Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

  Joy is an earnest emotion, and visible. The guard must have seen a light in his eyes, realization, yes, there could be a good and respectable life ahead of him. In fact, it was relief that she was gone and he had not been driven to violence, which never went well for him. The bruised reed he did not break. Not for lack of trying. Don’t talk like that. The guard allowed that he had, at one time, pretty well given up on himself, remarkable as this might seem now. Bad friends! They’re the worst thing that can happen to a fellow! Jack almost put in a word for bad enemies, then thought better of it. The guard checked Jack’s face for any sign he might be less than serious. Then he said, “I’ve given you fair warning, bud. Now move along. I don’t want to see you around here again, understand?” He was already distracted. There was another bum shambling down the road in need of castigation. Jack thought, My lucky day. He’d had to leave his bedroll and could not possibly go back for it, testy as the guard had been, but that might just make him change his life.

  * * *

  And so it was. After he had shaved and washed up and slept a few hours and put on the shirt he kept in decent shape, he actually stepped into the shoe store with the yellowing HELP WANTED sign and offered his services. The old woman at the counter said, “Nobody wants to work here. I don’t want to work here. The pay is terrible and there aren’t any customers. If you want the job, you’re welcome to it. At least it’ll keep you out of the weather. That’s about all I can say for it.”

  Clearly this would not be too abrupt a change in his way of life to be sustainable. “Jack Boughton,” he said, thinking, reasonably enough, that the information might be of interest to her.

  “That’s fine, Slick,” she said. “Hang up your hat.” Then she went back to staring resentfully out the window, jilted by the passing world, a woman left waiting at the altar of commerce. “Every damn person on earth needs shoes,” she muttered, as if that fact proved there was malice behind all the public indifference. “Shoes are shoes,” she said, as if to fend off the suggestion that the same six pairs had been posed in that window while far too many seasons passed. “By the way, those knots in your shoelaces look bad. Get yourself some new ones. I’ll take ’em out of your wages,” she said, and laughed.

  At some point she had said, in that half growl of hers, something that included “Beverly.” He wasn’t sure whether it was a first name or a last name. It might seem rude to use it in either case. So in his mind she was “the woman.”

  All right. The absence of customers meant fewer people to deal with. No one would think to look for him there. The question was what he should do with himself, how to create some slight impression that he was of use, in case anyone happened to look in the window. He suggested that he might take down the HELP WANTED sign, but the woman shook her head. “I’d just have to make another one.” So he might not last long enough to work off the shoelaces. He had thought, over the years, that by indenturing himself he would sometime observe practicality at close range, to glean the lessons and rituals of productive life. St. Louis was a vast hive of enterprise, grocers and barbers and barkeeps doing whatever they did well enough to be there from one day to the next, one year to the next. His wanderings in the city had all confirmed this. Yet he had managed to find his way to a business that resembled busyness so little it surprised him every morning to find the door unlocked and the lights on. And when he walked in each morning, she seemed a little surprised. “You again!” she said once, and it took him a second to be sure she meant it as a joke, so that was bad, and worse was the fact that she noticed his hesitation and apologized. Actually she said, “Kidding.” He’d flinched, that reflex of rigid pride and low expectations that had sent him out other doors, walked him away from personal items—a few books, two hats—he could not afford to lose and could not make himself go back for, since they exposed his instant of confusion, always out of proportion to the near-nothing that was at stake. His pride! How could that blasted thing have survived the thousand embarrassments it had cost him? Well, the woman apologized again—“Kidding”—and he had nodded and hung up his hat. And he reminded himself to move the hat rack nearer the door, where he might notice it if he sometime found himself making a sudden exit.

  After a week the woman handed him an envelope with money in it. This seemed a bit more like charity than like honest gain, since he had waited on only two customers, neither of whom had bought anything. If some abrupt advantage emerged from the incomprehensible operations of the universe, it was a modest return on their random exactions, the disruptions and defeats. Or so he told himself, though it was clear that the woman had almost as stark use for the money as he had. He might actually be the burden under which their little bark foundered. For weeks he still strolled around by the docks after hours to see if there were dishes to wash, floors to sweep, avoiding places where he’d had trouble before. He imagined the woman might sometime need a loan just to keep him employed, and that he would provide it. He bought two packs of cigarettes, one for her.

  And he did not drink! He was not even tempted to drink. He had fallen back on the old habit of imagining that Della might pass him on the street. The shoe store did not serve colored, but Della was so much on his mind that when the bells above the door jangled he was a little slow to look up and see someone who was not her walking in. When he left the cemetery, he had looked down the street in the direction she would have gone, and she was nowhere in sight. After the five minutes, six at most, he had spent accepting the guard’s reproofs. This alarmed him; he couldn’t imagine what it might mean, so after he had slept and shaved and put in what was left of his first day at the shoe store, and loitered until he was sure she’d be home and there’d be less risk of encountering her on the sidewalk, he walked across town, past her door. There was a book in the window, the cover toward the street. It was her sister’s Hamlet.

