“Really,” Doug said.
“My daughter lives in a slum,” Mac told him.
“Now, Daddy.”
“She makes less money than I made during the Depression and then she gives it all to this Church of the Second Rate.”
“Second Chance! And I do not; I tithe. I don’t have to do even that, if I don’t want to. It’s all in secret; we don’t believe in public collection. You act like they’re defrauding me or something.”
“They’re a church, aren’t they? A church’ll take its people for whatever it can get,” Mac said. He glanced at Doug. “Hope that doesn’t offend you.”
“Me? No, no.”
“Want to hear what I hate most about churches? They think they know the answers. I really hate that. It’s the people who don’t know the answers who are going to heaven, I tell you.”
“But!” his daughter said. “The minute you say that, you see, you yourself become a person who knows the answers.”
Mac gave Doug an exasperated look and chomped into a drumstick.
Bee was sitting on a chaise longue with her legs stretched out, sharing a plate with Daphne. She was the only guest who seemed to have remained outside the gathering. Everyone else was laughing, growing looser, circulating from group to group in a giddy, almost tipsy way. (Although of course there wasn’t a bit of alcohol; just that insipid fruit punch.) Reverend Emmett was holding forth on his inspiration for this picnic. “I felt led,” he told a circle of women. He had the breathless look of an athlete being interviewed after a triumph. “I was listening to one of our brothers a couple of weeks ago; he said he wished he could share his salvation with his parents except they never would agree to come to services. And all at once I felt led to say, ‘Why should it be services? Why not a picnic?’ ”
The women smiled and nodded and their glasses flashed. (One of them was Jessie Jordan, looking thrilled.) An extremely fat young woman threaded her way through the crowd with a plastic garbage bag, saying, “Plates? Cups? Keep your forks, though. Dessert is on its way.”
What could they serve for dessert if they didn’t believe in sugar? Fruit salad, it turned out, in little foil dishes. Thomas carried one of the trays around. When he came to Doug he said, “Grandpa? Are you having a good time?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Are you making any friends?”
“Certainly,” Doug said, and he felt a sudden wrench for the boy’s thin, anxious face with its dots of old chicken-pox scars. He took a step closer to Mac McClintock, although they’d run out of small talk some minutes ago.
The women were clearing the table now, debating leftovers.
“It seems a shame to throw all this out.”
“Won’t you take it home?”
“No, you.”
“Law, I couldn’t eat it in a month of Sundays.”
“We wouldn’t want to waste it, though.”
Reverend Emmett’s mother said, “Mr. Bedloe, we all think so highly of Brother Ian.”
“Thank you,” Doug said. This was starting to remind him of Parents’ Night at elementary school. He swallowed a chunk of canned pineapple, which surely contained sugar, didn’t it? “And you must be very proud of your son,” he added.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “I look around me and I see so many people, so many redeemed people, and I think, ‘If not for Emmett, what would they be doing?’ ”
What would they be doing? Most would be fine, Doug supposed—his own son among them. Lord, yes. But in all fairness, he supposed this church met a real need for some others. And so he looked around too, following Sister What’s-Her-Name’s eyes. What he saw, though, was not what he had expected. Instead of the festive throng he had been watching a few minutes ago, he saw a spreading circle of stillness that radiated from the table and extended now even to the children, so that a cluster of little girls in one corner allowed their jack ball to die and the boys gave up their violent ride in the glider. Even Bee seemed galvanized, an orange section poised halfway to her parted lips.
“It’s the table,” a woman told Reverend Emmett’s mother.
“The—?”
“Something’s damaged the surface.”
Reverend Emmett’s mother thrust her way through the circle of women, actually shoving one aside. Doug craned to see what they were talking about. The table was bare now and even shinier than before; someone had wiped it with a damp cloth. It looked perfect, at first glance, but then when he tilted his head to let the light slant differently he saw that the shine was marred at one end by several distinct, unshiny rings.
