Home

“HOME TO STAY, GLORY! YES!” HER FATHER SAID, AND her heart sank. He attempted a twinkle of joy at this thought, but his eyes were damp with commiseration. “To stay for a while this time!” he amended, and took her bag from her, first shifting his cane to his weaker hand. Dear God, she thought, dear God in heaven. So began and ended all her prayers these days, which were really cries of amazement. How could her father be so frail? And how could he be so recklessly intent on satisfying his notions of gentlemanliness, hanging his cane on the railing of the stairs so he could, dear God, carry her bag up to her room? But he did it, and then he stood by the door, collecting himself.

“This is the nicest room. According to Mrs. Blank.” He indicated the windows. “Cross ventilation. I don’t know. They all seem nice to me.” He laughed. “Well, it’s a good house.” The house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable. And which he never failed to acknowledge, especially when it stood over against particular sorrow. Even more frequently after their mother died he spoke of the house as if it were an old wife, beautiful for every comfort it had offered, every grace, through all the long years. It was a beauty that would not be apparent to every eye. It was too tall for the neighborhood, with a flat face and a flattened roof and peaked brows over the windows. “Italianate,” her father said, but that was a guess, or a rationalization. In any case, it managed to look both austere and pretentious despite the porch her father had had built on the front of it to accommodate the local taste for socializing in the hot summer evenings, and which had become overgrown by an immense bramble of trumpet vines. It was a good house, her father said, meaning that it had a gracious heart however awkward its appearance. And now the gardens and the shrubbery were disheveled, as he must have known, though he rarely ventured beyond the porch.

Not that they had been especially presentable even while the house was in its prime. Hide-and-seek had seen to that, and croquet and badminton and baseball. “Such times you had!” her father said, as if the present slight desolation were confetti and candy wrappers left after the passing of some glorious parade. And there was the oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung its imponderable branches out over the road and across the yard, branches whose girths were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa. There had once been four swings suspended from those branches, announcing to the world the fruitfulness of their household. The oak tree flourished still, and of course there had been and there were the apple and cherry and apricot trees, the lilacs and trumpet vines and the day lilies. A few of her mother’s irises managed to bloom. At Easter she and her sisters could still bring in armfuls of flowers, and their father’s eyes would glitter with tears and he would say, “Ah yes, yes,” as if they had brought some memento, these flowers only a pleasant reminder of flowers.

Why should this staunch and upright house seem to her so abandoned? So heartbroken? The eye of the beholder, she thought. Still, seven of her father’s children came home as often as they could manage to, and telephoned, and sent notes and gifts and crates of grapefruit. Their own children, from the time they could grasp a crayon and scrawl, were taught to remember Grandpa, then Great-grandpa. Parishioners and their children and grandchildren looked in on her father with a faithfulness that would have taxed his strength if the new minister had not hinted at the problem. And there was Ames, her father’s alter ego, in whom he had confided so long and so utterly that he was a second father to them all, not least in the fact of knowing more about them than was entirely consistent with their comfort. Sometimes they made their father promise not to tell anyone, by which he knew they meant Reverend Ames, since he was far too discreet to repeat any confidence, except in the confessional of Ames’s stark bachelor kitchen, where, they suspected, such considerations were forgotten. And what was their father not to tell? How they informed on Jack, telling him what Jack had said, what Jack had done or seemed inclined to do.

“I have to know,” their father said. “For his sake.” So they told on their poor scoundrel brother, who knew it, and was irritated and darkly amused, and who kept them informed or misinformed and inspired urgent suspicions among them which they felt they had to pass on, whatever their misgivings, to spare their father having to deal with the sheriff again. They were not the kind of children to carry tales. They observed a strict code against it among themselves, in fact, and they made an exception of Jack only because they were afraid to do otherwise. “Will they put him in jail?” they asked one another miserably when the mayor’s son found his hunting rifle in their barn. If they had only known, they could have returned it and spared their father surprise and humiliation. At least with a little warning he could have composed himself, persuaded himself to feel something less provocative than pure alarm.

But no, they did not put him in jail. Jack, standing beside his father, made yet another apology and agreed to sweep the steps of the city hall every morning for a week. And he did leave the house early every morning. Leaves and maple wings accumulated at city hall until the week was over and the mayor swept them up. No. His father would always intercede for him. The fact that his father was his father usually made intercession unnecessary. And that boy could apologize as fluently as any of the rest of the Boughtons could say the Apostles’ Creed.

A decade of betrayals, minor and major, was made worse by awareness on every side that they were all constantly alert to transgression and its near occasion, and made worse still by the fact that Jack never repaid them in kind, though this may only have been because their own mischief was too minor to interest him. To say they shared a bad conscience about Jack to this day would be to overstate the matter a little. No doubt he had his own reasons for staying away all these years, refusing all contact with them. Assuming, please God, he was alive. It was easy to imagine in retrospect that Jack might have tired of it all, even though they knew he made a somber game of it. Sometimes he had seemed to wish he could simply trust a brother, a sister. They remembered that from time to time he had been almost candid, had spoken almost earnestly. Then he would laugh, but that might have been embarrassment.

They were attentive to their father all those years later, in part because they were mindful of his sorrow. And they were very kind to one another, and jovial, and fond of recalling good times and looking through old photographs so that their father would laugh and say, “Yes, yes, you were quite a handful.” All this might have been truer because of bad conscience, or, if not that, of a grief that felt like guilt. Her good, kind, and jovial siblings were good, kind, and jovial consciously and visibly. Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all, though it was meant only to compensate for Jack, who was so conspicuously not good as to cast a shadow over their household. They were as happy as their father could wish, even happier. Such gaiety! And their father laughed at it all, danced with them to the Victrola, sang with them around the piano. Such a wonderful family they were! And Jack, if he was there at all, looked on and smiled and took no part in any of it.

Now, as adults, they were so careful to gather for holidays that Glory had not seen the house empty and quiet in years, since she was a girl. Even when the others had all gone off to school her mother was there, and her father was still vigorous enough to make a little noise in the house with coming and going, singing, grumbling. “I don’t know why he has to slam that door!” her mother would say, when he was off to tend to some pastoral business or to play checkers with Ames. He almost skipped down the steps. The matter of Jack and the girl and her baby stunned him, winded him, but he was still fairly robust, full of purpose. Then, after his frailty finally overwhelmed him, and after their mother died, there was still the throng of family, the bantering and bickering child cousins who distracted and disrupted adult conversation often enough to ward off inquiry into the specifics of her own situation. Still teaching, still engaged to be married, yes, long engagements are best. Twice the fiancé had actually come home with her, had shaken hands all around and smiled under their tactful scrutiny. He had been in their house. He could stay only briefly, but he had met her father, who claimed to like him well enough, and this had eased suspicions a little. Theirs and hers. Now here she was alone with poor old Papa, sad old Papa, upon whose shoulder much of Presbyterian Gilead above the age of twenty had at some time wept. No need to say anything, and no hope of concealing anything either.

The town seemed different to her, now that she had returned there to live. She was thoroughly used to Gilead as the subject and scene of nostalgic memory. How all the brothers and sisters except Jack had loved to come home, and how ready they always were to leave again. How dear the old place and the old stories were to them, and how far abroad they had scattered. The past was a very fine thing, in its place. But her returning now, to stay, as her father said, had turned memory portentous. To have it overrun its bounds this way and become present and possibly future, too — they all knew this was a thing to be regretted. She rankled at the thought of their commiseration.

Most families had long since torn down their outbuildings and sold off their pastures. Smaller houses in later styles had sprung up between them in sufficient numbers to make the old houses look increasingly out of place. The houses of Gilead had once stood on small farmsteads with garden patches and berry patches and henhouses, with woodsheds, rabbit hutches, and barns for the cow or two, the horse or two. These were simply the things life required. It was the automobile that changed that, her father said. People didn’t have to provide for themselves the way they once did. It was a loss — there was nothing like chicken droppings to make flowers thrive.

Boughtons, who kept everything, had kept their land, their empty barn, their useless woodshed, their unpruned orchard and horseless pasture. There on the immutable terrain of their childhood her brothers and sisters could and did remember those years in great detail, their own memories, but more often the pooled memory they saw no special need to portion out among them. They looked at photographs and went over the old times and laughed, and their father was well pleased.

Boughton property lay behind the house in a broad strip that spanned two blocks, now that the town had grown and spread enough to have blocks. For years a neighbor — they still called him Mr. Trotsky because Luke, home from college, had called him that — planted alfalfa on half of it, and her father sometimes tried to find words for his irritation about this. “If he would just ask me,” he said. She was too young at the time to understand the alfalfa putsch, and she was in college when she began to see what the old stories meant, that they were really the stirring and smoldering of old fires that had burned furiously elsewhere. It pleased her to think that Gilead was part of the world she read about, and she wished she had known Mr. Trotsky and his wife, but old as they were, they had abandoned Gilead to its folly in a fit of indignation about which no one knew the particulars, just at the end of her sophomore year.

The land that was the battlefield would have been unused if the neighbor had not farmed it, and alfalfa was good for the soil, and the joke and perhaps the fact was that the neighbor, who seemed otherwise unemployed and who railed against the cash nexus, donated his crop to a rural cousin, who in exchange donated to him a certain amount of money. In any case, her father could never finally persuade himself that objection was called for. The neighbor was also an agnostic and probably spoiling for an ethical argument. Her father seemed to feel he could not risk losing another one of those, after the embarrassing episode when he tried to prevent the town from putting a road through his land, on no better grounds than that his father would have opposed it, and his grandfather. He had realized this during a long night when his belief in the rightness of his position dissipated like mist, under no real scrutiny. There was simply the moment, a little after 10:00 p.m., when the realization came, and then the seven hours until dawn. His case looked no better by daylight, so he wrote a letter to the mayor, simple and dignified, making no allusion to the phrase “grasping hypocrite,” which he had thought he heard the mayor mutter after him as he walked away from a conversation he had considered pleasant enough. He told all of them about this at the dinner table and used it more than once as a sermon illustration, since he did devoutly believe that when the Lord gave him moral instruction it was not for his use only.

Each spring the agnostic neighbor sat his borrowed tractor with the straight back and high shoulders of a man ready to be challenged. Unsociable as he was, he called out heartily to passersby like a man with nothing to hide, intending, perhaps, to make the Reverend Boughton know, and know the town at large knew, too, that he was engaged in trespass. This is the very act against which Christians leveraged the fate of their own souls, since they were, if they listened to their own prayers, obliged to forgive those who trespassed against them.

Her father lived in a visible state of irritation until the crop was in, but he was willing to concede the point. He knew the neighbor was holding him up to public embarrassment year after year, seed time and harvest, not only to keep fresh the memory of his ill-considered opposition to the road, but also to be avenged in some small degree for the whole, in his agnostic view unbroken, history of religious hypocrisy.

Once, five of the six younger Boughtons — Jack was elsewhere — played a joyless and determined game of fox and geese in the tender crop of alfalfa, the beautiful alfalfa, so green it was almost blue, so succulent that a mist stood on its tiny leaves even in the middle of the day. They were not conscious of the craving for retaliation until Dan ran out into the field to retrieve a baseball, and Teddy ran after him, and Hope and Gracie and Glory after them. Somebody shouted fox and geese, and they all ran around to make the great circle, and then to make the diameters, breathless, the clover breaking so sweetly under their feet that they repented of the harm they were doing even as they persisted in it. They slid and fell in the vegetable mire and stained their knees and their hands, until the satisfactions of revenge were outweighed in their hearts by the knowledge that they were deeply in trouble. They played on until they were called to supper. When they trooped into the kitchen in a reek of child sweat and bruised alfalfa, their mother made a sharp sound in her throat and called, “Robert, look what we have here.”

The slight satisfaction in their father’s face confirmed what they dreaded, that he saw the opportunity to demonstrate Christian humility in such an unambiguous form that the neighbor could feel it only as rebuke.

He said, “Of course you will have to apologize.” He looked almost stern, only a little amused, only a little gratified. “You had better get it over with,” he said. As they knew, an apology freely offered would have much more effect than one that might seem coerced by the offended party, and since the neighbor was a short-tempered man, the balance of relative righteousness could easily tip against them. So the five of them walked by way of the roads to the other side of the block. Somewhere along the way Jack caught up and walked along with them, as if penance must always include him.

They knocked at the door of the small brown house and the wife opened it. She seemed happy enough to see them, and not at all surprised. She asked them in, mentioning with a kind of regret the smell of cooking cabbage. The house was sparsely furnished and crowded with books, magazines, and pamphlets, the arrangements having a provisional feeling though the couple had lived there for years. There were pictures pinned to the walls of bearded, unsmiling men and women with rumpled hair and rimless glasses.

Teddy said, “We’re here to apologize.”

She nodded. “You trampled the field. I know that. He knows, too. I’ll tell him you have come.” She spoke up the stairs, perhaps in a foreign language, listened for a minute to nothing audible, and came back to them. “To destroy is a great shame,” she said. “To destroy for no reason.”

Teddy said, “That is our field. I mean, my father does own it.”

“Poor child!” she said. “You know no better than this, to speak of owning land when no use is made of it. Owning land just to keep it from others. That is all you learn from your father the priest! Mine, mine, mine! While he earns his money from the ignorance of the people!” She waved a slender arm and a small fist. “Telling his foolish lies again and again while everywhere the poor suffer!”

They had never heard anyone speak this way before, certainly not to them or about them. She stared at them to drive her point home. There was convincing rage and righteousness in her eyes, watery blue as they were, and Jack laughed.

“Oh yes,” she said, “I know who you are. The boy thief, the boy drunkard! While your father tells the people how to live! He deserves you!” Then, “Why so quiet? You have never heard the truth before?”

Daniel, the oldest of them, said, “You shouldn’t talk that way. If you were a man, I’d probably have to hit you.”

“Hah! Yes, you good Christians, you come into my house to threaten violence! I will report you to the sheriff. There is a little justice, even in America!” She waved her fist again.

Jack laughed. He said, “It’s all right. Let’s go home.”

And she said, “Yes, listen to your brother. He knows about the sheriff!”

So they trooped out the door, which was slammed after them, and filed home in the evening light absorbing what they had heard. They agreed that the woman was crazy and her husband, too. Still, vengefulness stirred in them, and there was talk of breaking windows, letting air out of tires. Digging a pit so large and well concealed that the neighbor and his tractor would both fall in. And there would be spiders at the bottom, and snakes. And when he yelled for help they would lower a ladder with the rungs sawed through so that they would break under his weight. Ah, the terrible glee among the younger ones, while the older ones absorbed the fact that they had heard their family insulted and had done nothing about it.

They walked into their own kitchen, and there were their mother and father, waiting to hear their report. They told them that they didn’t speak to the man, but the woman had yelled at them and had called their father a priest.

“Well,” their mother said, “I hope you were polite.”

They shrugged and looked at each other. Gracie said, “We just sort of stood there.”

Jack said, “She was really mean. She even said you deserved me.”

Her father’s eyes stung. He said, “Did she say that? Well now, that was kind of her. I will be sure to thank her. I hope I do deserve you, Jack. All of you, of course.” That tireless tenderness of his, and Jack’s unreadable quiet in the face of it.

Mr. Trotsky planted potatoes and squash the next year, corn the year after that. A nephew of the rural cousin came to help him with his crop, and in time was given the use of the field and built a small house on one corner of it and brought a wife there, and they had children. More beds of marigolds, another flapping clothesline, another roof pitched under heaven to shelter human hope and frailty. The Boughtons tacitly ceded all claim.

WITHIN WEEKS OF HER RETURN GLORY AND HER FATHER had settled into a tolerable life of its kind. The housekeeper, Mrs. Blank, who was a number of years older than her father, was happy to retire, now that she knew she was leaving the Reverend in good hands. Customary attentions to her father by neighbors and parishioners were bated, stealthy when they happened at all. Glory could feel how miraculous and temporary the cessation was. It was as if some signal had been given, as if a sea had parted and the waters were standing back like walls. Once when they were children her sister Grace, pondering at the dinner table, said she did not know how such a thing could have happened, that water could simply stand still like that, and Glory, who had turned this question over in her mind, said it would have been like aspic. She had not meant to explain the miracle, only to describe its effect. But everyone at the table laughed at her. Jack, too. She had sometimes felt he took more pity on her youth than the others did. So she noticed and remembered that he laughed. All the same, it had seemed to her, laugh as they might, that sticking a finger into a wall of stopped water could not differ essentially from sticking it into a molded salad — which she had occasion to do, being a minister’s daughter, any number of times. She was caught at it more than once. But she thought it was inevitable that out of all those multitudes one Israelite or Egyptian must have made the same experiment, and that touching a fish in those circumstances could not differ greatly from touching a slice of banana. What a strange thing to remember. It came with being home.

Every day she swept and straightened — light work, since the house was virtually uninhabited. She did what little her father required to make him comfortable. He sat at the window, he sat in the porch, he ate crackers and drank milk and studied the newspaper and The Saturday Evening Post. She read them, too, and whatever else she could find. Sometimes she listened to the radio, if there was an opera or a drama, or if she just wanted to hear a human voice. The big old radio grew warm and gave off an odor like rancid hair tonic. It reminded her of a nervous salesman. And it made a sullen hiss and sputter if she moved away from it. It was the kind of bad companion loneliness makes welcome. A lesson in the success of clumsy courtship, the tenacity of bad marriage. She blamed and forgave it for its obsession with “The Flight of the Bumblebee” and Ravel’s “Boléro.” To appease the radio she sat beside it while she read. She even thought of taking up needlework. She might try knitting again, bigger, simpler things. Her first attempts were a baby sweater and bonnet. Nothing had come of that. It had alarmed her mother, though. She said, “Glory, you take things too much to heart.” That was what they always said about her. Hope was serene, Luke was generous, Teddy was brilliant, Jack was Jack, Grace was musical, and Glory took everything to heart. She wished they had told her how to do otherwise, what else she should have done.

She wept easily. This did not mean that she felt things more deeply than others did. It certainly did not mean that she was fragile or sentimental or ready to bring that sodden leverage to bear on the slights that came with being the baby of the family. When she was four she had wept for three days over the death of a dog in a radio play. Every time she teared up a little, her brothers and sisters remembered how she had sobbed over Heidi and Bambi and the Babes in the Woods. Which they read to her dozens of times. As if there were any other point to those stories after all but to elicit childish grief. It really was irritating, and there was nothing to be done about it. She had learned to compose her face, so that from a distance she would not necessarily seem to be weeping, and then they made a little game of catching her at it — tears, they would say. Ah, tears. She thought how considerate it would have been of nature to allow the venting of feeling through the palm of a hand or even the sole of a foot.

