Saint Maybe

5. People Who Don’t Know the Answers

After Doug Bedloe retired, he had a little trouble thinking up things to do with himself. This took him by surprise, because he was accustomed to the schoolteacher’s lengthy summer vacations and he’d never found it hard to fill them. But retirement, it seemed, was another matter. There wasn’t any end to it. Also it was given more significance. Loaf around in summer, Bee would say he deserved his rest. Loaf in winter, she read it as pure laziness. “Don’t you have someplace to go?” she asked him. “Lots of men join clubs or something. Couldn’t you do Meals on Wheels? Volunteer at the hospital?”

Well, he tried. He approached a group at his church that worked with disadvantaged youths. Told them he had forty years’ experience coaching baseball. They were delighted. First he was supposed to get some training, though — spend three Saturdays learning about the emotional ups and downs of adolescents. The second Saturday, it occurred to him he was tired of adolescents. He’d been dealing with their ups and downs for forty years now, and the fact was, they were shallow.

So then he enrolled in this night course in the modern short story (his daughter’s idea). Figured that would not be shallow, and short stories were perfect since he never had been what you would call a speed reader. It turned out, though, he didn’t have a knack for discussing things. You read a story; it’s good or it’s bad. What’s to discuss? The other people in the class, they could ramble on forever. Halfway through the course, he just stopped attending.

He retreated to the basement, then. He built a toy chest for his youngest grandchild — a pretty decent effort, although Ian (Mr. Artsy-Craftsy) objected to particleboard. Also, carpentry didn’t give him quite enough to think about. Left a kind of empty space in his mind that all sorts of bothersome notions could rush in and fill.

Once in a while something needed fixing; that was always welcome. Bee would bring him some household object and he would click his tongue happily and ask her, “What did you do to this?”

“I just broke it, Doug, all right?” she would say. “I deliberately went and broke it. I sat up late last night plotting how to break it.”

And he would shake his head, feeling gratified and important.

Such occasions didn’t arise every day, though, or even every week. Not nearly enough to keep him fully occupied.

It had been assumed all along that he would help out more with the grandkids, once he’d retired. Lord knows help was needed. Daphne was in first grade now but still a holy terror. Even the older two — ten and thirteen — took quite a lot of seeing to. And Bee’s arthritis had all but crippled her and Ian was running himself ragged. They talked about getting a woman in a couple of days a week, but what with the cost of things … well, money was a bit tight for that. So Doug tried to lend a hand, but he turned out to be kind of a dunderhead. For instance, he saw the kids had tracked mud across the kitchen floor and so he fetched the mop and bucket with the very best of intentions, but next thing he knew Bee was saying, “Doug, I swan, not to sweep first and swabbing all that dirty water around …” and Ian said, “Here, Dad, I’ll take over.” Doug yielded the mop, feeling both miffed and relieved, and put on his jacket and whistled up the dog for a walk.

He and Beastie took long, long walks these days. Not long in distance but in time; Beastie was so old now she could barely creep. Probably she’d have preferred to stay home, but Doug would have felt foolish strolling the streets with no purpose. This gave him something to hang onto — her ancient, cracked leather leash, which sagged between them as she inched down the sidewalk. He could remember when she was a puppy and the leash grew taut as a clothesline every time a squirrel passed.

For no good reason, he pictured what it would look like if Bee were the one walking Beastie. The two of them hunched and arthritic, a matched set. It hurt to think of it. He had often seen such couples — aged widows and their decrepit pets. If he died, Bee would have to walk Beastie, at least in the daytime when the kids weren’t home. But of course, he was not about to die. He had always kept in shape. His hair might be gray now but it was still there, and he could fit into trousers he’d bought thirty years ago.

A while back, though, their family doctor had told him something unsettling. He’d said, “Know what I hate? When a patient comes in and says, ‘Doc, I’m here for a checkup. Next month I hit retirement age and I’ve planned all these great adventures.’ Then sure as shooting, I’ll find he’s got something terminal. It never fails.”

Well, Doug had avoided that eventuality. He just hadn’t gone for a checkup.

And anyhow, planned no great adventures.

The trouble was, he was short on friends. Why had he never noticed before? It seemed he’d had so many back in high school and college.

If Danny had lived, maybe he would have been a friend.

Although Ian was nice company too, of course.

It was just that Ian seemed less … oh, less related to him, somehow. Maybe on account of that born-again business. He was so serious and he never just goofed off the way Danny used to do or sat around shooting the breeze with his dad. Didn’t even have a girlfriend anymore; that pretty little Cicely had faded Clear out of the picture. She had found someone else, Doug supposed. Not that Ian had ever said so. That was the thing: they didn’t talk.

Danny used to talk.

Walking Beastie past the foreigners’ house one unseasonably mild day in February, Doug noticed someone lying face down on the roof. Good Lord, what now? They lived the strangest lives over there. This fellow was sprawled parallel to the eaves, poking some wire or electrical cord through an upstairs window. Doug paused to watch. Beastie groaned and thudded to the ground. “Need help?” Doug called.

