Jack (Gilead #4)(89)
“She’s a Negro. I don’t want her coming around here.”
“Well then, I’m leaving!” he said, as if this were a threat. So much had he come to assume.
She turned and looked at him, eyes bright with wrath. “You damn well bet you’re leaving! Now! I took you for a decent man!”
Dear Jesus, don’t let me lay a hand on this woman! He waited for the outrage that flooded him to recede enough to allow him to move or speak, but it was clearly apparent to her, and she was alarmed.
She said, “I’m going to call the cops!”
He stepped aside to let her leave the room, to ease her panic. This meant she could get to the telephone, with what consequences he could hardly bear to think. He went to his room and grabbed everything he could stuff into his valise, including certain cautious purchases that meant the catch wouldn’t close. He did remember his hat and what remained of his money. As for anything else, hell with it.
He had money enough for a bus ticket to Memphis or to St. Louis. St. Louis was where it seemed Della would be, but in Memphis he might find out where she really was. Out on the street again, he felt a sharp yearning for the meager comforts of the old room in the old flophouse, only a long walk away from what used to be Della’s house. That would be capitulation. He would just be looking for memories. So he would go to Memphis, where she might not be, and then he would have the trouble and expense of following her, if they told him where she was, and in any case of getting himself back to St. Louis. While I think on thee, dear friend. It was the thought of her that made all this tolerable, the hope of finding her, just seeing her. He would sleep on a bench, sitting upright with his arms around his valise to protect it, buy his ticket, hope for a tolerable seat, and let himself be delivered to Memphis, stale, rumpled, and unshaven. His new suit, half paid for, would hang forever where he saw it last, and he would present himself to Della’s father exactly the old white bum of that man’s deepest fears. All losses are restored, and sorrows end. So long as he thought of her, and it was somehow really her he thought of. He knew that with use even memories wear.
He arrived on a Sunday, found the address of the church in a phone book, was pointed in its direction by a porter, and walked. Churches everywhere; chatty crowds at open doors, perfume, wafts of organ music, bells. The great Sabbath and its festivals. He walked on into the black city. By then doors were closing for the hour or two the worshippers variously pondered life and its implications. The church he was looking for finally came into sight. It was a big stone building with an urban, prosperous look, two squared-off towers with a stained-glass window between them. The wide doors at the base of each tower were still closed, so he loitered in a doorway across the street, wishing, pointlessly, that he had shaved and that there was anything he could spare, to abandon in some corner so the valise, which was a decent enough thing in itself, would close. But he couldn’t risk being seen rummaging in it. If he didn’t stop trying to force it, the catch would break. This felt inevitable. He wished he had a cigarette. Then the doors opened to a robust postlude and the bishop came out and took his place, ready to greet his congregation. He was a large man, attired in that episcopal finery Jack’s father, in the black weeds of true Protestantism, sometimes took a moment to deplore. A wind stirred his vestments. Good Christ, he was imposing.
There was nothing else to do—he had spent his last dime getting there—so Jack began to saunter, a little obliquely, toward the edge of the crowd that mingled on the broad steps and on the sidewalk. The bishop looked up and saw him. It was a look like a rifle shot, aimed at him precisely. Jack stopped where he was. He decided to remove his hat. The bishop excused himself to the gathering and crossed the street, stopping at a distance from him of several feet.
“John Boughton,” Jack said.
“Yes.” The man was studying his face the way people do when they’re about to say, How could you! Then he said, “You can wait inside,” and walked off briskly toward the big stone house beside the church, the parsonage. Jack took this to mean he should follow, uneasy at the thought that he might have misunderstood, that something else was meant by “inside” and he was tagging along for no reason. But he followed him up the steps and into a big room with a public feeling about it. There were two pictures of Jesus, the one in Della’s apartment but larger, and on another wall the one where He is holding a lamb in His arms. There was an upright piano and a chalkboard on an easel. The minister gestured at a chair, said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” and went away. And Jack sat there, thinking he would be much more comfortable on one of the couches but loath to presume. How had Della’s father known who he was? He could not have been expected. Surely if Della described him she would not have described him as he was then, exhausted and so visibly out of luck. He was being treated like the embarrassing relative, to whom something both minimal and absolute is owed, respect having no part in it. Well, at least that would put him within the family circle. There might be some frayed version of those mystical bonds that attach relatives, if magazine poetry speaks true. This impressive man, he thought, is in some way or degree my father-in-law. He had to be careful what he thought. It might affect what he said. He had to laugh at the horrible possibility of his seeming in any way familiar.
The bishop was gone a good deal longer than a few minutes. Jack’s carnal self had learned to expect breakfast. Chicago seemed more and more like an episode in Pilgrim’s Progress, an enchanting byway where the hero’s soul is imperiled by excesses of sound sleep and personal hygiene. What would John the Baptist have to say about all that? Jesus Himself, for that matter, before He was translated into the figure in the calming portraits. Jack had his hunger and the rest in common with the primitive church, who would stream into this room, impressed by the mismatched lamps and the wilted doilies, clamoring for some explanation of Methodist Episcopal, while his own reverend father stood by, hoping to offer a few words on the meaning of Presbyterian. He was falling asleep on that comfortless chair. He began to wonder if the delay meant that he should take offense and leave. And go where? And do what? He would be lurking around the next day, having come so far, having spent his last dime. The cops would get him for loitering and keep him for seeming deranged. This was life at its lowest ebb. But Julia brought him a tuna-fish sandwich with sweet pickle along the edge of the plate, a napkin, and a newspaper. These little attentions were an almost unbearable relief, though all she said to him was “I’ll bring you some coffee” and “He’ll be back soon.”