That was okay, though. It had kept everybody else from buying it. That, and the hefty price tag. But it was worth every cent he paid for it. Bruce knew that his own grandmother would have approved of such an expenditure, and because he was using her money, it gave him all the more pleasure.
Celia told Bruce she was thinking about buying the painting herself, Bruce wrote, but Ollie showed up at the gallery one day and put a red dot by it, saying he had an anonymous buyer. Bruce pretended to be disappointed for her when she told him, never letting on about the talk he’d had with Ollie.
But she was also glad in a way, she had gone on to tell Bruce, that somebody else, some lucky intelligent sensitive person, had recognized the value of the painting and was going to get to enjoy it for the rest of his life. Anonymous buyers, she told him, were quite common in the art world, and they always fascinated her. Maybe the buyer of this painting was afraid everybody would laugh at him for buying what amounted to the ugly duckling of the show.
The noon delivery was modest—a heart-shaped pizza from Pop’s Pizza Palace over in Derby, where they were running a Valentine special for only ten bucks. Bruce was watching for the delivery car and met the kid in the driveway to give him a tip and to stick a note to the top of the pizza box that said, Save room for dinner tonight. See you at six.
At one o’clock Bruce saw Elizabeth Landis knocking at Celia’s door with a long, flat, triangular-shaped gift, wrapped in white paper with little red hearts all over it and a tag, which read, Looking forward to many more love matches. No doubt Celia would know at first glance what this gift was, and furthermore, she might even suspect the ulterior motive behind it. If he gave her a new racket, Bruce figured, he could use her old one, the one with which she had whacked Matt’s wrist, instead of borrowing Milton Stewart’s ancient wooden racket again.
From his bedroom window, Bruce saw Celia smile when she opened the door to let Elizabeth in. She laughed when she read the message on the gift tag, and they both disappeared inside.
Milton Stewart’s wooden racket had provided Bruce with a good excuse for not winning a single game out of the twelve he and Celia played during their first match several weeks ago, which in turn had provided Celia with the opportunity to explain to him that the term for that particular score in tennis lingo was “double bagel.”
“Well, just wait till I get a better racket, one with a decent sweet spot,” he had said, waving the wooden one around. “Then you’ll have to eat a few of those double bagels yourself.” Whereupon she had insisted on trading rackets with him for another set, then proceeded to find the sweet spot on Milton’s wooden racket time and time again while winning another six easy games in a row.
Bruce’s main problem right now, he wrote in the black notebook, is keeping the ball inside the lines, but as soon as he learns to control his massive power, Celia will have trouble on her hands.
He wrote about driving to Greenville to talk in person with the pro at the Greenville Country Club, who recommended the Dunlop 900–G racket, advertised as “heat refined” in a “hot-melt carbon process,” producing a racket with “explosive power and strength.” For strings he had chosen natural gut, which was the best according to the pro, and for tension he selected something midrange between high, which he was told resulted in greater control, and low, which was for power.
“Let me tell you, she will love this racket,” the pro said, “and with a little luck, some of that might transfer to you.” And how did he know she didn’t already love him? Bruce asked. The savvy pro replied that Bruce’s very personal interest in every aspect of this gift didn’t strike him as coming from a man who already had the cat in the bag, so to speak. Bruce took issue with the pro, telling him that he would always be as particular about the gifts he bought this woman as he was being right now. And though the wise pro only smiled as he took Bruce’s money, Bruce could tell he was thinking, Oh yeah, right, I hear you. (Bruce is therefore putting this in writing so that Celia will someday be reminded to pay that pro a visit and inform him that not every man becomes careless and forgetful over time.)
Promptly at two o’clock Bruce watched Patsy Stewart plod down the driveway holding a present wrapped in shiny red paper topped with a silver bow. He had asked her to please deliver it to Celia’s front door instead of going down through the basement.