The foreigner raised his head. In that peremptory way that foreigners sometimes have, he said, “Yes, please to enter the house and accept this wire.”

“Oh. Okay,” Doug said.

He let Beastie’s leash drop. She wasn’t going anywhere.

He had been in the foreigners’ house several times, because they gave a neighborhood party every Fourth of July. (“Happy your Independence Day,” one of them had once said. “Happy yours,” he’d answered before he thought.) He knew that the window in question belonged to the second-floor bathroom, and so he crossed the hall, which was totally bare of furniture, and climbed the stairs and entered the bathroom. The foreigner’s face hung upside down outside the window, his thick black hair standing straight off his head so that he looked astonished. “Here!” he called.

Darned if he hadn’t broken a corner out of a pane. Not a neatly drilled hole in the wood but a jagged triangle in the glass itself. A wire poked through — antenna wire, it looked like. Doug pulled on it carefully so as not to abrade it. He reeled it in foot by foot. “Okay,” the foreigner said, and his face disappeared.

Doug hadn’t thought to wonder how the man had got up on the roof in the first place. All at once he was down again, brushing off his clothes in the bathroom doorway — a good-looking, stocky young fellow in a white shirt and blue jeans. You could always tell foreigners by the way they wore their jeans, so neat and proper with the waist at the actual waistline, and in this man’s case even a crease ironed in. Jim, was that his name? No, Jim was from an earlier batch. (The foreigners came and went in rotation, with their M.D.’s or their Ph.D.’s or their engineering degrees.) “Frank?” Doug tried.

“Fred.”

They were always so considerate about dropping whatever unpronounceable names they’d been christened with. Or not christened, maybe, but—

“Please to tie the wire about the radiator’s paw,” Fred told him.

“What is it, anyhow?”

“It is aerial for my shortwave radio.”

“Ah.”

“I attached it to TV antenna on chimney.”

“Is that safe?” Doug asked him.

“Maybe; maybe not,” Fred said cheerfully.

Doug wouldn’t have worried, except these people seemed prone to disasters. Last summer, while hooking up an intercom, they had set their attic on fire. Doug wasn’t sure how an intercom could start a fire exactly. All he knew was, smoke had begun billowing from the little eyebrow window on the roof and then six or seven foreigners had sauntered out of the house and stood in the yard gazing upward, looking interested. Finally Mrs. Jordan had called the fire department. What on earth use would they have for an intercom anyway? she had asked Bee later. But that was how they were, the foreigners: they just loved gadgets.

Fred was walking backward now, playing out the wire as he headed across the hall. From the looks of things, he planned to let it lie in the middle of the floor where it would ambush every passerby. “You got any staples?” Doug asked, following.

“Excuse me?”

“Staples? U-shaped nails? Electrical staples, insulated,” Doug went on, without a hope in this world. “You tack the wire to the baseboard so it doesn’t trip folks up.”

“Maybe later,” Fred said vaguely.

Meanwhile leading the wire directly across the hall and allowing not one inch of slack.

In Fred’s bedroom, gold brocade draped an army cot. A bookcase displayed folded T-shirts, boxer shorts, and rolled socks stacked in a pyramid like cannonballs. Doug managed to take all this in because there was nothing else to look at — not a desk or chair or bureau, not a mirror or family photo. A brown plastic radio sat on the windowsill, and Fred inserted the wire into a hole in its side.

“Looks to me like you might’ve brought the wire in this window,” Doug told him.

But Fred shrugged and said, “More far to fall.”

“Oh,” Doug said.

Presumably, Fred was not one of the engineering students.

Fred turned on the radio and music started playing, some Middle Eastern tune without an end or a beginning. He half closed his eyes and nodded his head to the beat.

“Well, I’d better be going,” Doug said.

“You know what means these words?” Fred asked. “A young man is telling farewell to his sweetheart, he is saying to her now—”

“Gosh, Beastie must be wondering where I’ve got to,” Doug said. “I’ll just see myself out, never mind.”

He had thought it would be a relief to escape the music, but after he left — after he returned home, even, and unsnapped Beastie’s leash — the tune continued to wind through his head, blurred and wandery and mysteriously exciting.

A couple of days later, the foreigners tried wiring the radio to speakers set strategically around the house. The reason Doug found out about it was, Fred came over to ask what those U-shaped nails were called again. “Staples,” Doug told him, standing at the door in his slippers.

“No, no. Staples are for paper,” Fred said firmly.

“But the nails are called staples too. See, what you want is …” Doug said, and then he said, “Wait here. I think I may have some down in the basement.”

