The Clock Winder

6

Elizabeth had a nightmare which she couldn’t remember. She awoke and sat up, her heart thudding, while vague, malevolent spirits swooped over her head. But the room was warm and sunlit, and a breeze was ruffling the dotted swiss curtains. She lay down and went to sleep again. She dreamed she was mending a quantity of buttons — the finish to every nightmare she had had this month, as boring and comforting as hot milk. She was riffling through a cascade of chipped and broken buttons in a cardboard box. Plastic, glass, leather, gold, mother-of-pearl. She fitted together two halves of a tiny white button that belonged on a shirt collar. She rewove an intricate leather knot from a blazer. She glued a silver shank to a coat button, and a pearl disc back into its round metal frame; she found the missing piece of a pink plastic heart from a baby’s cardigan. Her hands moved surely and deftly, replacing the gagging horror of the nightmare with a quiet calm. More buttons appeared, in cigar boxes and coffee cans and Band-Aid tins. Sometimes she grew discouraged. Why mend things so fragile? Why couldn’t they let her throw them out and buy new ones? But there was some joy in doing her job so well. She worked on, plowing through a torrent of colored discs. She awoke feeling as exhausted as if she had been laboring all night long.

Her mother was out in the kitchen, running the Mix-master. “I hope you know what time it is,” she told Elizabeth.

“Eleven-fifteen,” Elizabeth said. She got herself a glass of orange juice and sat down on a stool.

“You never used to get up so late. Do you feel all right?”

Mrs. Abbott was pouring evaporated milk into the beater bowl. Her face from a distance was young and thin and bright, but up close you could see a network of lines like the creases in crumpled, smoothed-out tissue paper. She wore a gingham dress and canvas slip-ons, and she moved with a quick, definite energy that made Elizabeth feel all the more lumpish. In two swift motions she had scraped down the sides of the beater bowl, slapping the scraper sharply against the bowl’s rim. “Maybe you’re coming down with something,” she said.

“I feel all right.”

“You look a mite yellowish.”

“I’m fine.”

But she wasn’t. Her head ached, her throat was dry, her eyelids stung. Her joints seemed in need of oiling. She wondered if she were falling apart, like the machine Mrs. Emerson had talked about. Maybe, at twenty-three, she had passed her peak and started the long slope downhill. “Twenty-three,” Timothy said out of nowhere, “is a woman’s sexual prime, and you are going to be very very sorry you didn’t take advantage of it.” His voice brushed past her right ear. She flicked it away. Ghosts in the daytime were easily dealt with.

Her mother broke eggs into the beater bowl, and then dumped in an unmeasured amount of salt. Two or three times a year she spent a morning in the kitchen brewing up this mixture — chicken and rice in a pale cream sauce, a dozen portions at once, laid away in the freezer until some church member should sicken or die. The pans were aluminum foil, disposable, to save the bereaved the effort of washing and returning them. How thoughtful can you get? And what would old Mr. Bailey say, or that sickly Daphne Knight, if they knew that even now their funeral baked meats were lying in wait for them in the freezer? She watched her mother disjoint a row of stewed chickens on the counter, tossing the slippery gray skin to the collie who fidgeted at her feet. “This is what you were doing the last time I was here,” Elizabeth said. “They must have been dying off like flies.”

“Oh, they have,” said her mother. “I made another batch while you were gone.” She sounded cheerful and matter-of-fact. On the surface she was the perfect minister’s wife, tilting her head serenely beneath his pulpit on Sundays and offering the proper sympathy in the proper soft, hesitant voice; but underneath she was all bustle and practicality, and if she could have deep-frozen her sympathy ahead of time too she probably would have. She yanked a thighbone from a hen and tossed it toward the garbage bin, but Elizabeth reached out to catch it and offer it to the dog. “Oh no, Elizabeth,” her mother said, and grabbed it back without altering the rhythm of her work. “No bones for you, Hilary,” she told the dog. “They’ll give you splinters.”

“Oh, I doubt it,” Elizabeth said.

“Do you want to pay the vet’s bills?”

“Nope, she’s not worth it.”

Elizabeth scowled at Hilary, who was beautiful but stupid. She had a white mane and a long sharp nose. Because she was untrustworthy around henhouses she was kept in the house like any city dog, and pent-up energy made her nervous and high-strung. She prowled restlessly around the linoleum with her toenails clicking. “I don’t like you,” Elizabeth told her. Hilary moaned and then zeroed in on a place to lie down.

“Your father’s having trouble over tomorrow’s sermon,” her mother said. “He’s working on it now, but when he’s through he wants to have a talk with you.”

“What about?”

“That’s for him to say.”

“Slothfulness,” said Elizabeth. “Aimlessness. Slobbishness.”

“Oh, Elizabeth.”

“Well, that is it, isn’t it?”

“If you know what it is,” her mother said, “why don’t you do something about it?”

Elizabeth stood up. “I believe I’ll walk the dog,” she said.

