At dinner I could look down a straight row of Emory boys (skipping Dr. Sisk, who poked in everywhere) and see four variations on a single theme-all those large, sober faces, Saul in black, Julian in a flashy turtleneck, Linus wearing something limp and unnoticeable and Amos in tatters of denim, like an easygoing, good-natured hitch-hiker. Well, he was easygoing. He was good-natured. Then why did he get on my nerves so?
He was always asking me questions. What I thought of Holy Basis; why we had so much furniture; how I could stand so many strangers coming through. "What strangers?" I said.
"Oh, Miss Feather, Dr. Sisk."
"Miss Feather's been with us near as long as Selinda. I wouldn't really call her a stranger."
"And what causes Saul to look the way he does?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
"He's got so… shadowed, he's got this haunted look. Is everything all right?"
"Of course it's all right, don't be silly," I said.
He studied the ceiling a while. "I don't suppose it's easy, being a preacher's wife," he said.
"Why would you think that?"
"Well, having him so, well, saintly. Right?" I stared straight through him.
"Or for him, either; it wouldn't be easy married to you. Belinda says you aren't religious. Doesn't that scare him?"
"Scare him? It makes him angry," I said.
"It scares him. Of course it does, the way you coast along, no faith, all capability, your… sparseness, and you're the one that makes the soup while he just brings home the sinners to eat it. Isn't that so? He forever has to keep wrestling with the thoughts that you put in his mind."
"I don't! I never touch his mind! I deliberately keep back from it," I said.
"He wrestles anyway," said Amos. He grinned. "His private devil." Then he grew serious. He said, "I don't understand married people."
"Evidently not," I told him, stiffly.
"How they can keep on keeping together. Though it's admirable, of course."
What he meant was, it might be admirable but he didn't admire it. Well, I didn't admire him, either. I disliked the careless way he moved around the room, examining various cabinets no bigger than matchboxes. Faced with Amos's scorn, I underwent some subtle change; I grew loyal, stubborn. I forgot the plans for my trip, I reflected that it would be pointless: no matter where I went, Saul would be striding forever down the alleys of my mind, slapping his Bible against his thigh. "You don't know the first thing about it," I told Amos.
But Amos just said, "No, probably I don't," and went on easily to something new. "Whose dog is that?"
"Selinda's."
"Peculiar kind of animal." Well, it's true that Ernest wasn't worth much. He was a mongrel-a huge black beast, going gray, with long tangled hair and a mop-shaped head. When Ernest wagged his tail, everything at his end of the room fell and broke. Some form of hearing loss led him to believe that we were calling him whenever we called Amos or Linus, and he always arrived drooling and panting, withering us with his fish-market breath, skidding and crashing into things and scraping the floor with his toe-nails.
Also, he'd become unduly attached to me and any time I left him alone he lost control of his bladder. Oh, I admit he wasn't perfect.
Still, I didn't see what business it was of Amos's. "Tell me," I said, "is there one single thing here you approve of? Shall we throw the whole place out and start over?" Then Amos held up one hand, backing off, and said, "All right, all right, don't take it wrong." He was smiling his shy, sweet, hitch-hiker's smile, lowering his head, looking out from under his shaggy eyebrows. Instantly I felt sorry for him. He was just new here, that was all. He had left home longer ago than his brothers, traveled farther, forgotten more. Forgotten that in every family there are certain ways you shrink and stretch to accommodate other people. Why, Linus for instance could remember back to his nursing days (Alberta's nipple like a mouthful 'of crumpled seersucker, he claimed) but Amos couldn't stand to remember and told me so, outright. He hadn't liked being a child, he said. Their mother had been pushy, clamorous, violent, taking over their lives, meddling in. their brains, demanding a constant torrent of admiration and gaiety. Her sons had winced when she burst into their rooms. She breathed her hot breath on them, she laughed her harsh laugh. She called for parties! Dancing! let's show a little life here! Given anything less than what she needed, he said (and she was always given less, she could never get enough), she turned mocking and contemptuous. She had a tongue like a knife. The sharp, insistent colors of her clothes and even of her skin, her hair, were painful to her children's eyes. They had hated her. They had wished her dead.
Alberta?
"Why are you surprised?" Amos asked me. "Do we look like four normal, happy men? Hasn't it occurred to you? The other three can't even seem to leave Clarion; and I'm not much better, hopping around like something in a skillet, running before the school year's even finished half the time and breaking with whoever gets close to me. Three of us have never married; the fourth chose somebody guaranteed to let him keep his doors shut." I stared at him.
"Isn't it true? You don't know a thought in his head, never asked. If you had, none of this would come as any surprise to you. Saul hates Alberta worse than any of us."
"But… no, that's only because of…" I didn't want to come right out and say it.
"Because of Grandpa?" Amos asked. "Face it: single events don't cause that kind of effect. It took Saul years and years to get as bitter as he is. He's come away from her in shreds; all of us have. He and the others just sit here in Clarion circling her grave and picking at her bones, trying to sort it through, but not me. I gave up. I don't remember. Tve forgotten." And he did, in fact, smile at me with the clear, blank eyes of a man without a past. I could tell he had truly forgotten. He had twisted every bit of it, muddled his facts hopelessly. There was no point in trying to set him straight I took him with us to church. He sat beside me, dressed in a borrowed suit, scrubbed and subdued.
But even here, he seemed to be asking his questions. The moment Saul announced his text-Matthew:, "He that is not with me is against me" Amos shifted his feet, as if about to lean forward and shoot up a hand and shout, "Objection!"
But he didn't, of course. It was all in my mind. He sat there as quiet as anyone, with his fingers laced. I don't know how he managed to annoy me so.
That night I dreamed that Saul and I had found ourselves a bedroom of a watery green color, like an aquarium. We were making love under flickering shadows, and for once there was no tiny knock on our door, no sad little voice: Tim lonesome," no church members phoning with deaths and diseases. Saul looked down at my face with a peculiarly focused, thoughtful look, as if he had some plan in mind for me. I decided the new bedroom was a wonderful idea. Then Onus stretched out alongside me and covered me with soft, bearded kisses, and Julian arrived in his gambling clothes which he slowly took off, one by one, smiling at me all the while. I was circled by love, protected on every side. The only Emory who wasn't there was Amos, and he was who they were protecting me from.
Thirteen
The sign said:
PERTH MANOR MOTEL. $ NITELY. ANTIQUES. ATTIC TREASURES.
NOTARY PUBLIC. PURE BRED DALMATIONS.
We paused on the sidewalk to read it.
Twilight had slipped in more suddenly than usual, it seemed to me. We'd been taken by surprise, had our eyes clapped over by some cool-handed stranger coming up behind us. But this sign was written in movable white letters such as you see in cafeterias where the menu often changes, and we could easily make it out Behind it was a small plain building, mostly porch, with OFFICE glowing on one pillar. Further back we saw a, string of cottages no bigger than henhouses, the faded color of something chalked up and then rubbed away.