by Anne Tyler
While Sister Harriet talked, Ian smiled at her. He was sitting on the piano bench with his long, blue-jeaned legs stretched in front of him and his elbows propped on the keyboard lid. One last shaft of sunlight was slanting through the side window, and it struck his face in such a way that the peach fuzz on his cheekbones turned to purest gold. Surely Miss Pennington would have to notice. How could she resist him? He looked dazzling.
At dinner Mr. Kitt offered an account of his entire fifth-grade experience. “I do believe,” he said, “that everything that’s gone wrong in my life can be directly traced to fifth grade. Before that, I was a roaring success. I had a reputation for smartness. It was me most often who got to clean the erasers or monitor the lunchroom, so much so that it was whispered about by some that I was teacher’s pet. Then along comes fifth grade: Miss Pilchner. Lord, I can see her still. Brassy dyed hair curled real tight and short, and this great big squinty fake smile that didn’t fool a person under age twenty. First day of school she asks me, ‘Where’s your ruled paper?’ I tell her, ‘I like to use unruled.’ ‘Well!’ she says. Says, ‘In my class, we have no special individuals with their own fancy-shmancy way of doing things.’ Right then and there, I knew I’d hit hard times. And I never was a success after that, not then or ever again.”
“Oh, Mr. Kitt,” Miss Pennington said. “What a pity!”
“Well now, I, on the other hand,” their grandpa said from the head of the table, “I was crazy about fifth grade. I had a teacher who looked like a movie star. Looked exactly like Lillian Gish. I planned to marry her.”
This was a little too close for comfort; all three children shifted in their chairs. But Miss Pennington merely smiled and turned to Ian. She said, “Ian, I hope you have happy memories of fifth grade.”
“Hmm? Oh, yes,” Ian said without interest. He didn’t look up from his plate; he was cutting his meat.
“Did you attend school here in Baltimore?” she asked him.
Her voice was so bendable; it curved toward him, cajoling, entwining. But Ian merely transferred his fork to his right hand, seeming to move farther from her in the process. “Yes,” he said shortly, and he took a bite of meat and started chewing. Why was he behaving this way? He was acting like … well, like a laborer, in fact.
Finally their grandma spoke up in his place. “Yes, indeedy! He went all twelve years!” she said brightly. “And you know, Miss Pennington—”
“Ariana.”
“Ariana, I was a teacher, back about a century ago.”
“Oh, Ian mentioned that.”
“I taught fourth grade in the dark, dark ages.”
“Me too,” Sister Harriet said suddenly.
Everyone looked at her.
“I taught seventh,” she said. “But I wasn’t very good at it.”
Ian said, “Now, Harriet. I bet you were excellent.”
“No,” she said. “It’s true. I just didn’t have the—I don’t know. The personality or something.”
Well, that was for sure. The three children traded amused sidelong glints.
Leaning forward so earnestly that her bolsterlike bosom almost grazed her plate, Sister Harriet said, “Every day I went in was such a struggle, and I had no idea why. Then one night I dreamed this dream. I dreamed I was standing in front of my class explaining conjunctions, but gibberish kept coming out of my mouth. I said, ‘Burble-burble-burble.’ The students said, ‘Pardon?’ I tried again; I said, ‘Burble-burble-burble.’ In the dream I couldn’t think what had happened, but when I woke up I knew right away. You see, the Lord was trying to tell me something. ‘Harriet,’ He was saying, ‘you don’t speak these children’s language. You ought to get out of teaching.’ And so I did.”
“Well, my goodness,” their grandma said, sitting back in her chair.
But Ian was regarding Sister Harriet seriously. “I think that was very brave of you,” he told her.
She flushed and said, “Oh, well …”
“No, really. To admit the whole course of your life was wrong and decide to change it completely.”
“That does take courage,” Miss Pennington said. “I agree with Ian.” And she sent him a radiant smile that he didn’t appear to notice.
Was he blind, or what?