“Go ahead. The leash is on the doorknob.”

She stalked through the house, with Hilary leaping and panting and whimpering behind her. There was nothing about this place that made her feel comfortable. Until a few years ago they had lived in an old Victorian frame parsonage, but then the church ladies (always in a flutter over how to make life easier for Reverend Abbott) had arranged to have a brick ranch-house built. It was nearer the church, which was no advantage because the church sat in the middle of a tobacco field out on R.F.D. 1. The outline of the house was bland and shallow. Even the sounds there were shallow — wallboard thudding flimsily, carpets purring, water hissing into a low-slung modern tub. Mr. Abbott, who was subject to drafts, loved it. Mrs. Abbott hated it, although only Elizabeth guessed that. Mrs. Abbott was very much like Elizabeth; she liked wood and stone, she had enjoyed outwitting the bucking hot water heater and the back screen door that was forever sticking shut in the old house. Moving around her new streamlined kitchen, she sometimes stopped to throw a baffled look at the stove that timed its own meals. Then Elizabeth would say, “We could always move back again.”

“Move back? What would the congregation think? Besides, they’re tearing it down.”

Elizabeth clipped the leash to Hilary’s collar and stepped out the front door. Blazing heat poured down on her. It was only the beginning of June, but in this treeless yard it felt like August. She crossed the flat spread of grass and descended the clay bank to the highway. Just to her right sat the church, raw brick that matched the house, topped by a white steeple. Gravestones and parking space lay in back of it. The Sunday school bus sat beneath a pecan tree at one side. FAITH BAPTIST CHURCH, its sign read. “THE DIFFERENCE IS WORTH THE DISTANCE.” She never could get that phrase straight in her head. At night sometimes it came to her: The difference is worth the distance, the distance is worth the difference. Which was it? Either would do. She stopped to let the dog squat by the mailbox, and then moved on up the road.

Neat white farmhouses speckled the fields, as far as the eye could see. Each had its protective circling of henhouses and pigsties, barns and tobacco barns, toolsheds and whitewashed fences. Occasionally a little dot of a man would come into view, driving a mule or carrying a feedsack. Nobody seemed to notice Elizabeth. She imagined that the neighbors thought of her as a black sheep — the minister’s ne’er-do-well daughter who lay in bed till eleven and then had no better occupation than walking the dog.

There in that green field, where nothing useful grew, a circus tent rose up every August and a traveling revivalist came. He stood behind a portable pulpit, sweating from all his flailing and shouting beneath the bug-filmed extension lamps. His message was death, and the hell to follow — all for people who failed to give in to God in this only, only life. Elizabeth’s father sat to one side of him in a folding wooden chair. “Wouldn’t you be jealous?” Elizabeth had asked him years ago. “Having someone else to come and save your own people?” “That’s a very peculiar notion you have there,” her father said. “As long as they arrive at the right destination, does it matter what road they come by?” She hadn’t taken his words at face value; she never did. She had watched, in her white puff-sleeved dress on a front row seat, and come to her own conclusion: the revivalist picked sinners like plums, and her father stood by with a bushel basket and smiled as they fell in with a thud. His smile was tender and knowing. Ordinary Baptist housewives, stricken for the moment with tears and fits of trembling, flocked to the front with their children while the choir sang, “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” and her father smiled down at them, mentally entering their names on a list that would last forever. What if they changed their minds in the morning? Maybe some did; for next year they were at the front once more as if they felt the need of being saved all over again. A girlfriend of Elizabeth’s had been saved three times before she was fourteen. Each time she cried, and vowed to love her mother more and stop telling lies. She gave Elizabeth her bangle bracelets and her bubble-bath, her movie magazines and her adjustable birthstone rings from Dick Tracy candyboxes and all other vain possessions. “Oh, how could you just sit there?” she said. “With that preacher’s voice so thundery and your father so quiet and shining? This has changed my whole life,” she said. Although it never did, for long. But Elizabeth was always stunned by those brief glimpses of Sue Ellen in her altered state, with her face flushed and intense and the centers of her eyes darker. And then at breakfast the next morning there would be her father and the revivalist calmly buttering buckwheat muffins, never giving a thought to what they had caused.

Hilary was begging to run, yelping and shaking with excitement. “Oh, all right,” Elizabeth told her. They took off across a field. Elizabeth’s moccasins sank deep into plowed orange earth. The collie in motion rippled like water, her tail a billowing plume, her white forepaws landing daintily together. But Elizabeth only felt heavy and out of breath, and an ache between her shoulderblades was spreading down her spine. “Stop, now,” she said. She drew the leash inward and Hilary slowed, still panting, and chose her way between clods of earth. From behind she was bulky-hipped and dignified. The long hair on her hindlegs looked like ruffled petticoats. That should have made Elizabeth smile; why did she want to cry? She studied the petticoats, and the stilt-like legs beneath them — old-lady legs. Mrs. Emerson’s legs. She saw Mrs. Emerson gingerly descending the veranda steps, slightly sideways, with her skirt swirling around her thin, elegant shins. Sun lit her hair and the discs on her bracelet. She was looking down, concentrating on the precise placement of her pointy-toed alligator shoes. Was it worry that puckered the inner corners of her eyebrows?