  An actual jolt of relief passed through him. It was as if he’d touched a power line. He had to wonder what he looked like in that half second when every nerve in his startled body was galvanized with joy, probably, though the particulars of the sensation were lost in the force of it. But the street was empty. Thank you, Jesus. He walked on, and then back past her door again, to make the experience milder by anticipation of it, by familiarity. This was indeed the effect, slight but marked enough that he had to persuade himself not to walk past a third time, which would inevitably involve a fourth. What a fool. Know thyself, Boughton. When he had gone a mile or so toward home, he began to doubt he had looked carefully enough to be sure there was not also a sprig of ivy. He knew the peril of relief, which was so welcome sometimes that he gave in to it impulsively and lost his grasp of the reality of the situation. He walked back toward her house half a mile, thought better of it, and went home to his rooming house. At worst, things were not terrible. He could sleep.

  Della had said he was more like most people than he realized, so, when after a week or two business had improved enough that the word “business” began to seem appropriate to what went on behind that window, he felt he could actually attribute it to his being there, diluting the balefulness of the woman’s endlessly fresh disappointment. Adding a degree of human warmth, possibly. Passersby no doubt saw them eating their sandwiches together from the little basket she always brought, even sharing a newspaper during the slowest hours. His mere presence might have broken a spell of some kind, disrupted the primal fear that loneliness is contagious, which puts the seal on isolation. So he had concluded. And there they were, chatting for the world to see. When customers came in, there was all that genuflecting to get through. The cost of doing this particular business. He could tell himself there was a kind of gallantry in it. Or he could think of it as an act of reverence, toward souls who would otherwise never enjoy even the outward sign of any such thing. His father would like that.

  Della was speaking to him sometimes in his thoughts, or she was quiet, simply there at the edge of his vision. In her gentle way she was making everything easier. What would she
find becoming in him? That was what he did. And by putting himself in the way of survival, not to put too fine a point on it, he was doing as she had asked him to do, so forthrightly. Can these bones live? Oh, Lord, you know. But for you, Miss Miles, I am eating this sandwich, for you I am smiling at this stranger, for you I am trying to sleep. He could not imagine an occasion when she might acknowledge any of this. No matter. Their lives were parallel lines that would not meet, he knew that, he would see to that. But they defined each other, somehow. Equidistance was like silence. It had to be carefully sustained to exist at all. He actually allowed himself thoughts like these, making an imaginary something out of literally nothing, finding a kind of reassurance in his successfully forbidding himself to walk down her street, past her door. Silence was one fragile thing he had almost never broken. Distance was another.

  It had turned cold. It wasn’t quite the dry, windy cold they had at home. When he first came to St. Louis, he thought the place looked like a corner of Eden where the bad news had not arrived quite yet. All that shiny vegetation, fat with life, untried by weather. At home the winter brought with it a high-minded rigor, every distraction swept away, cold light pouring through bare trees. He still felt as though an unwelcome demand came with autumn, then winter. A habit of dread persisted from his early education, from those years before he had mastered truancy. He had made an early start on a wasted life.

  There were always the back porch steps and the kitchen door and the yellow painted table with mismatched chairs around it, and what always seemed at first the too-bright light and the too-warm air, smelling like steam from the rattling radiators and the mittens drying on them, and like cinnamon or yeast, or, if he came in late, like whatever supper had been, his plate of it warm in the oven. He could feel the relief in the house, but they had learned not to ask where he had been, what he had been up to. Even Teddy. They were grateful that he was in out of the cold. His mother would come into the kitchen to put his supper on the table and pour his milk.

  “You never talk about your mother.”

  “Yes. I don’t.”

  That tremor in her hands. He could have said, “I found a little creek where the ice wasn’t solid yet, panes of ice, clear as glass.” He could even say he liked the sound they made under his boots, how they shattered when he threw them down. She knew about his interest in fragile things, and would have liked to hear that for once no harm was done. But she was fragile, so he could not bring himself to comfort her. Half the time he would roll up whatever he could of his supper in a piece of bread and be out the door again. Better the cold. Better the dark. Why was that? He knew how she felt when he left. He felt it himself. Dear Jesus, keep me harmless. He knew what that meant. Keep me alone.

  * * *

  So, the library. He read Hamlet a number of times and developed certain opinions. It might really be about the love between Claudius and Gertrude, which struck him as very deep, and which might really make all the crimes and sins and so on unimportant, comparatively speaking. That would be extreme, but where else could you even think such a thing except in a book, or a dream? It was a profound friendship, the only one in the play. Hamlet is mistaken when he goes on about reechy kisses. He is the loneliest man in the world, so he can’t see what it is that has pushed him aside, made nothing of him, let alone of custom, religion, morality, and the rest. A letter would be one way to tell Della that he had been thinking about things she thought about, and also that he was fit and well, as per her instructions. It would be a delicate business, making the case to a minister’s daughter that morals might be eclipsed in some cases by other considerations, hypothetically. For the purposes of the play, which might be about the difference between love and loneliness, and how people on either side can’t understand people on the other. He knew if he wrote it he might be tempted to mail it. Then he would have to wonder if the risk of offending her was part of the impulse. She would answer, or not. He would dread opening her letter if she sent one. Things were much better left as they were.