This past Easter, one of the foreigners had dropped by with his younger sister who was visiting from her college. She might have stepped out of the Arabian Nights; she was dark and slim and beautiful, with a liquid, demure way of speaking. Twice her brother had made pointed references to her eligibility. “High time she find a husband and settle down, get herself a green card, develop some children,” he said, and he told them it was up to him to locate a suitable husband for her, since his family still believed in what he called organized marriage. But Ian hadn’t seemed to understand, and later when Daphne asked if he’d thought the sister was pretty he said, “Pretty? Who? Oh. No, I’ve never cared for women who wear seamed stockings.”
They should have known right then that no one would ever meet his qualifications.
“Seconds, anyone?” their grandpa was asking. “Mr. Kitt? Miss Pennington? Ian, more roast beef?”
“I wonder,” Ian said, “how many times we dream that kind of dream—something strange and illogical—and fail to realize God is trying to tell us something.”
Oh, perfect. Now he was turning all holy on them. “Ariana,” their grandma said hastily, “help yourself to the gravy.” But Miss Pennington was watching Ian, and her smile was glazing over the way people’s always did when the bald, uncomfortable sound of God’s name was uttered in social surroundings.
“It’s easier to claim it’s something else,” Ian said. “Our subconscious, or random brain waves. It’s easier to pretend we don’t know what God’s showing us.”
“That is so, so true,” Sister Harriet told him.
Miss Pennington’s smile seemed made of steel now.
“Damn,” Daphne said.
Everybody looked at her. Their grandma said, “Daphne?”
“Well, excuse me,” Daphne said, “but I just can’t—” And then she sat up straighter and said, “I just can’t help thinking about this dream I had a couple of nights ago.”
“Oh, tell us,” their grandma said, sounding relieved.
“I was standing on a mountaintop,” Daphne said. “God was speaking to me from a thundercloud.” She looked around at the others—their polite, attentive faces, all prepared to appreciate whatever she had to say. “ ‘Daphne,’ He said—He had this big, deep, rumbling voice. ‘Daphne Bedloe, beware of strangers!’ ”
“And quite right He was, too,” their grandma said briskly, but she seemed less interested now in hearing the rest of it. “Doug, could you send the salad bowl this way?”
“ ‘Daphne Bedloe, a stranger is going to start hanging around your uncle,’ ” Daphne bellowed. “ ‘Somebody fat, not from Baltimore, chasing after your uncle Ian.’ ”
“Why, Daphne!” their grandma said, and she dropped a clump of lettuce on the tablecloth.
Later, Daphne argued that their grandma was the one who’d hurt Sister Harriet’s feelings. After all, what had Daphne said that was so terrible? Nothing. She had merely described a dream. It was their grandma who had connected the dream to Sister Harriet. All aghast she’d turned to Sister Harriet and said, “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what’s got into her.” Then Sister Harriet, white-lipped, said, “That’s okay,” and sipped shakily from her water glass, not looking at the others. But she wouldn’t have taken it personally if their grandma had not apologized, Daphne said; and Thomas and Agatha agreed. “She’s right,” Agatha told Ian. “It’s not Daphne’s fault if someone fat was in her dream.”
This was after their guests had departed. They had left at the earliest acceptable moment—Miss Pennington reflective, Mr. Kitt bluff and unaware, Sister Harriet declining with surprising firmness Ian’s offer to walk her home. As soon as they were gone, the grandparents had turned and climbed the stairs to their bedroom.
“Daphne was only making conversation,” Thomas told Ian, but Ian said, “Yeah, sure,” in a toneless voice, and then he went into the dining room and started clearing the table.
They followed, humble and overeager. They stacked plates and took them to the kitchen, scraped leftovers into smaller containers, collected pots and pans from the stove while Ian ran a sinkful of hot water. He didn’t say a word to them; he seemed to know that all three of them were to blame and not just Daphne.
They couldn’t bear it when Ian was mad at them.
And worse than mad: dejected. All his fine plans come to nothing. Oh, what had they done? He looked so forlorn. He stood at the sink so wearily, swabbing the gravy tureen.
