She didn’t answer. He looked over at me. His face was damp from the heat of the car, and his hair was coiled and springy. “She used to like magic a lot,” he told me.
“Well, I don’t any more!” Mindy said.
“I don’t know what’s got into her.”
The fezzes were at long last gone and here came another high school band. Everybody clapped and waved. But then there must have been a hitch of some kind, somewhere up front. They came to a halt, still playing, then finished their tune and fell silent and stood staring straight ahead. You could see the little pulses in their temples. You could see the silver chain linking a musician to his piccolo, giving me a sudden comical picture of the accident that must once have happened to make them think of this precaution. I laughed—the loudest sound on the street. For the clapping had stopped by now. There was some understanding between players and audience: each pretended the other wasn’t there. Till finally the parade resumed and so did the clapping, and the audience was filled with admiration all over again as if by appointment. The players marched on. Their legs flashed as steadily and evenly as scissors. I was sorry not to have them to watch any more.
“I would think a drum would be a right good instrument,” Jake told me, gazing after them.
“You just like whatever booms and damages,” said Mindy.
We looked at her.
“Oh! I was going to do my billfold trick,” Jake said.
“No, thank you.”
“Now, where’s my … shoot, my billfold.”
“Never mind,” said Mindy.
“Lend me your billfold, Charlotte,” Jake said.
I pulled it out of my purse and gave it to him, meanwhile watching a floatful of white-wigged men signing a paper that was scorched around the edges. “Look close, now,” Jake said to Mindy. “Maybe you’ll figure how I do it, finally. Here we have a empty billfold, see? Observe there ain’t no tricks to this, no hidden pockets, secret compartments …” I heard him riffling through it, flicking the plastic windows, snapping up some flap. There was a sudden silence.
“Why,” he said. “Why, what have we here. Charlotte? Charlotte, what is this?”
I took my eyes away from the parade and looked at what he held out. “It’s a traveler’s check,” I told him.
“A traveler’s check! Looky there, Mindy, a hundred-dollar traveler’s check! We’re rich! Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. “What kind of sneaky way is that to act?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think,” I said.
“Didn’t think? Carrying around a hundred dollars and didn’t think?”
“Well, I’ve had it for so long, you see. I mean I had it for just one purpose, I forgot it could be used for anything else.”
“What in hell purpose was that?” Jake asked.
“Why, for traveling,” I said.
“Charlotte,” Jake told me, “we are traveling.”
“Oh,” I said.
12
When Selinda was little, I tried to tell her the truth as much as possible. I told her that as far as I knew, when people die they die and that’s the end of it. But after church one day she asked, “How come you and me just die and other people get to go to heaven?”
“Well, there you are,” I told her. “You can take your choice.”
Selinda chose heaven. I didn’t blame her. She went to all those extras that I stayed home from: prayer meetings, Family Night, and so forth. I began to notice her absence. She was seven now and a whole separate person. Well, she always had been, really, but I thought of seven as the age when people come into their full identity. Sometimes it seemed to me that my own seven-year-old self was still looking out of its grownup hull, wary but unblinking. I asked Selinda, “Will you remember to pay me a visit now and then?”
“I live here,” Selinda said.
“Oh, I forgot.”
Up till then, I’d thought it would be a mistake to have another child. (More to take with me when I left.) But I changed my mind. And Saul, of course, had wanted more all along. So in January of 1969 I got pregnant. By March I was buying stacks of diapers and flannel nightgowns. In April I had a miscarriage. The doctor said it wouldn’t be wise for us to try again.
Nobody knew how much I’d already loved that baby. Not even Mama, who after all had never been consciously pregnant herself. She fussed around with my pillows, looking hopeful and puzzled. Miss Feather brought lots of fluids as if she thought I had a cold. Linus and Selinda acted scared of me; Julian suffered one of his lapses and lost three hundred dollars at the Bowie Racetrack. And Saul sat beside my bed, flattening my hands between his own. He looked not at me but at my fingernails, which had a bluish tinge. He didn’t say a word for hours. Wasn’t he supposed to? Wasn’t it a preacher’s job? I said, “Please don’t tell me this was God’s will.”