One night a couple of weeks ago Bruce had looked in Celia’s bedroom after she had paused The African Queen and gone to the kitchen to pop another bag of popcorn, right after the scene where Katharine Hepburn had pulled all the leeches off Humphrey Bogart’s back. He was looking to see if Celia had a jewelry box, and as far as he could see, she didn’t unless she kept it hidden in a drawer somewhere.
He had gone shopping the next day and found one at a gift shop in Greenville—not one of the tacky imitation leather kind stacked up with multiple little drawers, nor one of the more expensive tall wooden ones, some of them very pretty but still with all the drawers and doors, like miniature armoires. This one was a small elegant silver case. A scroll design was worked into the metal, and in the center of the lid was a plain oval silver nameplate for monogramming.
He had given a great deal of thought about what to have inscribed on the plate and had finally chosen a verse reference—Proverbs 1:9. It was a verse he and Celia had discussed almost two months earlier on the day of the ice storm, when they had met by God’s design, as Bruce always described it, outside Cracker Barrel, the day Bruce discovered that Celia had, as she put it, “been sought, found, and brought back” during her recent trip to Georgia over Thanksgiving. What a day of surprises that Cracker Barrel day had been.
“For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head,” the verse in Proverbs said, “and chains about thy neck,” the “they” referring to the wise instruction of parents, grounded in the fear of God. Celia had told him about her grandmother that night, haltingly at first but gradually with greater freedom, after which she had gone on to speak of her parents.
“And you know what I’ve finally realized?” she had said. “Even though my grandmother’s way of loving was totally different from my parents’, it was still love, through and through. And even though I thought her way of looking at life was hard and cold and stern, she was right about a lot of things. Behind all her rules was a heart that wanted to please God more than anything in the world.” She had realized, she said, that Christians weren’t perfect, that some of their methods weren’t the best, but that you couldn’t throw out God’s truth because of man’s faults. Besides, she’d had plenty of faults herself during the three years with her grandmother.
From the pages of her grandmother’s diaries, she told him, she had gotten a glimpse of what their three years together had cost her grandmother, not only in the careful scrimping to put away every penny she could in order to provide for Celia’s welfare after high school, but also in the countless hours spent in prayer on her behalf, and finally in the deep sorrow she carried to her grave over failing to “keep my precious Celie safe.” She had written about the dread of facing her daughter in heaven someday with the news of that failure.
Over Thanksgiving, three weeks before their meeting at Cracker Barrel, Celia had visited her grandmother’s church again and talked at great length with the pastor’s wife, with whom she had been corresponding by letter since August, a woman who, according to Celia, “had a lot more to her than you’d ever guess from just looking at her.” Denise Davidson had met Celia’s every question head on. “Never once did she look shocked at anything I said,” Celia told him.
One thing Celia had wrestled with in particular was how sad her parents would be if they knew the things she had done. “I couldn’t figure out,” she told Bruce, “how I could have turned my back on everything they taught me if I had ever really been converted in the first place. So I kept struggling over whether I needed to start at the beginning and ask God for salvation, or if maybe I was just what everybody used to call ‘backslidden’ and needed to repent. I wa
sn’t really sure I had ever understood that salvation was more than keeping a long list of rules. I don’t think I had ever really caught onto the concept of God’s grace.”
And the answer to her quandary was so simple, she said, that she was a little embarrassed that Denise Davidson had to spell it out for somebody who had always considered herself well educated, somebody with a healthy IQ and a master’s degree, not to mention years and years of churchgoing in her background. And would she please spell it out for him, too, Bruce requested. What exactly had Denise Davidson told her?
“She said why don’t we leave it up to God to decide, that if I bowed my head and confessed my sins and repented and asked for his grace to be poured out on me, I didn’t need to worry about which category I fit into. He would take care of it.” Celia shrugged and smiled. “So I did exactly that.”
Before she left Dunmore after Thanksgiving, Celia told Bruce she had visited her grandmother’s grave, had stood there for a long time, praying for God to let her grandmother know right now that she would be joining her in heaven someday, and that she loved her and thanked her for all she had sacrificed and was sorry for all the grief she had caused her.
