She said, “Let me help.” She took her father’s other arm, and they walked him into the house, slowly, carefully. Her helping did nothing to lessen her father’s pain, but it did spare Jack from being the sole immediate cause of it. She took off the old man’s tie and shoes and bundled him into his chair. She went to the kitchen to get him aspirin and a glass of water, and she heard the car start and went out to the porch. She saw the beautiful old plum-colored DeSoto disappear into the barn, and then she heard the barn doors close. When Jack came in, he held the keys out to her.
“It’s your car,” she said.
“I’m making you a gift of it.” He shook the keys so they jingled. “Here. I don’t want the damn thing.”
“Tell me that in a week and I might believe you.”
He dropped the keys on the piano and smiled at her. “Whatever you say, Pigtails.”
She said, “Jack, you can’t leave.”
“Well, I can’t very well stay, can I.” He rubbed his eyes and laughed. “No point in it. I can see myself giving my lady love a tour of the scenes of my youth. Not that she has so many illusions about me. But the few she does have might just be crucial.”
“Maybe they are. Who knows. But we have to think about Papa. We don’t want to kill him.”
“No, we don’t. And if we were to leave, we would be forever alienated from our little sister, on whom we have become surprisingly dependent.”
“Yes, we would. You would. And I mean it, Jack. If I’ve ever meant anything in my life.”
“Such ferocity,” he said, and laughed and rubbed his eyes. “Thank you. A good brisk threat can orient a fellow. But what is this? Now you’re crying!”
She said, “Never mind.”
“You forgive me.”
“Of course.”
He said, “There are all the others, Glory. The old fellow would love to have them around, and they’d be a lot more help to you than I am.” He said, “This might be too hard, you know. I’m not exactly a pillar of strength. And if I went wrong, it would be better if I did it somewhere else. Better for Papa. I do think about that.”
“Yes, you thought about that for twenty years, didn’t you.”
He laughed. “In fact I did. And maybe I wasn’t wrong, Glory. Not altogether wrong.”
“You know more about that than I do. But you said that for ten years you had been all right.”
“That’s true. Almost ten.”
“Then you could at least have come home for Mama’s funeral.” Her voice trembled. “That would have meant so much to him. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I don’t know why I did.”
He smiled. “I’m a scoundrel, Glory. Let’s leave it at that.” He said, “I’m sorry. I’m going to have to lie down for a while. Please excuse me.”
“Wait.” She went to him where he stood with his hand on the stair railing, his face so weary, and she kissed his cheek. He laughed.
“Thanks,” he said. “That was kind. That might even help me sleep.”
He slept, and he came down to help set the table for supper. “I can stick around for a while. If that’s still all right.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
He watched a baseball game on television with his father when the dishes were done.
SUNDAY MORNING JACK CAME DOWNSTAIRS DRESSED AND shaved, in his stocking feet, carrying his shoes, to avoid waking his father. He looked at her and shrugged as if to say, What have I got to lose, and she handed him a cup of coffee. He sipped it, leaning against the refrigerator. Then he went to the money drawer and took two dollars. “For the collection plate,” he said softly. “I owe you.” He brushed at the brim of his hat. “Do you mind if I borrow your watch? Then I can take a little walk before the service begins.” She gave him the watch and he glanced at it and then slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Well,” he said, “here goes.” He stopped in the porch to put on his shoes and adjust his hat, and he left.
Half an hour later she heard her father stirring, and she took him his tray of coffee and applesauce and buttered toast and the aspirin tablets with a glass of water. She was still in her robe and slippers and wearing a hairnet. He said, “Aren’t you feeling well, my dear? No church today? Maybe I should call Ames and tell him we’ll have to have dinner another time—”
“No, Papa, I’m fine. I stayed home today so Jack could go.”
“Go to church? Jack?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Jack went to church?”
“Ames’s church. As a gesture of respect, he said.”
“Yes, well, that’s very good. John can give a fine sermon. That new fellow we’ve got now, I’m not so sure about him. I might go to the Congregationalists myself. If I went anywhere. Well.” He laughed. “This is something. This is quite a day.”