Pieces of Emersons were lodged within Elizabeth like shrapnel. Faces kept poking to the surface — Timothy, Mrs. Emerson, Margaret cheerfully sharing her sawdusty room. And Matthew. Always Matthew, with his dim eyes behind his glasses asking why she had been so curt with him when she left. Why had she? She wanted to do it all over again, take more time explaining to him even if it meant catching a later bus. Take the time to tell Mrs. Emerson goodbye, and to put away her tools properly. No one else would. But most of all, what she wanted was to change all those days with Timothy. “Whatever it was that happened,” Matthew had told her, “you can’t blame yourself for it.” Well, why not? Who else could she blame? She had done everything wrong with him from the very beginning, laughed off all he said to her right up to the moment when the gun went off, misread every word; and what she hadn’t misread she had pretended to. She thought of that snowy night when he worried that he had died, and she had acted as if she didn’t understand. If she couldn’t help him out, couldn’t she at least have admitted she couldn’t?

“Don’t mull it over,” Matthew had said. But he was under the impression that they were talking about a straightforward suicide. And he didn’t have the picture of death from a bullet wound to struggle against every night of his life.

She tapped Hilary with a loop of leash. “Let’s go,” she said. Then she set off toward the ranch-house, with Hilary trotting beside her casting helpful, anxious glances. Red dust had worked into the stitches of Elizabeth’s moccasins. A hot wind stiffened her face. Everywhere she looked seemed parched and bleak and glaring, but at least she was back where she was supposed to be.

When she got home Polly was in the kitchen with her baby, the smallest, fattest baby Elizabeth had ever known. Creases ringed her wrists like rubber bands; she not only had a double chin but double thighs, double knees, double ankles as well. Polly jostled her in her lap absentmindedly, speaking over her wispy head. “Look at you,” she said. “I wish I could just go tearing off with the dog any time I wanted.”

“Why don’t you?” Elizabeth said. “Leave Julie with Mother.”

“Oh, no,” said Polly. She sighed. She was smaller than Elizabeth, with a heart-shaped face and a tousle of yellow curls like a frilled nightcap. “You’re the one with the cute little sister,” people used to tell Elizabeth. In high school Polly had been Queen of May Day. She had kept to the style of the fifties ever since — spitcurls framing her forehead, her lipstick a pure bright pink. Her flower-sprigged shirtdress was immaculate, except where the baby had just spit down the front. “Hand me a Kleenex, will you?” she asked Elizabeth. “What did I take all that Good Grooming for, if this was what I’d come to?”

“If you wore a bibbed apron—” her mother said. “That’s what I always did.” She was laying sheets of foil across the casseroles, which lined one counter from end to end. Without looking around she said, “Polly brought the mail in with her. What’d you do with that letter, Polly?”

“Here it is.”

From the look Polly gave her as she handed her the envelope, Elizabeth guessed that they had been discussing it before she came in. She made a point of ripping it open in front of them, not even bothering to sit down. It was written in Matthew’s looped, rounded hand. Dear Elizabeth, Why don’t you ever answer my letters? Did your suitcase arrive safely? Why do you—She folded the sheets of paper and replaced them in the envelope. “What’s for lunch?” she asked her mother.

“One of these casseroles.”

“Funeral food?”

Polly settled her baby into a new position and studied Elizabeth’s face. “You certainly have been getting a lot of mail these days,” she said.

“Mmm.”

“All from Baltimore. You used to be the world’s worst letter-writer. Have you changed? Or is someone an optimist.”

“Oh, you know, these are just people I met,” Elizabeth said vaguely.

“People? They look like mostly one handwriting.”

“Now, Polly, leave her alone,” her mother said. “Elizabeth, honey, I wish you’d take these down to the freezer for me.”

She stacked foil pans into Elizabeth’s outstretched arms. They were still warm, almost hot. Elizabeth rested her chin on the uppermost pan and started for the basement. Behind her, a deep meaningful silence linked her mother and Polly.

Most of the basement was a recreation room, which smelled of asphalt tile. A phonograph sat in one corner. When she was still in secretarial school Polly used to bring her friends here, and they had danced and drunk Cokes and eaten endless bags of Fritos. Then Carl had proposed to her on that vinyl loveseat in front of the TV. Elizabeth remembered the night it happened — Polly making the announcement, smiling up at Carl as she spoke. She was still the younger sister then; it wasn’t until she was married that she somehow bypassed Elizabeth and began exchanging those knowing glances with her mother over Elizabeth’s head. She had hugged Elizabeth tightly and suggested they have a double wedding. A what? Elizabeth thought she had lost her mind. By then Elizabeth was in her junior year of college, living at home, and she had brought no boys back with her except the laundromat burglar once and you couldn’t count poor sweet Dommie. She had never used this recreation room. It affected her the way New Year’s Eve parties did: you were supposed to have fun there, you were pressured into it, and the obligation weighed her spirits down.