  Days passed, weeks passed. He bought a new shirt and a new razor. The woman said, “Hey, Slick, time for a haircut.” She had a point. And he bought shoe polish, at a discount, which meant she waved off the coins he offered her. He had trouble sleeping, because the chill in the air made him remember things. So he walked at night, though not the way he used to when he had nowhere to be in the morning. St. Louis was quite a town. He wondered if Della had ever seen Eads Bridge from down by the water. It looked like the walls of Troy. Gigantic, tawny stones, soaring arches. Of course, the stones themselves would be as ancient as the stones at Troy, and the fossils in both of them older, by the measure of the little lives that had fallen into whatever it was, clay by the color of it. And the eons they had spent evolving so they could end up there. The next time he imagined walking with Della by the bridge he would know many striking and impressive things.

  Too much sleeplessness and he would be looking haggard. So no walking around for a while. To distract himself, he made plans and acted on them. The haircut, first of all. There was a roll of brown wrapping paper at the store. He took a piece of it and used it to wrap Della’s book, so he could carry it in his pocket without further risk of foxing. His shoes were polished, and polished again. All this was easy enough. Then Mrs. Beverly said, “Store’s closed tomorrow. Of course,” and handed him an envelope with five dollars in it. After work he stopped in front of a florist shop to look at the roses in the window. Half price. The clerk said if he didn’t sell them before the holiday he’d have to throw them away. So Jack walked home with an enormous red bouquet, roses in full bloom but still passable. He set them on his dresser, in a bucket, since that was all he could find that was big enough to hold them, and they looked so preposterous in that room, against the faded wallpaper roses, that he set them on the floor in a corner. Then for some reason he thought there would be no harm in getting himself a little bottle of something. He bought a larger bottle than he meant to. Rum. A couple of swallows would help him sleep.

  He woke up feeling pretty damaged. He looked around for the bottle to see how much he had actually drunk and found it in a dresser drawer, exactly half empty, the lid tightly screwed on. He knew he became oddly prudent when he was too drunk to remember the reasoning behind his decisions. But he could guess. Half tonight and half tomorrow, and then everything would be resolved. Every possibility extinguished. He would not even glance in his thoughts at the worst of them. It was a relief that he would never know for certain what he’d have had to regret.

  So when he woke up again and it was evening, he didn’t put on his new shirt and he didn’t shave. If he just showed up at her door looking like he always did, not as though he thought she might ask him in, but with the book to give her and some sort of apology to offer, then he’d have kept a promise. She might not have remembered everything she’d said, but of course she’d be glad to have her book. Some of the roses were dropping petals. Some were all right. It would be a sort of joke to offer them to her, a part of the apology. But, dear Jesus, he couldn’t even decide to leave his room. A swallow of rum, just enough to dull him to what he was doing, and then he made the better roses into a bunch and put on his tie and jacket and hat and went out into the night, without the roses, but he came back for them. Yes, he had the book.

  The first time he walked past, he saw lights on, so she was probably at home. He was almost disappointed. Just leaving the book and the roses on the step might be the perfect thing, in the circumstances. A nice gesture, and she wouldn’t have him to deal with. Of course, he could do that in any case. The second time he passed her door, she, or someone, had turned on the porch light. This made him wish he had shaved. It made his scar itch. He walked far past her street, almost as if he had decided to give up on the whole thing. Then he went back again, thinking it might be late enough that if he did knock no one would answer. Then he could leave the book, possibly the roses. But then he dropped them into the bushes by her stoop. He would look ridiculou
s, standing there with a bouquet like a suitor, as if he thought he could ingratiate himself, showing up at her door in the middle of the night. Late as he knew it must be, disreputable as he knew he must look, displeased as he assumed she would be, he did finally knock on her door, because he just wanted to see her face.

  She opened the door. That flinch. He saw tears in her eyes. She said, “So you remembered to come, after all. In the middle of the night. Liquor on your breath.” She said, “It’s after midnight. That makes you a day late.”

  This was bad enough. He hardly knew her, and he’d almost made her cry. But at least he knew now that she had been expecting him, a remarkable thing. He handed her the little package with her book in it and said, “I happened to be in the neighborhood,” which was what he had planned to say if she seemed not to have remembered that invitation, or not to have meant it. He said, “My apologies. I mean that quite sincerely,” and tipped his hat, which he would have removed except for that fear of trying to seem ingratiating. He did look at her face, no harm in that. He might as well take what pleasure he could before the regret really set in.