“Oh, no,” Reverend Emmett’s mother breathed.
Everyone started speaking at once: “Try mayonnaise.”
“Try toothpaste.”
“Rub it down with butter.”
“Quiet! Please!” Reverend Emmett’s mother said. She closed her eyes and pressed both hands to her temples.
Reverend Emmett stood near Doug, peering over the others’ heads. (Above the collar of his jaunty polo shirt, his neck looked scrawny and pathetic.) “Perhaps,” he said, “if we attempted to—”
“Shut up and let me think, Emmett!”
Silence.
“Maybe if I came back tomorrow,” she said finally, “with that cunning little man from Marx Antiques, the one who restores old … he could strip it and refinish it. Don’t you suppose? But the owners are due home Tuesday, and if he has to strip the whole … but never mind! I’ll tell him to work round the clock! Or I’ll ask if …”
More silence.
Ian said, “Was it soaped?”
Everyone turned and looked for him. It took a minute to find him; he was standing at the far end of the room.
“Seems to me the finish is some kind of polyurethane,” he said, “and if those rings are grease, well, a little soap wouldn’t do any harm and it might even—”
“Soap! Yes!” Reverend Emmett’s mother said.
She went herself to the kitchen. While she was gone, the fat young woman told Doug, “Brother Ian works with wood every day, you know.”
“Yes, I’m his father,” Doug said.
She said, “Are you really!”
Reverend Emmett’s mother came back. She held a sponge and a bottle of liquid detergent. They parted to let her through and she approached the table and bent over it. Doug was too far away to see what she did next, but he heard the sighs of relief. “Now dry it off,” someone suggested.
A woman whipped a paisley scarf from her neck and offered that, and it was accepted.
“Perfect,” someone said.
This time when he craned, Doug saw that the rings had vanished.
Right away the congregation started packing, collecting coats and baskets. Maybe they would have anyhow, but Doug thought he detected a sort of letdown in the general mood. People filed out meekly, not glancing back at the house as they left it. (Doug imagined the house thinking, Goodness, what was all THAT about?) They crossed the columned front porch with their heads lowered. Doug helped Bee into the car. “Coming?” he asked Mrs. Jordan.
“Oh, I’m going to ride in the bus,” she said. She alone seemed undampened. “Wasn’t Ian the hero, though!”
“Sure thing,” Doug said.
He watched her set off toward the bus with one hand clamping down her cartwheel hat.
Driving home, he made no attempt to stay with the others. He left the bus behind on the Beltway and breezed eastward at a speed well above the legal limit. “So now we’ve been to a Christian Fellowship Picnic,” he told Bee.
“Yes,” she said.
“I wonder if it’ll become a yearly event.”
“Probably,” she said.
Then she started talking about Danny. How did she get from the picnic to Danny? No telling. She started kneading the knuckles of her right hand, the hand that looked more swollen, and she said, “Sometimes I have the strangest feeling. I give this start and I think, ‘Why!’ I think, ‘Why, here we are! Just going about our business the same as u
sual!’ And yet so much has changed. Danny is gone, our golden boy, our first baby boy that we were so proud of, and our house is stuffed with someone else’s children. You know they all are someone else’s. You know that! And Ian is a whole different person and Claudia’s so bustling now and our lives have turned so makeshift and second-class, so second-string, so second-fiddle, and everything’s been lost. Isn’t it amazing that we keep on going? That we keep on shopping for clothes and getting hungry and laughing at jokes on TV? When our oldest son is dead and gone and we’ll never see him again and our life’s in ruins!”
“Now, sweetie,” he said.
“We’ve had such extraordinary troubles,” she said, “and somehow they’ve turned us ordinary. That’s what’s so hard to figure. We’re not a special family anymore.”
“Why, sweetie, of course we’re special,” he said.
“We’ve turned uncertain. We’ve turned into worriers.”
“Bee, sweetie.”
“Isn’t it amazing?”
It was astounding, if he thought about it. But he was careful not to.