So the two o’clock gift, the jewelry box with its inscribed verse reference, is meant to be a symbol, Bruce wrote, of the ornaments of grace in a Christian’s life, and of Celia’s circling back to the instruction of her parents and grandmother. The interior of the case is lined with soft velvet the color of atoning blood. Every time Celia opens the lid, she will see the red velvet and be reminded of how much God loves her.
At first Bruce had resisted the idea of resorting to someone like Patsy for the two o’clock delivery, someone with such a total lack of dramatic flair. But the more he thought about it, the more fitting it seemed, since he and Celia had been talking about taking Milton and Patsy out for dinner some night soon and sharing with them the story of how God had brought them to himself, first of all, then brought them to each other. Bruce had already told Milton about Celia’s mistaking him for Kimberly’s husband, which Milton thought was very funny.
* * *
At three o’clock Milton Stewart walked down the driveway to Celia’s front door, Bruce wrote after the next delivery, carrying a gold gift bag with musical notes stamped all over it and tissue tucked inside. There were six CDs in the bottom of the bag, all of the ones they had at the Barnes and Noble over in Greenville recorded by a clarinet virtuoso named Richard Stoltzman, whom Elizabeth Landis’s husband, Ken, had recommended. Richard Stoltzman had a vast repertoire, everything from classical to jazz. One of the CDs even had “Amazing Grace” on it.
Bruce had already told Elizabeth that he and Celia were planning to visit her church tomorrow, on the day after Valentine’s Day, and he had even been so bold as to ask Elizabeth if she could make a couple of requests of their song leader, which she had promised to do. He knew Celia liked the song “Wonderful Grace of Jesus” as much as he did. Of all the hymns about grace he had heard so far, that one had the happiest melody, in his opinion. He particularly liked the chorus, which described grace not just in moderate terms, as a flowing river, but flamboyantly, as “the mighty rolling sea.” He liked the men’s line “Broader than the scope of my transgressions, sing it!”
At four o’clock Bruce carefully guided Maddy down the Stewarts’ driveway on her little ambulance car, the one Celia had helped him locate the week before Christmas from an upscale toy shop she found on the Internet.
Bruce placed the gift in Maddy’s hands. She held it gingerly, as if it were a fresh loaf of bread she didn’t want to squeeze. He helped her ring the doorbell, then stepped around the corner of the house to wait for her. Celia opened the door and stepped out on the concrete stoop. She asked Maddy to help her open the present. He heard them laugh as they tore off the paper and ribbon.
“Oh, look,” Celia said, “it’s a video.”
“Cartoons?” Maddy said.
“No, it’s a story,” Celia said. “A very nice story.” Then she told Maddy to wait right there while she went inside to get a Valentine treat for her, which turned out to be a big lollipop wrapped in red cellophane. When she came back, she called out, “When you see your uncle Bruce, tell him I like the present very much.”
At his desk a few minutes later, Bruce wrote, At four o’clock Maddy brought Celia a video of Emma, the one with Gwyneth Paltrow, which Celia had told Bruce was one of her top five favorite movies, along with Pride and Prejudice.
She had told Bruce she liked Emma even a little better than P & P, as they had come to call the other one, because she could identify so much now with Emma Woodhouse, who thought of herself as very alert and observant, although she had completely overlooked all the virtues of the man right under her nose, her neighbor Mr. Knightley.
She was very fond of Austen, “now that I have grown up,” she had said. On a bookshelf next to her sofa was a dark blue volume titled The Complete Works of Jane Austen, and she had taken to reading Bruce excerpts from it in the past several weeks. She was still ashamed to think how she had once considered Austen’s works nothing more than Victorian twaddle. Now she was full of admiration for them.