So one thing led to another. He found the staples, he went over to help, he stayed for a beer afterward, and before long he was more or less hanging out there. They always had some harebrained project going, something he could assist with or (more often) advise them not to attempt; and because they were students, keeping students’ irregular hours, he could generally count on finding at least a couple of them at home. Five were currently living there: Fred, Ray, John, John Two, and Ollie. On weekends more arrived — fellow countrymen studying elsewhere — and some of the original five disappeared. Doug left them alone on weekends. He preferred late weekday afternoons, when the smells of spice and burnt onions had already started rising from Ollie’s blackened saucepans in the kitchen and the others lolled in the living room with their beers. The living room was furnished with two webbed aluminum beach lounges, a wrought-iron lawn chair, and a box spring propped on four stacks of faded textbooks. Over the fireplace hung a wrinkled paper poster of a belly dancer drinking a Pepsi. A collapsible metal TV tray held the telephone, and the wall above it was scribbled all over with names and numbers and Middle Eastern curlicues. Doug liked that idea — that a wall could serve as a phone directory. It struck him as very practical. He would squint at the writing until it turned lacy and decorative, and then he’d take another sip of beer.

These people weren’t much in the way of drinkers. They appeared to view alcohol as yet another inscrutable American convention, and they would dangle their own beers politely, forgetting them for long minutes; so Doug never had more than one. Then he’d say, “Well, back to the fray,” and they would rise to see him off, thanking him once again for whatever he’d done.

At home, by comparison, everything seemed so permanent — the rooms layered over with rugs and upholstered furniture and framed pictures. The grandchildren added layers of their own; the hall was awash in cast-off jackets and schoolbooks. Bee would be in the kitchen starting supper. (How unadorned the Bedloes’ suppers smelled! Plain meat, boiled vegetables, baked potatoes.) And if Ian was back from work he’d be occupied with the kids — sorting out whose night it was to set the table, arbitrating their disputes or even taking part in them as if he were a kid himself. Listen to him with Daphne, for instance. She was nagging him to find her green sweater; tomorrow was St. Patrick’s Day. “Your green sweater’s in the wash,” he said, and that should have been the end of it — would have been, if Bee had been in charge. But Daphne pressed on, wheedling. “Please? Please, Ian? They’ll make fun of me if I don’t wear something green.”

“Tell them your eyes are the something green.”

“My what? My eyes? But they’re blue.”

“Well, if anybody points that out, put on this injured look and say, ‘Oh. I’ve always liked to think of them as green.’ ”

“Oh, Ian,” Daphne said. “You’re such a silly.”

He was, Doug reflected. And a sucker besides. For sure enough, later that night he heard the washing machine start churning.

Most days Ian took the car, but Tuesdays he caught the bus to work so Doug could drive Bee to the doctor. She had to go every single week. Doug knew that doctor’s waiting room so well by now that he could see it in his dreams. A leggy, wan philodendron plant hung over the vinyl couch. A table was piled with magazines you would have to be desperate to read — densely printed journals devoted to infinitesimal research findings.

Two other doctors shared the office: a dermatologist and an ophthalmologist. One morning Doug saw the ophthalmologist talking with a very attractive young woman at the receptionist’s desk. The receptionist must have proposed some time or date, because the young woman shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t make it then.”

“Can’t make it?” the doctor asked. “This is surgery, not a hair appointment. We’re talking about your eyesight!”

“I’m busy that day,” the young woman said.

“Miss Wilson, maybe you don’t understand. This is the kind of problem you take care of now, you take care of yesterday. Not next week or next month. I can’t state that too strongly.”

“Yes, but I happen to be occupied that day,” the young woman said.

Then Bee came out of Dr. Plumm’s office, and Doug didn’t get to hear the end of the conversation. He kept thinking about it, though. What could make a person defer such crucial surgery? She was meeting a lover? But she could always meet him another day. She’d be fired from her job? But no employer was that hardhearted. Nothing Doug came up with was sufficient explanation.

Imagine being so offhand about your eyesight. About your life, was what it amounted to. As if you wouldn’t have to endure the consequences forever and ever after.

Wednesday their daughter dropped by to help with the heavier cleaning. She breezed in around lunchtime with a casserole for supper and a pair of stretchy gloves she’d heard would magically ease arthritic fingers. “Ordinary department-store gloves, I saw this last night on the evening news,” she told Bee. “You’re lucky I got them when I did; I went to Hochschild’s. Don’t you know there’ll be a big rush for them.”

“Yes, dear, that was very nice of you,” Bee said dutifully. She already owned gloves, medically prescribed, much more official than these were. Still, she put these on and spread her hands out as flat as possible, testing. She was wearing one of Ian’s sweatshirts and baggy slacks and slipper-socks. In the gloves, which were the dainty, white, lady’s-tea kind, she looked a little bit crazy.

Claudia filled a bucket in the kitchen sink and added a shot of ammonia. “Going to tackle that chandelier,” she told them. “I noticed it last week. A disgrace!”

Probably it was Ian’s housekeeping she was so indignant with — or just time itself, time that had coated each prism with dust. She wasn’t thinking how it sounded to waltz into a person’s home and announce that it was filthy. Doug cast a sideways glance at Bee to see how she was taking it. Her eyes were teary, but that could have been the ammonia. He waited till Claudia had left the kitchen, sloshing her bucket into the dining room, and then he laid a hand on top of Bee’s. “Peculiar, isn’t it?” he said. “First you’re scolding your children and then all at once they’re so smart they’re scolding you.”