When she was small she had confused, in fact fused, the words “secret” and “sacred.” In church you must not even whisper. There are words you must never say. There are things that will be explained to you when you are old enough to understand. She had whispered compulsively, in church and out. Her big sisters would say, This is a secret. You must never ever tell, promise you’ll never tell. Cross your heart. Then they would murmur in her ear something meaningless or obvious or entirely untrue and watch her suffer with the burden of it for ten or fifteen minutes. The joke was that she could not keep a secret, that she would whisper behind a cupped hand into the first obliging ear whatever remained of the nonsense confided to her. But “hope to die” and “if I die before I wake” also became linked in her mind, aware as she was that she broke her vows constantly. Once, when she was still too young for school and Jack ought to have been in school but was not, she saw him out in the orchard, and she went to him, weeping with what had become an unbearable fear. He looked at her and smiled and said, “Damnit, kid, grow up.” Then he said, “Are you going to tell on me? Are you going to get me in trouble?” She did not. That was the first secret she kept. It seemed to her she had learned honor then, perhaps simply because she was of an age and predisposed. Perhaps in the whole of her life she had never really distinguished the secret from the sacred, and loved tact and discretion better than she should. Well, in all this she may only have been a Boughton, after all.

But at thirty-eight she was still wary of country songs and human interest stories. She was wary indeed of certain thoughts, certain memories, because her father could not bear her unhappiness. His face fell when he saw any sign of it. So she did not permit herself to brood, strong as the urge was sometimes. It would make him miserable.

Her parents had watched her and worried over her in the days of what were, insofar as they might ever know, Jack’s crowning disgrace, and they considered her feelings with a seriousness that interested her. Her feelings were largely untried then. She was about to enter her sixteenth year of gentle life in a quiet place, which meant only that her passions and convictions were uncomplicated and potent, that they strove together like figures in allegory. Truth must be stalwart, Loyalty absolute, Generosity unstinting, while Appearance and Convention were children of the giant Hypocrisy and must be put to flight. She had not had time or occasion to think far into the implications of loyalty or generosity. She really had no idea what she was thinking about, sheltered as she was. How it had happened that Jack had a child, for example. It seemed to her to be a fairly delightful thing, though this was an opinion she kept to herself. She knew from books and also from fragments of rumors on the same general subject that she was wrong to take so simple a view of the matter. Her parents really were the last people on earth to weep and whisper over the birth of a grandchild, and she knew she needed to find some way to take their sorrow into account. So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this was sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensationalism. But the chain of transmission was broken when Grace left to live with Hope in Minneapolis, and her parents had forgotten the problem, having so long depended on their children to startle one another with this information.

Her parents were, in their way, fully as innocent as she was, having put aside their innocence on practical grounds, not in the belief that it had been discredited, but because they accepted the terms of life in this world as a treaty to be preferred to conflict, though by no means ideal in itself. Experience had taught them that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness. They had learned that excessive devotion to even the highest things seemed and probably was sanctimonious, and that the one sufficient measure of excess was that look of annoyance, confirmed in themselves by a twinge of embarrassment, that meant the line had been crossed. They recognized grace in the readiness of the darkest sinner to take a little joke, a few self-effacing words, as an apology. This was something her father in particular, who was morally strenuous but sociable, too, had learned to appreciate cordially. Truly there were perils on every side in the pastoral life, and her father was wary of them all. With the dreadful rigor of an upright child Glory had noted and pondered his accommodations, however minor or defensible. This was in part an effect of her finding herself in a suddenly quiet house with only her parents to think about.

Still, Glory’s view of things had an authority for them precisely because it was naïve. A baby is a splendid gift of God, after all. Her father had never christened one without saying those words. And if Jack had behaved disgracefully toward its mother—“She is so young, so young!” her father whispered — this did not alter the basic fact that the infant was a child of the family, deserving of welcome and embrace. Glory had really not understood why misery was any important part of her parents’ response to the situation. The girl could not have been much younger than Glory herself, and she was fairly sure she would not have minded having a baby. Imbecile as she was then with loneliness and youth, and far as she was from understanding why her father should feel that arrogance had a part in it all, or cruelty. Or why he whispered those words with such bitter emphasis. Every Sunday when the boys were home her father would stand at the front of the church, waiting for the pews to fill. Her brothers would file in, three of them, and her father would wait a moment more, watching the doorway, glancing up at the balcony. Then his head would fall to one side, regret and forgiveness in one gesture. Sometimes, rarely, he would nod to himself and smile, and then they knew that Jack was there, and that the sermon would be about joy and the goodness of God no matter what the text was. She had never heard her father say such hard words — the cruelty of it! the arrogance! — and she had never seen him brood and mutter for days at a time, as if he were absorbing the fact that some transgressions are beyond a mere mortal’s capacity to forgive. How often those same hard, necessary words had come to her mind.

But in those days their lives were lived so publicly, it had seemed to her they might as well just acknowledge what everyone would have known in any case. She had never had any reason to think her parents had other intentions, but she might have helped them, she thought, by giving them herself to worry about. They both believed firmly in the power of example. This would be a great act of moral instruction. They must act consistently with their faith. They must consider all its applications in the present circumstance. Yes! She watched as her father mustered his courage. “The Lord has been very good to me!” he said, reminding himself that his obligations were correspondingly great, in fact limitless. This was a thought he always found exhilarating. Jack had left his car keys on the piano and taken the train back to college. She was almost old enough to drive, and she was fairly sure she knew how it was done. So she took her father out into the country to see that baby. It was disturbing to remember how happy she had been then, in the very middle of his deepest grief.

It was being home that made her remember, being alone in all that silence, or sitting beside the irksome radio trying to read the book she had chosen as possibly least unreadable among the hundreds of old books in the scores of shelves and bookcases that narrowed the overfurnished rooms. “Saber Dance,” of course. “The 1812 Overture.” This is Gabriel Heatter with the news. Her father would rouse himself from time to time for a game of checkers or Monopoly. This was for her sake. In her childhood, when she was kept home in bed by chicken pox, measles, and mumps, or by the flu, her father came up to her room with a bag of mints and a bottle of ginger ale and the Monopoly set, and played a brief and hilarious game with her, pulling get-out-of-jail cards from his sleeves, losing his token in the bedspread and finding it behind her ear. Now from time to time he cheated for her benefit. He would slyly stop just short of landing on Boardwalk, when he had plenty of money to buy it and already owned Park Place. It made her sad. On the same grounds he was not to be trusted with the bank.

When he sat on the porch in the afternoons she worked in the garden. Those hours passed pleasantly. She cleared out patches she could break up well enough to plant with peas and lettuce.

But oh, the evenings were long. I am thirty-eight years old, she would say to herself, as she tidied up after supper. I have a master’s degree. I taught high school English for thirteen years. I was a good teacher. What have I done with my life? What has become of it? It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents’ house. Of course plain, respectable dresses hung in her closet, suitable for the classroom. There were the cardigans and low-heeled shoes of that other life. No reason not to wear them.

She dreamed sometimes that she was back in school. She was a child pretending to teach, or a teacher who realized to her embarrassment that she was turning into a child. In both dreams she had no idea what she was talking about and invented desperately. She sensed smirking and resentment in the room, murmurs and odd looks. The students would all walk out, ignoring her, and there was nothing to say to them to make them stay. Such humiliation! She would shout over the laughter and the clash of locker doors and wake herself up in crickety, black Gilead. Better in its way than waking up in Des Moines, knowing she would be in her classroom again when morning came. Her dreams reminded her that she did not altogether love teaching, though by daylight she thought she did. That stab in the heart she felt when she woke, and the panicky doubt that her life was in her grasp, not fraud or failure, not entirely — that was a brief misery and one she could set aside by putting the light on and reading for a while. She used to ask herself, What more could I wish? But she always distrusted that question, because she knew there were limits to her experience that precluded her knowing what there was to be wished.

If she had been a man she might have chosen the ministry. That would have pleased her father. Luke had followed him, but only after it became clear that Dan would not. Jack was by then Jack, and Teddy was too young to shoulder anyone’s hopes, however willingly he might have made the attempt. She seemed always to have known that, to their father’s mind, the world’s great work was the business of men, of gentle, serious men well versed in Scripture and eloquent at prayer, or, in any case, ordained in some reasonably respectable denomination. They were the stewards of ultimate things. Women were creatures of a second rank, however pious, however beloved, however honored. This was not a thing her father would ever have said to her. It was Hope who told her that clergy were only and always men, excepting Aimee Semple McPherson, who proved the rule. But she knew how things were before she was told. No bright child could fail to know. None of this had mattered much through all the years of her studies and her teaching, but now, in the middle of any night, it was part of the loneliness she felt, as if the sense that everything could have been otherwise were a palpable darkness. Darkness visible. That was Milton.

Those grown children had, almost all of them, bent their heads over whatever work she gave them, even though their bodies were awkward and restless with the onset of adulthood, fate creeping through their veins and glands and follicles like a subtle poison, making them images of their parents and strangers to themselves. There was humor in it of a kind that might raise questions about the humorist.

Why do we have to read poetry? Why “Il Penseroso”? Read it and you’ll know why. If you still don’t know, read it again. And again. Some of them took the things she said to heart, as she had done once when they were said to her. She was helping them assume their humanity. People have always made poetry, she told them. Trust that it will matter to you. The pompous clatter of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” moved some of them to tears, and then she had talked to them about bad poetry. Who gets to say what’s good and what’s bad? I do, she said. For the moment. You don’t have to agree, but listen. Some of them did listen. This seemed to her to be perfectly miraculous. No wonder she dreamed at night that she had lost any claim to their attention. What claim did she have? Could it be that certain of them lifted their faces to her so credulously because what she told them was true, that they were human beings, keepers of lore, makers of it? That it was really they who made demands of her? Her father taught his children, never doubting, that there was a single path from antiquity to eternity. Learn the psalms and ponder the ways of the early church. Know what must be known. Ancient fathers taught their ancient children, who taught their ancient children, these very things. Puritan Milton with his pagan muses. It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself? That was her father humming “Old Hundred” while he shaved. It was John Keats in Cheapside, traveling his realms of gold. No need to be a minister. To be a teacher was an excellent thing. Those vacant looks might be inwardness. The young might have been restless around any primal fire where an elder was saying, Know this. Certainly they would have been restless. Their bodies were consumed with the business of lengthening limbs, sprouting hair, fitting themselves for procreation. Even so, sometimes she felt a silence in the room deeper than ordinary silence. How could she have abandoned that life? For what had she abandoned it?

Her supposed former fiancé of so many years had told her in a letter that he knew to the penny how much he owed her. He had kept some sort of ledger. He must have kept it from the very beginning, from the time he took her to dinner and then realized he had forgotten his wallet. She blushed when she thought of it. He said he would pay it all back to the last penny, as soon as his situation began to improve. He said, “It will take some time to repay you in full, since the total is quite large.” What horrible, vindictive little streak of honesty had moved him to keep a record of these “debts”? She had not kept anything like an account, had never thought of such a thing, had never even felt she was giving anything away. None of it mattered now. To have been such a fool mattered. In that letter he had said, “I am sorry if I seem to have misled you.” She could not let herself remember the lonely pleasures she found in living so simply, actually enjoying the renunciations and the economies that would some time make possible — what? — ordinary happiness. The kind of happiness she saw in the luncheonette, passed in the street.

She knew there had to be Shakespeare and Dickens around the house, Mark Twain had to be somewhere. Kipling was on the dresser in Luke and Teddy’s room, as he always was, but she hated Kipling. Finally she asked her father what had become of the books she liked to read; he made a phone call, and within two weeks six boxes arrived from six addresses, full of the good old books and with some sober and respectable new novels included, too, Andersonville, The High and the Mighty, Something of Value. She put ten of them in a stack beside the radio. At this time she could decide nothing about her life. She did not want to think about her life. She opened Andersonville. Her father told her, “The fellow that wrote that is from Iowa. I forget what town. He’s famous now. I forget his name.” She knew about MacKinley Kantor of Webster City. Andersonville was long and notoriously sad. It had broken the heart of greater Des Moines. She decided she would read it to the end. She could weep without upsetting her father.

Then one day the mail came, a bill or two, a note to her from Hope, and a letter addressed to her father, who had come into the kitchen for a glass of water. “This letter is from Jack,” he said. “I know his hand. This is his hand.” He sat down and placed the letter on the table in front of him. “Quite a surprise,” he said softly, gruffly. Then he was so still she was afraid he might be having a spell of some kind, a stroke. But he was only praying. He put out his hand and touched a corner of the envelope. “I believe I’ll be needing a handkerchief, Glory, if you don’t mind. They’re in that top right-hand drawer.” And there they were, in a neat stack, large and substantial. He had always carried a beautiful handkerchief, since in his line of work he never knew when it might be needed. She brought him one, and he wiped his face with it. “So we know he’s alive. That’s really something.”

She thought, Dear God, what if he’s wrong? What if this is a mistake brought on by yearning and old age?

She said, “Do you mind if I look at it?”

“Well, it’s a letter from your brother! Of course you’ll want to look at it! Thoughtless of me!”

She took it up. It was slight, no more than a slip of paper, in an envelope with a St. Louis return address and postmark. Reverend Robert Boughton in a small, distinct, graceful hand. “Should I open it?”

“Oh no, my dear, I’m sorry, but I’d better do that myself, in case there’s anything confidential in it. He might appreciate, you know, consideration for his privacy. I don’t know. At least he’s alive.” He wiped his eyes.

She put the envelope down on the table, and the old man laid his hand beside it. From time to time he tipped it up to look at the writing on it, and the postmark. “Yes, it’s from Jack, all right. A letter from Jack.”

She thought he might be waiting for her to leave the room, and yet she was afraid to leave. He might be disappointed, or the note might really be from Jack, but upsetting somehow, written from a ward for the chronically vexatious, the terminally remiss. From jail, for heaven’s sake. He had better have a good reason for rousing these overwhelming emotions in his father. He had better have a good excuse for exposing the old man to the possibility of inexpressible disappointment. Even if he was dead.

“Glory, I think you will have to help me. I was waiting till I got a little steadier, but I guess that’s not going to happen. You’ll want to use a penknife. We don’t want to damage that return address.”

She found a paring knife and sliced the envelope, removed a folded slip of paper, and handed it to him. He cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. He found the handkerchief in his lap and set it on the table. “Let’s just see what he has to say.” And he opened the note and read it. “Well. He says he’s coming home. He says here, ‘Dear Father, I will be coming to Gilead in a week or two. I will stay for a while if that is not inconvenient. Respectfully, Jack.’ Inconvenient! What an idea! We’ll have to write to him. I’ll do it myself, but I have to rest a little first. I don’t think I could hold a pen right now.” He laughed. “This is quite a day!” he said. “I wasn’t always sure I’d live to see a day like this.” She helped him into his chair in the bedroom, slipped off his shoes, and covered him with a quilt. She kissed his forehead. He kept the letter in his hand. He said, “Ames will want to know.”

So while he napped, prayed, composed himself, set aside grievances and doubts, suffered the pangs of anticipation, sought footing in the general blessedness of his life for a posture of heroic and fatherly grace, and perhaps skirted dangerously near rupture of some part of the sensorium given over to grand emotion — her father’s silences were never merely silences — she walked over to Ames’s house.

The place looked exactly as it always had, but swept, polished. It was built in the style of any modest farmhouse in that region, with nothing in the way of ornament about it except the spindle shape of the porch pillars and bannisters. For all the years of her childhood old Ames had seemed to live in his study on the second floor. At night she always saw light in that window, and in the daytime when she was sent with a note or a book for him she stood in the kitchen and waited until he heard her voice, finished a paragraph he was writing or reading and came down the stairs. The kitchen had smelled of cleanliness, never of use, as though an essence emerged from the linoleum to fill a vacuum left by the idle stove and the empty pantry.

Now there were geraniums in the kitchen window and there was something like glee in the whiteness and crispness of the kitchen curtains. New gardens had been planted along the walk. The Boughtons had all come home for Ames’s wedding, except for Jack, of course. It was the last wedding at which her father would ever officiate, he said, and the most joyful of them all. He relented a few times, married six or seven other couples he felt a special affection for. He had expected to marry Glory, but she had sent a letter explaining that, on impulse, just to get things settled, they had gone to a justice of the peace. Her father performed a few more baptisms besides those of his own grandchildren. Still, he called the Ameses’ marriage the culmination of his pastorate. Lila, the improbable bride, in her yellow satin suit and pillbox hat, had stood smiling with gentle embarrassment, tolerating their photographs, humoring them. Her arms were full of roses she had grown and gathered herself. Her roses were her particular pride. They still teased her because she had refused to toss her bouquet. Like his parsonage, old Ames seemed to have been transformed without being changed. Now he was not only fatherly but a father, not only courteous but squire to a wife who seemed to be always aware of his courtesies to her and to be wryly touched by them.

He was sitting on the porch swing reading a book, but when he saw Glory coming he eased himself up and stood waiting for her with the gallant deference he showed to anyone over the age of twelve, and by which she had always felt flattered. Now she sensed a kind of condolence in it, though she tried not to. She tried not to wonder what he knew.

“Splendid afternoon,” he said. “How are you? How is your father? Would you like to sit down?”

She said, “We’re fine, I think. I can only stay for a minute, though. This morning Papa got a letter from Jack. He wanted me to tell you. I mean from Johnny.”

“Oh yes. A letter from Jack.”

“He says he’s coming home.”

“Hm. Does he. How is your father taking this?”

“It’s hard for him, I think. To know what to expect. Jack has never been the most reliable person in the world.”

Silence again. “Did he say when he was coming? Did he say why?”

“He said he would come in the next week or two. That’s about all.”

“Well, that’s wonderful.” He said this without a trace of conviction. “Would your father feel up to a visit this afternoon?”

“I think he would.”

As he followed her down the walk to open the gate for her, he said, “It might be best if he doesn’t get his hopes too high.” Then they laughed. He said, “Well, there’s not much we can do about that.” But Glory had her own hopes, which were also too high — that this visit would happen at all, that it would be interesting, and that Jack would not remember her as the least tolerable, the most officious, the least to be trusted of his brothers and sisters. She thought and hoped he might hardly remember her.

WHEN SHE CAME HOME SHE FOUND THAT HER FATHER had written his letter, addressed it, and sealed it. “Yes, I put a little check in there just to be sure. Travel is expensive these days. I hope it won’t offend him, but I thought it was a way to emphasize how eager we are to see him. I thought it was a good idea on balance. I’ll take it out if you think I ought to—”

“He won’t be offended, Papa. You’ve always sent little checks.”

