Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

  So he left her porch and set out on the long walk home or somewhere. It struck him how foolish he’d been to tell himself he was living for her sake, and how lost he was already without anything at all to tell himself. But he heard her footsteps. She had come after him, and she put her hand in the crook of his arm. “I kept a drumstick for you, Mr. Boughton, and some stuffing, and a piece of pie. Lorraine took the rest over to the church. But there’s plenty here.” She said, “I just don’t want you to walk away looking so sad.”

  A parlor, very warm after the street. A drab couch on a bright rug, a little bookcase with books stacked on both sides of it, an upright piano with a lace scarf and a crowd of family pictures, one of them Jesus. He sat down on the couch with his hat beside him, and she went into the kitchen to make up a plate for him. He heard the front door open and close and felt the cold from it. That woman, Lorraine, said, “I suppose you know there’s an old white man asleep on the sofa. I suppose you can explain that.”

  And Della said, “Oh, leave him be. He’s just so weary.”

  * * *

  He woke up thinking that a pillowcase is a pleasant thing. This one was perfect, a little crisp with laundering but very soft with use. He was lying crouched on a sofa with his head on a pillow and a blanket over him. What! He sat up, bewildered, in a lamplit room, a black woman in a housecoat and slippers watching him from an armchair in the corner. Lenore. No, Lorraine. His hat was in arm’s reach. He said, “I should be going. Thanks for everything. Very much,” and picked it up.

  She said, “You’re not leaving yet. You can’t go sneaking out of the house before the sun comes up.”

  “I see,” he said, for some reason. He wanted to ask where Della was, but decided against it. He thought he might make an attempt at conversation. “I understand you teach with Miss Miles.”

  “Algebra.” She dropped the word like a trump card, and that was the end of conversation. After a few minutes, she did say, “The washroom is there across the hall from the kitchen. You better clean up. She’s going to make you pancakes.”

  This last she said in that tone of incredulous rebuke people use to announce a wholly unmerited kindness. He said, “Thank you,” on the grounds that the phrase seemed generally inoffensive, and went to find the bathroom. He pulled the cord, the light came on, and there he was, unshaven and scarred and haggard, in a little room that smelled like lavender. In the cabinet there were bottles and jars and curlers and pins, but no razor. He did find a wide-tooth comb. Tooth powder, which he put on the tip of his finger. It seemed very wrong to him that he should be looking at these things, touching them. But he did allow for a certain desperation in himself that had to be dealt with. He could hear Della in the kitchen. He washed his face again, gargled the water he could hold in his cupped hand, pulled the cord again, and stood there in the dark, feeling the overbearing innocence of strangers’ domesticity. He absolutely should not be there. He could not help having noticed the painted cup on the windowsill with its bouquet of artificial violets. In the dark he was still aware of it, the kind of tentative claim on a rented space people make without even thinking about it. He could slip the flowers in his pocket and no one would notice for weeks, probably. The flowers would be there, in quiet effect, until someone noticed they were gone. He pinched off just one little bloom. Then he made himself step out into the hall. And there was Della, turning from the stove to smile at him. Sweet Jesus, more domesticity. She was wearing an apron—a sky-blue dress he thought he had seen before and a yellow apron with flowers on it. The little room was very bright, probably cheerful to a less nocturnal eye, to someone not wearing the clothes he had slept in.

  He said, “I should be going. You’ve been very kind. I—” He was about to say something complicated about wanting to return her book and regretting any inconvenience. Then he said, “I can’t be late to work,” which sounded so much like a lie that the truth of it startled him.

  She said, “It’s five o’clock in the morning. I think you have time for a little breakfast.”

  The hiss of pancake batter on a hot skillet, coffee percolating. Here he was, within three feet of a woman so lovely in his thoughts that he was afraid of her.

  She laughed. “So here I am, cooking breakfast for the Prince of Darkness. How does he like his eggs?”

  “Over easy.” Is that what people say? It sounded strange. I’m such a fool.