He sat perfectly still for a minute, smiling into space, considering. “Just when you’re about to give up entirely! The Lord is wonderful!”
“Maybe you shouldn’t read too much into it, Papa.”
“Read into it! It’s just a fact! You go to church and there you are!” He said, “I thought I must have turned him against it all. I really did. I’ve heard of that in preachers’ families. More than once.”
“Well, he seems to have had some contact with a church in St. Louis. He says he played piano for them.”
“Did he! I wouldn’t know that. He doesn’t talk to me very much. Never did.” He laughed. “Your mother used to ask me, Why do we keep paying for piano lessons for that boy? Because he wouldn’t practice, you know. If you tried to make him, he’d just walk out the door. But I said I thought something might come of it. He’d go to the lessons when Teddy went. Yes. I told her I thought we should treat all the children the same, Jack, too.” He sat there smiling, his face bright with vindication. “It’s wonderful. You make some sort of decision, just a little choice you can’t even quite explain, and years later—Well, I knew he was clever. That was clear to me. He was always paying more attention than he would let on. But I knew it, I did.” He laughed at the thought of his own shrewdness. “Yes.”
Glory said, “He seems to have friends in the church there.”
“Friends! Well, I suppose he would. That just happens in a church, doesn’t it. He didn’t really have friends as a boy, though. He never seemed to want them. I’ve prayed his whole life that he’d have a friend or two. It often came to my mind, you know, that loneliness of his. And it didn’t really occur to me—it honestly never occurred to me—that off in St. Louis somewhere my prayers were being answered! Isn’t that something!” He shook his head. “It would have been a weight off my heart, I’ll tell you that. I could have spared myself years of grief, just by having a little trust. There’s a lesson in that.” Then he said, “I do wonder what happened, though. I mean, right now he doesn’t strike me as a man who feels he has friends. Then I could be wrong.”
“He doesn’t tell me very much either.”
“Well,” he said, “here I am worrying, and this is a remarkable day! I have to bestir myself. Would you mind giving my hair a little trim, Glory? I’ve been feeling sort of shaggy. It’s probably my imagination, mostly.” He laughed. “Not much there anymore, I know. Still.”
So she brought her father into the kitchen, sat him down, wrapped a towel around his shoulders and tucked it close around his neck. She got a comb and the pair of shears and set to work. His hair had vanished, or was on the point of vanishing, not through ordinary loss but by a process of rarification. It was so fine, so white and weightless, that it eddied into soft curls. Wafted, she thought. She hated to cut it off, since there seemed very little chance that it could grow back again as it was. It was like cutting a young child’s hair. But her father claimed to be irked by the prettiness of it. Fauntleroy in his dotage, he said.
So she clipped and trimmed, making more work of it than it was in order to satisfy him that some change had been accomplished, combing it down a little with water so he would feel sleek and trim. T
he nape of his neck, the backs of his ears. The visible strain of holding the great human head upright for decades and decades. Some ancient said it is what makes us different from the beasts, that our eyes are not turned downward to the earth. Most of the time. It was Ovid. At the end of so much effort, the neck seemed frail, but the head was still lifted up, and the ears stood there, still shaped for attention, soft as they were. She’d have left all the lovely hair, which looked like gentle bewilderment, just as the lifted head and the ears looked like waiting grown old, like trust grown old.
“Yes,” her father said, “whenever I thought of him, he was always alone, the way he used to be, and I would wonder what kind of life he could have, with no one even to care how he was, what he needed. I realize that was the one thing I thought I knew, that he would be alone.” He laughed. “Yes, that cost me a lot of grief, and I never thought to question it. I prayed about that more than any one thing, I believe.”
The screen door opened and Jack came into the porch, then into the kitchen. He looked at her and shrugged. “My courage failed,” he said. “I thought if you were dressed you might be able to go late. Sorry.”
After a moment her father said, “Come here, son,” and held out his hands. Jack set his hat on the table and came to the old man and let him take his hands. “There is nothing surprising in this,” the old man said. “Not at all.” There was a quaver in his voice, so he cleared his throat. “Many people find it hard to go to church if they’ve been away for a while. I’ve seen it very often. And I’d say to them, It’s because it means something to you. The decision is important to you. As it should be! So, you see, there’s no reason at all to be disappointed. I used to say, The Sabbath is faithful. In a week she’ll be here again.” And he laughed, sadly, and patted Jack’s hands.