“Well, I just worry he might not remember, you know, my eccentricities. I should have waited so you could take a look at what I wrote. I just thought we’d want to get it in the mail. He’ll be waiting to hear. If it is ‘not inconvenient.’ Imagine! We certainly don’t want him to worry about that!”

“I’m sure he was just being polite.”

“Very polite. Yes. He might have been writing to a stranger. But here I am finding fault.”

She kissed his cheek. “I’ll take this to the post office.”

“I believe it is quite legible. The address is clear enough, I think.” He said, “I worried about that, the way my hands were trembling there for a while. I should have let you look it over. I hope he’ll be able to read it.”

“It will be just fine,” she said. But she knew he did not want any wholly sufficient, entirely persuasive assurance. If he was disappointed and Jack did not come home, he could tell himself that the fault was his own, taking the bitterness of it all on himself and sparing his miscreant son. He’d have done the same for any of them, had done it for her, she knew. But it was for Jack he had always devised and deployed his greatest strategies of — what to call it — rescue. He used to say, “That boy has really kept me on my knees!” He seemed to have persuaded himself that this was yet another blessing.

Ames arrived and the two of them put their heads together over the checkerboard. There were so many jokes between them. Once when they were boys in seminary they were walking across a bridge, arguing about some point of doctrine. A wind had blown her father’s hat into the water, and he had rolled up his pant legs and walked in the river after it, not gaining on it at all, still disputing, as it sailed along in the current. “I was winning that argument!” her father said.

“Well, I was laughing too hard to keep up my side of it.” The hat finally caught on a snag, and that was the whole story, but it always made them laugh. The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed. In a calm, affectionate way they studied each other.

Ames said, “I understand that boy of yours is coming home.”

“So he tells me. He sent a letter.”

“Will the brothers and sisters be coming, too?”

Her father shook his head. “I’ve made some phone calls.” There it was, the parting of the sea. “They agree it would be best for them to wait until he wants to see them. He was never much at ease with them. I believe I was at fault in that. Of course, it’s good that Glory is here to help,” he said, remembering she was in the room. So she went into the parlor, sat beside the muttering radio, and worked a crossword puzzle. She thought, Is it good that I am here? That might be true. I will have to remember not to be angry. She reminded herself of this because Jack would probably still be insufferable and she had spent all her patience elsewhere.

WHAT FOLLOWED WERE WEEKS OF TROUBLE AND DISRUPtion, dealing with the old man’s anticipation and anxiety and then his disappointment, every one of which made him restless and sleepless and cross. She spent the days coaxing her father to eat. The refrigerator and the pantry were stocked with everything he thought he remembered Jack’s having a liking for, and he suspected Glory of wanting to give up too soon and eat it all on the pretext of avoiding waste. So he would accept nothing but a bowl of oatmeal or a poached egg, while skin thickened on cream pies and lettuce went limp. She had worried about what to do with it all if Jack never came. The thought of sitting down to a stale, humiliated feast with her heartbroken father was intolerable, but she had thought it anyway, to remind herself how angry she was, and with what justification. She had in fact planned to smuggle food out of the house by night in amounts the neighbor’s dogs could eat, since it would be too old to offer to the neighbors themselves, and they would no doubt feed it to the dogs anyway, tainted as it was with bitterness and grief.

Glory had rehearsed angry outbursts in anticipation of his arrival. Who do you think you are! and How can you be so inconsiderate! which became, as the days passed, How can you be so mean, cruel, vicious, and so on. She began to hope he would come so she could tell him exactly what she thought. Well, of course she was angry, with those loaves of banana bread ripening noisomely in the pantry. What right do you have! she stormed inwardly, knowing as she did that her father’s only prayers were that Jack would come, and that Jack would stay.

“He says here ‘for a while’! A while can be a significant amount of time!” They had Jack’s address after the Great Letter came, the one that made her father weep and tremble. Her father sent another note and a little check, in case the first had gone astray. And they waited. Jack’s letter lay open on the breakfast table and the supper table and the lamp table and the arm of the Morris chair. He had folded it away once, when Reverend Ames came for checkers, presumably because he did not want a doubtful glance to fall on it.

“Yes, he will definitely be coming,” he would conclude, as if uncertainty on that point had to do with the language of the letter. Two weeks passed, then three days. Then came the Telephone Call, and her father actually spoke with Jack, actually heard his voice. “He says he will be here day after tomorrow!” Her father’s anxiety turned to misery without ever losing the quality of patience. “I believe it could only be trouble of a serious kind that would account for this delay!” he said, comforting himself by terrifying himself. Another week, then the Second Telephone Call, again with the information that he would arrive in two days. Then four days passed, and there he was, standing in the back porch, a thin man in a brown suit, tapping his hat against his pant leg as if he could not make up his mind whether to knock on the glass or turn the knob or simply to leave again. He was watching her, as if suddenly reminded of an irritant or an obstacle, watching her with the kind of directness that forgets to conceal itself. She was a problem he had not taken into account. He did not expect to find me here, she thought. He is not happy to see me.

She opened the door. “Jack,” she said, “I was about to give up on you. Come in.” She wondered if she would have recognized him if she had passed him on the street. He was pale and unshaven, and there was a nick of scar under his eye.

“Well, here I am.” He shrugged. “Should I come in?” He seemed to be asking her advice as well as her permission.

“Yes, of course. You can’t imagine how much he has worried.”

“Is he here?”

Where else would he be? “He’s here. He’s sleeping.”

“I’m sorry I’m late. I tried to make a phone call and the bus left without me.”

“You should have called Papa.”

He looked at her. “The phone was in a bar,” he said. He was quiet, matter-of-fact. “I would have cleaned up a little, but I lost the bag that had my razor in it.” He touched the stubble on his jaw with a kind of concern, as if it were an abrasion. He had always been fastidious about such things.

“No matter. You can use Papa’s razor. Sit down. I’ll get you some coffee.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.” She didn’t say it was late for him to start worrying about that. He was distant and respectful and tentative. In this, at least, he was so much like the brother of her memory that she knew one hard look from her might send him away, defeating all her prayers, not to mention her father’s prayers, which were unceasing. If he came and left again while her father was sleeping, would she ever tell the old man he had come and gone? Would she tell him it was her anger that had driven him away, this thin, weary, unkempt man who had been reluctant even to step through the door? And he had come to the kitchen door, a custom of the family from their childhood, because their mother was almost always in the warm kitchen, waiting for them. He must have done it unreflectingly, obedient to old habit. Like a ghost, she thought.

“It’s no trouble,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

“Thank you. Glory. That’s good to know.”

He hesitated over her name, maybe because he was not absolutely certain which sister he was dealing with, maybe because he did not wish to seem too familiar. Maybe because familiarity required an effort. She started putting water in the percolator. But he said, “I’m sorry about this — could I lie down for a little while?” He put his hand to his face. That gesture, she thought. “This shouldn’t have happened. I’ve been all right for a long time.”

“Sure, you go rest. I’ll get the aspirin.” She said, “It seems like old times, sneaking you upstairs with a bottle of aspirin.” She had meant this as a joke of sorts, but he gave her a startled look, and she was sorry she had said it.

Then they heard bedsprings and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory! I believe we do! Yes!” And then the slippered feet and the cane.

Jack stood up and brushed his hair off his brow and shook down his cuffs and waited, and then the old man appeared in the door. “Ah, here you are! I knew you would come, yes!”

She could see her father’s surprise and regret. His eyes brimmed. Twenty years is a very long time. Jack offered his handand said, “Sir,” and his father said, “Yes, shaking hands is very good. But I’ll put down this cane — There,” he said, when he had hooked it on the table’s edge. “Now,” he said, and he embraced his son. “Here you are!” He put the flat of his hand on Jack’s lapel, caressingly. “We have worried so much, so much. And here you are.”

Jack put his arms around his father’s shoulders carefully, as if he were frightened by the old man’s smallness and frailty, or embarrassed by it.

His father stepped back and looked at him again. He wiped his eyes. “Isn’t it something!” he said. “Here I’ve been wearing a necktie for days, waking and sleeping as Glory will tell you, and you’ve caught me in my nightshirt! And what is it? Almost noon! Ah!” he said, and laid his head against Jack’s lapel for a moment. Then he said, “Glory will help me out a little. I’ll get my shoes on and comb my hair, and pretty soon I’ll be something you can recognize! But I knew I heard your voice and I couldn’t wait to get a look at you! Yes!” he said, and took his cane and started toward the hallway. “Glory, if you could help me a little. After you put the coffee on.” And he set off toward his room.

Jack said, “After all these years I guess he still knows when I’m hungover.”

“Well, the coffee will help. He’s excited now, but he’ll rest after lunch and you’ll be able to get some sleep.”

Jack said, “Lunch.”

Twenty years was long enough to make a stranger of someone she had known far better than this brother of hers, and here he was in her kitchen, pale and ill at ease and in no state to receive the kindness prepared for him, awaiting him, even then wilting and congealing into the worst he could have meant by the word “lunch.” And what an ugly word that was anyway.

“I’ll help Papa shave, and then I’ll bring you the razor. The cups are where they always were, and the spoons. So help yourself when the coffee is done.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I will.” He was still standing, still hat in hand. That’s how he was, all respectfulness and good manners when he knew he ought to have been in trouble. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. She had heard someone say that about him once, a woman at church. He cleared his throat. “Has any mail come here for me?”

“No, nothing.” She went off to help her father put his socks on and shave and get his shirt buttoned, and she thought, as she often did, At least I know what is required of me now, and that is something to be grateful for. She helped him on with his tie and his jacket and parted his hair and combed it straight to one side, which is how he had always combed it himself. Well, no matter, there wasn’t much left of it anyway.

When she was done, her father said, “Now I’ll just look at the newspaper for a little while. I know Jack will want to get cleaned up, too.”

She could smell that the coffee had gone a little past ready, and the thought struck her that he might have left, but there he was, washing up at the kitchen sink with a bar of laundry soap. The house had always been redolent of lavender and lye. She wondered if he remembered. He had hung his jacket and tie over the back of a chair and loosened his collar and was scrubbing his face and his neck with a tea towel, one of those on which their grandmother in her old age had embroidered the days of the week. No matter.

He wrung out the towel and began drying himself down with it. And then he realized she was in the room and turned around and looked at her, embarrassed that she should see him so undefended, she thought, since he rolled down his sleeves and buttoned them and pushed his hair off his brow.

“That’s a little better,” he said. Then he shook out the tea towel and hung it on the bar above the sink. It said Tuesday.

“You should drink this coffee if you’re going to.”

“Yes. I forgot the coffee, didn’t I.” He put his jacket back on and slipped the tie into his pocket.

They sipped bad coffee together while their father sat by the window in his Morris chair reading about the world situation. There were five years between them, and Teddy and Grace, and he had never shown much interest in her beyond tousling her hair now and then. It wasn’t her fault that she was the one to have been at home when everything happened. He seemed embarrassed, this man who began to remind her more of her brother as she looked at him. It was hard for her to look away from him, though she knew he would have liked her to. He held his cup in both hands, but it trembled anyway. He spilled coffee down his sleeve and winced with irritation, and she thought how kind her father was to give him time to recover himself. She said, “You couldn’t be more welcome here, Jack. You can’t know what it means to him to have you here.”

He said, “It’s good of you to say that, Glory.”

“It’s just the truth.”

There now. Her thought was that she might be able to worry a little less if an edge crept into her voice or if she lost patience for a minute.

He said, “Thanks for the coffee. I’ll go shave.”

HE HAD TAKEN HIS BAG UPSTAIRS, AND HE CAME BACK down with his jaw polished and his hair combed and smelling of her father’s Old Spice. He was still buttoning his cuffs. He nodded at the towel. “Is it Tuesday?”

“No,” she said, “that towel is a little fast. It’s still Monday.”

He reddened, but he laughed. And from the other room the newspaper crumpled and then they heard the cane and the hard, formal shoes that took a good shine and would not wear out in this world. Their father appeared, a roguish look in his eye, as there always was when he felt at the top of his form.

“Yes, children, lunchtime, I believe. Glory has been so busy getting things ready. She said you hated cream pie, but I was certain I remembered you had a special fondness for it, and she made it on my say-so, despite her reservations.”

“It’s pretty leathery by now,” she said.

“You see, she’s trying to prejudice you against it! You’d think we’d made a wager of some kind!”

Jack said, “I like cream pie.” He glanced at her.

“It’s for supper, in any case,” she said, and she thought he looked relieved. “Jack’s probably too tired to be hungry. He spent last night on the bus. We should give him a sandwich and let him go rest.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

His father looked at him. “You’re pale. Yes, I see that.”

“I’m all right. I’m always pale.”

“Well, you ought to sit down anyway. Glory won’t mind waiting on us this one time, will you, dear.”

She said, “This one time, no.”

“She works me half to death around here. I don’t know what she’d do without me.”

Jack smiled obligingly, and rested his brow on his hand when his father settled into the grace. “There is so much to be grateful for, words are poor things”—and the old man fell into what might have been a kind of slumber. Then he said, “Amen,” and mustered himself, roguish again, and patted Jack’s hand. “Yes,” he said, “yes.”

GLORY TOOK JACK UPSTAIRS TO THE ROOM SHE HAD PREpared for him, Luke and Teddy’s room they still called it. He said, “That was kind of you,” when she told him she had not put him in the room he had had growing up. It was the same kindness her father had showed her. When, half an hour later, she came upstairs with some towels for him, Jack had already hung up his clothes and set a half dozen books on the dresser between the Abraham Lincoln bookends, having stacked the ten volumes of Kipling they had supported for two generations in the corner of the closet. He had taken a little picture out of his old room, a framed photograph of a river and trees, and set it on the dresser beside his books. Insofar as he was capable of such a thing, he appeared to have moved in.

The room was empty, the door standing open, so she stepped into the room just to put the towels on the dresser, and she did pause, noticing things, it was true. And when she turned he was there watching her from the hallway, smiling at her. If he had said anything, it would have been “What are you looking for?” No, it might have been “Looking for something?” because he thought he had caught her prying.

“I brought you some towels.”

“Thank you very much. You’re very kind.”

“I hope you’re comfortable,” she said.

“I am. Thank you.”

His voice was soft as it had always been. He never did raise his voice. When they were children he would slip away, leave the game of tag, leave the house, and not be missed because he was so quiet. Then someone would say his name, the first to notice his absence, and the game would dissolve. There was no point calling him. He came back when he came back. But they would look for him, as if the game now were to find him at mischief. Even their father tried, walking street to street, looking behind hedges and fences and up trees. But the mischief was done and he was at home again before they had given up searching. One time, when his absence had ended an evening game of croquet that she was for once on the point of winning, she was overcome with rage and exasperation. And when she knew he was home she had stamped into his room and shouted, “What right do you have to be so strange!”

He smiled at her, pushed his hair off his brow, said nothing. But she knew she had jarred him, even hurt him. She must have been nine or ten, still the little sister he teased or ignored. Her question sounded adult to her, perhaps to him. It sounded un-harmless, and that had startled them both. From then on his wariness included her, too — a slight change, inevitable no doubt.

And now here she was, embarrassed to have been found putting towels in a long-empty room she had been at some pains to make ready for him, as if a few shirts, a few books, were an inviolable claim on the place and her crossing the threshold an infraction. There was no use being angry. What could he have thought she was looking for? Of course, alcohol. How insulting to think that of her. But then, how insulting to him if she had actually been searching his room. The thought would not have crossed her mind, but he would not know that. Now she found that she almost assumed there was a bottle concealed somewhere, under the bed or behind the stack of Kipling. She promised herself she would never set foot in that room again.

Did she choose to be there, in that house, in Gilead? No, she certainly did not. Her father needed looking after, and she had to be somewhere, like every other human being on earth. What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be. All those years of work and nothing to show for it. But you make the best of things. People respect that. It is a blessing to know what is being asked of you. And how can this man drift in from nowhere, take a room in the house and a place at the table, and make her feel she was there on sufferance? Though in fact there was no presumption, only deference and reluctance, in his manner. Clearly he, too, did not choose to be there. She found it a little annoying how obvious that was. Of course there was nothing remarkable in the fact of a grown man wanting one room to call his own, especially since he was almost a stranger in the house. Since he was also a member of the family. She went out to the garden. The sun on her shoulders calmed her. The squash were coming up. She would check the rhubarb patch. She stooped to pull a weed or two, and then she got the hoe and began clearing out the plot she would plant in tomatoes. She had always liked the strong smell of the plants in the sun, the beaky little blossoms. The garden gave her a perfectly good reason not to be anywhere else, not to do anything else. And it always needed more time than she could give it.

She came into the house and found Jack washing his shirt at the kitchen sink. He glanced up at her, that look of wariness and mild embarrassment, as if they were strangers sharing too close quarters, seeing behind the shifts meant to maintain appearances. “I’m about finished,” he said. “I’ll get out of your way.”

“You aren’t in my way. But if you want to, you can just put your things in the wash. It won’t make any difference to me. I’ll show you how to use the machine, if you like.”

“Thank you,” he said, and rinsed and wrung out the shirt, careful and practiced. Then he took it outside, shook it out, and pinned it to the clothesline, and sat down on the back porch steps to smoke. Well, let him have his cigarette, out there in his undershirt, blinking in the sunlight, abiding by his boardinghouse notions of privacy. When he came inside he said no thank you to a piece of cake, thank you to a cup of coffee. He took the cup and the newspaper she offered him to his room.

In the town where she used to live she had sometimes seen a man on the street and thought, No, that isn’t Jack. What is it about him that made me think of Jack? The stir of something like recognition lingered after she had thought, It is only his stride, only the tilt of his head. She had sometimes crossed streets to look into strangers’ faces for the satisfactions of resemblance, and met a cool stare or a guarded glance, not so unlike his, a little amused, like his. She always knew how many years it was since she had last seen him, and she corrected against her memory of him because he was so young then. It was as if she had spent the years preparing herself to know him when she saw him, and here he was, tense and wary, reminding her less of himself than of those nameless strangers.

STARTING ALL OVER AGAIN, SHE MADE A DINNER TO WELcome him home. The dining room table was set for three, lace tablecloth, good china, silver candlesticks. The table had in fact been set for days. When she put the vase of flowers in place, she noticed dust on the plates and glasses and wiped them with her apron. Yellow tulips and white lilacs. It was a little past the season for both of them, but they would do. She had the grocery store deliver a beef roast, two pounds of new potatoes, and a quart of ice cream. She made biscuits and brownies. She went out to the garden and picked young spinach, enough to fill the colander, pressed down and flowing over, as her father would say. And Jack slept. And her father slept. And the day passed quietly, with those sweet savors rising.