“I wasn’t going to,” he said.
I said, “Oh.” I felt disappointed. “Because it’s not,” I said. “It’s biological.”
“All right.”
“This is just something my body did.”
“All right.”
I studied his face. I saw that he had two sharp lines pulling down the corners of his mouth, so deep they must have been there a long time. His hair was getting thin on top and sometimes now he wore reading glasses. He was thirty-two years old, but looked more like forty-five. I didn’t know why. Was it me? I started crying. I said, “Saul, do you think my body did this on purpose?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Because a baby would have kept me from leaving?”
“Leaving,” said Saul.
“Leaving you.”
“No, of course not.”
“But I just keep thinking, you see. I’m so afraid that … I mean, sometimes it seems that we strain at each other so. We’re always tugging and chafing and … sometimes when we’re in the pickup, that rusty, creaky pickup, and Mama’s taking two thirds of the seat and Selinda’s irking my lap, and I am nagging over something I don’t even care about, as if I just want to see how far I can push you, and you’ve grown disgusted and backed off somewhere in your mind—well, then I think, ‘Really, we’re a very unhappy family. I don’t know why it should come as any surprise,’ I think. ‘It feels so natural. It’s my luck, I’m unlucky, I’ve lived in unhappy families all my life. I never really expected anything different.’ ”
I waited to see if Saul would argue, but he didn’t. He went on flattening my hands. He kept his head bowed. Already I was sorry I had said it all, but that’s the way my life was: I was eternally wishing to take everything back and start over. It was hopeless. I went on.
“Well,” I said, “I’m worried that my body thought, ‘Now, we don’t want to drag this thing out. We surely don’t want a baby; a baby would stop her from leaving for another whole seven years. So what we should do is just—’ ”
“Charlotte, you would never leave me,” Saul said.
“Listen a minute. I have this check, these shoes, I—”
“But you love me,” Saul said. “I know you do.”
I looked over at him, his long, steady eyes and set mouth. Why did he always put it that way? That time at the Blue Moon Motel, too. Shouldn’t he be telling me how he loved me?
But what he said was, “I am certain that you care for me, Charlotte.”
And another thing: how come it always worked?
———
I’d been back on my feet six weeks or so when Saul walked into the kitchen one noontime carrying a baby and a blue vinyl diaper bag. Just that suddenly. This was a large baby, several months old. A pie-faced, stocky boy baby, looking very stern. “Here,” Saul said, and held him out.
“What’s that?” I asked, not taking him.
“A baby, of course.”
“I’m not supposed to carry heavy things,” I said, but I didn’t move away. Saul shifted the baby a little higher on his shoulder. He loved children but had never got the knack of holding them right; the baby’s nig
htgown was rucked up to his armpits and he tilted awkwardly, frowning beneath his spikes of hair like a fat blond Napoleon. “Can’t you take him? He’s not that heavy,” Saul said.
“But I … my hands are cold.”
“Guess what, Charlotte? We’re going to keep him a while.”
“Ah, Saul,” I said. You think I wasn’t expecting that? Nothing could surprise me any more. In this impermanent state of mine, events drifted in like passing seaweed and brushed my cheek and drifted out again. I saw them clearly from a great distance, both coming and going. “Thank you for the thought,” I said, “but it wouldn’t be possible,” and I moved on around the table, serenely setting out soupbowls.
“Charlotte, he hasn’t got a father, his mother ran off and left him with his grandmother, and this morning we found the grandmother dead. I assumed you’d want him.”
“But then his mother will come back,” I said. “We could lose him at any moment.” I started folding napkins.
“We could lose anybody at any moment. We could lose Selinda.”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “He isn’t ours.”
“Nobody’s ours,” said Saul.