Bee smiled, and he saw that they weren’t real tears after all. “I suppose,” he went on more lightly, “there was some stage when we were equals. I mean while she was on the rise and we were on the downslide. A stage when we were level with each other.”

“Well, I must have been on the phone at the time,” Bee said, and then she laughed.

Her hand in the glove felt dead to him, like his own hand after he’d slept on it wrong and cut off the circulation.

The foreigners set their car on fire, trying to install a radio. “I didn’t know radios were flammable,” Mrs. Jordan said, watching from the Bedloes’ front porch. Doug was a bit surprised himself, but then electronics had never been his strong point. He went over to see if he could help. The car was a Dodge from the late fifties or maybe early sixties, whenever it was that giant fins were all the rage. Once the body had been powder blue but now it was mostly a deep, matte red from rust, and one door was white and one fender turquoise. Whom it belonged to was unclear, since the foreigner who had bought it, second- or third-hand, had long since gone back to his homeland.

John Two and Fred and Ollie were standing around the car in graceful poses, languidly fanning their faces. The smoke appeared to be coming from the dashboard. Doug said, “Fellows? Think we should call the fire department?” but Fred said, “Oh, we dislike to keep disturbing them.”

Hoping nothing would explode, Doug reached through the open window on the driver’s side and pulled the first wire his fingers touched. Almost immediately the smoke thinned. There was a strong smell of burning rubber, but no real damage — at least none that he could see. It was hard to tell; the front seat was worn to bare springs and the backseat had been removed altogether.

“Maybe we just won’t have radio,” John Two told Ollie.

“We never had radio before,” Fred said.

“We were very contented,” John Two said, “and while we traveled we could hear the birds sing.”

Doug pictured them traveling through a flat green countryside like the landscape in a child’s primer. They would be the kind who set off without filling the gas tank first or checking the tire pressure, he was certain. Chances were they wouldn’t even have a road map.

One morning when he came downstairs he found Beastie dead on the kitchen floor, her body not yet stiff. It was a shock, although he should have been prepared for it. She was sixteen years old. He could still remember what she’d looked like when they brought her home — small enough to fit in her own feed dish. That first winter it had snowed and snowed, and she had humped her fat little body ecstatically through the drifts like a Slinky toy, with a dollop of snow icing her nose and snowflakes on her lashes.

He went upstairs to wake Ian. He wanted to get her buried before the children saw her. “Ian,” he said. “Son.”

Ian’s room still looked so boyish. Model airplanes sat on the shelves among autographed baseballs and high-school yearbooks. The bedspread was printed with antique cars. It could have been one of those rooms that’s maintained as a shrine after a young person dies.

Danny’s room, on the other hand, had been redecorated for Thomas. Not a trace of Danny remained.

“Son?”

“Hmm.”

“I need you to help me bury Beastie.”

Ian opened his eyes. “Beastie?”

“I found her this morning in the kitchen.”

Ian considered a moment and then sat up. When Doug was sure he was awake, he left the room and went downstairs for his jacket.

Beastie had not been a large dog, but she weighed a lot. Doug heaved her onto the doormat and then dragged the mat outside and down the back steps. Thump, thump, thump — it made him wince. The mat left a trail in the sparkling grass. He backed up to the azalea and dropped the corners of the mat and straightened. It was six-thirty or so — too early for the neighbors to be about yet. The light was nearly colorless, the traffic noises sparse and distant.

Ian came out with his windbreaker collar turned up. He had both shovels with him. “Good thing the ground’s not frozen,” Doug told him.

“Right.”

“This is probably not even legal, anyhow.”

They chipped beneath the sod, trying as best they could not to break it apart, and laid it to one side. A breeze was ruffling Beastie’s fur and Doug kept imagining that she could feel it, that she was aware of what they were doing. He made his mind a blank. He set up an alternating rhythm with Ian, hacking through the reddish earth and occasionally ringing against a pebble or a root. In spite of the breeze he started sweating and he stopped to take off his jacket, but Ian kept his on. Ian didn’t look hot at all; he looked chilly and pale, with that fine white line around his lips that meant he had his jaw set. For the first time, Doug thought to wonder how this was hitting him. “Guess you’ll miss her,” he said.

“Yes,” Ian said, still digging.

“Beastie’s been around since you were … what? Eight or so, or not even that.”

Ian nodded and bent to toss a rock out of the way.

“We’ll let the kids set some kind of marker up,” Doug told him. “Plant bulbs or something. Make it pretty.”

It was all he could think of to offer.

They ended up cheating a bit on the grave — dug more of an oval than a rectangle, so they had to maneuver to get her into it. She fit best on her side, slightly curled. When Doug saw her velvety snout against the clay, tears came to his eyes. She had always been such an undemanding dog, so accommodating, so adaptable. “Ah, God,” he said, and then he looked up and realized Ian was praying. His head was bowed and his lips were moving. Doug hastily bowed his own head. He felt as if Ian were the grownup and he the child. It had been years, maybe all the years of his adulthood, since he had relied so thankfully on someone else’s knowledge of what to do.