When she walked in from the garden, the house had already begun to smell like Sunday. It brought tears to her eyes. That old orderliness, aloof from all disruption. Sabbath and Sabbath and Sabbath. The children restless in their church clothes, the dresses and jackets and shoes that child after child stepped into, out of, put on, took off, as his or her turn came. Too large and then too small, but never ever comfortable. Eight of them, or seven, crowded at that table, three on the piano bench, one on the kitchen stool, practicing their manners — keeping their elbows to themselves, not swinging their legs, for an hour not going on with the teasing and arguing that were endless among them. Waiting for the blessing, waiting for the guests to be served — always ancient men with some ecclesiastical dignity attached to them which entailed special prohibitions against childish behavior. Waiting to speak until they were spoken to, until the meal was finished, out of respect to talk of creeds and synods. Waiting even to begin until their mother lifted her fork, which she would not do until every major sign of impatience among them was suppressed. And Jack so quiet, if he was there at all.

The dining room was immutable, like the rest of the house. But it was oppressive in ways that could easily have been changed. If she could have taken down the plum-colored drapes that hung over the lace curtains that covered the window shades, she’d have done it in a minute. If she could have taken up the plum-colored carpet with lavender fins or fans or fronds in a border around it. She’d have cleared the sideboard of the clutter of knickknacks, gifts displayed as a courtesy to their givers, most of whom by now would have gone to their reward. Porcelain cats and dogs and birds, milk-glass compote dishes. But in this place of solemn and perpetual evening, every family joy had been given its occasion, and here they would celebrate Jack’s homecoming, if he woke up in time. When her father had been up and dressed for half an hour, he said, “You might just go knock at his door,” and then they heard him on the stairs.

He stepped through the doorway and paused there. He was wearing his jacket and tie. He looked tentative, as if he were afraid he might presume, and as if he would be happier somewhere else. He looked like the old Jack. Her father must have thought so, too, because he was clearly moved to see him. A moment passed before he said, “Come in, son. Sit down, sit down.”

Glory said, “You can light the candles, Jack.” She went into the kitchen for the roast and came back to find the two of them silent in the candlelight, her father lost in thought, Jack toying with a matchbook. Twenty years before, they had had a quiet conversation in that room. She should have thought of that. She should have served dinner in the kitchen.

When the biscuits were on the table and she had taken her place, the old man rose from his chair to address the Lord. “Dearest Father,” he said, “Father whose love, and whose strength, are unchanging, in whose eyes we too are unchanging, still your beloved children, however our fleshly garment may soil and wear—”

Jack smiled to himself, and touched the scar beneath his eye.

“Holy Father,” the old man said. “I have rehearsed this prayer in my mind a thousand times, this prayer of gratitude and rejoicing, as I waited for an evening like this one. Because I always knew the time would come. And now I find that words fail me. They do. Because while I was waiting I got old. I don’t remember those prayers now, but I remember the joy they gave me at the time, which was the confidence that someday I would say one or another of them here at this table. If I lived. I thought my good wife might be here, too. We do miss her. Well, I thank you for that joy, which helped through hard times. It helped very much.” He paused.

“But when I think what it is that brings us to our Father, it might be grief or sickness — trouble of some sort. Weariness. And then there we are, and it’s a good thing at such times to know we have a Father, whose joy it is to welcome us home. It really is. Still, humanly speaking, there is that trouble, that sorrow, and a Father has to be aware of it. He can’t help it. So there is a sadness even in great blessing, which can be a hard thing to understand.” He seemed to ponder.

“Lord, put the veil of time and sorrow aside for us. Restore us to those we love. And restore the ones we love to us. We do long for them—”

Jack said softly, “Amen.” His father looked up at him, so he shrugged and smiled and said, as if by way of explanation, “Amen.”

“Yes, well, I was finished, really. I’m sorry I went on.”

“No, sir. I’m sorry — I didn’t—” He put his hand to his face and laughed.

His father said, “No need to apologize, Jack! Here you’ve only been home a few hours and I have you apologizing to me! No! We can’t have that, can we now!” He put his hand very gently on Jack’s shoulder. “And here I am letting our dinner get cold! Do you want to carve, Jack?”

“Maybe Glory wouldn’t mind?”

“Not at all,” she said, and she cut the roast, and gave the first piece to her father, the second to herself, and the third to Jack. “There’s still a little pink to that one,” she said.

And he said, “It looks wonderful. Thank you.”

Her father strove manfully to generate conversation at a level of undamaging abstraction. “I believe the threat of atomic war is very real!” he said. “This is a point on which Ames and I do not agree! He has never made a proper estimate of the force of sheer folly in the affairs of nations! He pretends to be mulling it over, but I know he will vote Republican again. Because his grandfather was a Republican! That’s what it comes down to for people around here. Whose grandfather was not a Republican? But there is no way to reason with him about it. Not that I’ve stopped trying.”

“I’m a Stevenson man, myself,” Jack said.

“Yes. That’s excellent.”

She ought to have closed her eyes during that prayer, or lowered them, at least. But there was Jack, just across the table from her, studying his hands, then glancing up at the oddnesses of the room, the overbearing drapes and the frippery glass droplets on the light fixture, as if the sound of the old man’s words were awakening him to the place. When he met her eyes he smiled and looked away, uneasy. Why did it seem like an elegance in him, that evasiveness? How would he look to her, seem to her, if he had not been, for so many years, the weight on the family’s heart, the unnamed absence, like the hero in a melancholy tale? It seemed to her as if he ought to have been beautiful, and he was not. He had the lank face that was to be looked for in a Boughton, and weary eyes, and the coarsened skin of middle age. He put his hand to his brow as if to shield himself from her attention, then he dropped it to his lap, perhaps because it trembled. She was glad when he said “Amen,” grateful. When her father spoke to the Lord he spoke in earnest — out of the depths, as he said sometimes. Out of a grief so generous it embraced them all.

When dinner was over, Jack helped her clear away the dishes, and he washed them, too, while she was helping her father to bed. She came into the kitchen and found him almost done, the kitchen almost in order. “Amazing,” she said. “This would have taken me an hour.”

He said, “I have had considerable professional experience, madam. I share the Boughton preference for the soft-handed vocations.” She laughed, and he laughed, and their father called out to them, “God bless you, children! Yes!”

GLORY HAD OFTEN REFLECTED ON THE FACT THAT Boughtons looked very much like one another. Hope was the acknowledged beauty of the family, which is to say the Boughton nose and the Boughton brow were less pronounced in her case. All the rest of them, male and female, were, their mother said, handsome. They all passed from cherubic infancy to unremarkable childhood to gangling youth to that adult state of Boughton-hood their mother soothed or praised with talk of character and distinction, Hope being the one exception. So adolescence was a matter of watching unremarkable features drift off axis very slightly, of watching the nose knuckle just a little and the jaw go just a bit out of square. So Glory’s face had transformed itself in its inevitable turn. She remembered her alarm.

And then the brow. Their grandfather had once happened upon a phrenologist who found, in the weighty pediment of brow resting upon the tottered pillar of his nose, so much to praise that over the next few months he had dabbled in metaphysics and even considered running for public office. Fortunately, he was the sort of man who noticed the absence of encouragement and drew conclusions from it. But he did have his photograph taken, three times, in fact, twice in profile and once full face. This sepia triptych hung in the parlor in a gold frame with laurel wreaths in the corners, like a certificate of merit, and also like a textbook illustration. From the full-face portrait the sepia eyes still burned with a gleeful and furious certainty — he in his own prudent person bequeathing a higher solvency to his descendants, a remarkable soundness of spirit and of intellect. One might suspect that there was also visible a joy in the fact of discovering that the features he presented to the world were not simply heavy and irregular, whatever the uninformed observer might have thought of them. It was many years before he had even one heir, their father, the only child of a marriage approached with a caution and deliberation on both sides that was the clearest proof the parties to it ever gave of being suited to each other, or so the story went. In any case, genius might well make its abode in so spacious a cranium, though in his case as in theirs, the tenant had so far been competence, shrewd in one case, conscience-racked in another, highly refined in another, but always competence. He might have found his hopes dwindling in the moderated forms his visage took in the course of generations. His offspring were all grateful to be spared, to the degree they felt they had been spared, what was sometimes called his slight resemblance to Beethoven, though they did find comfort when needed in the thought that it might be a predisposition to genius that had put its mark on them all. Phrenologically speaking, physiognomically speaking, Jack was as plausible a claimant to character and distinction as any of the rest of them, as he must have known. Perhaps that is why he seemed mildly sardonic when he looked at her, knowing with what interest she looked at him. Yes, he seemed to say, here it is, the face we all joked about and lamented over and carried off as well as we could, the handsome face. Does its estrangement disturb you? Are you surprised to see how it can scar and weary?

AFTER TWO DAYS IT WAS CLEAR THAT JACK WOULD STAY IN his room until his father woke up, and then he would come down, presentable, respectfully affable, and attend on the old man. He said no more to her than courtesy required. He must have listened for his father’s voice, or the sound of the slippers and the cane, because it was never more than a few minutes before he appeared. The thought that he listened, that he remained upstairs while his father was asleep, while it was only she who came and went and swept and dusted, played the radio — softly, of course — in short, the thought that he avoided her, was more than an irritation. He makes me feel like a stranger in my own house. But this isn’t my house. He has the same right to be here I have. So she decided to take him the newspaper as soon as her father had finished with it. His interest in the news surprised her a little. Time and Life and the Post had drifted up the stairs and gathered in a stack by his bed, and he came down in the evening to listen to Fulton Lewis, Jr. So she would take him the newspaper and a cup of coffee. With a cookie on the saucer. She thought, I’ll give him these things and go away, and he’ll see it as a simple kindness, and that will be a beginning. There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding. Her father had said this more than once, in sermons, with appropriate texts, but the real text was Jack, and those to whom he spoke were himself and the row of Boughtons in the front pew, which usually did not include Jack, and then, of course, the congregation. If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.

Everyone was fairly interested in these sermons, though they recurred, in substance at least, more frequently over time, and though they told them all not to expect the grand exertion of paternal control that people always take to be possible and effective in other households than their own, and especially in parsonages. Seven paragons of childhood, more or less, all learners of times tables, all diligent at the piano, their greatest transgression the good-natured turbulence their father seemed to enjoy. And Jack. When did he begin to insist on that name?

His door stood open. The bed was made, and the sash of the window was up so the curtains stirred in the morning air. He was neatly dressed, in his stocking feet, propped against the pillows, reading one of his books.

“Don’t get up,” she said. “I don’t mean to bother you. I just thought you might want the newspaper.”

“Thank you,” he said. She wondered what it was that made him stand when she or her father came into a room. It looked like deference, but it also seemed to mean, You will never see me at ease, you will never see me unguarded. And that thank-you of his. It was so unfailing as to be impersonal, or at least to have no reference to any particular kindness, as if he had trained himself to note the mere fact of kindness, however slight any instance of it might be. And of course there was nothing wrong with that. Certainly not in his case.

She said, “You’re welcome.” And then she said, “Papa would like us to talk.”

“Ah,” he said, as if the motive behind her coming into his room were suddenly clear. He brushed back his hair. “What would he like us to talk about?”

“Anything. It doesn’t matter. He just worries that we don’t talk. He hates a silent house.”

Jack nodded. “Yes. I see. Sure. I can do that.”

A minute passed. “So—” she said.

“There actually is something I wanted to talk to you about.” He went to the dresser and took up a bill that had been lying there and handed it to her. Ten dollars.

“Why are you giving me money?”

“I don’t suppose the Reverend has much to get by on. I thought that might help with the groceries.”

“It will help, of course. But he’s all right. He gets some income from the farm. Mrs. Blank retired when I came, so he doesn’t have to pay a housekeeper. And the others look after him. And the church.”

“The church.” He said, “And the church knows I’m here.”

“Well, yesterday there were those two pies on the porch, and today there was a casserole and six eggs.”

“So the word is out, then.”

“Yes.”

“They won’t come by, though.”

“Not unless they’re invited.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s good.” He looked at her. “You won’t invite them.”

“No.”

“Good. Thank you.” Then, as if by way of explanation, “I need a little while to get used to this place. To try to.”

It had occurred to her more than once that his thank you had the effect of ending conversation. He might not intend it that way. And just now, when the conversation had gone reasonably well, she decided not to take it that way. So she said, “What are you reading?”

Jack glanced at the worn little book he had left lying on the bed. “Something a friend gave me.” He said, “It’s pretty interesting.” And he smiled.

“That’s fine,” she said, and turned and went down to the kitchen. She did not care what he was reading. She had only tried to make conversation. Her father had not said in so many words that he noticed the silence between them and that he worried about it, but she knew it must be true, and she felt no real regret about mentioning it to Jack, even though it surprised her a little when she did. Papa was asleep so much of the time. It would be good to have someone to talk to. It was rude of him to shun her. Even if his memories of her were irritating to him. There is so much more to courtesy than Thank you, That’s kind of you! This was among those thoughts she hoped she would never hear herself speak out loud. She went back up the stairs.

He was still standing there, with the book in his hand. “W.E.B. DuBois,” he said. “Have you heard of him?”

“Well, yes, I’ve heard of him. I thought he was a Communist.”

He laughed. “Isn’t everybody? I mean, if you believe the newspapers?” He said, “Now I suppose you’ll think I’m up here reading propaganda.”

“I don’t care what you’re reading. All I really care about is whether we can live in this house like civilized people.” They heard the creak of bedsprings, and they heard the clack of a cane falling to the floor. “Coming, Papa!”

Jack said, “It’s hard, Glory. I know what you think of me.”

“Well, that’s more than I know.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m completely serious.”

They heard a clatter. She shouted, “I’m coming!” and ran down to the kitchen, and there was her father standing beside a chair that had fallen on its back. He was wearing his robe and one slipper and his hair was awry. He regarded them with anxiety that was in some part irritation. He was holding the Monopoly set. “I thought we might amuse ourselves with this. A game or two. I’d better sit down now.” She helped him into a chair. “You know how it is when you jump up from a sound sleep. I thought something bad had happened—” and he fell into that doze of his that might have been prayer.

Jack took out the board, the money, and the dice. “I’m the top hat,” he said.

Their father said, “Well, I’m something. I don’t know quite what I am.” He closed his eyes. “I guess I’m going to finish that nap anyway, so I might as well get comfortable.” Jack helped him to his armchair. Then he came back to the kitchen.

Glory said, “I’m the shoe.”

“The shoe?”

“I know. But it’s lucky for me.”

He laughed. “You play a lot of Monopoly?”

“About a thousand times more than I ever thought I would.”

After four turns she had bought two utilities.

“Well,” Jack said, “that looks pretty insurmountable. I see what you mean about the shoe.”

“You’re ready to concede?”

“More than ready.”

Jack put the game away, squaring up the deeds and the money as if it mattered.

Glory said, “How do you know I’m not a Communist?”

He laughed. “You’re too nice a girl.” Then he said, “Not that that means anything. I’m not a Communist either.”

“I’m thinking of reading up on it. Marxism.”

“DuBois isn’t a Communist. Not really.”

“I wasn’t hinting,” she said. But she was. She thought if she read his book they might have something to talk about. “I’d go down to the library to see if they have anything, but the MacManus sisters work there and I can’t face talking to either one of them.”

“You go to church.”

“Last in, first out. I have to do that. It matters to Papa.”

THE CHURCH OF THEIR CHILDHOOD WAS GONE, THE WHITE clapboard church with the steeply pitched roof and the abbreviated spire. It had been replaced by a much costlier building, monumental in style though modest in scale, with a crenellated Norman bell tower at one corner and a rose window above the massy entrance. Someone whose historical notions were sufficiently addled might imagine that centuries of plunder and dilapidation had left this last sturdy remnant of grandeur, that the bell tower might have sunk a dozen feet into the ground as ages passed. The building was reconsidered once or twice as money ran out, but the basic effect answered their hopes, more or less. “Anglicanism!” her father had said, when he saw the plans. “Utter capitulation!” His objections startled the elders, but did not interest them particularly, so they drew discreet conclusions about his mental state. Nothing is more glaringly obvious than discretion of that kind, since it assumes impaired sensitivity in the one whose feelings it would spare. “As if I were a child!” her father said more than once, when the decorous turmoil of his soul happened to erupt at the dinner table.

This was a grief his children had never anticipated. Nor had they imagined that their father’s body could become a burden to him, and an embarrassment, too. He was sure his feebleness inspired condescensions of every kind, and he was alert for them, eager to show that nothing got past him, furious on slight pretexts. The seven of them telephoned back and forth daily for months. He was in graver pain than he was accustomed to, and his dear old wife was failing. He was not himself. Ames sat with him for hours and hours, though even he was not above suspicion. They pooled strategies for softening the inevitable blow of his retirement, which would have been a mercy if it had come about under other circumstances. Ah well. He came back to himself, finally, reconciled to loss and sorrow and waiting on the Lord.

Now Glory was the family emissary. At holidays they went as a delegation, there to signal reconciliation not quite so complete as to induce her father to struggle up those stone steps. The no longer new pastor was youngish, plump, smiling. His admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr brought him to the brink of plagiarism now and then, but he meant well. She was always the object of his special cordiality, which irritated her.

For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God’s good world, with God’s good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church.

SHE PUT JACK’S TEN-DOLLAR BILL IN THE DRAWER WHERE they had always kept cash for household expenses. Every week someone from the bank came by with an envelope. She noticed that the amount it contained had gone from fifty dollars to seventy-five. Another telephone call. Even fifty dollars was never needed. When the week was over, she put whatever remained in the piano bench, for no particular reason except that her father’s arrangements were no business of hers, and the cash drawer would overflow if she didn’t put the excess somewhere else. She put Jack’s ten dollars in an envelope of its own. That he had had it ready must have meant that he had decided how much he could spare. That he had given it to her — well, he always did act as though the house was not quite his, nor the family, for that matter. There was a gravity in the gesture, in the fact that he had intended it for hours or days before he had made it, and that he must have known the amount could not have mattered to anyone but him and yet pride had required him to give it to her. There was an innocence about it all. She felt she should be careful not to spend that bill as if it were simply ordinary money.

Every day Jack waited for the mail. However else he might while away his time, he was always somewhere near the mailbox when it came, the first to look through it, though it seemed none of it was ever for him, except once, three days after he arrived. It was his birthday, which she had forgotten. There were six cards for him, from the brothers and sisters. He opened one and glanced at it and left it with the others, which he did not open, on the table in the hallway. “Teddy,” he said. “He’s glad I’m here. He’s looking forward to Christmas.”