Last month he’d brought home a saltcellar shaped like a robot. When you pressed a button in its back it would start walking on two rigid plastic legs, but they hadn’t realized that and they hadn’t paid it much attention, frankly, when he set it among the supper dishes. He kept asking, “Doesn’t anyone need salt? Who wants salt? Shall I just pass the salt?” Finally Agatha said, “Huh? Oh, fine,” and he pressed the robot’s button and leaned forward, chortling, as it toddled across the table to her. His mouth was perked with glee and his hands were clasped together underneath his chin and he kept darting hopeful glances into their faces, and luckily they’d noticed in time and put on amazed and delighted expressions.
“Dust off the fruitcake, it’s Christmas again,” he always caroled in December, inventing his own tune as he went along, and on Valentine’s Day he left a chocolate heart on each child’s breakfast plate before he went off to work, which tended to make them feel a little sad because really all of them—even Daphne—had reached the stage where nonfamily valentines were the only ones that mattered. In fact there were lots of occasions when they felt sad for him. He seemed slightly out of step, so often—his jokes just missing, his churchy language setting strangers’ eyes on guard, his clothes inappropriately boyish and plain as if he’d been caught in a time warp. The children loved him and winced for him, both. They kept a weather eye out for other people’s reactions to him, and they were constantly prepared to bristle and turn ferocious on his behalf.
One vacation when they were little he took a swim in the ocean and told them to wait on the shore. He swam out beyond the breakers, so far he was only a dot, and the three of them sat down very suddenly on the sand and Daphne started crying. He was leaving them forever and never coming back, it looked like. A man standing ankle-deep told his wife, “That fellow’s gone,” and Daphne cried harder and the other two grew teary as well. But then Ian turned and swam in again. Soon he was striding out of the surf hitching up his trunks and streaming water and shining in the sun, safely theirs after all, solid and reliable and dear.
He lowered a serving bowl into the sink. He swished it back and forth. Daphne said, “Ian? Want for us to take over now?” but he said, “No, thanks.” The others sent her sympathetic looks. Never mind. He wasn’t the type to carry a grudge. Tomorrow he would view this in a whole new light; he would realize they hadn’t meant to cause any harm.
All they had wanted, he would see, was somebody wonderful enough to deserve him.
8
I Should Never Tell You Anything
When Reverend Emmett had his heart attack, the Church of the Second Chance was forced to manage without him for most of the month of October. The first Sunday a retired Baptist minister, Dr. Benning, gave the sermon, but Dr. Benning had to leave immediately afterward for a bus tour of the Sun Belt and so the second Sunday Sister Nell’s uncle filled in—a nondenominationalist named Reverend Lewis who kept mixing up his “Thy” and his “Thou.” “We beseech Thee to flood Thou blessings upon this Thou congregation,” he intoned, and Ian was reminded of the substitute teachers he’d had in grade school who had always seemed just the slightest bit lacking. The sermon was based on Paul’s first letter to Timothy. Many might not realize, Reverend Lewis said, that it was love of money, and not money alone, that was held to be the root of all evil. Ian, who had never had much money or much love of money either, held back a yawn. All evil? Wasn’t that the phrase to examine?
On the third Sunday not even Reverend Lewis was available and they skipped the sermon altogether. They sang a few hymns and then bowed their heads for a closing prayer delivered in an uncertain voice by Brother Simon. “Dear God,” Brother Simon said, “please give Reverend Emmett back to us as soon as possible.” The fourth Sunday Reverend Emmett returned, gaunter and paler than ever, and preached a message of reassurance. Afterward, while shaking Ian’s hand at the door, he asked if they might have a little talk.
So Ian sent Daphne on home without him and waited at one side, listening to each member inquire after Reverend Emmett’s health. When the last of the congregation had departed he followed Reverend Emmett through the door behind the counter, into what passed for an office. Tangled pipes ran overhead and giant bolt holes marred the floor. In the center of the room stood an antique desk and swivel chair that must have come down from Reverend Emmett’s family, with two blue velvet armchairs facing them. Reverend Emmett gestured Ian into one armchair but he himself remained on his feet, distractedly running a hand through his hair. As usual, he wore a white shirt without a tie and skinny black trousers. Ian guessed he must be in his mid-forties by now or maybe even older, but he still had that awkward, amateurish air about him, and his Adam’s apple jutted above his collar like a half-grown boy’s.