The weather began to grow warmer, and Doug raised all the windows and lugged the summer clothing down from the attic for Bee. Across the street, the foreigners came out in their shirtsleeves to install an electric garage-door opener they’d ordered from a catalog. Doug found this amusing. A door that opened on its own, for a car that could barely move on its own! Of course he kept them company while they worked, but the door in question was solid wood and very heavy, potentially lethal, and he’d just as soon not be standing under it when calamity struck. He stayed several feet away, watching Ollie teeter on a kitchen chair as he screwed something to a rafter overhead. Then when Doug got bored he ambled inside with the two who were less mechanically inclined, leaving Ollie and Fred and John Two to carry on. He refused a beer (it was ten in the morning) but accepted a seat by the window, where a light breeze stirred the tattered paper shade.
From here the garage was invisible, since it lay even with the front of the house, but he could see Fred standing in the drive with the pushbutton control in both hands, pressing hard and then harder. Doug grinned. Fred leaned forward, his face a mask of straining muscle, and he bore down on the button with all his might. You didn’t have to set eyes on the door to know it wasn’t reacting. Meanwhile Ollie walked out to the street and climbed into the car and started the engine, and John Two removed a brick from under the left rear wheel. Optimistic of them; Doug foresaw a good deal more work before the garage would be ready for an occupant. Through the open window he heard the croupy putt-putt as the car turned in and rolled up the drive and sat idling. “In another catalog,” John One was saying, “we have seen remarkable invention: automatic yard lights! That illuminate when dark falls! We plan to send away for them immediately.”
“I can hardly wait,” Doug said, and then he twisted in his chair because he thought he noticed someone emerging from his own house, but it was only shrubbery stirring in the breeze.
He was a touch nearsighted, and the mesh of the window screen seemed more distinct to him than what lay beyond it. What lay beyond it—home—had the blocky, blurred appearance of something worked in needlepoint, each tiny square in the screen filled with a square of color. Not only was there a needlepoint house but also a needlepoint car out front, a needlepoint swing on the porch, a needlepoint bicycle in the yard. His entire little world: a cozy, old-fashioned sampler stitched in place forever.
The best thing about the foreigners, he decided, was how they thought living in America was a story they were reading, or a movie they were watching. It was happening to someone else; it wasn’t theirs. Good Lord, not even their names were theirs. Here they spoke lines invented by other people, not genuine language—not the language that simply is, with no need for translation. Here they wore blue denim costumes and inhabited a Hollywood set complete with make-believe furniture. But when they went back home, there they’d behave as seriously as anyone. They would fall in love and marry and have children and they’d agonize over their children’s problems, and struggle to get ahead, and practice their professions soberly and efficiently. What Doug was witnessing was only a brief holiday from their real lives.
He was pleased by this notion. He thought he’d examine it further later on—consider, say, what happened to those foreigners who ended up not going home. The holiday couldn’t last forever, could it? Was there a certain moment when the movie set turned solid? But for now, he didn’t bother himself with all that. He was happy just to sit here, letting some of their Time Out rub off on him.
Then Ollie turned toward the house and called, “Come see!” and for courtesy’s sake, Doug rose and followed Ray and John One to the yard. Other neighbors were here too, he realized. It looked like a party. He joined them and stood squinting in the sunshine, smiling at the foreigners’ car which sat half inside the garage and half out like a crumpled beer can, with the door bisecting it neatly across the middle.
6
Sample Rains
Every Saturday morning, the Church of the Second Chance gathered to perform good works. Sometimes they went to an ailing member’s place and helped with the cleaning or the fixing up. Sometimes they went to some stranger. Today—a warm, sunny day in early September—they met at the little house where Reverend Emmett lived with his widowed mother. Reverend Emmett was not a salaried minister. His sole means of support was a part-time counseling job at a private girls’ school. So when his house needed painting (as it sorely did now, with the old paint hanging in ribbons off the clapboards), all his flock pitched in to take care of it.