The two younger children came down with chicken pox — first Daphne and then Thomas. Everybody waited for Agatha to get it too but she must have had it earlier, before they knew her. Daphne was hardly sick at all, but Thomas had a much worse case and one night he woke up delirious. Doug heard his hoarse, startled voice, oddly bright in the darkness—“Don’t let them come! Don’t let their sharp hooves!”—and then Ian’s steady “Thomas, old man. Thomas. Tom-Tom.”

In that short-story course, Doug had read a story about an experiment conducted by creatures from outer space. What the creatures wanted to know was, could earthlings form emotional attachments? Or were they merely at the mercy of biology? So they cut a house in half in the middle of the night, and they switched it with another half house in some totally different location. Tossed the two households together like so many game pieces. This woman woke up with a man and some children she’d never laid eyes on before. Naturally she was terribly puzzled and upset, and the others were too, but as it happened the children had some kind of illness, measles or something (maybe even chicken pox, come to think of it), and so of course she did everything she could to make them comfortable. The creatures’ conclusion, therefore, was that earthlings didn’t discriminate. Their family feelings, so called, were a matter of blind circumstance.

Doug couldn’t remember now how the story had ended. Maybe that was the end. He couldn’t quite recollect.

In the dark, Bee’s special white arthritis gloves glowed eerily. She lay on her side, facing him, with the gloves curled beneath her chin. The slightest sound used to wake her when their own three children were little — a cough or even a whimper. Now she slept through everything, and Doug was glad. It was a pity so much rested on Ian, but Ian was young. He had the energy. He hadn’t reached the point yet where it just plain didn’t seem worth the effort.

Ian invited his parents to a Christian Fellowship Picnic. “To a what?” Doug asked, stalling for time. (Who cared what it was called? It was bound to be something embarrassing.)

“Each of us invites people we’d like to join in fellowship with,” Ian said in that deadly earnest way he had. “People who aren’t members of our congregation.”

“I thought that church of yours didn’t believe in twisting folkses’ arms.”

“It doesn’t. We don’t. This is only for fellowship.”

They were watching the evening news — Doug, Bee, and Ian. Now Bee looked away from a skyful of bomber airplanes to say, “I’ve never understood what people mean by ‘fellowship.’ ”

“Just getting together, Mom. Nothing very mysterious.”

“Then why even say it? Why not say ‘getting together’?”

Ian didn’t take offense. He said, “Reverend Emmett wants us to ask, oh, people we care about and people who wonder what we believe and people who might feel hostile to us.”

“We’re not hostile!”

“Then maybe you would qualify for one of the other groups,” Ian said mildly.

Bee looked at Doug. Doug pulled himself together (he had a sense of struggling toward the surface) and said, “Isn’t it sort of early for a picnic? We’re still getting frost at night!”

“This is an indoor picnic,” Ian told him.

“Then what’s the point?”

“Reverend Emmett’s mother, Sister Priscilla, has relatives out in the valley who own a horse farm. They’re in Jamaica for two weeks and they told her she could stay in the house.”

“Did they say she could throw a church picnic in the house?”

“We won’t do any harm.”

Bee was still looking at Doug. (She wanted him to say no, of course.) The bombers had given way to a moisturizer commercial.

“Well, it’s nice of you to think of us, son,” Doug said, “but—”

“I’ve invited Mrs. Jordan, too.”

“Mrs. Jordan?”

“Right.”

“Jessie Jordan?”

“She’s always wanting to know what Second Chance is all about.”

This put a whole different light on things. How could they refuse when a mere neighbor had accepted? Drat Jessie Jordan, with her lone-woman eagerness to go anywhere she was asked!

And then she had the nerve to make out she was being so daring, so rakish. On the way to Greenspring Valley (for they did end up attending, taking their own car which was easier on Bee’s hips than the bus), Mrs. Jordan bounced and burbled like a six-year-old. “Isn’t this exciting?” she said. She was dressed as if headed for a Buckingham Palace garden party — cartwheel hat ringed with flowers, swishy silk dress beneath her drab winter coat. “You know, there are so many alternative religions springing up these days,” she said. “I worry I’ll fall hopelessly behind.”

“And wouldn’t that be a shame,” Bee said sourly. She wore an ordinary gray sweat suit, not her snazzy warm-up suit with the complicated zippers; so her hands must be giving her trouble today. Doug himself was dressed as if for golfing, carefully color-coordinated to compensate for what might be misread as sloppiness on Bee’s part. He kept the car close behind Second Chance’s rented bus. Sometimes Daphne’s little thumbtack of a face bobbed up in the bus’s rear window, smiling hugely and mouthing elaborate messages no one could catch. “What did she say? What?” Bee asked irritably.