So I finished folding the last of the napkins, and warmed my hands in my apron a minute, and came back to where Saul was standing. There was some comfort in knowing I had no choice. Everything had been settled for me. Even the baby seemed to see that, and leaned forward as if he’d expected me all along and dropped like a stone into my waiting arms.
We called him Jiggs. His real name was something poor-white that I tried not ever to think about, and Jiggs seemed better suited anyway to his stubby shape and the thick, clear-rimmed spectacles that he very soon had to start wearing. Also, Jiggs was such an offhand name. I might as easily have called him Butch, or Buster or Punkin or Pee Wee. Anything that showed how lightly I would give him back when his mother came to claim him.
We sat him in a pile of blocks in my studio whenever I was working. Linus built him teetering cities, Selinda drew crayon horses for him to ponder. I would talk to him continuously as I moved the lamps around. “Is he yours?” a customer might ask, and I would say, “Oh no, that’s Jiggs.”
“Ah.”
And I would photograph their polite, baffled faces.
For I was still taking pictures, but just because people happened to stop by. And only on a day-to-day basis. And I had lost, somewhere along the line, my father’s formal composition. During the years stray props had moved it: flowers, swords, Ping-Pong paddles, overflow from Alberta’s clutter. People had a way of picking up odd objects when they entered, and then they got attached to them. They would sit down still holding them, absent-mindedly, and half the time I never even noticed. I wasn’t a chatty, personal kind of photographer. I would be occupied judging the light, struggling with the camera that had grown more crotchety than ever. Its bellows were all patched with little squares of electrical tape. Its cloth was so frayed and dusty I got sneezing fits. Often I would have gone as far as printing up a negative before I really saw what I had taken. “Why,” I would say to Linus. “What on earth …?”
Then Linus would set the baby aside and the two of us would study my photo: some high school girl in Alberta’s sequined shawl, strung with loops of curtain-beads, holding a plume of peacock feathers and giving us a dazed, proud, beautiful smile, as if she knew how she had managed to astonish us.
In the fall of 1972, Alberta died. We got a telegram from her father-in-law. YOUR MOTHER DEAD OF HEART FAILURE FUNERAL 10 A.M. WEDNESDAY. When he read it, Saul turned grim but said nothing. Later he called Linus and Julian into the sunporch and they held a conference with the doors closed. I hung around outside, fiddling with strands of my hair. When it came to matters of importance, I thought, I was not remotely a part of that family. Here I assumed I had broken into their circle, found myself some niche in the shelter of Alberta’s shadow, but it turned out the Emorys were as shut away as ever and Alberta had gone and died. Underneath I had always expected her back, I believe. I wanted her approval; she was so much braver, freer, stronger than I had turned out to be. There were a thousand things I had planned on holding up for her to pass judgment on. Now it seemed that these things had no point any more, and I thought of them all—even the children—with a certain flat dislike.
I went to find my mother, who was knitting in front of the TV. “Alberta has died,” I told her.
“Oh, my soul,” said Mama, not missing a stitch. But then she never had thought much of her. “Well, I suppose the men will be going to the funeral.”
But they didn’t, as it happened. That was the subject of the conference. Saul had told them he wasn’t going, and he didn’t think they should either, but that was up to them. They discussed it carefully, examining all the issues. This was what they’d come to: her gloriously wicked sons, now aging and balding and troubled by pathetic, minor errors. In her absence, their colors had faded. People are only reflections in other people’s eyes, it turns out. In Alberta’s absence her house had crumbled and vanished, her belongings had taken on a rusty smell. (She told me once that the Emorys had always been killed by horses; that was their mode of dying. But in her absence it emerged that only one had been: a distant uncle. The others had passed away in their beds, puny deaths they would have been spared if Alberta had only stayed around.)
Julian said he wouldn’t attend the funeral either. That left Linus, the only one who might have liked to go, but everybody knew that he wouldn’t defy his brothers. (Linus had a beard because he never had shaved, not ever, since the day his first whiskers grew in. That was how little he fought things.) “I’ll just stay at home and say a prayer for her in my mind,” he told Saul.