“Teddy’s glad I’m here, too,” she said. “They all are.”

He laughed. Then he asked, “Is it so bad for you, being here?”

“Let’s just say it isn’t what I had in mind.”

“Well,” he said, “poor kid.”

That was brotherly, she thought, pleasing in a way, though it came at the cost of allusion to her own situation, which she always preferred to avoid. What did he know about it? Papa must have told him something. She resented the condescension in “poor kid.” But brothers condescend to their sisters. It is a sign of affection.

The next day there was one more card. It was addressed in print so crude it might have been a child’s. She saw it because the mailman came early, before Jack would have expected him. She took the card up to his room and handed it to him. He glanced at it and his color rose, but he slipped it unopened into the book he was reading, and said nothing to her except, “Thank you, Glory. Thank you.”

AFTER A FEW DAYS SHE MIGHT FIND HIM SITTING IN THE PORCH, reading a magazine. And sometimes, if she was busy in the kitchen, he would bring his magazine to the kitchen table and read it there. A stray, she thought, learning the terms of domestication. Testing the comforts, weighing the costs. So she was tactful, careful to seem unsurprised. Once when she opened a cookbook on the table he said, “I hope you’ll tell me if I’m in the way.”

“Not at all. I appreciate the company.” She had been waiting for the chance to tell him that.

“Thanks,” he said. “I don’t really want to keep to myself so much. It’s just a habit.”

IT WAS IN FACT A RELIEF TO HAVE SOMEONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE. And it was interesting to watch how this man, gone so long, noticed one thing and another, as if mildly startled, even a little affronted, by all the utter sameness. She saw him put his hand on the shoulder of their mother’s chair, touch the fringe on a lamp-shade, as if to confirm for himself that the uncanny persistence of half-forgotten objects, all in their old places, was not some trick of the mind. Nothing about that house ever did change, except to fade or scar or wear. Miracles of thrift in their grandparents’ generation had meant that the words “free and clear” could be spoken over the house and all it contained by the time it came into the young hands of their father. Those words blessed the stodginess and the shabbiness. All that big, crowding furniture and all that prim and doubtful taste commemorated heroic discipline and foresight, which could be, and must never be, undone by bringing other standards to bear than respectability and serviceability. Their parents often told them how fortunate they were to have all their needs supplied, while their neighbors fitted out their lives as best they could on layaway and the installment plan. The Boughtons bought outright the big wooden radio and the upright piano and the electric refrigerator and stove, because the grandparents in their remarkable providence had left them a number of debt-free acres ten miles out of town which they rented to a farmer for a mutually agreeable sum. So even the things they acquired were in effect gifts from beyond the grave, since, having no needs, they could enjoy certain pleasures and conveniences free and clear. No sooner than their neighbors did, of course. Thrift that was second nature to them in any case was reinforced by care not to seem as prosperous as they were, and was pleasantly coincident with a fondness for familiar things. Why should a pastor’s family run the risk of ostentation? Why should a family with eight rambunctious children bother owning anything that could be damaged? They sat on the arms of their mother’s overstuffed chair while she read to them, and they hung over the back of it, and they pinched and plucked at its plushy hide. If the nib of a feather poked through, they would pull it out and play with it, a dry little plume of down, sometimes unbroken. As they listened to the story they would turn and turn the painted vellum lampshade till the rim of it was soiled and the stems of the four nosegays on its four sides were nearly worn away. No matter that there were paths in the rugs, no matter that the big plate spoons were out at elbow with use and polishing.

She learned the word “waft” sitting in her mother’s chair, breathing on a feather. Jack had come into the room, and the stir of air had floated it out of her hand. In those days the boys called her Glory B. or Glory Be or Glory Bee or Glory Hallelujah or Runt or Pigtails. Sometimes instead of Grace and Glory they had called their little sisters Justification and Sanctification, which came near irritating their father. But in general her brothers had ignored her, Jack not so completely as the others. He had stood in the doorway that evening and watched the feather circle against the ceiling in the air he brought in with him, and then he had reached up and caught it lightly in his hand and given it back to her. “It just wafted away,” he said. She might have been seven, so he would have been twelve. He was himself already then, solitary when he could be, gentle when the mood was upon him, a worry to them all as often as he was out of sight. Then there were those other years, after even Grace was gone, those tense years only she and her mother and father had lived through together in that house, when they lost the habit of mentioning Jack by name. She thought more often now, with Jack in the house, of that freckled girl sitting at the kitchen table, shy and bold at once, ignoring what was said to her, impatient to go home. That girl and her baby.

A MONTH BEFORE JACK AND TEDDY LEFT FOR SCHOOL, Grace had gone to live with Hope in Minneapolis so that she could study piano with a real teacher. They had all been instructed by Mrs. Sweet, a soft-bodied woman with a petulant smirk who was very deft at smacking hands without actually interrupting the performance of a scale or an etude. She sat on the bench beside them, reeking of lily-of-the-valley, and turned an injured look on the keyboard. Alert as a toad, Hope said, and quick as a toad, too. Whack! when a note offended, and then the return to sullen watchfulness, then again Whack! Six of them soldiered through, played their recitals, and emerged at the end of high school modestly competent and relieved to have one more tedious initiation into adulthood behind them. Sometimes Jack went along to lessons with Teddy, to laugh with him afterward about the horrible Mrs. Sweet. But Grace actually liked piano. She practiced more than she needed to and learned more than was exacted of her. Once she told her parents, weeping, that the hand smacking distracted her, so their mother went to speak to Mrs. Sweet, who asked, indignant, “How else will she improve?” But from then on she restrained herself, barely, when Grace played and vented her pedagogical method on Glory.

Hope, who was newly married, brought her sister-in-law on a visit to Gilead. That lady heard Gracie playing and was charmed, and mentioned the benefits for such a gifted child of life in Minneapolis. Glory still remembered the day and hour that thought settled itself in the minds of her family. All of them looked at Grace as if some ring or amulet had been discovered that identified the foundling as a royal child. It would be wonderful, Hope said, and their mother relented, and bags were packed, and Glory sat in her room, absorbing the fact that there was no argument to be offered, no appeal to be made. It was Jack who noticed her. He said, “Poor Pigtails will be all alone.” When he saw he had brought tears to her eyes, he said, “Sorry,” and smiled, and tousled her hair.

It might have been those words that allowed her to believe for years that a special bond existed between them, that she understood him as others could not. They were the unexceptional children, she thought — slighted, overlooked. There was no truth in this notion. Jack was exceptional in every way he could be, including, of course, truancy and misfeasance, and yet he managed to get by on the cleverness teachers always praised by saying “if only he would put it to some good use.” As for herself, she was so conscientious that none of her A’s and A-pluses had to be accounted for otherwise than as the reward of diligence. She was good in the fullest and narrowest sense of the word as it is applied to female children. And she had blossomed into exactly the sort of adult her childhood predicted. Ah well.

Still, when she was thirteen and miserable and Jack was away at school, she could imagine whatever she liked and find comfort and satisfaction in it, a mistake she could never really regret. When she believed better of him than he deserved, she was also defending him, and she could not regret that either. Years later she had heard her father say, in the depths of his grief, “Some things are indefensible.” And it was as if he thought a great gulf had opened, Jack on the far side of it, beyond rescue or comfort. She felt she could not allow that to be true, especially since it was her father who seemed to be in hell. He had come to the last inch of his power to forgive, and there was Jack, still far beyond his reach. So he stood at the verge of despair, despite whatever her mother might say to talk him away from it and despite every prayer and text old Ames could muster.

Her mother said to her once, “I believe that boy was born to break his father’s heart.” And once she said, “I have never seen Robert so afflicted. It frightens me”—speaking to her as to an adult. That evening Glory wrote the first of her letters to Jack, having no clear sense of what she should ask of him, except that he call or make a visit home for their father’s sake.

Already she had driven her father out across the river into the country, tense with responsibility because she had only begun to drive, and excited and protective because suddenly her parents seemed to depend on her. She had waited in the car with her father outside the gate until a woman appeared in the door of the disheveled little house and called the dogs in. Her father got out of the car and waited beside it, hat in hand. Then a man walked out to the gate and stood with his hands on his hips eyeing the car. It was Jack’s convertible, after all. He said to her father, “Who are you? What do you mean, coming around here?”

Her father said, “I am Robert Boughton. I understand that my family has some responsibility toward your daughter and her child. I have come to let you know we are aware of our obligation and ready to assume it—” And he offered an envelope, apologetically, almost diffidently, but the man spat on the ground and said, “What’s that? Money? Well, you can keep your damn money.” But the woman appeared in the doorway again, this time holding the baby, and when the man had walked off toward the barn she came out to the gate and said, “You can just leave it on the post there.” Then she folded back the blanket that had concealed the infant’s face.

A moment passed. Her father said, “Yes. I am Robert Boughton. This is my daughter.” The woman nodded, turned away from them, and walked back to the house. A girl in a blue nightgown came out on the stoop and took the baby into her arms. She nuzzled its cheek, watching them until they drove away.

JACK DID COME HOME TO SPEAK WITH HER FATHER. GLORY thought this might have been an effect of her letter because when after half an hour of quiet talk behind a closed door he left the dining room and saw her in the parlor, sitting in their mother’s chair, he had said, “Do you have another sermon for me?” He might have meant that his father had just preached to him, but he might also have meant he had felt the weight and seriousness of her letter, which did indeed draw upon every resource her sixteen-year indoctrination in moral sincerity had conferred on her, and upon all the certainty of her youth. She had spoken mainly of her father’s grief, since all the rest of it was too delicate and complicated. But she had settled on the solution to it all. She had arrived at one great hope.

So she asked him, “Are you going to marry her?”

He was very pale. He smiled — that strange, hard shame of his — and said, “You’ve seen her.”

She said, “Well, what is Papa going to do—”

“Do to me? Nothing. I mean, he’s going to forgive me.” He laughed. “And now I have a train to catch.”

“You won’t even stay for supper?”

He said, “Poor Pigtails,” and smiled at her and walked out the door.

And twenty years passed. There was no way of knowing that day that anything absolute had happened. Her mother had been so upset she stayed in her room, no doubt waiting for him to come to her seeking reconciliation. She would never see him again in this life. When evening fell no lights were put on, and supper-time came and went unremarked. Her father stepped out of the dining room and saw her in the dark parlor. He said, “Yes, Glory,” as if reminding himself of something, and went upstairs. She toasted two pieces of bread and ate them dry because she dreaded the sound she might make spreading butter on them. Then she went up to her room. Never had it entered her mind that their household could contain so desolate a silence.

NOW SHE WAS HOME AGAIN, JACK WAS HOME AGAIN. THE furniture and the damage done to it in the course of the old robust domestic life were all still there. And the old books. Their grandfather had sent a significant check to Edinburgh, asking a cousin to assemble the library needed for instruction in the true and un-corrupted faith. He had received in response a trunk full of large books, bound in black leather, in which they all assumed the true faith did abide. Sometimes they pondered the titles and wondered about them together. On Predestination, an Answer to an Anabaptist; On Affliction; The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women; Booke of the Universall Kirk of Scotland; De Vocatione, a Treatise of God’s Effectual Calling; The Hind Unloos’d; Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himselfe. Or A Survey of our Saviour in his soule-suffering, his lovelynesse in his death, and the efficacie thereof. They were respectfully proud to have these books in the house, as if they had been given the Ark of the Covenant for safekeeping and knew better than to touch it, except, of course, for Jack, who took down a volume from time to time and read or seemed to read a page or two, perhaps only to worry his father, who was as respectful of the Edinburgh books as they all were, and as little inclined to open them, and who clearly dreaded the thought that they might be damaged. “Are you finding anything of interest there, Jack?” he would say, and Jack would answer, “No, sir, not yet,” and seem to read on, and then, after a few minutes, set the book on its shelf again. Whether he had found occasion to mar a page no one would know. There were tens of thousands of pages. And their father would not have wanted to know, since, even more than the other inexplicable and irremediable damage her brother left behind him, this might exasperate him beyond patience. Everything the rest of them treated with tacit reverence Jack found his way to. Poor old Ames. For many years he bore the brunt of it, uncomplainingly. Many things must have passed between him and the boy that Ames never spoke of, and this was a gentleness toward their father, a wordless, palpable, patient regret very much like their father’s own. Those became the good days in retrospect, the days of their father’s happiness.

IN THE AFTERNOON SHE WENT OUT TO WORK IN THE GARden. She had planted peas and pole beans and tomatoes and squash and spinach. Rabbits were a problem, and groundhogs. Still, the futility of it all was not yet absolute. She would have had to ask someone to put up some sort of fence, and that would involve talking to someone, which she preferred not to do.

And after a few minutes there was Jack, standing in the sunlight at the edge of the garden, smoking a cigarette. He said, “I thought maybe you could put me to work out here.”

“Sure. I mean, you can put yourself to work. There’s so much that needs to be done. Well, you can see that. Mama had iris beds right up the hill—”

“I know,” he said. “I used to live here.”

“I just meant that might be a place to start. They’re so overgrown. Of course you used to live here.”

“—Strange as it seems—” He said it as if he were completing her thought, or sharing it.

They heard voices from the street, and a look of alarm or irritation passed over his face. Then he saw that it was a young man and a child passing by, taking no notice of them.

She said, “That’s Donny McIntire’s son. And his grandson. You might remember him. He was Luke’s age.”

“And good old Reverend Ames has a boy of his own, I understand.”

“Yes, he does. And a wife. Marriage seems to agree with him.”

He said, “What did people think of all that?”

“I guess there was some talk. But who could begrudge him. Papa has felt a little neglected. He and Ames used to spend so much time together.”

Jack dropped the butt of his cigarette and stepped on it. “I’d better make myself useful,” he said, and went off to stand among the irises in his urban shoes and a fairly respectable white shirt with the creases of folding in it and light another cigarette. Their father came out to his chair on the porch, a project for him, a painful business. Now, with Jack there, he avoided help when he could, toiling dangerously up the stairs to shave himself with an unsteady hand. There was nothing to be done except to listen for the sounds of emergency and pray, and ignore the scruff of hair at the back of his head where his comb didn’t reach. From his chair in the porch he could look out on the garden.

Jack stooped to pull a clump of weeds and tossed it aside, and pulled another one and tossed it. Then he went to the shed behind the house to find a spade. When he came back, he said, “That DeSoto in the barn isn’t yours. It’s been there too long.”

“No, one of the boys left it for Papa. But he never really did start driving. I guess he had a license for a while. Years ago.”

“It looks like a decent car.”

“I tried to start it once.”

“You left the keys in the ignition.”

She nodded. “No safer place in the world for them.”

“Well,” he said, “a little gas in the tank might change that. A little water in the radiator. Some air in the tires. I wiped off the windshield to make the thing look less — humiliated. I thought I might roll it out into daylight for a couple of hours so I could get a better look under the hood. If that’s all right.”

“I can’t imagine why anyone would object.”

He nodded. “I wanted to be sure.” When he was done with his cigarette he began breaking up the ground.

He used to live here, and he knew how things were done. It had somehow never seemed to her that the place had his attention, or it seemed he was attentive to strategies of evasion and places of concealment, never to the skills of the ordinary, dutiful choring that made up most of every life, and was so much the worth and the pride of that life, by local reckoning. But he spaded between the rows of irises and he was businesslike about it, too. He had rolled up his sleeves.

SHE HEARD HER FATHER CALL OUT, “SUPPER, JACK!” WHICH WAS an opinion he had formed on his own, since it was 4:15 and she had not begun to prepare anything. But Jack stood the spade in the ground and paused for a minute, looking at his hand. He walked to the porch, looking at it, and she heard her father say, “Let’s see! Oh yes, yes! Glory will take care of that! Glory? He has a splinter here. From that old spade handle! I don’t know how long we’ve had that spade! I should have said something! Glory?”

Jack said, “If I can borrow a needle, I can take care of it, I think.”

“No, no. That’s pretty deep, Jack!”

Her father’s face was animated with concern. He held to the wrist of Jack’s upturned hand and almost hurried along beside him. “We’ll put some iodine on that!”

Glory said, “You can wash up and I’ll disinfect a needle.”

“I’ll get the iodine!” the old man said, and launched a determined assault on the staircase.

Jack looked at her. “It’s just a splinter.”

She said, “Not much happens around here,” and he laughed.

She had made him laugh twice. She took a certain satisfaction in the joke about the towel, but in order to laugh at this little remark he must be feeling pretty kindly toward her, she thought. He was never one to laugh when you hoped he would, when other people would. In those old days, that is. He was a restless, distant, difficult boy, then twenty years passed with hardly a word from him, and now here he was in her kitchen, offering her his wounded hand, still damp with washing, smelling like lavender and lye. They sat at the table and she took his hand to steady it. A slender hand, still unsteady, with a few blisters rising on it from the work he had done that morning. Cigarette stains.

He noticed her scrutiny. “Do you read palms?” he asked.

“No. But if I did, I would say that you have a splinter through your lifeline.”

He laughed. “I believe you may have found your calling.”

She put the needle down. “I’m afraid to do this. It might actually hurt. And your hand is trembling.”

“Well, if that one is, so is the other one. I could do myself harm if I tried it, I suppose.”

“All right. Stay as still as you can.” She thought, If he really were a stranger, this would not seem so odd to me. She could hear his breathing. She could see the blue traces of blood under the white skin of his wrist. “Just a second — there.” She extracted the splinter easily enough.

“Thank you,” he said.

The cane and the creaky railing and the hard, slippery shoes, and their father hurried into the kitchen with a bottle of iodine and a spool of gauze.

“Yes, you’ll want to wash it and dry it again,” he said. Then he daubed iodine here and there, finally where it should have been.

Jack said, “Ow,” for old times’ sake, by the sound of it.

“Yes, but it is very effective!” Her father was afire with solicitude. He went to the refrigerator and opened the door and stood there, purposive. “Supper!” he said. “I believe the pies are missing!”

Glory said, “They were so old I put them over the fence for the Dahlbergs’ dogs.”

“You did? The way things go around here, it might be time to invest in a dog of our own!”

Jack laughed, and his father smiled at him and patted his arm and said, “Well, that’s wonderful! That’s what I like to hear!”

Someone had left sliced ham and a macaroni salad in the porch the day before, one of those kindly reminders that nothing passed in their household unnoticed. The grace was exuberant—“Our hearts are much too full!” the old man said, and sank into that reverie prayer had become for him.