She crossed to the dark cubicle behind the record player, partitioned off by cinderblocks, containing only a furnace and a freezer. On the floor by the freezer a batch of orange wine was brewing up in a canning kettle. “What’s that stuff you have down there?” her mother had asked the day before. “It’s a new kind of preserves,” Elizabeth said. “Preserves? What on earth kind of preserves …” Elizabeth had cut all the oranges and lemons herself, regretting it before she was halfway done; every whiff of lemon reminded her of when she and Matthew had done this job together. She had a mind like a tape recorder, an audial version of a photographic memory, and each chop of knife blade against breadboard brought her bits of things that Matthew had said. “ ‘Two cups raisins, minced’—how, when they stick together so?” “Did you ever make pomander balls?” “When the wine has aged we’ll go on a picnic. I’ll bring a chicken, you bring the wine in some nice, round jug with a cork plugged in.…” Now the wine was probably rotting away on the sink, and she would never know how it came out. That was why she was brewing more now — that and sheer devilment. She liked the idea of strong spirits bubbling in Reverend Abbott’s basement. She had sent off this time for the special government permit, just so she would know that the parsonage was a licensed brewery even if no one else ever did.

When she had stashed the casseroles away she bent to lift the cheesecloth from the canning kettle. Warm spicy smells rose up. Bubbles stung her nose. Matthew lifted his head and gave her a long, slow, puzzled look from behind his glasses.

It was late afternoon before her father was finished with his sermon. He pushed away the papers on his desk when she came in. “Every week, the sermon gets harder,” he told her. “Now I wonder why that should be. I always reach a point where I think I’m beaten, I can’t go on, I have finally found a sermon that can’t be written.” He smiled and rubbed his eyes with a long angular hand. His face was made of straight lines; his skin was stretched over fine, narrow bones and his fair hair conformed exactly to his skull. When he opened his eyes they were like blue glass globes, but tired veins were traced across the whites. “I need a vacation,” he said. “I believe it’s showing in my sermons.”

“Take one.”

“Well, but there’s always someone needing me, you know.”

“They’ll manage,” Elizabeth said.

“Have a seat, will you? Just clear those things off the chair.”

She handed him what she collected — mimeographed pages and a stack of manila folders — and sat down in the captain’s chair opposite his desk. He spent some time aligning the corners of the mimeographed pages. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Well now, Liz, it seems to me we were going to have a little talk.”

“That’s what Mom said.”

“Your mother, yes. Now last week you said, if I’m right—” He slumped in his seat and stared at a letter opener. It always took him some time to get started. In these preliminary stages, before he grew sure of himself, Elizabeth kept feeling she had to help him out. “I said I would look for a job,” she reminded him.

“Yes. A job.”

“And that—”

“And that you were reapplying to Sandhill. I remember. My point is, do you?” He straightened his back suddenly, and stared at her so directly that his eyes seemed to grow square. “Are you planning to go on like this forever?” he asked. “The last thing I want to do is pressure you, Liz, but I never saw anyone live the way you do. Week after week you rise late and lie around the house all day, your appearance is disorderly and your habits are slovenly, you go nowhere, you see no friends, you stay up till all hours watching television so you can rise late the next day — and your mother says you are no help at all.”

“Did Mom say that?”

“She has enough to do as it is.”

“How can she say that? I help out. I did the dishes the last four nights running. Why didn’t she come to me about it?”

“It’s not only the dishes,” said her father. “It’s your general presence. You’re disrupting an entire household. Now I suggested, if you remember, that you find something to keep you busy until fall term. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t want to remain idle all that time,’ I told you. Well, it seems I was mistaken. You do want to. Your mother says you’ve taken no steps whatever toward finding a job. You haven’t even left the house, except to walk Hilary. What kind of life do you call that?”

“I can’t think of any job I’d be good at,” Elizabeth said. She drew a pack of Camels from her shirt pocket, causing her father to wince. “It’s not as if I could type, or take shorthand, or do anything specific,” she said, tamping a cigarette on the edge of his desk.

“You know what smoke will do to my asthma,” her father said. “Liz, honey. I know all about young people. It’s part of my job. But you’re twenty-three years old. We’ve been waiting twenty-three years for you to straighten out a little. Isn’t it time you shaped up? Don’t you think you’re past the stage for teenage rebellion? It’s just not becoming. Why, I would expect you to be married and starting a family by now. Whatever happened to young Dommie?”