“Whatever you like,” Saul said.
It was Linus I heard this from, of course. Never Saul. Linus sat on a kitchen chair later, sanding a piece of wood the size of a postage stamp. For a couple of years now, he had been building dollhouse furniture. I don’t know why. And all of a sudden he said to me, “In my opinion, he should forgive her.”
“What?”
“Saul,” said Linus, “should forgive our mother.”
“Oh well, let him have one sin.”
“On the sunporch he said, ‘What makes me laugh is, that crazy old man outlived her after all.’ Grandpa, he meant. Then he really did laugh. Threw back his head and laughed out loud. What do you make of that?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t even try. Leave him alone.”
So Linus blew a speck of sawdust away, and wiped his forehead with one veiny brown arm and fell silent. He was used to my protecting him, not Saul. He didn’t guess how often I had asked myself the same question: What do you make of Saul?
Saul had become a man of blacks and whites. In the pulpit, looming black robe with a wide white neckband; the rest of the time, cheap black suit and white shirt. Often, while buying groceries or walking with the children, I would catch sight of him striding through the town on some wild mission—larger than life, with his unbuttoned suit coat billowing out behind him, trouser cuffs flapping, tie fluttering, strings of neglected hair feathering over his collar. He carried a Bible, always, and wore a dark, intense expression, as if narrowing in on something. Most of the time, he didn’t even see us.
Was he just a fanatical preacher, bent on converting the world?
But sometimes when giving his sermons he stumbled and halted, and appeared to be considering the words he had just spoken. Then I would have to consider them myself, trying to discover what truth might lie within them. Sometimes, while lashing out against the same old evils, he would stop in midsentence and sag and shake his head and walk away, forgetting to say the benediction. Then his bewildered, ever smaller flock would rustle in their pews, and I would sit gripping my gloves. Should I run after him? Should I let him be? I pictured some great substructure shifting and creaking inside him. I felt my own jagged edges grinding together as they settled into new positions. At night, I often woke with a start and pressed my
face against his damp, matted chest. Even his heartbeat seemed muffled and secret. I never was able to imagine what he dreamed.
I was moving around the kitchen one day in the spring of 1974, serving up breakfast to a man from the mourners’ bench. Dr. Sisk. I was trying to hurry Jiggs along because it was nearly time for kindergarten and he was just sitting there with one sock on and nothing else. I was tripping over the dog, this terrible dog that Selinda had brought home from Girl Scouts. It wasn’t one of my quieter times, in other words. So it took me a minute to notice what I assumed to be Saul from another age, leaning in the doorway—the Saul I married, with a calmer face and no lines around his mouth, a little more hair on top, easier and looser and less preoccupied. He wore faded, tattered jeans and carried an Army surplus knapsack. He watched me with a kind of wry amusement that Saul had long ago lost. Well, I wasn’t so very surprised. In fact I’d already thought of an explanation for it (some simple time warp, nothing to get alarmed about) when he spoke. “I knocked but nobody answered,” he said.
It wasn’t Saul’s voice at all, and never had been; didn’t have that echo behind it. I said, “Amos!”
“How you doing, Charlotte?”
He straightened up and came to offer me his hand. By now I was so used to various people wandering in it didn’t occur to me to ask why he was here. (I’d been expecting him for years, to tell the truth. Wondered what was keeping him.) But Amos seemed to think he had to tell me. “Hear Clarion High School is looking for a music teacher,” he said. “I thought I might apply. I guess I should’ve dropped a line ahead of time but I’m not too much of a letter writer.”
He had sent us fifteen letters in all the time we’d been married—if you count a Hallmark wedding card and about fourteen of those printed change-of-address notices that you pick up free from the post office. But that’s the way the Emorys did things. I said, “Never mind, have some breakfast. Meet Jiggs and Dr. Sisk.”