Jack looked down at him, tender and distant. “Next week,” he said.
Glory combed through her father’s hair and then kissed it where it was whitest and thinnest, just at the top of his head. “All done,” she said, and took the towel off from around him.
Jack said, “I don’t suppose you’d have time for another customer.”
“Well, sure.” She was surprised. They had always been so careful of him, almost afraid to touch him. There was an aloofness about him more thoroughgoing than modesty or reticence. It was feral, and fragile. It had enforced a peculiar decorum on them all, even on their mother. There was always the moment when they acknowledged this—no hugging, no roughhousing could include him. Even his father patted his shoulder tentatively, shy and cautious. Why should a child have defended his loneliness that way? But let him have his ways, their father said, or he would be gone. He’d smile at them across that distance, and the smile was sad and hard, and it meant estrangement, even when he was with them.
Her father was also surprised. He said, “Well, I’ll get myself out of your way here.” Glory helped him up from his chair. “I’ve got to give the paper a little going over, if Ames is coming. I have to be up to the minute in case he starts talking politics.” She settled him by the window, and when she came back, Jack was still standing there, waiting.
“You’re probably busy,” he said.
“Not especially. But I have to warn you, I don’t make any claims for myself as a barber. I really just pretend to cut Papa’s hair.”
Jack said, “If you could trim it a little. I should have gone to the barbershop yesterday. I might have felt a little less—disreputable.”
“This morning? You looked fine.”
“No.” He took off his jacket, and she wrapped the towel around his neck and around his shoulders. “I could feel it. It was like an itchiness under my skin. Like—scurrility. I thought it might be my clothes. I mean that they made it obvious. More obvious.”
He shied away from her touch. “You’re going to have to sit still,” she said. “Is it Ames?”
“Him, too. But I can’t really say the experience is unfamiliar. It has come over me from time to time. It rarely lasts more than a few months.” He laughed. “I shouldn’t have asked you to do this. You don’t have to.”
“Sit still.”
“You can’t commiserate. You have never felt disreputable.”
“How do you know?”
“Am I right?”
“I suppose.”
“I am right.” He said, “In case you’re wondering, scurrility seems to be contagious. Be warned. I should wear a leper bell. I suppose I do.”
“You’re imagining.”
“No, I’m only exaggerating.”
“You didn’t actually go inside the church.”
“I didn’t even cross the street.”
She put her hand under his chin and lifted his head. Had she ever touched his face before? “I can’t really see what I’m doing here. You’ll have to sit up.”
“I suppose old Ames must have seen me there. Loitering. Lurking. Eyeing his flock.” He laughed. “What a fool I am.”
“Sit still.”
“Will do.”
“I’m going to trim around your ears. I’ve got to get it even.”
He crossed his ankles and folded his hands and sat there obediently while she snipped at one side and then the other. She tipped up his face again to judge the effect. There were tears on his cheeks. She took a corner of the towel and patted them away, and he smiled at her.
“Exasperation,” he said. “I’m so tired of myself.”
HE ASKED HER TO CUT HIS HAIR SHORTER ON THE TOP SO it wouldn’t fall down on his forehead. He said, “I look like some damn gigolo.”
“No, you don’t.”
He eyed her. “How would you know?”
“I suppose I wouldn’t know.”
He nodded. “One brief stint as a dance instructor. The old ladies loved me. But I was drinking at the time, so I never really mastered the samba.”
She laughed. “That’s a sad story.”
“Yes, it is. I thought I was doing all right. But my employer frowned on, you know, improvisation. I did some very interesting steps, but you really have to be able to do them again, at least once. That was his major criticism.”
“Ah, Jack.”
“Jack indeed. I spent that winter at the library. It was such a miserable winter that I seized the opportunity to improve my mind. The old ladies loved me there, too. A gentleman fallen on hard times. I subsisted on bran muffins and white cake. These were not the same old ladies. Less rouge, no henna.”