“He’s engaged,” Elizabeth said. She slid the cigarette back into its pack and studied a double photograph frame on the desk — Polly at eleven, dimpling and looking upward through long lashes; Elizabeth at twelve, an awkward age, with her face sullen and self-conscious and her organdy dress too tight under the arms. “I bet you were a tomboy,” Timothy once said, but she never had been. She had dreamed of being rescued from fire or water by some young man; she had experimented with lipsticks from the five-and-dime until she realized she would never look anything but garish in make-up. She grimaced, and without thinking took the Camel out again and struck a kitchen match on the arm of her chair. Her father buried his face in his hands.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Elizabeth told him cheerfully. “I’ll find something. And school begins in September.”

“September!” her father said. “You’ll have rotted away by then.” He raised his head and stared at the photograph. Long deep lines pulled the corners of his mouth down. Was he thinking of when she had been twelve, when he still had some hope she might turn out differently? She suddenly felt sorry for him, and she leaned forward to pat his knee. “Look,” she said. “Maybe I could ask if they need help at the newspaper office.”

“I already did.”

“Oh. You did?”

“I even asked my secretary if she needed an envelope-stuffer. She doesn’t. There is something at the hospital, though — a sort of nurse’s aide, working on the children’s ward—”

“I wouldn’t like it,” Elizabeth said.

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, well, seeing all those children with leukemia and things—”

“There’s nobody in Ellington with leukemia.”

“And there’s so many things you could cause there, I mean, giving out the wrong paper pill cup—”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t do that.”

“Someone did it to me once,” Elizabeth said darkly. “When I was there having my wisdom teeth cut out.”

“That was only a vitamin, Liz.”

“If I did it, it would be cyanide.”

“Dear heart,” said her father, gathering himself together again, “I don’t know where you get all these thoughts, but if you keep on with them you’re going to render yourself immobile. Now, I gather something must have happened up there in Baltimore. All you say is there was a death in the family. Well, it must have been a mighty important death to make you come live here so suddenly, but if you don’t want to discuss it I surely won’t press you. You know, however, that my job has given me right much experience in—”

“No!” said Elizabeth, surprising both of them.

“Was the person who passed on very close to you?”

Passing on made her think of Matthew, not Timothy. She blinked at Matthew’s face, which used to be so warm against her cheek and now made her feel merely cold and shut away.

“Well, we won’t go into that if it bothers you,” her father said after a pause. “But do you know what I would tell you if you were a member of my church? ‘Young lady,’ I’d say, ‘you need to get outside yourself a little. Join a group. Do volunteer work. No man is an—’ ”

“Maybe I could be a garbage collector,” Elizabeth said.

“Please try to be serious a moment. Now, there is one opportunity I haven’t brought up yet. A sort of companion for old Mrs. Stimson’s father. I mention this as a last resort because, frankly, I consider the man beyond need of companionship. His mind is failing. Taking care of him would be a waste of your talents, and I recommend—”

“Would I have to give him pills?”

“Pills? No, I don’t—”

“I’ll take it,” Elizabeth said.

“Liz, honey—”

“Why not?” She rose and stubbed out her cigarette in a paper clip tray. “When do I start work?”

“Well, there is the matter of an interview,” her father said. “We’ll have to let you talk to Mrs. Stimson. But I wonder if you shouldn’t think this through a little more.”

“Didn’t you tell me to get a job? I’m ready to go any time you are.”

“All right,” her father said. He pulled a leather address book toward him and leafed through the pages. “I’ll just give her a ring. Meanwhile, could you change?”

“Change?” Elizabeth stared at him.

“Your clothes. Change your clothes, Liz. Put on a nice frilly dress.”

“Oh,” said Elizabeth. “Okay.”

When she left, her father was just reaching for the phone with that broad, sweeping gesture that meant he was back to being a minister again.

She went to her room and changed into the wrinkled beige dress that she had worn home. She slipped her bare feet into ballerina flats and pulled her hair off her face with a rubber band. Then she went out to the living room, where her parents were waiting. They sat side by side on the couch, like a wedding picture. Her mother looked unhappy. “Elizabeth,” she said immediately, “I don’t think this is the job for you at all.”

“Well, that’s what I’m going to find out,” Elizabeth said.

“Honey, Mr. Cunningham needs a practical nurse. That’s what you’d be doing. Why, they say they can’t make sense out of half he says, you’d go out of your mind in a week.”

“It’s only till September.”

“John?” Her mother looked at her father, waiting for him to help out — a rare thing for her to do. (“Don’t tell your father,” she had once said, “but it’s a fact that from the day they’re born till the day they die, men are being protected by women. Here at least. I don’t know about other parts of the world. If you breathe a word of this,” she said, “I’ll deny it.”) Her father only frowned and smoothed his forehead. “It’s better than wasting away at home,” he said.

“She’d be more wasted there. Here at least she could — oh, I don’t know—”

“Walk the dog,” Elizabeth suggested.

“Oh, Elizabeth.”

Her mother went back to her mending, shaking her head. Elizabeth and her father left. Behind them, Hilary yelped anxiously and flung herself at a picture window.