  She said, “If you just sit down at the table—” Which meant, If you’ll just step out of the doorway— She was standing in front of him with a plate in each hand. He took one of them and let her pass. There was a small table by a window, and two chairs. Lorraine was in one of them. Della nodded at the other one, that he should sit down, which left her standing. He said, “You—” and she laughed.

  “We don’t have company very often. There’s another chair in the kitchen. Eat your breakfast.”

  “Company,” Lorraine said. “You know, people around here have a name for him. They call him That White Man. It’s short for That White Man That Keeps Walking Up and Down the Street All the Time.”

  Flinch. Della put her hand on his shoulder so he wouldn’t stand up. “Do you really want him to leave now, Lorraine? Is that the idea now? It wasn’t five minutes ago.”

  “I never wanted him here in the first place. Nobody asked me.”

  “No reason to be unkind. This wasn’t his idea, either, remember.”

  “He might as well leave and be done with it. The whole neighborhood is going to know he spent the night no matter what.”

  He wanted to find his handkerchief to wipe his face. When he blushed, he sweated. Of course people noticed him, walking past her house however many times it was. He actually hadn’t thought of that. Fool. But it would look a little abject to be mopping his brow with that monogrammed rag he had in his pocket. It wasn’t even his monogram.

  “Then let him eat his pancakes. If it doesn’t matter when he leaves, anyway, he can leave in an hour.”

  Lorraine said, “This is just ridiculous. I sat up the whole night so I could keep an eye on him. Now I just want him gone. I’m going to go get some sleep, and he better be gone when I wake up. If anything goes wrong, it’s your problem!” She said this last as her chair scraped back, and she left the room.

  Della said, “She’s a really nice woman, most of the time.” She sat down across from him, her head in her hands.

  He said, “This is all very embarrassing. You should have waked me up.”

  “And sent you out into the dark and the cold. I know. Not that it would have solved anything.”

  He couldn’t stay and he couldn’t leave. So there he was. The story of his life.

  “If the world had ended that night,” she said, “I could let you fall asleep on my sofa and give you breakfast in the morning, and no one would say a word about it. They might say it was nice. How could I wake you up so you’d be walking home in the cold? In the middle of the night.” An earnest question.

  “I’ve done that. Any number of times. I’m not exactly fragile.”

  She shook her head. “Nobody wants to wake up like that. You didn’t even have your dinner.”

  “My fault.”

  She nodded. “True enough. I’ll forgive you for it if you eat your breakfast.”

  “Seriously, though. It might be better if I left now. In an hour more people will be awake. It might be getting light by then.”

  “Yes, I think it would be better to wait two hours, so you won’t seem to be sneaking away.”

  He laughed. “I believe I always seem to be sneaking away. My boss calls me Slick. She hadn’t known me five minutes before she started calling me that.”

  She looked at him. “I can see what she means. It’s kind of a compliment.”

  “No, it isn’t. But she’s all right. We talk a little baseball.”

  “Good,” she said. She had taken her hands away from her face. “You’re all right, then.”

  Solicitude. So he said, “Sure I am. I gue
ss you better find yourself another stray.” That sounded rude. It was the flinch speaking.

  “Oh.”

  He said, “All I mean is that I’m trouble. I might do you real harm, never meaning to.”

  She said, “I know that.”

  “I can’t leave and I can’t stay.”

  “Then you might as well stay.”

  “For those two hours you gave me. Maybe an hour and a half by now.”

  She said, “I make food for you and you don’t touch it.”

  “I just thought I should talk to you first. I’m sorry about last night.”

  “I know that.”

  “It was hard for me to give up that book. I should have brought it back weeks ago. Months.”

  “I’ll lend you another book.”

  He laughed. “I’d appreciate that. And I want you to know I didn’t figure out some nefarious scheme to come across you in the cemetery. That was so—unexpected. I’m sure you must wonder about it.”

  “No, I’ve never wondered.”