Through supper Jack was patiently restless, hearing out his father’s attempts at conversation—“Yes, this was a very different town at one time, when we were still on the main road! There were people passing through. You wouldn’t remember the old hotel. We thought it was very fine. It had a big veranda and a ballroom—” He grew ruefully excited, pondering the Gilead that was, and Jack watched him with the expression of mild impassivity he wore now that the embarrassments of his arrival were more or less behind him. She felt sorry for her father, happy as he was. It was hard work talking to Jack. So little in his childhood and youth could be mentioned without discomfort, his twenty-year silence was his to speak about if he chose to, but they were prepared to appreciate his discretion if any account of it might have caused more discomfort still. Then there was the question “Why are you here?” which they would never ask. Glory thought, Why am I here? How cruel it would be to ask me that.

When his father began to weary with the effort of talk—“Yes, yes,” he said, “yes”—Jack cleared away the dishes and then he said, “Sir,” and took his father’s arm and helped him up from the table, a thing the old man never let Glory do, and he took him to the chair in his room where he napped. He helped him out of his jacket and opened his collar and loosened his tie. Then he knelt and removed his shoes. “That old quilt—” his father said, and Jack took it from the foot of the bed and spread it over him. The manner of his doing all these things, things she had done every day for months, suggested courtesy rather than kindness, as if it were a tribute to his father’s age rather than a concession to it. And she could see how her father was soothed by these attentions, as if pain were an appetite for comforting of just this kind.

She did her best.

THE BOYS CALLED THEIR FATHER SIR, BUT THE GIRLS never did. Behind his back the boys called him the Reverend, or the Old Gent, but the girls always said Papa. Jack, can you tell me why you have done whatever you did, acted however you did? No, sir. You can’t explain it, Jack? No, sir. That courtesy was his shield and concealment. It was his courage. His father would never raise a hand against it, would seldom raise his voice. You do understand that what you did was wrong. Yes, sir, I understand that. Will you pray for a better conscience, better judgment, Jack? No, sir, I doubt that I will. Well, I’ll pray for you then. Thank you, sir.

When Jack helped his father from his chair, it was with that same courtesy, and she could see that his father’s pleasure was partly in the surprise of recognition, as of an old promise kept, an old debt remembered. Mama had said, “That boy has you wrapped around his finger!” And her father had said, “I just don’t want us to lose him.” That was before her parents realized she listened and, after a fashion, understood. Hearing words like these between her parents had nerved her to say to him, “What right do you have—” and had given her that glimpse of fear she still remembered. He must have thought he knew where she had learned that question, that inflection. She remembered standing there feet planted, arms akimbo. Poor, stupid child. Because she was the youngest, they forgot she was too old to be allowed to overhear. Then whenever he was gone she knew they might have lost him. “Go away, Glory,” he would say if she tried to tag after him. “Please just go away.”

While Jack settled his father for his nap, Glory stood in the hall, watching. It was beautiful to see, the old man making not one sound of discomfort, soothed by the gracefulness of Jack’s attention, tucked in like a weary child.

AT DUSK JACK CAME DOWNSTAIRS IN HIS SUIT AND TIE. “Back in a bit,” he said. He paused on the steps to put his hat on and adjust it, and then he walked down the road toward town. Her father stirred when he heard the door closing. He called, “Did Jack go out?”

“He said he’d be right back.” After an hour Glory went up to his room, just to see if by some means he had gathered his few effects and slipped them out of the house, but they were there where he had put them, shirts in the closet, books on the dresser. Of course she did not turn on the light, since he might see it from the road. And of course she heard the front door open as she stood there. She crept down the hall to the bathroom and turned on the water. He came up the stairs and paused in the hallway. Then she heard him flip on the light in his room. The door had been standing ajar, she remembered. And had she left it open? Did he look for signs that someone had come into his room? He did that when they were children. Someone! Who could it be but me, she thought.

All those years ago her father had said, “I’m afraid we might lose him.” And here he is again, leaving the house for an hour, and by the end of it the old man is too anxious to sit still and she is prowling in his room, intruding on his privacy — when if there was one thing on earth she was eager to concede to him or to anyone it was privacy! It was amazing. Her whole life long that house was either where Jack might not be or where he was not. Why did he leave? Where had he gone? Those questions had hung in the air for twenty years while everyone tried to ignore them, had tried to act as if their own lives were of sufficient interest to distract them from the fact that few letters came, that at Christmas there was again no phone call, that their father seemed bent under the weight of an anxiety time only increased. They were so afraid they would lose him, and then they had lost him, and that was the story of their family, no matter how warm and fruitful and robust it might have appeared to the outside world.

What had she thought? That he had dropped his suitcase out the window, absconding like someone trying to cheat the landlord? Why would he do that? But why did he do anything — come home, for example? She heard him go downstairs again, and she heard her father say, “Yes, yes, we were beginning to miss you, Jack! Glory’s around here somewhere—” So she went down to the kitchen and there he was, studying the wound in his hand.

“How is it?” she asked.

“Mending nicely, thanks.” His glance was mild, unreadable. “I was out looking the place over. What do people do for work around here?”

“Well, that’s a good question,” she said. “Aside from farming, there’s the grocery store and the dry-goods store and the barbershop and the gas station and the bank.”

“Teachers are always needed!” the old man shouted from his chair, and Jack said, “I guess I’d better bring him in here, hadn’t I.”

His father was already halfway down the hall, but he let Jack take his arm. He even handed him his cane, as if all caution and struggle ended when he had Jack to lean on. “Yes!” he said. “I have never known it to be true that an educated man could not find work as a schoolteacher! There are more children every day! I notice them everywhere!” Jack helped him into his place at the table. “They pass by in the street!” he said, as if he thought he might have weakened his case by overstating it.

Jack gave him a glass of water. “I don’t really think I’m cut out to be a schoolteacher,” he said.

“Well, I hope you’ll give it some thought!”

“Yes, sir, I will. Is this today’s newspaper?”

His father said, “Yesterday’s, I believe. Not that it makes much difference. I put it aside because I didn’t quite finish the crossword puzzle.”

“Good. I’ll read my horoscope. I’ve sort of forgotten what I did yesterday. Here. It says new enterprises are favored. I guess I missed my chance.”

“That’s the only thing it ever says! That’s probably what mine says!”

“Yes, sir, it is. We have the same sign. And here’s yours, Glory. ‘Curiosity is not always welcome. Consider self-restraint.’” He smiled at her, folded the paper, and tucked it under his arm.

She felt herself blush hotly and, she knew, visibly. But he looked away from her quickly enough, almost, to make her believe he had not meant to embarrass her. Maybe the horoscope was real after all. She decided it was better to assume it was real, because if she took offense she would be confessing, and seeming to confess to worse by far than she had done, not that there was anything wrong with what she had done. And if she found out it was not real, that he was taunting her, everything would only be harder. That was the decision of the moment, and when she considered it afterward, she was grateful to herself for having made it. Consider self-restraint indeed, when she bit her tongue twenty times a day. All she had wanted when she stepped into his room was to know whether she had to begin hinting to her poor old father that Jack was gone again. It was not her fault that so ridiculous a fear was justified. And she did not intend to notice now that nothing suggested he had been drinking.

“I believe I’ll go out for a little walk,” she said. It was late enough to have made her father worry, if he had been paying attention. But he was consulting with Jack about the crossword puzzle.

She was afraid to be angry, and that made her angry. What right did he have to take over the house this way? Granting he had as much claim to it as she did, the only difference being that she had spent some months caring for the house and her father before he arrived. Now he seemed inclined to help with the old man, too, and he did it well, and as if something were communicated in it that made it more a gracious ceremony than the acting out of duty or obligation. A tacit agreement had formed between the two men that Jack would help his father with the bathing and changing that had been the uneasiest part of her caring for him, and that was a great relief, since he had been reluctant to accept the attention he needed. The fact was that she had taken comfort from the thought that her duty was plain and that a sense of obligation was becoming in anyone and so on. But things were better with Jack in the house.

“Insinuating” is an ugly word, snakey. She’d have thought of a better one if she could. He had resumed his place in his father’s heart, that was clear. She believed that in twenty years there might have been four letters, because when she was newly returned to her father’s house she went to the big Bible with the altogether blameless intention of soothing her mind with a psalm or two, and the Bible opened on four letters, tucked between the Testaments. The envelopes were worn enough to make her think the letters might have some family interest, but when she saw the return addresses, she put them back unread. Whatever had passed between father and son, their father had not seen fit to tell any of the rest of them, at least as far as she knew. Jack had ceased to be spoken of, almost. Now here he was, without a word of explanation, crowding her out of that big, empty house, or so it seemed to her sometimes. I should leave, she told herself once or twice, to savor the thought of their surprise, their regret. What a childish idea. Then Jack would leave, no doubt, so that she would come back, as she would have to do, and her father would be plunged in sorrow of which she was directly the cause, and which would not end in this life.

She was less inclined to pray than she had been once. In her childhood, when her father, a tall man then and graceful, had stepped into the pulpit and bowed his head, silence came over the people. He prayed before the commencement of prayer. May the meditations of our hearts be acceptable. It seemed to her that her own prayers never attained to that level of seriousness. They had been desperate from time to time, which was a different thing altogether. Her father told his children to pray for patience, for courage, for kindness, for clarity, for trust, for gratitude. Those prayers will be answered, he said. Others may not be. The Lord knows your needs. So she prayed, Lord, give me patience. She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord, my brother treats me like a hostile stranger, my father seems to have put me aside, I feel I have no place here in what I thought would be my refuge, I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse. But it cost her tears to think her situation might actually be that desolate, so she prayed again for patience, for tact, for understanding — for every virtue that might keep her safe from conflicts that would be sure to leave her wounded, every virtue that might at least help her preserve an appearance of dignity, for heaven’s sake. She did wonder what the neighbors thought, if anyone saw her in the street at that hour. Something fairly near the mark, no doubt.

As she considered the prayer she was not yet disconsolate enough to put into words, the unwelcome realization came to her that she loved Jack and yearned for his approval. This was no doubt inevitable, since it was assumed to be true of the whole family, separately and together, excluding in-laws, who might never have met him or even heard his name, and who could only be a little amazed by the potency of this collective sentiment if by some means they became aware of it. He was the black sheep, the ne’er-do-well, unremarkable in photographs. None of the very few stories that mentioned him suggested the loss of him could have been wholly regrettable. It was the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all. Glory was thirteen when he left for college, having been by that time ignored by him for years. And here she was in middle age feeling the fact of his touchy indifference a judgment on her, so it seemed to her, though he had been so grievously at fault, and her intrusions all those years ago, her excesses, whatever he might have called them, were no such thing — she had defended them in her mind a thousand times and would defend them to his face if the occasion ever arose, which God forbid, God forbid.

The thought had occurred to her more than once, even before the gradual catastrophe of her own venture into the world had come to an end, that “despite all” was a dangerous formula, and that the romance of absence was a distraction from more sustaining joys. Those years of her late childhood, when she felt so necessary, when she was so sure things would come right if only enough effort was given to making them come right — those years stayed with her as if they had been the whole of her life. The others hadn’t even known — not Faith, not Teddy. Her father said it was Jack’s choice to tell them or to be silent, since he might feel still less at ease with them if they knew, and not seek them out if the need arose. He might not come home when they came home, at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Her father told her with tears in his eyes that the three of them could alleviate Jack’s guilt and also his shame by making the very best of the situation. So she took up knitting. It was a deep secret. They were at work on a great rescue. Her parents talked freely to her or in her hearing about it all, trusted her, and she never breathed a word except to old Ames, whose discretion was perfect. It embarrassed her to remember how happy she had been, those three bitter, urgent years until it all ended. Her brother would never know the thousand things she had done to make life tolerable for him.

Brothers. When she was a child, attention from any of her brothers was wonderful to her. It was rare, and it was wry, odd, not at all parental. Even Grace, who was older than she was by less than two years, tried sometimes to mother her, and Faith and Hope — such names! — were irksomely mature and responsible. But when any of the brothers noticed her, it was to swing her around by her hands or to carry her on his back or to show her a card trick or the husk of a cicada. When the boys had all gotten their growth, they were within an inch of one another in height, lanky young fellows with angular faces and unruly hair. Luke had left for school when she was four, Dan when she was seven. Jack and Teddy left the same year, the year she was thirteen, since Teddy was so good in school that he had skipped two grades. So when they were at home together, in the summer and at holidays, they took a conscious pleasure in it, and this was truer as the younger boys were recruited into the ranks of the fully grown. They joked and sparred and took off together in Luke’s old Ford, sometimes even to Des Moines, Jack with them if he could be cajoled. They were vain of their freedom and their manhood, of their cleverness and their long legs, but gentlemanly all the same, and vain of that, too. Their mother called them the princes of the church, and they did look fine, strolling into the sanctuary together in their jackets and ties, Bibles in hand, the three of them, and then sometimes the fourth. They said things like volo, nolo, and de gustibus and “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” and she was in awe of them. Seeing Jack reminded her of those days. She knew the others now, after the manner of adult friendship. And fond as she was of them, it was hard to remember that they had ever seemed marvelous to her. But Jack was as remote from her as he ever had been, and she found herself waiting again for notice and approval, to her own considerable irritation.

After a little while she went back to the house, thinking her father might be waiting up. But Jack had gotten him to bed and had gone upstairs to his room. The porch light was left on for her.

THE NEXT MORNING SHE ROSE EARLY, EARLY ENOUGH THAT she could assume Jack was still sleeping, and she went downstairs to the kitchen, measured out coffee and made pancake batter, and then waited to hear her father stir, as he always did well before dawn, though it was his custom to wait to rouse himself until she came downstairs an hour or two later. Mornings were worst for him, and the tedium of lying awake wore on him, she knew. This morning and from now on she would do better by him. He loved pancakes. She would make them often.

So when she heard him stirring, she started the coffeepot and the griddle, then she went into his room and helped him up, held his arm while he stepped into his slippers, bundled him into his robe. She brought a washcloth for his face and hands, and combed his hair.

“Ready to greet the day, more or less,” he said.

She said, “Pancakes.”

“Yes, that’s wonderful. I heard you out there and I thought it was part of a dream I was having. I don’t remember the dream, but it had footsteps in it.”

It had not occurred to her to look at the clock, assuming that, since she awoke feeling purposeful, with a highly formed intention in her mind, it must be the dark of the morning. The clock on her father’s dresser said 3:10. He saw her look at it.

“Pancakes are always welcome!” he said, mustering himself.

“I can let you sleep for a couple more hours, Papa.”

“Not at all! The smell of coffee,” he said, “has put all thought of sleep behind me! Yes!” and he moved with halting resolution toward the kitchen, and took his chair, and sat looking alertly at nothing in particular. So she gave him a plate and a knife and fork.

“I’m afraid you children might not be getting along,” he said. This remark was so apt and abrupt it brought tears to her eyes. She turned to the business of making pancakes and said, when she could trust her voice, “It is hard, you know, after so many years — I was young when he left for school, and we were never close—” and she put a pancake on his plate. He took up his fork. She poured another pancake. “And I do think he feels uneasy with me. I’m not at ease with him, that’s a fact, and I might as well be honest about it—”

She set the second pancake on the first, and her father said, “If you’ll put my foot on the stove there,” and something else, and she realized he was asleep. He was asleep with his fork in his hand and a sociable expression on his face. She couldn’t find it in her heart to wake him again, so she turned off the coffee and the griddle and the ceiling light and sat down at the table, too. And when she found she couldn’t hold up her head, she rested it on her arms, and wept a little, and drowsed a little. And then she heard Jack on the stairs.

It was still long before dawn, so he switched on the light and as quickly switched it off again. He whispered, “What’s wrong?”

She said, “Nothing, really.”

“You’re crying.”

“That’s true.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s sound asleep. You can turn the light on.”

The light came on, and Jack stood in the doorway taking in the situation. “I did smell coffee,” he said.

His father stirred in his chair, and Jack slipped the fork out of his hand. “It’d be a shame to waste those pancakes,” he said.

“They’re cold.”

“They’re still pancakes. Do you mind?”

“I don’t mind. And there’s the cold coffee, too.”

“Excellent,” he said. “Thank you.” He took his father’s plate and cup, filled the cup with coffee, and sat down to the pancakes. “This is nice in its way. But it’s a little strange. I don’t mean that as criticism.” Then he said, “You’re really not going to explain this, are you.”

“No, it doesn’t matter. I don’t feel like it.”

“Okay.” He laughed. “I’m always willing to play by the house rules.” Then he said, “When we finish our breakfast, can we go back to bed?”

“No.”

“I suppose I should have guessed that.”

“He almost never sleeps this soundly. I’m not going to disturb him. But I don’t want him to be confused when he wakes up. I’ll stay here. You can go back to bed.”

Jack watched his father for a moment. Then he stood up, put one arm under his knees and the other around his shoulders, and lifted him out of his chair. The old man murmured, and he said, “You’re fine, sir. It’s Jack.” A hand floated up to touch his face, his cheek and ear. Jack carried him into his room and tucked him into his bed. Then he came back to the kitchen.

“Now you can get some more sleep,” he said.

Glory said, “Thank you, I will.” And she went upstairs and lay on her bed and hated her life until morning.

WHEN MORNING CAME, SHE WENT DOWN TO THE KITCHEN and made coffee and pancakes, as if for the first time. Jack’s expression was opaque. Her father was drowsy, or he was pensive. Finally he said, “I have something on my mind. ‘Last night I saw the new moon with the old moon in his arm.’ What is that? I’ve been trying to think.”

She said, “‘The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens.’”

Jack said, “Good for you, college girl.”

“No,” the old man said. “She was an English teacher. In high school. A very fine teacher of English, for a number of years. Then she got married, so she had to resign. They made them do that. ‘The new moon with the old moon in his arm.’ That is a very sad song. A number of times I heard my grandmother sing it, and it was very sad. ‘Oh forty miles off Aberdour ’tis fifty fathoms deep, and there lies good Sir Patrick Spens with the Scots lairds at his feet.’ She said the life was very difficult in Scotland, but she was always homesick. She said she would die of the homesickness, and maybe she did, but she took her time about it. She was ninety-eight when she died.” He laughed. “‘We that are young will never see so much nor live so long.’” He said, “You just picked me up and carried me, didn’t you, Jack. Well, that’s all right. I’m not the father you remember, I know that.”

Jack put his hand to his brow. “Of course you are. I didn’t — I’m sorry—”

“No matter. Never mind. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

The color left Jack’s face. After a moment he pushed back his chair. “Well,” he said. “There’s work to be done.” He went out to the garden and stood in the path he had made along the iris beds and lighted a cigarette. Glory watched him from the porch. She said, “I should probably help him.”