The Stimsons lived in town, in a narrow frame house whose sides were windowless. Wooden curlicues ran under the eaves of the porch. It was Mrs. Stimson who answered the door for them. “Oh, Elizabeth, honey,” she said, “isn’t it nice to see you again. Jerome, you remember—”

“Yes indeed, yes indeed,” said Mr. Stimson from behind her. “And how are you, Reverend?”

He stepped forward to shake hands. He and his wife could have been twins — both small and round, middle-aged. When he shook hands Elizabeth’s father laid his other hand on top of Mr. Stimson’s — a habit he had when greeting church members. “Good seeing you, Mr. Stimson,” he said. “How’s that lumbago doing?”

“Oh, can’t complain. Just a twinge now and then, don’t you know, when the—”

“Well, let them in, Jerome. Won’t you all come in?”

Mrs. Stimson led the way into a tiny living room, which had heavily veiled windows and plush furniture with carved legs. Everything wore a settled look, as if it had been there for centuries. Even the seashells and gilt-framed photographs seemed immovable. “Sit down, won’t you?” Mrs. Stimson said. “Elizabeth, I declare, are you still growing? Why I remember when you were no bigger than a Coke bottle and now look. How tall are you, honey?”

“Five-nine,” Elizabeth said glumly.

“Hear that?” Mr. Stimson asked her father. “Kind of takes you by surprise, don’t it?”

“Oh, yes, yes it does. All you have to do is turn your back a minute and—”

“Now tell me about your boyfriends,” Mrs. Stimson said. “I just know you must have dozens.”

“What I really came for was to talk about the job,” Elizabeth said.

She had thrown the conversation out of rhythm. Everyone paused; then her father said, “Yes, honey, but first I just have to ask, I can’t believe my eyes. Mrs. Stimson, are those African violets? Why, you must have the greenest thumb in Ellington!”

Mrs. Stimson smiled into her lap and made tiny pleats in her print dress. “Oh, pshaw, that’s not anything,” she said. “Well, I do have this love of flowers, I guess you might call it—”

“Now, Ida, don’t go being modest,” Mr. Stimson said. “She could make an old stick bloom, Reverend, she’s got the damnedest — or, excuse me. But she does have a way with growing things.”

“I can see that,” Elizabeth’s father said. “It’s a shame that more people don’t have your talent, Mrs. Stimson.”

“Oh, nowadays, nowadays,” said her husband. “Who takes the time any more? Why, I remember back in ’48 or ’49, over Fayette Road way. Old Phil Harrow, remember him? No kin to Molly Harrow that runs the beauty parlor. He grew melons that could break the table legs, had squash and corn and his own asparagus bed. How many years it been since you see asparagus growing? I believe they make it out of nylon now. And beans. Down to the right, you see — say this rug is Fayette Road — to the right would be the corn, and then between the rows, two or maybe three rows of—”

“Jerome, he don’t want to hear about that.”

“Well, I say he does, Ida.”

“This is all very interesting,” Elizabeth’s father said. His voice had grown deeper and more southern. His face, when he turned toward Mrs. Stimson, had a kindly, faraway smile, as if he were making a mental note to relay to God everything she said. “There is something truly healing about raising little green things,” he told her.

In the bookcase behind Mrs. Stimson’s head was a line of pastel paperbacks. If she squinted, Elizabeth could just make out the titles. Nurse Sue in the Operating Room, she read. Nurse Sue in Pediatrics. The Girl in the White Cap. Nancy Mullen, Stewardess. Nurse Sue in Training. She veered to an enormous spiny conch shell, and was just deciphering what beach it commemorated when Mrs. Stimson leaned forward and said, in a whisper that stopped all conversation, “Elizabeth, I just know you want some Kool-Aid.”

“No, thank you,” Elizabeth said.

“You do, Reverend.”

“Why, that would be very nice,” said Elizabeth’s father.

“I’ll just have it ready in a jiffy, then. You want to come keep me company, honey? You don’t want to hear about farmland and all.”

Elizabeth rose and followed her out to the kitchen. Everything there was spotless, but orange cats had taken over all the windowsills and counters and the linoleum-topped table. “I’m just a fool about cats,” Mrs. Stimson said. “I guess you can tell. Eleven, at last count, and Peaches here is expecting any minute.” She opened the refrigerator door, dislodging the cat sitting on top of it. “We never had the fortune to be parents, don’t you see. I guess the Lord just didn’t will it that way. Jerome says I pour all my love out on the cats, he says I would have made just a wonderful mother if you can judge by how I treat animals.”