  “All right, then. I was grievously at fault—no, let me make my confession. If you had just spoken to the guard, he’d have let you out. He’d have unlocked a gate for you. You probably didn’t have to go through the whole night there.”

  “Do you think I didn’t know that?”

  Well.

  She said, “I bring problems on myself. Some of them are worth it.” She looked at him calmly, candidly.

  He said, “You loosened my tie.”

  She nodded. “I unbuttoned your collar.”

  He felt himself blush. After a minute, he said, “You know, the world didn’t end that night. Nice idea, but nothing came of it.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I’m just saying what your father would say. Don’t take in strays.”

  “My father would never say that.”

  “Mine either.”

  “They always talk as though the world has ended. Turn the other cheek. Welcome the stranger. All right. Then they say, Well, you do have to exercise a little common sense.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  She looked at him. “You don’t.”

  He laughed. “I’m a special case. For me, turning the other cheek is only prudent. Everyone on earth is a stranger, and I’m another one, so that rule doesn’t really apply. No one to do the welcoming.”

  He had turned in his chair to stretch out his legs and cross them at the ankles. He put his hands in his pockets. Slick. He did want those pancakes, and courtesy obliged him to eat them, but there was something just a little mendicant about it. He couldn’t quite pass from the thought to the deed.

  She stood up and took his plate. “Nobody likes cold eggs.”

  “I actually—”

  “I suppose you like them better cold? Jack Boughton, it’s a shame how you lie.” The plate in one hand, she went to the sofa table and picked up his hat. “Now I have a hostage,” she said, and took it with her into the kitchen.

  It was true, he wouldn’t leave without it. If it had been sitting there much longer, reminding him by its battered raffishness of who he actually was, or who he usually was, anyway, he’d have been out the door. There was no gentlemanly way to take it away from her. Well, he could hear pancake batter hitting the skillet, so leaving was out of the question, hat or no hat.

  He thought he might go out to the sidewalk to see if he could find a couple of roses in the bushes. It would seem a little miraculous to her to find roses on the table, slightly elegant, even if they were wilting. They would be something to give her, and then he could accept breakfast without being abject about it. She would see the roses and be pleased and probably laugh. But then he thought how bizarre it would seem to anyone who saw That White Man groping around in the shrubbery before dawn, only stranger if he did happen to find a rose or two. And then he realized that anyone passing her doorstep in the morning would see those roses and wonder what to make of them, and they would add interest to whatever stories might be circulating about lovely Della, who only meant to be kind. He felt his doom, that old companion who knew the worst about him long before he knew it himself, settle into him, however that happened. But it did. So when Della came into the room again, he could hardly look at her. This time she had a plate for herself, too, which made things better.

  “Excellent,” he said.

  A moment passed, and then she laughed. “I guess somebody’d better say grace.”

  “All right.” He folded his hands and bowed his head. He heard himself saying, “‘Down to the grave will I take thee, / Out from the noise of the strife; / Then shalt thou see me and know me— / Death, then, no longer, but life.’” He looked at her. “I don’t know why that came to mind. I hope I wasn’t— I sometimes think the Lord might enjoy a few lines of poetry. I apologize—”

  She said, “I know why it came to mind. You were thinking of that night the world didn’t end.”

  “I guess I was. Sunrise was a disappointment, but not really a surprise. Otherwise, it was about perfect, I thought.” Should he say he didn’t write those lines? Well, of course she would know Paul Dunbar wrote them. He said, “Paul Dunbar,” so she would know he wasn’t trying to take credit for them.

  She nodded. “‘I am the mother of sorrows, / I am the ender of grief.’ I like that poem.”

  Then they sat there eating together, sharing the syrup, stirring their coffee. He was the one who remembered that there was coffee, and he went into the kitchen and found the cups and saucers and filled them, and realized there would be less chance of a spill if he had filled them at the table, but he was very careful.