“Can’t quite make it out, hon.”

They traveled deeper and deeper into country that would be luxurious in the summer but was now a vast network of bare branches lightly tinged with green. Pasturelands extended for miles. The driveway they finally turned into was too long to see to the end, and the white stone house was larger than some hotels. “Oh! Would you look!” Mrs. Jordan cried, clapping her hands.

Doug didn’t like to admit it, but he felt easier about Second Chance now that he saw such a substantial piece of property connected to it. He wondered if the relatives were members themselves. Probably not, though.

They parked on the paved circle in front. Passengers poured from the bus — first the children, then the grownups. Doug fancied he could tell the members from the visitors. The members had a dowdy, worn, slumping look; the visitors were dressier and full of determined gaiety.

It occurred to him that Bee could be mistaken for a member.

Carrying baskets, coolers, and Thermos jugs, everyone followed Reverend Emmett’s mother up the flagstone walk. They entered the front hall with its slate floor and center staircase, and several people said, “Ooh!”

“Quite a joint,” Doug murmured to Bee.

Bee hushed him with a look.

They crossed velvety rugs and gleaming parquet and finally arrived in an enormous sun porch with a long table at its center and modern, high-gloss chairs and lounges set all about. “The conservatory,” Reverend Emmett’s mother said grandly. She was a small, finicky woman in a matched sweater set and a string of pearls and a pair of chunky jeans that seemed incongruous, downright wrong, as if she’d forgotten to change into the bottom half of her outfit. “Let’s spread our picnic,” she said. “Emmett, did you bring the tablecloth?”

“I thought you were bringing that.”

“Well, never mind. Just put my potato salad here at this end.”

Reverend Emmett wore a sporty polo shirt, a tan windbreaker, and black dress trousers. (He and his mother belonged in Daphne’s block set, the one where you mismatch heads and legs and torsos.) He put a covered bowl where she directed, and then the others laid out platters of fried chicken, tubs of coleslaw, and loaves of home-baked bread. The table — varnished so heavily that it seemed wet — gradually disappeared. Streaky squares of sunlight from at least a dozen windows warmed the room, and people started shedding their coats and jackets. “Dear Lord in heaven,” Reverend Emmett said (catching Doug with one arm half out of a sleeve), “the meal is a bountiful gift from Your hands and the company is more so. We thank You for this joyous celebration. Amen.”

It was true there was something joyous in the atmosphere. Everyone converged upon the food, clucking and exclaiming. The children turned wild. Even Agatha, ponderously casual in a ski sweater and stirrup pants, pushed a boy back with shy enthusiasm when he gave her a playful nudge at the punch bowl. The members steered the guests magnanimously toward the choice dishes; they took on a proprietary air as they pointed out particular features of the house. “Notice the leaded panes,” they said, as if they themselves were intimately familiar with them. The guests (most as suspicious as Doug and Bee, no doubt) showed signs of thawing. “Why, this is not bad,” one silver-haired man said — the father, Doug guessed, of the hippie-type girl at his elbow. Doug had hold of too much dinner now to shake hands, but he nodded at the man and said, “How do. Doug Bedloe.”

“Mac McClintock,” the man said. “You just visiting?”

“Right.”

“His son is Brother Ian,” the hippie told her father. “I just think Brother Ian is so faithful,” she said to Doug.

“Well … thanks.”

“My daughter Grade,” Mac said. “Have you met?”

“No, I don’t believe we have.”

“We’ve met!” Gracie said. “I’m the one who fetched your grandchildren from school every day when your wife was in the hospital.”

“Oh, yes,” Doug said. He didn’t have the faintest memory of it.

“I fetched the children for Brother Ian and then Brother Ian closed up the rat holes in my apartment.”

“Really,” Doug said.

“My daughter lives in a slum,” Mac told him.

“Now, Daddy.”

“She makes less money than I made during the Depression and then she gives it all to this Church of the Second Rate.”

“Second Chance! And I do not; I tithe. I don’t have to do even that, if I don’t want to. It’s all in secret; we don’t believe in public collection. You act like they’re defrauding me or something.”

“They’re a church, aren’t they? A church’ll take its people for whatever it can get,” Mac said. He glanced at Doug. “Hope that doesn’t offend you.”

“Me? No, no.”

“Want to hear what I hate most about churches? They think they know the answers. I really hate that. It’s the people who don’t know the answers who are going to heaven, I tell you.”

“But!” his daughter said. “The minute you say that, you see, you yourself become a person who knows the answers.”

Mac gave Doug an exasperated look and chomped into a drumstick.