“Brother Ian,” he said, “while I was in the hospital I did some serious thinking. It’s unusual to have a heart attack at my age. It doesn’t bode well for the future. I’ve been thinking I should face the fact that I’m not going to live forever.”
Ian opened his mouth to protest, but Reverend Emmett raised a palm. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t plan on dying tomorrow or anything like that. Still, this kind of thing makes you realize. It’s time we discussed my replacement.”
“Replacement?” Ian asked.
“Someone who’ll take over the church when I’m gone. Someone who might help out before I’m gone, even. Ease my workload.”
Ian said, “But—”
But you ARE the church, he wanted to say. Only that sounded blasphemous, and would have distressed Reverend Emmett.
“I believe you ought to start training for the ministry,” Reverend Emmett told him.
Ian wondered if he’d heard right.
“You know our congregation is fairly uneducated, by and large,” Reverend Emmett said, finally sitting in the other armchair. “I think most of them would feel the job was beyond them. And yet we do want someone who’s familiar with our ways.”
“But I’m not educated either,” Ian said. “I’ve had one semester of college.”
“Well, the good thing about this heart attack is, it serves as advance warning. It gives us a chance to get you trained. I realize you might not want to follow my own route—university and such. I was younger and had more time. You’re what, thirty-four? Still, Lawrence Bible School, down in Richmond—”
“Richmond! I can’t go to Richmond!”
“Why not?”
“I have responsibilities here!”
“But surely those are just about finished now, aren’t they?” Reverend Emmett asked. “Shouldn’t you be thinking ahead now?”
Ian sat forward, clamping his knees. “Reverend Emmett,” he said, “Daphne at sixteen is more trouble than all three of them were at any other age. Do you know her principal has me picking her up at school every day? I have to take off work and pick her up and drive her home in person. And it has to be me, not my father, because it turns out my father believes anything she tells him. Both my parents: they’re so far behind the times, they just don’t fully comprehend what modern kids can get into. You honestly suppose I could leave her with them and head off to Richmond?”
Reverend Emmett waited till Ian had wound down. Then he said, “What grade is Daphne in in school?”
“She’s a junior.”
“So two more years,” Reverend Emmett said. “Maybe less, if she straightens out before she graduates. And I’m certain that she will straighten out. Daphne’s always been a strong person. But even if she doesn’t, in two years she’ll be on her own. Meanwhile, you can start with a few courses here in Baltimore. Night school. Towson State, or maybe community college.”
Ian said, “But also …”
“Yes?”
“I mean, shouldn’t I hear a call to the ministry?”
Reverend Emmett said, “Maybe I’m the call.”
Ian blinked.
“And maybe not, of course,” Reverend Emmett told him. “But it’s always a possibility.”
Then he rose and once again shook Ian’s hand, with those long, dry fingers so bony they fairly rattled.
When Ian arrived home, Daphne was talking on the kitchen telephone and her grandmother was setting various dishes on the table. Sunday dinner would apparently be leftovers—tiny bowls of cold peas, soggy salad, and reheated stew from a tin. “Cool,” Daphne was saying. “We can get together later and study for that Spanish test.” Something artificial and showy in her tone made Ian flick a glance at Bee, but Bee missed his point and merely said, “Well? How was church?”
“It was all right.”
“Could you tell your father lunch is on?”
He called down to the basement and then beckoned Daphne from the phone. “I gotta go now,” she said into the receiver. “My folks are starting brunch.”
“Oh, is this brunch?” Ian asked his mother.
She smiled and set a loaf of bread on the table.
Once they were seated Ian said the blessing hurriedly, conscious of his father drumming his fingers on his knees. Then each of them embarked on a different meal. Doug reached for the stew, Ian put together a peanut butter sandwich, and Daphne, who was a vegetarian, dreamily plucked peas from the bowl one by one with her fingers. Bee finished anything the others wouldn’t—more a matter of housekeeping than personal taste, Ian thought.