Jack (Gilead #4)(88)
He said, “That’s what she is.” He watched her leafing through the pages. She said, “I like this one the best,” holding up what happened to be a fair likeness. “It’s very realistic. You know, you could make money drawing pictures of people.”
“Lots of people don’t want to know what they look like.” Another truth he had learned in prison. “They think they do, till they see the picture.” Then you might get your fingers busted. This amounted only to a minor sprain and a very alarming threat, but it had persuaded him that there might be little profit in portraiture.
“Well, you’re a man of many talents,” she said.
Not all of them strictly legal. The petty thievery was surprisingly hard to give up. “Thank you.” He could not help being aware of the drawers full of silverware. Some vagrant spoon might yet be his undoing. He knew the landlady trusted him, not on the basis of any presumed insight into his individual character, but as a being of a higher order, too devoted to books and music to check the back of a fork for a sterling mark. The old impulse was still there to remind him that he was Jack, after all, defrauding people of their good opinion, if nothing else. A new suit would help, since the material benefits of respectability were made so clear to him every day. Enhanced, they would no doubt overwhelm temptation, offering inducements far more lucrative, though he was not sure calculations of this kind had any significant part in determining his actions. His father had observed, even dwelt on, the fact that the laws of Moses actually treated theft as debt. No hanging, no branding, only, in effect, a very steep rate of interest—steal one sheep, restore two. That was the Old Dispensation. Under the New Dispensation, debt was to be forgiven, as every Christian knew. Jack would stand by his father at the church door to see the pointedly blank expression of whatever parishioner he, Jack, had trespassed against recently, and whom his father, with homiletical legerdemain, had relieved of the right even to grumble. From boyhood he had schooled his poor father, staunch and doctrinal as he was by nature, in a kind of metaphysics of inversion and dissolution. The distinction “mine and thine” collapsed altogether, at least in his sermons. Even “good and evil” were held up to scrutiny. It had seemed to Jack that his father proposed a sort of Promised Land where troublesome categories did not apply. “Night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light.” Those words nullified a very primary distinction. “God separated the light from the darkness,” in the very first moments of creation. Verse 4. Then how was anyone to believe that any distinction was absolute, not secondary to a more absolute intention, the luminous reality concealed behind the veil of experience? He thought he should write this down, to show it to Della, maybe to her father. He and Della had been there, in that luminous absence of distinctions, in that radiant night.
He found a shop that sold ready-made suits with cuffs unfin ished, to be tailored to fit the purchaser. Wonderful. Jack excused himself from lunch with the boss’s daughter twice to stand in a shadow of chalk dust and basting threads while a man with a mouth full of pins made and unmade minute adjustments. The pant leg should touch the shoe and break a little. The sleeve should allow for a quarter inch of shirt cuff to show. It was a very muted tweed, gray blue, a good choice for his coloring, the man said, with the suspect objectivity that always complicates decisions of this kind. It was a fine suit, inexpensive, but tasteful in a way that concealed the fact. Jack had put a deposit on it, the balance due when this maddeningly meticulous tailor actually finished it. Meanwhile, he found the Moonlight Sonata in a stack of sheet music the landlady brought down from the attic and tried his hand at parts of it that looked possible. People had started calling him professor again, this time without any sign of malice.
It might not end! There might be no joke, no trapdoor, no banana peel. He had found himself in a highly congenial life that broke no laws. It took him a minute or two to remember the last time he had been seriously embarrassed. Then, to top it off, the landlady came to his door and told him that the young couple who had stayed in the largest room were leaving. It was in effect two rooms with sliding doors between them and a little balcony. She was beaming. “You could bring your wife here!” she said, gesturing at the flounces on the vanity, the cushion on the rocking chair. “You see, there’s a writing desk in the alcove.” She opened the desk to show him its hidden drawers and the tiny key that locked them. “It’s a little too dainty for a man. Perfect for a lady.”
“I’m not sure I could afford it,” he said.
“Oh, nonsense! Another dollar a week.” The landlady was in love with him, in some sense of those words. To her mind the absent wife was the elegant consort he deserved, and her face glowed with the thought of their happiness. He certainly could imagine Della in these rooms, their bridal excesses a tribute to female loveliness. He would add a geranium. Fool that he was, or wasn’t, since he knew that in this world there are limits to reasonable expectation, he said, “My wife is a colored lady.”
She said, “That isn’t possible. It’s against the law.” She turned her back to him. She said, “Just when you think you know somebody!”
So, just like that, it had ended. He knew there was no appeal to be made. But he said, “She’s a wonderful, gentle woman. She’s educated. She’s a minister’s daughter, an English teacher.”