throw. She never gave them to him. He never saw her face.
No, he was a college man, trying his hand at cynicism. He had the use of a convertible and a letter sweater. Ah, Jesus. “Give me a cig, Jackie. Just ’cause you puked the first time don’t mean I will.” He hated that fellow, always had. Thief, liar, worse, defrauding his father of every ordinary hope. And what was he doing now after so many years of penitential attrition? He was, day by day, depriving his father of his last hope. He knew exactly how the water and stones and silt felt in that baby’s hands, under her feet. The West Nishnabotna was the river that circled Eden. He thought sometime he might get off the bus a stop early and walk to it, and kneel and wash his face in it, and then he would feel ready to go home.
But for now, here he was, entrusted again, by whatever it is that does the entrusting, with another human soul. He had not even bothered to promise himself this would not happen, since every single thing about his life had made it impossible. When the Lord shows you a little grace, the man said, he won’t mind if you enjoy it. She had looked up at him that day, tiny droplets of rain in the puffs of hair that had escaped her hat. Then they were laughing, like girl and boy enjoying the accidental flirtatiousness of escaping the rain together. Tea from that chipped pot. Tea! It brought tears to his eyes. A moment of grace, truly, that ended with his slipping her book into his pocket, the one signed by the poet, and the slim Hamlet in the other pocket, so that the first one would not have so much effect on the hang of his coat. When she realized what he had done, she would never want to see him again, which would have likely been true in any case. He was just introducing himself—I am Jack Boughton, thief. He meant to leave the books on her step with a rose or something when he was done with them.