“Her humor is so understated,” she had told Bruce one day. To illustrate, she read several passages, among them the famous opening line of P & P, with which Bruce was familiar, since it was also in the movie: “‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’”
Bruce pretended not to catch it. “I don’t see anything so funny about that,” he said.
And she pretended to explain the meaning patiently. “She’s using irony. She’s really saying that it’s everybody else who thinks the man needs a wife to help him spend all his money. She’s just making an observation about all the mothers in the neighborhood who can’t wait to get their eligible daughters married off to somebody rich.”
“Well, then, that’s good for him, I guess. He’s got his pick of the whole lot.”
“Oh, like women are apples or something? Like a man can stroll through the orchard looking them over, then whenever he feels good and ready just reach up and pluck one?”
“Well, yeah, or like watermelons. He can thump them all on the head till he finds a good one.”
“And I guess he ought to check their teeth, too, like when you buy a horse.”
“Not a bad idea. Here, open up.”
They had talked at length by now about how each of them had been more than a little guilty of both pride and prejudice toward the other. Bruce didn’t believe it when Celia first told him that the original title of Austen’s book had been First Impressions. She had to prove it by showing him the exact sentence in the introduction to her Complete Works.
“That’s funny,” Bruce said. “I had a little discussion once with Elizabeth Landis about first impressions. You were mentioned in the conversation, as I recall.”
“You and Elizabeth talked about me? I would have expected it out of you, but I thought she was my friend.”
“Oh, she was on your side, believe me.”
“Well, she was on your side, too,” Celia said. “Seemed like she was always finding a way to work you into a conversation—‘He’s so good with kids,’ ‘You should see him in play rehearsals,’ ‘He’s got a great sense of humor,’ ‘He’s a true gentleman,’ blah blah blah.”
“Blah blah blah? Are you suggesting none of it was true?”
“Hey, I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“I’m not touching that one. No way am I going to comment on a woman’s age.”
The five o’clock delivery was made by Kimberly, along with her new baby girl, Reagan, wrapped up in a white blanket. Bruce was a little nervous about this one, realizing the method of delivery was a gamble. He had told Kimberly to give him a signal when she left Celia’s apartment, and twenty minutes later, after saying good-bye to Celia, she looked straight toward his window, raised one thumb, and nodded.
The last
gift had to be a book, Bruce wrote. Specifically, Bruce wanted poetry. So he asked their mutual friend Elizabeth for suggestions, and she told him without hesitation that he could do no better for Valentine’s Day than a collection of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who, she said, not only had a lovely first name and an underappreciated literary gift but also, interestingly enough, had found the love of her life at the age of forty.
He had decided on a slim, gorgeously bound volume of Browning’s Sonnets From the Portuguese, which he had ordered over the Internet from a bookshop in London that specialized in rare editions. None of your ordinary mass-produced books would do for this gift, he wrote.
First he had gone to the library and done some reading of Browning’s poems on his own, thinking he might like to get a complete collection. But many of them had such melancholy subjects—deserted gardens, the tears of an angel, a dead person’s hands, lost bowers, exiles from home, and that horrible one about the children weeping. Never would he give Celia a book with such lines to stumble across: “But the young, young children, O my brothers, / They are weeping bitterly! / They are weeping in the playtime of the others.”
So he had settled on the Sonnets From the Portuguese for the five o’clock gift, the final one before he came to her door at six. When the book arrived from England, he was tempted to underline certain passages: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” But it was Celia’s book. He would let her do any underlining.
When Bruce had gone to the hospital right after Reagan was born three weeks ago and had looked at her through the window of the nursery on the maternity ward, he had received a small glimmer of understanding about how it worked with parents and their children. All the love he had felt for Maddy these two and a half years was miraculously reproduced and heaped upon this new baby he had never even held yet, without an ounce of it being subtracted from Maddy. It had to be one of the most astounding properties of love, that ability to multiply itself. Bingo, just like that, he had loved her. All those other babies who looked pretty much like her behind the window—well, they were okay, but nothing to compare to her.
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