The old man said, “Yes, dear, that would be good of you.” So she settled her father in the Morris chair with the newspaper, and then she went out to the garden. She touched Jack’s arm and he looked at her.

“What is it?” he said.

“I just wanted to say that there was nothing wrong with what you did. He hates being feeble. And he’s had to put up with it for a long time.”

He drew on his cigarette. “Thank you,” he said.

“No, really. I thought it was gallant. A beau geste. A demonstration of your fabled charm.”

“Too bad. I’ve found that people weary of my fabled charm.”

“Well, I guess I haven’t had much chance to weary of it.”

He laughed. “The day is young.” Then he said, “I didn’t intend anything when I said college girl. I don’t know what was offensive about it.”

“It wasn’t offensive. He just wants to make sure you think well of me. He’s afraid we don’t get along.”

He looked at her, studied her. “He said that?”

“Yes, he mentioned it.”

“Last night.”

“Yes—”

“And what did you say?”

“Well, I said that you and I never did really know each other very well.”

“That’s all?”

“He was too sleepy to talk much.”

“So he’s worried about it.”

“He worries about everything. It’ll be fine. You’ve always known how to please him.”

He shook his head. “No. I could always count on him to be pleased with me. From time to time. Often enough. I never understood it myself.” He shrugged and laughed. “What the hell,” he said, “I don’t believe I’ve ever understood much of anything.” He threw down his cigarette and glanced at her, and there was a kind of irritation in his look, as if she had drawn him into a confidence he already regretted. “I’m not making excuses,” he said.

“I know that. I want to get a bandage for your hand. I’ll be right back.”

The old man had moved to the porch. She called to him and waved as she passed. She brought the gauze and the tape, and there where they knew he could watch them, she tended to Jack’s wound. “That should be all right.”

“Very kind. Thank you,” he said. And with his bandaged hand, gravely and tentatively, he mussed her hair.

SHE HAD LET HIM BELIEVE THAT THEIR FATHER WAS UP IN the night worrying. That was wrong, but it wasn’t really intentional. She had wanted to tell him how beautiful it was to have taken up his father in his arms that way. She had thought it at the time, and had felt bitterly how helpless she was to be so gentle, so sufficient. To own up to this unwelcome feeling of admiration, aloud, to Jack himself, had given her a sense of freedom and strength, those rewards of self-overcoming her father had always promised. She had felt this briefly. Then she saw that wary look of his, caution with no certainty of the nature of the threat, and with no notion at all of possible refuge. He realized he did not please his father, did not know how to please his father. He would probably have liked to believe he had done something wrong so that he could at least orient himself a little, but she had told him a terrible thing, that he had done nothing to offend, that his father had found fault with him anyway, only because he was old and sad now, not the father he thought he had come home to.

They worked quietly in the sunshine, heaving up irises and separating them. Jack was very earnest about the work, and very preoccupied, reflective. Glory replanted the best of the corms, setting a few aside for Lila. “You’re a friend of hers?” Jack asked.

“We get along. She’s a nice woman. You haven’t stopped by the Ameses’ yet, have you.”

“Too busy,” he said, and laughed. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“She keeps a big garden herself, and she’s offered to help me with this one, but I don’t want to take her away from her husband. Time’s wingèd chariot and so on.”

“How is old Ames?”

“Papa’s worried about him. He really does worry about everything. But he says, ‘Ames just isn’t quite right!’ He says, ‘I’ve known him all my life, and I can tell there’s something the matter!’” She looked toward the porch and whispered, “He’s supposed to be deaf, but he seems to hear whatever I’d rather he didn’t. I’d better be careful.”

Jack said, “I’d have thought Ames would come by. No wonder the old fellow misses him. I didn’t know forty-eight hours could pass without a quarrel, or at least a checker game.”

“I suppose he’s giving Papa time to enjoy having you here.”

“Ah yes. Who better than Reverend Ames to understand that special joy I bring with me wherever I go—”

“No, seriously. You don’t realize what this has meant.”

“What it meant until I actually showed up.” He said, “The hangover was a mistake, that’s for sure.” He took the cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lighted one.

“Children!” the old man shouted. “I think that’s enough for one day!”

She said, “Ames has mellowed a little. At least he’s not as abstracted as he used to be. So much of that was loneliness, I think. And it would please Papa if you paid a call on him.”

Jack looked at her. “I know. Of course. I intend to.” They were walking back to the house. He flicked his cigarette away and pushed the hair off his brow, and he held the door for her. Then he stood there just inside the door, like a stranger unsure of his welcome.

THEIR FATHER HAD PUT THE CHECKERBOARD ON THE kitchen table. He said, “Jack, I like a good game of checkers. But Glory lets me win.”

“No, I don’t.”

“She does. And I know it’s kindly meant.”

“I don’t let you win.”

“She doesn’t really enjoy the game, so half the time she more or less concedes by the third move. It’s frustrating. I can’t hone my skills!”

Glory said, “I win about as often as you do.”

Her father said, “That is my point! Half the time she is just letting me win!” And he laughed roguishly and winked at Jack, who smiled. He opened the box. “Black is my preference. Glory, you sit down here and watch. You might want to pick up some pointers. This fellow may have acquired strategies unheard of in Gilead!”

“No, sir, “ Jack said. “Not where checkers are concerned.” He came to the table and took a seat. He placed the red checkers on their squares.

Glory said, “I’ll make popcorn.”

“Yes, like the old times—” Her father made a move.

She thought, Yes, a little like the old times. Graying children, ancient father. If they could have looked forward from those old times, when even a game of checkers around that table was so rambunctious it would have driven her father off to parse his Hebrew in the stricken quiet of Ames’s house — if they could now look in the door of the kitchen at the three of them there, would they believe what they saw? No matter — her father was hunched over his side of the board, mock-intent, and Jack was reclined, legs crossed at the ankles, as if it were possible to relax in a straight-backed chair. The corn popped.

After a while her father said, “Best two out of three! I know when I am outflanked.”

“Are you sure?” Jack asked.

“‘Sure’? If I do this, you do that. And if I do this, you do that,” he said, tapping the board with his finger. “It seems odd, in the circumstances, that I should be the one to point it out!”

“If you hadn’t, I might not have thought of it.”

“Well, then, we’ll call it a draw.”

Jack laughed. “That’s fine with me.”

“Whipped!” his father said. “Technicalities aside. It has taken the starch out of me! Glory, I’ve got the board warmed up. Let’s see what you can do with this fellow.”

So she sat down opposite her brother. He smiled at her. “This is very fine popcorn,” he said.

“Extra butter.”

He nodded. They played a polite game, distracted by their father’s palpable hope that they would enjoy it a little. There was no trace in Jack’s expression of anything at all except a readiness to oblige, which was only emphasized by the promptness with which he took his turns. “Oh,” he said, when she triple-jumped him.

Then his father said, “I believe you have an opportunity there, Jack.” And he reached over and made the move himself, a double jump. “Now you have a king, you see.”

Glory said, “No fair,” and Jack laughed.

“Old times, yes! It’s very good, but I can’t deal with all this excitement. I’m off to my room. No, you two finish your game,” he said, when Jack stood up to help him with his chair. “There’s time enough to get me to bed. I’m not going anywhere.”

So they went on with their game. Glory said, “I don’t recall that we ever did play checkers, you and I. I always played with the younger kids.”

Jack began to make his move, but his hand trembled and he dropped it into his lap.

“What is it,” she said.

He cleared his throat and smiled at her. “You never sneaked me upstairs with a bottle of aspirin. You were a little girl.”

“No, I didn’t mean I did it myself. I just meant I knew that it happened.”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize that. I didn’t realize at the time. That you would have been aware of it.” He cleared his throat.

“It was a stupid thing for me to say, Jack. I apologize. I hope you will forget it.”

He said, “It just makes things sound worse than they were. They were bad enough.”

“All right. I will never say it again.”

He considered. “Say what, exactly?”

“Well, you’re right. I didn’t say that I personally was the one who sneaked you upstairs. That’s just what you heard.”

He said, “I wouldn’t mind if we dropped the subject entirely. All that happened a long time ago.”

At that point she lost her temper. She thought, Why am I apologizing to this man for something I did not say, and also for what I did say, which was only the truth?

“Well.” She hoped she was controlling the quaver of anger in her voice. “At just that moment it was not obvious that all that had ended a long time ago.”

He put his hand to his face. Oh, she thought, this is miserable. Dear God, I have made him ashamed. How will we live in the same house now? He will leave, and Papa will die of grief, and the fault will be mine. So she said, “Forgive me.”

“Yes,” he said, “of course.”

Their father called, “Could one of you children come and give me a little help?”

“I’ll go,” Jack said. She put away the checkerboard, and then she looked down the hall, and there was Jack, kneeling to unlace the old man’s shoes. And his father regarding him with such sad tenderness that she wished she could will herself out of existence, herself and every word she had ever said.

THAT WAS THE DAY A PHONE CALL CAME, A WOMAN ASKING to speak to Jack Boughton. Glory said he was in the garden and she would call him, but he wasn’t there, so she went to the barn, where she found him leaning into the engine of the car. “There’s a telephone call for you.”

“Who is it?”

“She didn’t say. A woman.”

“Jesus,” he said, and he stepped past her and ran down the path and up the steps into the house. When she came into the kitchen the phone was back on its hook. “She hung up.” He said, “Sweet Jesus, I’m out of the house twenty minutes—”

“I’m sorry—”

He shook his head. “It’s not your fault. Did she tell you her name? What did she say?”

“She said she was calling from St. Louis. The connection was very bad. There was a lot of noise. She was calling from a phone booth, I think.”

“From St. Louis? She said that?”

“Yes.”

He sat down at the table. “St. Louis! Did she say she would call back?”

“Well, no. I thought I would be able to find you. I guess I thought she’d stay on the line. I should have asked.”

He drew a very deep breath and rubbed his eyes. “None of this is your fault,” he said. His hands were greasy, so he went to the sink and washed them, and washed his face, then he took a dishcloth and wiped down the telephone. “None of this is my fault, either, I suppose. There’s absolutely no comfort in that thought.” He sat down at the table. “I hope I’m not in the way here. I cannot be farther than an arm’s length from the telephone into the indefinite future. Jack Boughton in chains. All I need is an eagle to peck at my liver, such as it is. Ah,” he said, and he laughed. “At least I got a call. That’s something.” The thought seemed to lift his spirits.

“Can’t you call her? I mean, I know she was calling from a phone booth. But couldn’t you call her family and ask how to reach her?”

He shook his head. “I have been warmly encouraged not to do that. By her father, no less.”

She brought him the book she meant to read next, The Paths of Glory.

“Your memoirs?”

She said, “The girls in this family got named for theological abstractions and the boys got named for human beings. That’s bad enough without our having to be teased about it for the rest of our lives.”

“Sorry. It just slipped out. No more jokes.”

“‘The paths of Glory lead but to the grave.’ Now you don’t have to struggle with the urge to say that, either.”

“Thank you,” he said. “What a relief!”

So he sat in the kitchen reading, drumming his fingers. He turned the book to the last few pages and read the ending. “Sad!” He put it aside. She gave him a bowl of walnuts and he shelled them. And he paced. And he stood on the porch, just outside the back door, and smoked.

Two hours passed and the phone rang.

Her father called, in his sleep, “Could you get that, Glory?”

“It’s probably for Jack, Papa.”

“No, Faith said in her note she’d be giving me a call. She hasn’t called in a number of days.”

“You talked to her yesterday.”

The phone rang again. She whispered to Jack, “Answer it!” because he was just standing there, looking at her. She took the phone off the hook and handed it to him, and then she went to her father’s room. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. He looked drowsy, but he seemed set on getting up, so she brought his robe.

She heard Jack clear his throat. “Hello?”

Her father said, “That’s a very good thing. He should talk with all his sisters and brothers. Every one of them. They are anxious to hear from him.”

Jack said, “What’s that? I can’t quite hear you! He did? When? I am talking louder! No, it’s not your fault, I know that! Yes, they do get upset!”

Her father said, “Well, I can’t imagine that there could be any reason to shout like that!”

Glory said, “It’s a bad connection, someone calling from a phone booth.”

“Well, I hope so. Otherwise I’ll have to call Faith and explain. And I really don’t know how I could explain his shouting at her like that. I really don’t. She has always been very fond of him.” His eyes were closed, but she combed his hair and helped him into his slippers.

“He would never shout at Faith, Papa. So it has to be someone else.”

“Yes,” the old man said. “I suppose I should have realized that.”

Glory was trying to distract her father from the conversation, and she was trying not to hear it herself, though Jack did sound alarmed, or aggrieved, and she could not help but wish she knew what the matter was.

“If the boys could keep looking!” he shouted. “I’ll pay them! I’ll send money!” A pause. “No, I wasn’t suggesting that! I mean, I’m sure you are all doing your best, Mrs. Johnson! Believe me! I certainly don’t blame you!”

Her father said, “Yes, he mentioned a Mrs. Johnson. He’s shouting at someone we don’t even know.”

“Please, if he turns up, call any time! Call collect! Yes, thank you, thank you!”

She followed her father down the hall to the kitchen. Jack was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up, rubbing his face. He stood up and smoothed back his hair. He was pale and his eyes were red. He said, “It’s nothing. A dog ran off. I promised someone I’d look after his dog.”

“Oh yes,” his father said. “All that shouting was about a dog.” He shook his head. Her father woke up gruff sometimes, or confused. Sometimes he needed an hour or so to come into himself. Jack couldn’t know that.

“It was about a dog,” he said softly, and he smiled at her, because they had spent those long hours together and she would understand the bitterness of his surprise. “I can’t be trusted with a dog.”

She said, “They do come back sometimes. I think you’d better sit down.”

He nodded and smiled, pale as she had ever seen him. “I’ll get past this,” he said. “I’ll be all right.” He took the chair she pulled out for him. “Thank you.” She gave him a glass of water. “Maybe I can make it up to him.” He shrugged.

His father was gazing at him, and Jack glanced up and then looked away, uneasy. The old man said, “Well, whatever the trouble is, I’ll help if I can. I think you must know that by now.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“At this point I’m pretty much reduced to praying for you. Of course I do that anyway. If anything else comes to mind, let me know.”

“Yes, I will.”

When they were children their father had always avoided fault-finding, at least in the actual words he spoke to them. But there was from time to time a tone of rebuke in his voice that overrode the mildness of his intentions. She had not heard him speak that way in any number of years, and she watched Jack accept it now, patiently, as if he were hearing something necessary and true, something chastening. So she said, “None of this is your fault, Jack. The phone woke Papa out of a sound sleep, and he’s a little cross. That’s all there is to it.”

Jack said mildly, as if he found the fact interesting, “It never seems to make much difference. Whether I’m at fault or not.”

“Yes, if Glory says I was cross, I suppose I was cross. It wasn’t my intention, not at all. I don’t know what it was I said. I believe I said I’d help if I could. That seems all right to me. I don’t know.” He shook his head.

Jack said softly, “It was all right. It was very kind.”

“Yes,” the old man said, “I meant to be kind to you. I certainly did.”

MORE OFTEN, AS THE DAYS WENT BY, JACK SOUGHT HER out to talk with her, and when the talk drifted into silence, sometimes he would smile at her as if to say, You and I, of all people, here, of all places, killing time for lack of anything else to do with it. A stranger might look at her that way, past the tedium of their situation, past the accidental companionship that came with their whiling it out together, to let her know in a decorous and impersonal way how glad he was she was there.

And sometimes, when they were working in the garden or doing the dishes, she would notice that he had drawn back to watch her, appraisingly, as if he had suddenly dropped every assumption about her, as if she were someone who figured in an intention of his and about whom he realized he knew nothing to be relied upon, or nothing that mattered, someone he must consider again carefully. She did not remember from her childhood the habit he had now of running the tip of his tongue across his lower lip, but she thought she did remember that estrangement of his gaze, that look of urgent calculation, of sharply attentive calm. It could only be fear, and she wanted to say, You can trust me, but that is what they had always told him, and he laughed and pretended to believe them, and wished to believe them, she was sure, and never did. Her father always said, “That loneliness of his,” and when she saw it in him now, she felt lonely, even abandoned for the moment it lasted, until the banter of comfort and familiarity took up again. He’d say, “Hey, chum,” to coax her out of her thoughts. They were indeed very sad thoughts, as his must have been, too, and he would smile with fellow feeling, her bemused and improbable companion.

He would ask her advice about how to live in that house, and usually he would take it. He asked her if she thought it would be all right if he trimmed back the vines that grew on the front of the porch, and she said, “Better not. Those are there to attract hummingbirds.”

“The old fellow can hardly see who’s going by in the road.”

“Well, he doesn’t seem to mind that. He loves those birds. So did Mama. That’s part of it.”

Jack said, “Right.” Then he said, “When we were kids, we’d have thought crazy people must live in a house that looked like that. All overgrown.”

She laughed. “I remember the Thrushes. Teddy used to make you go with him to collect for the newspaper, because those old shrubs had grown up and buried the house.”

“I was thinking about that. She used to stand on her porch on Halloween night and call to the kids in the road. She’d say she had cookies and apples for them, and they’d take off running.”

“Everybody knows about Papa and his trumpet vines, though. And the house is pretty strange-looking, anyway. In my opinion.”

Jack said, “True.” But later she saw him appraising the vines again from the edge of the road, and the next day he began cutting back at the spragglier branches, more of them the next day and the next. She noticed the trimmings stacked out of sight behind the shed. Against her advice and to her surprise, he had undertaken a furtive campaign to make the house look a little less forbidding. He even found a flower pot in the barn and shoveled up some petunias to put in it and set it on the step.

“I didn’t think anyone would mind,” he said, when he saw her notice it.

GRADUALLY HE GAVE UP ON THE HOPE THAT THERE WOULD be another telephone call. He began spending time in the barn again, leaning into the engine of the DeSoto. To work on a car where anyone might see was considered unseemly by the Boughtons, not different essentially from setting it up on blocks. And Jack was aware of the likelihood of failure and therefore careful to provide as little opportunity as possible for anecdote or, worse, for offers of help or advice. Glory mused from time to time on how often the starchy proprieties observed in her family overlapped more or less precisely with Jack’s strategies for avoiding humiliation. In any case, he spent a good part of every day in earthy, dank concealment, oiling some memory of resilience into stiffened leather upholstery, or sinking inflated inner tubes into the horse trough to find the leaks in them.