Bee was sitting on a chaise longue with her legs stretched out, sharing a plate with Daphne. She was the only guest who seemed to have remained outside the gathering. Everyone else was laughing, growing looser, circulating from group to group in a giddy, almost tipsy way. (Although of course there wasn’t a bit of alcohol; just that insipid fruit punch.) Reverend Emmett was holding forth on his inspiration for this picnic. “I felt led,” he told a circle of women. He had the breathless look of an athlete being interviewed after a triumph. “I was listening to one of our brothers a couple of weeks ago; he said he wished he could share his salvation with his parents except they never would agree to come to services. And all at once I felt led to say, ‘Why should it be services? Why not a picnic?’ ”

The women smiled and nodded and their glasses flashed. (One of them was Jessie Jordan, looking thrilled.) An extremely fat young woman threaded her way through the crowd with a plastic garbage bag, saying, “Plates? Cups? Keep your forks, though. Dessert is on its way.”

What could they serve for dessert if they didn’t believe in sugar? Fruit salad, it turned out, in little foil dishes. Thomas carried one of the trays around. When he came to Doug he said, “Grandpa? Are you having a good time?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Are you making any friends?”

“Certainly,” Doug said, and he felt a sudden wrench for the boy’s thin, anxious face with its dots of old chicken-pox scars. He took a step closer to Mac McClintock, although they’d run out of small talk some minutes ago.

The women were clearing the table now, debating leftovers.

“It seems a shame to throw all this out.”

“Won’t you take it home?”

“No, you.”

“Law, I couldn’t eat it in a month of Sundays.”

“We wouldn’t want to waste it, though.”

Reverend Emmett’s mother said, “Mr. Bedloe, we all think so highly of Brother Ian.”

“Thank you,” Doug said. This was starting to remind him of Parents’ Night at elementary school. He swallowed a chunk of canned pineapple, which surely contained sugar, didn’t it? “And you must be very proud of your son,” he added.

“Yes, I am,” she said. “I look around me and I see so many people, so many redeemed people, and I think, ‘If not for Emmett, what would they be doing?’ ”

What would they be doing? Most would be fine, Doug supposed — his own son among them. Lord, yes. But in all fairness, he supposed this church met a real need for some others. And so he looked around too, following Sister What’s-Her-Name’s eyes. What he saw, though, was not what he had expected. Instead of the festive throng he had been watching a few minutes ago, he saw a spreading circle of stillness that radiated from the table and extended now even to the children, so that a cluster of little girls in one corner allowed their jack ball to die and the boys gave up their violent ride in the glider. Even Bee seemed galvanized, an orange section poised halfway to her parted lips.

“It’s the table,” a woman told Reverend Emmett’s mother.

“The—?”

“Something’s damaged the surface.”

Reverend Emmett’s mother thrust her way through the circle of women, actually shoving one aside. Doug craned to see what they were talking about. The table was bare now and even shinier than before; someone had wiped it with a damp cloth. It looked perfect, at first glance, but then when he tilted his head to let the light slant differently he saw that the shine was marred at one end by several distinct, unshiny rings.

“Oh, no,” Reverend Emmett’s mother breathed.

Everyone started speaking at once: “Try mayonnaise.”

“Try toothpaste.”

“Rub it down with butter.”

“Quiet! Please!” Reverend Emmett’s mother said. She closed her eyes and pressed both hands to her temples.

Reverend Emmett stood near Doug, peering over the others’ heads. (Above the collar of his jaunty polo shirt, his neck looked scrawny and pathetic.) “Perhaps,” he said, “if we attempted to—”

“Shut up and let me think, Emmett!”

Silence.

“Maybe if I came back tomorrow,” she said finally, “with that cunning little man from Marx Antiques, the one who restores old … he could strip it and refinish it. Don’t you suppose? But the owners are due home Tuesday, and if he has to strip the whole … but never mind! I’ll tell him to work round the clock! Or I’ll ask if …”

More silence.

Ian said, “Was it soaped?”

Everyone turned and looked for him. It took a minute to find him; he was standing at the far end of the room.

“Seems to me the finish is some kind of polyurethane,” he said, “and if those rings are grease, well, a little soap wouldn’t do any harm and it might even—”

“Soap! Yes!” Reverend Emmett’s mother said.

She went herself to the kitchen. While she was gone, the fat young woman told Doug, “Brother Ian works with wood every day, you know.”

“Yes, I’m his father,” Doug said.

She said, “Are you really!”

Reverend Emmett’s mother came back. She held a sponge and a bottle of liquid detergent. They parted to let her through and she approached the table and bent over it. Doug was too far away to see what she did next, but he heard the sighs of relief. “Now dry it off,” someone suggested.

A woman whipped a paisley scarf from her neck and offered that, and it was accepted.

“Perfect,” someone said.

This time when he craned, Doug saw that the rings had vanished.

Right away the congregation started packing, collecting coats and baskets. Maybe they would have anyhow, but Doug thought he detected a sort of letdown in the general mood. People filed out meekly, not glancing back at the house as they left it. (Doug imagined the house thinking, Goodness, what was all THAT about?) They crossed the columned front porch with their heads lowered. Doug helped Bee into the car. “Coming?” he asked Mrs. Jordan.

“Oh, I’m going to ride in the bus,” she said. She alone seemed undampened. “Wasn’t Ian the hero, though!”

“Sure thing,” Doug said.

