Jack (Gilead #4)(93)
“You know, we don’t have to wait around here if you really want to leave. But at least we can be together here.” Out in the city everything was Colored or White.
“I really don’t want to stay here for the goodbyes. But you should.”
“Yes. I will.”
“Give my thanks to Aunt Delia and your mother. Tell your little brothers I hold grudges.”
“Marcus?”
“Nothing comes to mind. Though I have drawn up a list of my strengths and virtues for him to share with your father, with a tastefully gilded account of my prospects.”
“You made a copy for me, I suppose. With angels.”
“Yes, and one for myself, to help me through life’s bleaker passages.”
They heard stirrings, voices. Jack said, “I’m getting out of here. I’m about to skedaddle. Goodbye, Julia. Au revoir, my love.” He kissed her. “Give me your suitcase. I can carry it for you. That’s the sort of thing a gentleman does, I believe.”
So, with her bag and his gaping valise he made the long walk back to the bus station. He got his ticket and took a seat where he could watch the door and see a part of the colored section of the waiting room. It was almost time for the bus to leave when Della finally came in, bought her ticket, and walked through the waiting room to the sidewalk where the bus was panting and reeking like an overexcited beast. Jack got on and took a seat at the back of the white section. It appeared to him that the colored seats were nearly all taken. From the window he saw his lovely Della pleading and cajoling, trying to talk a very old woman out of taking the last seat. Finally a young man, with the abruptness of contained exasperation, got off the bus, and the two of them boarded. So she was with him. She would tell him that she had been delayed by her mother’s grief and her father’s alarm. Jack’s visit had done not one thing to reassure them. Della would say, “I have been disowned,” and Jack would say, “That’s just how it is for some people.” They were together, after their fashion, and the world was all before them, such as it was.
And this was his grandest larceny by far, this sly theft of happiness from the very clutches of prohibition. True, it was also the theft of a beloved daughter from her proud family, with the damage this involved to their honorable hopes, and with a secondary though much greater damage that would come with the diminishing of those hopes. This might be felt for generations. It would touch his own child, too. Then there was the theft of every good effect she would have felt from her education. Over time she might decide that she was not in possession of her happiness as she might have believed, even, dear Jesus, of her own self-love. How would she live with that divine anger of hers when mere he, so far as he could, and not her father, stood between her and the insults and abrasions of the world?
The knowledge of good. That half of the primal catastrophe received too little attention. Guilt and grace met together in the phrase despite all that. He could think of himself as a thief sneaking off with an inestimable wealth of meaning and trust, all of it offended and damaged beyond use, except to remind him of the nature of the crime. Or he could consider the sweet marriage that made her a conspirator with him in it, the loyalty that always restored them both, just like grace.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home (2008), winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Lila (2014), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson’s nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things (2015), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), Absence of Mind (2010), The Death of Adam (1998), and Mother Country (1989). She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” Marilynne Robinson lives in Iowa City, Iowa. You can sign up for email updates here.