They had had a horse once, mottled white with a grayish face and stockings. They called him Snowflake for a dingy splat of near-white on his brow. He was docile when her father bought him for the first two of his children. There were photos of Luke and Faith as toddlers astride the horse and her father holding the reins. Docile meant old, and in the photos his weariness and bewilderment are already visible. But in fact what the photos captured was only the onset, in fact the spring, of a terrible longevity. Even Glory remembered the ancient, moldy horse standing in the barn or the pasture with his legs splayed out as if he expected the earth to tilt abruptly and was braced for it. It was his misfortune to be a horse, with enough persisting horse-like attributes, for example a mane and most of a tail, to have, in the eyes of children, a chivalric dignity and romance. So, year upon year, the matter of bringing an end to the tedium and confusion of his interminable life could not even be broached. Then finally one day he was gone. The boys made horrible jokes about how he had made a run for it, had charged through Gilead overturning matrons and baby carriages on his way to the freedom of the high plains. They took to calling glue and all that was gluelike Snowflake, to the irritation of their father and the bafflement of the younger children. Still, there was something about the fact that there had been a horse in that barn, that his trough still stood by the wall and his bridle still hung from a nail above it, that gave the barn itself a certain melancholy romance. A few motes of straw still managed to scintillate in any shaft of sunlight. It seemed sometimes as if her father must have meant to preserve all this memory, this sheer power of sameness, so that when they came home, or when Jack came home, there would be no need to say anything. In the terms of the place, they would all always have known everything.

JACK STILL HAD A LETTER TO MAIL ALMOST EVERY DAY. HE TOOK the letters to the post office, at the back of the drugstore. He dressed carefully before every venture into town, jacket, tie, and hat. It was a louche sort of respectability he achieved, she thought, but it was earnestly persisted in, with much attention to the shine on his shoes. He would sometimes tell her whom he had met on the street, if he recognized anyone, or, more precisely, if anyone recognized him. He reported brief conversations as if they were heartening, proof of something. Once he said, “I believe I could see myself here. Jack Boughton, honest working man. Little wife at home, little child — frolicking with his dog, I suppose. Not unthinkable.” And sometimes he came back drawn and silent, as if he had been shunned or slighted, perhaps. All those letters, and never a word about whomever it was he sent them to, and never a word of reply.

One day when she was in the parlor, dusting among the clutter of gifts and souvenirs that crowded the mantel, he said, “Well, Glory, I did as I was told. I stopped by Ames’s, paid my respects. Met the wife.” He laughed. “You know, after all these years he still can’t stand the sight of me.”

She said, “He’s a kind old fellow. He was probably just tired, probably up all night.”

“No doubt you’re right.” Then he said, “I’m an insensitive brute for the most part. But if there is one thing I know I can recognize, it is dislike. If he allows himself such thoughts, he was sitting there on his front porch thinking, Here comes Jack Boughton, that son of a bitch.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Sorry.”

“For what?”

“The language.”

“Never mind.”

He shook his head. “It’s hard, coming back here.” He opened the piano and touched middle C. “Did somebody tune this?”

“Papa had it tuned when I told him I was coming home. Back. That was the first thing he wrote to me, after his regrets and prayers and so on. ‘It will be wonderful to have music in this house again.’ I haven’t played, though. I haven’t really felt like it.”

Jack slid onto the bench. “I can’t do it without squinting one eye,” he said. He took a sip from an imaginary glass, set it down again, and sang, “‘When your heart’s on fire, you must realize, smoke gets in your eyes.’”

“I hate that song,” she said.

“‘I’ll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places. .’”

“Stop it,” she said.

He laughed. “Sorry. I really am sorry.” He shrugged. “Limited repertoire.”

“How can you even have a repertoire? You never practiced!”

“I thought playing piano had something to do with being Presbyterian. Nobody told me you could get paid for it.”

Their father’s voice rose from the next room, reedy and perfectly pitched. “‘This robe of flesh I’ll drop and rise, To seize the everlasting prize. .’”

Jack said, “I guess that’s a hint,” and he played the hymn through, embellishing a little but respectfully enough. “‘And sing while passing through the air, farewell, farewell, sweet hour of prayer.’” He knew the words, and he whispered them as he played. Well, that always was their father’s favorite hymn.

“Yes!” the old man said. “And I would also very much enjoy ‘Shall We Gather at the River.’ Or ‘The Church’s One Foundation,’ if you prefer that one. It’s all the same to me.” And he began, rather lustily, “‘Shall we gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river—’” Jack plunged in after him. “That was rousing, Jack! Yes, the old songs. I believe I’ve worked up an appetite. Four o’clock. Well, I might have a cookie—”

Jack said, “I’ll get one for you. Milk?”

“If you don’t mind.”

Jack brought him a plate and a glass. “Here you are, sir.”

His father said, “It’s always ‘sir,’ isn’t it? Never Papa. Or Dad. Some of the others call me Dad now, some of the boys do.”

“It’s a habit, I suppose. Do you mind?”

“Oh no, Jack, I don’t mind! Call me whatever you like! It’s just so good to hear your voice. To hear your voice in this house again. It’s just wonderful. If I could tell your mother, she’d never believe me.” He took Jack’s hand and stroked it.

Jack said, “Thank you, sir. It’s good to be here.”

And his father said, “Oh yes. Well, I hope so. That’s another matter entirely, isn’t it. Yes, it is.” He patted Jack’s hand and released it. “There’s not much I can do about it. That’s how it is.” He said, “I know Glory got her feelings hurt something terrible. Terrible.” He shook his head.

Jack looked at her, almost as if he had just learned something about her that was not perfectly obvious. Or maybe it was to see her reaction, to confirm his sense of things. How should she react? Her father understood much more than his happiness could abide with, and he was very old.

“I’ll start supper,” she said.

THE NEXT MORNING JACK WAS OUT IN THE GARDEN EARLY, cutting back weeds and spading up the soil. The old prairie came back the minute a spot of ground fell into neglect. Suddenly there would be weeds head high, gaunt shafts of plants with masses of tiny flowers on them, dusty lavender, droning with bees. And there would be black-eyed Susan, and nettles and milkweed and jewelweed and brambles and some avid vine that wilted in sunlight and broke at the slightest touch, leaving tiny whiskers of thorn in the hand that touched it. The roots they put down were deep and tough. It was miserable work to get them up. And here was Jack outside in the new morning light wrestling weeds out of the ground for all the world as if something depended on it. Glory made a pot of coffee and carried a cup of it out to him.

“I am working up an appetite,” he said. “Today I will eat. Tonight I will sleep.” He stood the spade in the ground and sipped the coffee. “Excellent. Thank you.” They saw the little Ames boy in the road, walking along with his friend Tobias, the two of them elaborating a tale or a joke of some sort, to judge by the laughter. Robby saw them and shouted, “Hey, Mr. Boughton!”

Jack said, “I guess that’s me.” He handed her the cup and walked down to the foot of the garden. He said, “Whatcha got there, kiddo? Is that a baseball?”

“No,” he said, holding it up. “It’s just a ball.”

Jack said, “Close enough. Chuck it here.”

The boy threw the ball a few feet into the garden. Jack dropped down on one knee in the dirt and scooped it up, and made as if to fire it back to him, then lobbed it gently into the road. The boys laughed. Tobias said, “My turn. Let me throw it this time.” And again, the ball fell into the garden. Jack picked it up, then drew himself up sidelong, formal as a matador, held the ball to his chest in both hands, and sited at Tobias along his shoulder. The boys giggled. Jack lifted his foot—“The windup, the pitch”—and lobbed the ball into the road. They laughed and stamped and shouted, “Do that again!” and threw him the ball, but he tossed it back and said, “Sorry, gentlemen. Another time. There is work to be done.”

Tobias said, “Are you his cousin?” and Robby said, “I already told you he isn’t my cousin!” and the two of them said goodbye and went off down the road, talking and laughing.

Jack watched them. “They seem like good kids. Nice kids.” Then he brushed at the dirt on his pant leg. “I really shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

Glory thought, That strange and particular grace a man’s body seems never to forget. Scooping up grounders and throwing sidearm. When her brothers were at home, even Jack would play baseball. That may have been why they were all so taken up with it. Even Jack could be drawn into arguments about records and statistics. He would sit around the radio with the rest of them to listen to the games. And sometimes when he played on a team he would make a beautiful catch or lay down a perfect bunt, exactly sufficient to circumstance as he never was elsewhere, and there would be a general happiness that included him, for a little while at least. She had forgotten all that.

She said, “It’s good of you to clear this out. I had more or less decided to let it go back to nature.” He had even cleared the weeds out of the place by the fence where gourds reseeded themselves year after year.

“Well,” he said, “at least now it will be a lot easier for the birds to find the strawberries.” He had always had a kind of hectic high-spiritedness that came over him when he ought to have been sad, and there it was, the strange old glitter in his eyes, the old brusqueness in his manner. What could have made him sad? He brushed again at the smudge on his knee and shrugged and said, “‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’”

“But you do need some work clothes.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Bib overalls. I have always admired them.”

“You know what I mean. Something I could throw in the wash. Or you could.”

He nodded, and took out a cigarette and lighted it. He said, “I am a stranger in a strange land. I might as well look like one, don’t you think?”

“It doesn’t matter to me. They’re your trousers.”

“Yes,” he said. “So they are. Good of you to point that out.” And he tossed his cigarette and went back to delving. That was a little flippant, she thought. She went into the kitchen to peel potatoes for a salad.

After a while he came into the porch and the kitchen and stood by the door.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What for?”

“When we were talking just now. I think I may have seemed — flippant.”

“No. Not at all.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. I can never be sure.” Then he went outside again.

When she went out to the garden for chives and parsley, she saw the Reverend Ames strolling up the street. Jack said, “I guess he’s decided I’ll be around for a while. No point trying to avoid me.”

Glory said, “Papa’s been storing up so many grievances against John Foster Dulles I was beginning to wonder if he could survive another day without Ames to grumble at.”

“Then he won’t expect us to contribute to the conversation. That’s good,” he said. “I’m filthy.”

GLORY WENT UP TO THE ATTIC, THE LIMBO OF THINGS that had been displaced from current use but were not in the strict sense useless. If civilization were to collapse, for example, there might be every reason to be glad for this hoard of old shoes and bent umbrellas, all of which would be better than nothing, however badly they might fare in any other comparison. Other pious families gave away the things they did not need. Boughtons put them in the attic, as if to make an experiment of doing without them before they undertook some irreparable act of generosity. Then, what with the business of life and the passage of time, what with the pungency of mothballs and the inevitable creep of dowdiness through any stash of old clothes, however smart they might have been when new, it became impossible to give the things away. From time to time their mother would come down from the attic empty-handed, brushing dust off herself, and write a check to the orphans’ home.

So, Glory thought, the shirts her father had worn before he began to lose weight and height were no doubt in the attic, too. She found them in a cedar chest, laundered and ironed as if for some formal event, perhaps their interment. They had changed to a color milder than white, and there was about them, besides the smell of time and disuse, of starch and lavender and cedar, a hint of Old Spice that brought tears to her eyes. She took six of them, the newest, to judge by the cut of the cuffs and collars, and brought them down to the kitchen, hoping to get them washed, at least, before Jack saw them. But he was there, in the kitchen, rummaging in a drawer. He closed it. He said, “I was just looking for a tape measure. I thought I might get some chicken wire and fence in that garden.” It made her uneasy that he always seemed to feel he had to make an account of himself to her.

“I found these shirts of Papa’s in the attic. I thought you could use them if you wanted to. Around the house. They’re good broadcloth.”

He stepped back and smiled. “What is that? Cedar? Starch? Lilies? Candle wax? Isn’t the phrase ‘the odor of sanctity’? I would not presume.”

She said, “I’m pretty sure the odor of sanctity will come out in the wash,” and he laughed. “I’ll try the effects of detergent and sunshine and then I’ll ask you again.”

“I’ve put you to a lot of trouble.”

“It’s no trouble.”

He nodded. “You really are kind to me,” he said, almost objectively, as though he finally felt he could justify that conclusion.

“Thank you,” she said.

SHE DECIDED TO WALK TO THE GROCERY STORE WHILE THE shirts were in the washing machine and her father was content with the new issue of Christian Century. It was time she stopped avoiding ordinary contact with people. If Jack could brave it, certainly she could, too. It was a beautiful afternoon, bright, warm, and the leaves still had a glitter of newness about them. She had almost forgotten weather, between her father and her novels and her unaccountable insistence on reading them in the darkest room in the house, excepting only the dining room, beside that tedious radio. The store was almost empty, the cashier was cordial. She started home again through the radiant day with a brown paper bag in her arms, redolent of itself and the cabbage she had bought and the Cheddar cheese, thinking she had done herself a little good, just getting out. She decided to put Andersonville aside for a day or two.

Jack was standing on the pavement with his hands on his hips, looking in the window of the hardware store. There were always two television sets in the window, a portable and a console, and they ran all day, test pattern to test pattern. This had been true for years, from the time television was a curiosity. A woman stopped beside him and watched for a minute. She said something to him, and he nodded and spoke, and then she went on. Glory walked up to him and stood beside him. He touched his hat brim, never looking away from the screen.

She said, “Is that Montgomery?”

He nodded. “Yes, it is.” Then the screen showed a tube of toothpaste.

Glory said, “Lila told me their church was planning to get a TV set so that Ames can watch baseball. I suppose that means Papa will want one, too.”

He looked at her. “That’s an idea.” He took her package from her and they began to walk home. He said, “A portable is a couple hundred dollars. But you could ask him about it.”

“I could just have them deliver one to the house. If he doesn’t like it, they’ll take it back.”

He cleared his throat. “You could do that now.”

“Yes, I could. Do you want to help me choose one?”

“Not really. I’ll wait here.” He laughed. “I’ve already spent about an hour in there looking at them. They all seem to work.”

So she went back to the store and chose an eighteen-inch Philco with a rabbit-ear antenna. The clerk asked after her father and her brothers and sisters and after Jack, too. “Is he home for a visit, or is he thinking he might stay?”

Glory said, for brevity’s sake, “He’s just visiting for a while.” If she’d said she didn’t know what had brought him back to Gilead, the strangeness of his situation would have interested the clerk, and the owner of the store, who came out of the back room wiping machine oil from his fingers. Interested them more than it did already. She imagined Jack standing among the bins of nails and tool belts and the ranks of crowbars, unspoken to beyond the ordinary courtesies, seeming unaware of their awareness of him, watching flickering television in that cave full of the smells of leather and wood and oily metal, idle among all those implements of force and purpose, citified among the steel-toed boots and the work shirts. An odd place for a man to loiter who was so alive to embarrassment, so predisposed to sensing even the thought of rebuke. And when he did leave the store, standing on the pavement, looking in at the window, at the silently fulminating authorities and the Negro crowds.

Well, the clerk told her, the Philco would be delivered that afternoon, and if the Reverend decided to keep it, an antenna would be installed on the roof whenever he gave the word. The owner reassured her on precisely these same points. People had always been eager to accommodate her father, and to give even ordinary transactions like this one the aspect of exceptional kindness. So she was obliged to answer every question and to accept every assurance twice at least. They told her that many of the older folks find television a great comfort. They agreed that the baseball season was shaping up. And she was obliged to hear a little gossip.

Jack had stood a long time with his arms full of groceries when she could finally leave the store. “So that worked out,” he said. “Good. Thank you.” He let her take a bottle of milk to make the bag less awkward, and they walked home.

Jack set the television on a lamp table in the parlor. He plugged it in, turned it on, and moved the antenna around one way and another until a passable image presented itself. Their father came in and sat down in an armchair Jack had turned and pushed into place in front of the set.

“So here it is,” the old man said. “We’re very modern now.” He watched without comment a woman in high heels running back and forth across a stage carrying eggs in a teaspoon while a gigantic clock ticked.

Glory said, “The news will be on soon, Papa.”

“Well, yes, I was about to say there isn’t much to this. But you can hear people laughing. I hope there’s money involved. To get a grown woman to act like that.”

The phone rang and Jack came into the kitchen while she answered it, but it was Luke, so he went back to watch the beginning of the news. He was standing in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips. On the screen white police with riot sticks were pushing and dragging black demonstrators. There were dogs.

His father said, “There’s no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it.”

Jack said, “Some people will probably remember it.”

“No. It wasn’t so long ago that everybody was talking about Senator McCarthy. Watching those fellows argue. It’s television that makes things seem important, whether they are or not. Now you never hear a word about Senator McCarthy.”

Jack said, “Well, that’s important, isn’t it?”

“I can’t disagree. I don’t know. I never admired him.”

Police were pushing the black crowd back with dogs, turning fire hoses on them. Jack said, “Jesus Christ!”

His father shifted in his chair. “That kind of language has never been acceptable in this house.”

Jack said, “I—” as if he had been about to say more. But he stopped himself. “Sorry.”

On the screen an official was declaring his intention to enforce the letter of the law. Jack said something under his breath, then glanced at his father.

The old man said, “I do believe it is necessary to enforce the law. The Apostle Paul says we should do everything ‘decently and in order.’ You can’t have people running around the streets like that.”

Jack snapped off the TV. He said, “Sorry. I was just kind of—”

“No need to be sorry, Jack. Young people want the world to change and old people want it to stay the same. And who is to judge between thee and me? We just have to forgive each other.” After a moment he said, “But I hope we don’t have to argue. I don’t like the shouting and I don’t like the swearing. Especially the swearing.” He said, “I know those words don’t mean much to you. They do to me. You could respect that.”

“Yes, sir.” Jack stepped away and felt in his shirt pocket for his pack of cigarettes. His hand trembled. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at his father. The old man sat bowed in his chair, his head forward, the deeply cleft nape of his neck exposed under the thin tousle of hair. He might have been praying, but anyone who did not know him well could think he was simply sad and frail. Jack glanced at Glory. “Did I do that to him?” The scar under his eye was white.

“He’s tired.”

He said, “I shouldn’t have said what I did. But things keep getting worse—”

“He’ll be all right when he’s had some sleep.”

“No. No, I mean the dogs. The fire hoses. Fire hoses. There were kids—” He gave her that distant, appraising look, as if to see the effect of trusting her so far.

“Are you thinking of going back to St. Louis? None of that will be a problem for you if you stay here.”

He laughed. “Oh, Glory, it’s a problem. Believe me. It’s a problem.”

He went upstairs, came down again for a book, brought the book back down in half an hour and put it by the radio. He stood in the porch and smoked, and then he said, “Back in a while,” and left. She kept his supper warm. Her father could not be persuaded to take even a bite of his. “I have never heard him speak that way. No, he was always respectful, as far as that goes. Here in my house. I may have made too much of it. No, it’s something I don’t feel I should tolerate.”

When Jack came in, his father was still at the table, brooding over his cold soup. “Don’t bother,” he said, when Jack offered to help him with his chair. “Glory is here. She will look after me.”