She went from cupboard to sink and then back again, mixing up a packet of grape Kool-Aid. Her small cushiony body was packed into some tight undergarment that she kept pulling down secretly at the thighs. Her dress was a church dress, flowers on a shiny black background, and she wore tiny round patent leather pumps. She must have dressed up as soon as she heard the minister was calling. Her husband, who was in a collarless shirt and work pants, would have grumbled over all the fuss and refused to change. Now Mrs. Stimson kept stopping work to listen for his voice, as if she worried that he would say something inappropriate. “Talk?” she said. “That man could talk the ears off a donkey. Oh, your poor father. Honey, your father is a magnificent human being, don’t you ever think otherwise. And when he called today about finding Daddy a companion I thought, Praise be, Reverend Abbott, if you aren’t—”

“Well, about that job,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, it don’t pay much, I know, but the hours aren’t long and the work is easy, just so you don’t mind elderly men. He’s well-nigh bedridden, you see. Has to be helped to his chair by the window — that’s where he stays. Nice view of the street. I’m gone most of the day, I clerk at Patton’s. Ladies’ wear. I could get you a discount on your clothing. Jerome’s gone too, and now, well, I don’t feel comfortable leaving Daddy up there alone all day. He’s getting on. I won’t mince words, his mind is failing. Times he’s clear as a bell, other times he thinks I’m Mama who’s been gone these twenty years. Or what’s worse, his own mama. He asks after these names I never hear of, never even knew were in the family. ‘Daddy,’ I say, ‘it’s me, it’s Ida.’ Then he’ll get right quiet. Then, ‘Ida,’ he’ll say, ‘I know I’m slipping. I feel it,’ he tells me. ‘Feels like my mind is flickering, feels like I’m a lightbulb just about to burn out. Ida,’ he says, ‘tell me straight, am I going to die now?’ Oh, it breaks my heart. I love him so. I’ve been looking into those eyes of his for sixty years, and now all of a sudden there’s nobody behind them. You know? Like all he left with me was their color, and he went somewhere else. Then when he clears he gets so scared. ‘Don’t let them take me away,’ he says, ‘when I am off like that.’ ‘You know I won’t,’ I tell him. I never would, I’d sooner they take me. I love him more than ever now that he’s so helpless.”

She stirred the Kool-Aid endlessly, her little feet set apart on the floor and her face pouched with worry. In the other room her husband said, “We had what they call a railroad apartment, I’m sure you know. Say this coffee table was the hallway. To your left, now, just as you enter, was the living room. No, wait, the coat closet. Then the living room.” Mrs. Stimson sighed and set her spoon down. “I expect you’d like to see him,” she said.

“Well, yes.”

“Come upstairs, then. I got him sitting by the window. I told him company might be coming.”

They filed up narrow dark stairs, through a wallpapered hall and into what was plainly the best bedroom. Light poured in from a tall window, whitening everything — the tufted bedspread, the polished floor, the bony old man sitting in an armchair. A shock of silver hair slanted across his forehead. He was tilting his face upward, letting the sun shine on sunken, gleaming eyelids. For a moment Elizabeth thought he was blind. Then he turned and looked at her, and his hand fluttered up to make sure his pajama collar was buttoned.

“Daddy, honey,” Mrs. Stimson said.

“They got me in pajamas,” the old man told Elizabeth. “Used to be I never wore pajamas if there was company coming.”

“How you feeling, Daddy?”

“Why, I’m all right.” He squinted at his daughter — nothing failing about those eyes of his, which were chips of bright, sharp blue. “Later I might come down and see the people,” he said.

“Well, I got someone I want you to meet. This is Elizabeth Abbott, the preacher’s daughter. Remember? I know you must have seen her when she was just a youngster. This is my daddy, Mr. Cunningham.”

“How do you do,” Elizabeth said.

Mr. Cunningham nodded several times. A metallic flash moved back and forth across his shock of hair. “I was an usher when the old one was there,” he said.

“The old—?”

“The old pastor, the one before Reverend Abbott.”

“Oh, Mr. Blake,” Elizabeth said.

“That’s the one. What became of him?”

“He died.”

Mrs. Stimson made a sudden clutch in the air with both hands, as if she wanted to grab Elizabeth’s words and reel them back in, but Mr. Cunningham only went on nodding. “That’s right,” he said. “Died. Now I remember.”

“Daddy, the nicest thing—”

“Aren’t you the one got married?” Mr. Cunningham asked Elizabeth.

“That was her sister, Daddy. The other daughter.”

“Well, anyone could make that mistake.”

“Of course they could,” said Mrs. Stimson. “I’ll tell you why she’s here, Daddy—”

“I would advise you against the marriage, young lady,” Mr. Cunningham said. “Call it off. Get a divorce. I married.” He turned and looked out the window again. “She aged so,” he said finally.

“Daddy?”

But he went on staring at framed squares of blue, with his hands limp on the arms of the chair. His feet in their leather slippers hung side by side, not quite touching the floor, as neat and passive as a well-cared for child’s.

When they had tiptoed out to the hall again Mrs. Stimson said, “Oh, my, I wish you had seen him more at his best.” And then, on the stairs, “He can be so smart sometimes, you wouldn’t believe it. Please don’t judge him by this.”

“No, I won’t,” Elizabeth said.