  How had he found the nerve? She smiled at him and said thank you, as if it were just a pleasant, ordinary thing. She opened a little porcelain box with sugar cubes in it and dropped two in his cup and two in hers. After a while, Lorraine, in her robe and slippers, came down the hall and stood there a minute, looking at them. “Awfully quiet,” she said.

  Della laughed. “Have we been keeping you awake?”

  “Yes, you have. It’s almost seven. The sun will be up.” She said, “The two of you just sitting there!” She could find no words. It was a little strange, that they had hardly spoken at all for a long time, he had no idea how long.

  “I really should go now.”

  “Yes, I’ll get your hat. It’s a quarter past six, by the way.”

  He had seen his hat on top of the icebox, looking as alien as a thing could look. She brushed at the brim a little before she handed it to him.

  He said, “I’m afraid it’s beyond help.” Then, “I have a confession to make.”

  “You wrote in my book.”

  “Actually, no,” which wasn’t entirely true. “Something else. This is a little embarrassing. I meant to bring you flowers last night, but at the last minute I lost my courage. I got them cheap, they were wilting. So I threw them into the bushes there by the steps.”

  “What kind of flowers?”

  “Roses.”

  “What color?”

  “Red. But my point is that they might look fairly scandalous—proof that you had a gentleman caller in the middle of the night. There are probably petals all over the place. I’d pick them up—but I guess that wouldn’t be wise in the circumstances.”

  She said, “You have strewn my steps with rose petals. That’s poetic.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “And for the pancakes. And the good night’s sleep.”

  She said, “Just trying to keep you alive.”

  “You don’t have to do that. Try, I mean. You keep me alive already. Just the thought of you. I didn’t mean that.” It was much more than he meant to say. So he stepped out the door and put on his hat and then lifted it to her, that odd little gallantry, skipped down the steps, and walked away. He did turn once, and he saw her stooping gracefully in the faint morning twilight, gathering roses.

  * * *

  After two weeks a letter came for him, for Mr. Jack Boughton. The desk clerk read the name out slowly an
d squinted at him, then read the name again, as if studying the discrepancy between the written name and Jack’s person. When Jack reached for it, he held it away from him. He said, “We used to have a Boughton here, but he’s two weeks behind on his rent. As of yesterday. So I guess that means he doesn’t live here anymore.”

  Jack had paid his rent. He had stayed sober, kept his job, bought a new razor and a decent aftershave. This may have been what threw him off. Normally he had to grant that he had made himself vulnerable to what might be called ridicule. He had no idea how many times he had been talked into paying his rent more than once. Then, before he knew it, he was all out of money, and after a few days the clerk was letting him off again, after threatening to throw his little hoard of shirts and socks and pilferings, his effects, as they say, out into the street. It was a kind of joke, he believed, when he was too fuddled to take a harsher view. There were always dishes to wash. So his life was not much affected, all in all. He drew a kind of resignation around himself, as if it were dignity.

  Now he had, so to speak, waked up sober. The preposterous fellow with dirty yellow hair just the color of the tobacco stains on his fingers and greasy yellow-tinted spectacles was treating him like a fool. Jack grabbed his arm and took the letter out of his hand, which, he thought with some satisfaction, was probably normal in the circumstances.

  On the flap of the envelope were written D. Miles and her address. So he put it in his pocket. He tipped his hat to the clerk, just to keep him off balance, and strode into the street and down the street until he was out of sight of him. I strode, he thought, still pleased with himself. But why would Della have written to him? The fact was that he had written his address on the back cover of her book, in tiny letters along the spine. She might never have seen it was there in faint pencil. He had sharpened one of Mrs. Beverly’s pencils, then rubbed the point of it against a newspaper until it was so fine it cut into the paper if he was not very careful. He had gone out on the pavement to look up at the number of the house he had lived in, slept in, for at least two years. It was a long time since he had thought of himself as having an address. He had written, in the tiniest hand he could manage, 11N15th. And she had found it and known what it must be, and sent him a letter. He had hardly dared hope.