Ian brought the three children, dressed in their oldest clothes. Thomas and Daphne loved Good Works but Agatha had to be talked into coming. At fifteen she was balky and resentful, given to fits of moody despair. Ian never could decide: should he force her to participate for her own good? Or would that just alienate her further? This morning, though, he’d had an easier time than usual. He suspected her of harboring a certain furtive interest in the details of Reverend Emmett’s private life.
The house was a one-story cottage, more gray than white, lying in a modest neighborhood east of York Road. By the time Ian and the children arrived, several members of the congregation were already setting out paint cans and brushes. Mrs. Jordan (Sister Jessie now, but Ian found it hard to switch) was spreading a drop-cloth over the boxwoods, and Reverend Emmett was perched on a ladder wire-brushing the porch overhang. Ian grabbed a ladder of his own and went to take the shutters down. Reverend Emmett’s mother came out in high heels and an aqua knit dress and asked if there was any little thing she could do, but they all said no. (What could they say? Her cardigan draped her shoulders so genteelly, with the sleeves turned back a precise two inches.)
Partway through the job, someone Ian didn’t know was sent to assist him. This was a cadaverously thin man in his thirties with a narrow ribbon of beard like Abraham Lincoln’s. Ian glanced at him curiously (their church didn’t see many guests), and the man said, “I’m Eli Everjohn. Bertha King’s son-in-law; we’re visiting from over Caro Mill.”
“Ian Bedloe,” Ian said.
He could see now who the man’s wife must be—the strawberry blonde who did resemble Sister Bertha, come to think of it, scraping clapboards with the children. She seemed much too pretty for such a knobby, gangling husband. This Eli handled tools at a remove. He handled his own hands at a remove, as if operating one of those claw arrangements where you try to scoop up prizes. His task was to take the hinges off the shutters and stow them in a bucket, which should have been easy enough; but the screwdriver seemed to confound him and he let it slip so many times that the screw heads were getting mangled. “Tell you what,” Ian said, setting down a shutter. “I’ll see to this and you can have my job.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that!” the man said. “I’m scared of heights.”
Heights? The highest shutter was eight feet off the ground. But Ian didn’t point that out.
; Eli raised one arm to wipe his forehead, waving the screwdriver dangerously close to Ian’s face. “At my church, we don’t mess with such as this,” he said. “We visit door to door instead.”
“What church is that?”
“Holy House of the Gospel.”
“I guess I never heard of it.”
“We’re much stricter than you-all are,” Eli said. “We would never for instance let our women wear the raiment of men.”
Ian glanced at Eli’s wife. Sure enough, she wore a dress—a rosebudded, country-looking dress that was interfering seriously with her attempts to mount a step stool.
“We don’t play cards neither, nor dance, and we’re more mindful of the appearance of evil,” Eli said. “Why, yesterday my mother-in-law got a prescription filled at a pharmacy that sells liquor! Walked right into a place that sells liquor without a thought for how it might look! And you don’t have no missionary outreach, neither.”
Ian was starting to feel defensive. He said, “We believe our lives are our missionary outreach.”
“Now, that’s just selfish,” Eli said. “To look at someone living in the shadow of eternal damnation and not try and change his ways: that’s selfish.”
Ian spun on his heel and went to fetch another shutter.
When he came back, though, Eli resumed where he had left off. “And if we did mess with house painting, we’d have prayed beforehand,” he said. His screwdriver slashed uselessly across a screw. “We pray before each task. We believe that whatever work we undertake is God’s work; I am an arrow shot by God to do His handiwork.”
He did look something like an arrow: straight and smooth, a sharp cowlick sticking up on the crown of his head.
“What exactly is your work?” Ian asked him, hoping to change the subject.
“I’m a private detective.”
This was so unexpected that Ian laughed. Eli scowled. “What’s funny about that?” he said.
“Detective?” Ian said. “You mean, like solving murders and mysteries and such?”