He watched her set off toward the bus with one hand clamping down her cartwheel hat.

Driving home, he made no attempt to stay with the others. He left the bus behind on the Beltway and breezed eastward at a speed well above the legal limit. “So now we’ve been to a Christian Fellowship Picnic,” he told Bee.

“Yes,” she said.

“I wonder if it’ll become a yearly event.”

“Probably,” she said.

Then she started talking about Danny. How did she get from the picnic to Danny? No telling. She started kneading the knuckles of her right hand, the hand that looked more swollen, and she said, “Sometimes I have the strangest feeling. I give this start and I think, ‘Why!’ I think, ‘Why, here we are! Just going about our business the same as usual!’ And yet so much has changed. Danny is gone, our golden boy, our first baby boy that we were so proud of, and our house is stuffed with someone else’s children. You know they all are someone else’s. You know that! And Ian is a whole different person and Claudia’s so bustling now and our lives have turned so makeshift and second-class, so second-string, so second-fiddle, and everything’s been lost. Isn’t it amazing that we keep on going? That we keep on shopping for clothes and getting hungry and laughing at jokes on TV? When our oldest son is dead and gone and we’ll never see him again and our life’s in ruins!”

“Now, sweetie,” he said.

“We’ve had such extraordinary troubles,” she said, “and somehow they’ve turned us ordinary. That’s what’s so hard to figure. We’re not a special family anymore.”

“Why, sweetie, of course we’re special,” he said.

“We’ve turned uncertain. We’ve turned into worriers.”

“Bee, sweetie.”

“Isn’t it amazing?”

It was astounding, if he thought about it. But he was careful not to.

The weather began to grow warmer, and Doug raised all the windows and lugged the summer clothing down from the attic for Bee. Across the street, the foreigners came out in their shirtsleeves to install an electric garage-door opener they’d ordered from a catalog. Doug found this amusing. A door that opened on its own, for a car that could barely move on its own! Of course he kept them company while they worked, but the door in question was solid wood and very heavy, potentially lethal, and he’d just as soon not be standing under it when calamity struck. He stayed several feet away, watching Ollie teeter on a kitchen chair as he screwed something to a rafter overhead. Then when Doug got bored he ambled inside with the two who were less mechanically inclined, leaving Ollie and Fred and John Two to carry on. He refused a beer (it was ten in the morning) but accepted a seat by the window, where a light breeze stirred the tattered paper shade.

From here the garage was invisible, since it lay even with the front of the house, but he could see Fred standing in the drive with the pushbutton control in both hands, pressing hard and then harder. Doug grinned. Fred leaned forward, his face a mask of straining muscle, and he bore down on the button with all his might. You didn’t have to set eyes on the door to know it wasn’t reacting. Meanwhile Ollie walked out to the street and climbed into the car and started the engine, and John Two removed a brick from under the left rear wheel. Optimistic of them; Doug foresaw a good deal more work before the garage would be ready for an occupant. Through the open window he heard the croupy putt-putt as the car turned in and rolled up the drive and sat idling. “In another catalog,” John One was saying, “we have seen remarkable invention: automatic yard lights! That illuminate when dark falls! We plan to send away for them immediately.”

“I can hardly wait,” Doug said, and then he twisted in his chair because he thought he noticed someone emerging from his own house, but it was only shrubbery stirring in the breeze.

He was a touch nearsighted, and the mesh of the window screen seemed more distinct to him than what lay beyond it. What lay beyond it — home — had the blocky, blurred appearance of something worked in needlepoint, each tiny square in the screen filled with a square of color. Not only was there a needlepoint house but also a needlepoint car out front, a needlepoint swing on the porch, a needlepoint bicycle in the yard. His entire little world: a cozy, old-fashioned sampler stitched in place forever.

The best thing about the foreigners, he decided, was how they thought living in America was a story they were reading, or a movie they were watching. It was happening to someone else; it wasn’t theirs. Good Lord, not even their names were theirs. Here they spoke lines invented by other people, not genuine language — not the language that simply is, with no need for translation. Here they wore blue denim costumes and inhabited a Hollywood set complete with make-believe furniture. But when they went back home, there they’d behave as seriously as anyone. They would fall in love and marry and have children and they’d agonize over their children’s problems, and struggle to get ahead, and practice their professions soberly and efficiently. What Doug was witnessing was only a brief holiday from their real lives.

He was pleased by this notion. He thought he’d examine it further later on — consider, say, what happened to those foreigners who ended up not going home. The holiday couldn’t last forever, could it? Was there a certain moment when the movie set turned solid? But for now, he didn’t bother himself with all that. He was happy just to sit here, letting some of their Time Out rub off on him.

Then Ollie turned toward the house and called, “Come see!” and for courtesy’s sake, Doug rose and followed Ray and John One to the yard. Other neighbors were here too, he realized. It looked like a party. He joined them and stood squinting in the sunshine, smiling at the foreigners’ car which sat half inside the garage and half out like a crumpled beer can, with the door bisecting it neatly across the middle.