“I’ve noticed how well-read you are.”
He nodded. “I have been a frequenter of libraries over the years. It’s the last place people think to look for you. The sort of people who come looking for you. Much better than a movie theater. So I thought I might as well read what I was supposed to have read in college. Insofar as memory served. Awfully dull work, a lot of it. I’d never have lasted a week in college if Teddy hadn’t been there to do it for me.”
“Oh.”
“He’s never mentioned that.”
“Not a word, so far as I know.”
“That precocity of his? It came from years of doing my homework. He is deeply in my debt. I would never mention this, of course. Except to you.”
“That’s good of you.”
He nodded. “We are brothers, after all.”
“But you have to sit still.”
“I’m trying.”
“Maybe calm down a little.”
“An interesting suggestion,” he said. “A really good idea.”
“I will not touch another hair of your head unless you sit still.”
“Fair enough. Just let me have the scissors and I’ll finish it up myself.”
“Not a chance, buster.”
He laughed.
“Not in the mood you’re in.”
He nodded. “You’re right to worry. I just want to be rid of this damn forelock. What do they say? Seize Fate by the forelock?”
“Time, I think. It’s Time that has the forelock.”
“Well, something’s g
ot me by the forelock. Nothing so dignified as Fate, I’m pretty sure. If thy forelock offend thee, cut it off. Sorry.”
“Then sit still.”
“Did you ever wonder what that means? If thy right eye offend thee? As if it were not part of thee? It’s true, though. I offend me—eyes, hands, history, prospects—”
“Did you have any breakfast?”
He laughed.
“You didn’t. I’m going to make you a sandwich. You’re worried about seeing Ames tonight at dinner.”
“Yes, well, it seems I’ve done as much as one man could do to make the experience embarrassing.”
“Nonsense. Really. If he did see you on the street, what of it?”
“Good point, Glory. Perspective. Just what is called for here. Would he have noticed my discomfort with myself from that distance? Well, so what? A law-abiding citizen has a perfect right to feel wretched on a public sidewalk, on a Sabbath morning. Even to pause as he does so. Near a church, too. There’s poetry in it, of a sort.”
“You don’t really know that he saw you.”
“Right you are.”
“Meat loaf or tuna salad?”
“Meat loaf. Just a little catsup.”
She started to move his jacket away from the table and he stood up and took it out of her hands, smiling. It was another sensitivity, like the privacy of that bare, orderly room upstairs. Fine. She was sorry she had forgotten. He felt for the slight weight in the left breast pocket, about which she did not let herself wonder, and put the jacket on. “I’ll shake out this towel,” he said. “Then I’ll sweep up a little.”
JACK BROUGHT HIS FATHER’S ARMCHAIR INTO THE KITCHEN so he could be present for the paring of apples and the rolling of pastry. “I have always enjoyed that,” the old man said, “the sound of a knife slicing through an apple.” He asked for a look at the pie before the top crust went on—“More fragrant than flowers!”—and for a look at it afterward, when the edge had been fluted and the vents were cut. He said, “My grandmother used to go out and gather up windfall apples. Our orchard was too young to produce much, but she’d pick them up wherever she found them and bring them home and make a pile of them out there in front of the shed, and they’d stay there till they fermented, and then she’d make them into cider. She said it was medicinal, tonic for her achy bones, she said. She’d give me a taste sometimes. It tasted terrible. But when the morning was chilly, the steam would pour off those apples like smoke. A smoldering pyre of apples. The chickens would roost on it, for the warmth.” He laughed. “The cats would sleep on it. She always had her own little projects. She’d eat kidney when she could find it. Tongue. Mutton. In spring she’d be out in the fields, along the fences, picking dandelion greens as soon as the sun was up. She’d come in with her apron full of purslane. My mother thought it was embarrassing. She’d say, ‘You’d think we didn’t feed her!’ But she always did what she wanted to do.” He talked on with the intermitted constancy of a pot simmering. Jack trimmed mushrooms he had brought in and washed them, and washed them again until he was sure there was no trace of sand left in them. He chopped the onion. The kitchen began to smell of pie baking.