“You mean you’ll take the job?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” She beamed and squeezed Elizabeth’s arm. Her skin seemed suddenly clearer, two shades lighter. “You don’t know what this means to me,” she said. “Could you start on Monday? Eight o’clock? I’m not due for work till nine, but I’ll want to show you what he eats and all.”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said.

They carried the Kool-Aid in to the men. Mr. Stimson was still talking. He broke off to say, “I was just remarking on the bum, the atom bum. I blame it for the increase in rainfall. Ida can tell you. Used to be we could plan a Sunday drive with some hope of carrying it out. Not any more. Bum’s changed the cloud formations.”

“What does Reverend Abbott care about cloud formations?” Mrs. Stimson asked. She settled herself in her rocker with a tinkling glass. “Jerome, Elizabeth says she’ll come look after Daddy for us.”

“Is that a fact,” said Mr. Stimson. “Well, you surely will be taking a load off my wife’s mind there, young lady.”

“And they hit it off just beautifully, Jerome.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Some people,” Mrs. Stimson told Elizabeth, “seem to irritate him, like. I’ve noticed that. We had a colored girl cleaning up for me on Fridays, he didn’t take to her at all. Then people with a lot of make-up on, he don’t like that. Well, he’s just old-fashioned is all. I notice you don’t wear make-up. I expect that’s from being a preacher’s daughter.”

“Ah well,” said Elizabeth’s father, “I’m glad things worked out. Any time these little problems come up, Mrs. Stimson, that’s what I’m here for.”

“I know that,” Mrs. Stimson said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Reverend. Why, I was about to have a collapse, worrying like I did all the time I was at work. I thought, if I could find someone—but I never dreamed your Elizabeth was back in town. I must’ve missed her in church.”

“I don’t go,” Elizabeth told her.

“Oh?”

There was a silence.

“Elizabeth’s one of these modern young people,” her father said. He laughed lightly. “She’ll get straightened out. We don’t see eye to eye on — what is it this week? Reincarnation.”

“You don’t say,” said Mr. Stimson. “Why, I never knew it was in any question. Don’t you believe in the reincarnation of Christ on the third day, young lady?”

“It’s a thought,” Elizabeth said.

“What?”

“She’ll get straightened out,” said her father.

“Why, of course she will. Of course she will,” Mrs. Stimson said. She beamed at Elizabeth and rocked steadily, holding her Kool-Aid glass level on her knees. Elizabeth’s father cleared his throat.

“Well now,” he said, “I expect we better be moving on. Got a busy day tomorrow.”

“Yes indeed,” said Mr. Stimson. “We surely do look forward to those sermons of yours, Reverend.”

“That one about pride!” his wife said. “Well, I can’t tell you how much it meant to me. And we appreciate this so much, you helping out about Daddy and all.”

“Glad to do it, glad to do it.”

“Be nice to have a young person about,” Mr. Stimson said. “Never had the fortune to have kids of our own.”

“That’s what I said earlier, Jerome.”

“And it takes the burden off Ida some. Old people tend to get difficult sometimes, not that they—” He grinned and rubbed his chin. “Dangedest thing,” he said. “The other day he took me for one of them quack medicine peddlers. Must have been forty years since they been through here last, wouldn’t you say? Believe it was back in ’21 or ’22, I was just a — well, he gave me hell, or heck. Seems I had sold him some little bottle I swore would cure anything. ‘Where’s your conscience?” he asks me. ‘Can you get up in the morning and look yourself in the eye, knowing how you let a man down?’ Well sir, there I stood, wondering who in Hades I was taking the rap for. Probably long dead, by now. Probably died a quarter century ago. Maybe more.”

Nobody said anything. Elizabeth’s father sat sharply forward, as if he were about to speak, but all he did was stare into the diamond formed by his knees and his laced hands. One wisp of hair had fallen over his eyes — a single flaw that made him look haggard and beaten. Elizabeth imagined that all his disappointments could be read in the grooves around his mouth: Why couldn’t his family see him the way his congregation did? Why had his daughter stayed glued to her seat in the revival tent? What gave him the feeling sometimes that his wife viewed God indulgently, like an imaginary playmate, and that she prepared her chicken casseroles as she would tea-party fare for children on a Sunday afternoon? He shook his head. Elizabeth leaned over to lay a hand on his arm. “We should go home, Pop,” she said gently.

He flinched, and she remembered too late that she should have called him Father.

When she went to bed, fragments of last night’s dreams puffed up from her pillow like dust. She lay on her back, clamping her forehead with one hand. She saw a tea-tin spilling out buttons — self-buttons with their fabric frayed, wooden buttons with the painted flowers chipping off, little smoked pearls knocked loose from their metal loops. The self-buttons she cut new circles of material for. The wooden ones she retouched with a pointed paintbrush. She dipped the metal loops in glue and set them into the pearls, holding them there until they dried, pressing them so tightly between thumb and forefinger that she could feel, even in her sleep, the dents they made in her skin.