Jack said, “I don’t suppose you’d have time for another customer.”
“Well, sure.” She was surprised. They had always been so careful of him, almost afraid to touch him. There was an aloofness about him more thoroughgoing than modesty or reticence. It was feral, and fragile. It had enforced a peculiar decorum on them all, even on their mother. There was always the moment when they acknowledged this — no hugging, no roughhousing could include him. Even his father patted his shoulder tentatively, shy and cautious. Why should a child have defended his loneliness that way? But let him have his ways, their father said, or he would be gone. He’d smile at them across that distance, and the smile was sad and hard, and it meant estrangement, even when he was with them.
Her father was also surprised. He said, “Well, I’ll get myself out of your way here.” Glory helped him up from his chair. “I’ve got to give the paper a little going over, if Ames is coming. I have to be up to the minute in case he starts talking politics.” She settled him by the window, and when she came back, Jack was still standing there, waiting.
“You’re probably busy,” he said.
“Not especially. But I have to warn you, I don’t make any claims for myself as a barber. I really just pretend to cut Papa’s hair.”
Jack said, “If you could trim it a little. I should have gone to the barbershop yesterday. I might have felt a little less — disreputable.”
“This morning? You looked fine.”
“No.” He took off his jacket, and she wrapped the towel around his neck and around his shoulders. “I could feel it. It was like an itchiness under my skin. Like — scurrility. I thought it might be my clothes. I mean that they made it obvious. More obvious.”
He shied away from her touch. “You’re going to have to sit still,” she said. “Is it Ames?”
“Him, too. But I can’t really say the experience is unfamiliar. It has come over me from time to time. It rarely lasts more than a few months.” He laughed. “I shouldn’t have asked you to do this. You don’t have to.”
“Sit still.”
“You can’t commiserate. You have never felt disreputable.”
“How do you know?”
“Am I right?”
“I suppose.”
“I am right.” He said, “In case you’re wondering, scurrility seems to be contagious. Be warned. I should wear a leper bell. I suppose I do.”
“You’re imagining.”
“No, I’m only exaggerating.”
“You didn’t actually go inside the church.”
“I didn’t even cross the street.”
She put her hand under his chin and lifted his head. Had she ever touched his face before? “I can’t really see what I’m doing here. You’ll have to sit up.”
“I suppose old Ames must have seen me there. Loitering. Lurking. Eyeing his flock.” He laughed. “What a fool I am.”
“Sit still.”
“Will do.”
“I’m going to trim around your ears. I’ve got to get it even.”
He crossed his ankles and folded his hands and sat there obediently while she snipped at one side and then the other. She tipped up his face again to judge the effect. There were tears on his cheeks. She took a corner of the towel and patted them away, and he smiled at her.
“Exasperation,” he said. “I’m so tired of myself.”
HE ASKED HER TO CUT HIS HAIR SHORTER ON THE TOP SO it wouldn’t fall down on his forehead. He said, “I look like some damn gigolo.”
“No, you don’t.”
He eyed her. “How would you know?”
“I suppose I wouldn’t know.”
He nodded. “One brief stint as a dance instructor. The old ladies loved me. But I was drinking at the time, so I never really mastered the samba.”
She laughed. “That’s a sad story.”
“Yes, it is. I thought I was doing all right. But my employer frowned on, you know, improvisation. I did some very interesting steps, but you really have to be able to do them again, at least once. That was his major criticism.”
“Ah, Jack.”
“Jack indeed. I spent that winter at the library. It was such a miserable winter that I seized the opportunity to improve my mind. The old ladies loved me there, too. A gentleman fallen on hard times. I subsisted on bran muffins and white cake. These were not the same old ladies. Less rouge, no henna.”
“I’ve noticed how well-read you are.”
He nodded. “I have been a frequenter of libraries over the years. It’s the last place people think to look for you. The sort of people who come looking for you. Much better than a movie theater. So I thought I might as well read what I was supposed to have read in college. Insofar as memory served. Awfully dull work, a lot of it. I’d never have lasted a week in college if Teddy hadn’t been there to do it for me.”
“Oh.”
“He’s never mentioned that.”
“Not a word, so far as I know.”
“That precocity of his? It came from years of doing my homework. He is deeply in my debt. I would never mention this, of course. Except to you.”
“That’s good of you.”
He nodded. “We are brothers, after all.”
“But you have to sit still.”
“I’m trying.”
“Maybe calm down a little.”
“An interesting suggestion,” he said. “A really good idea.”
“I will not touch another hair of your head unless you sit still.”
“Fair enough. Just let me have the scissors and I’ll finish it up myself.”
“Not a chance, buster.”
He laughed.
“Not in the mood you’re in.”
He nodded. “You’re right to worry. I just want to be rid of this damn forelock. What do they say? Seize Fate by the forelock?”
“Time, I think. It’s Time that has the forelock.”
“Well, something’s got me by the forelock. Nothing so dignified as Fate, I’m pretty sure. If thy forelock offend thee, cut it off. Sorry.”
“Then sit still.”
“Did you ever wonder what that means? If thy right eye offend thee? As if it were not part of thee? It’s true, though. I offend me — eyes, hands, history, prospects—”
“Did you have any breakfast?”
He laughed.
“You didn’t. I’m going to make you a sandwich. You’re worried about seeing Ames tonight at dinner.”
“Yes, well, it seems I’ve done as much as one man could do to make the experience embarrassing.”
“Nonsense. Really. If he did see you on the street, what of it?”
“Good point, Glory. Perspective. Just what is called for here. Would he have noticed my discomfort with myself from that distance? Well, so what? A law-abiding citizen has a perfect right to feel wretched on a public sidewalk, on a Sabbath morning. Even to pause as he does so. Near a church, too. There’s poetry in it, of a sort.”
“You don’t really know that he saw you.”
“Right you are.”
“Meat loaf or tuna salad?”
“Meat loaf. Just a little catsup.”
She started to move his jacket away from the table and he stood up and took it out of her hands, smiling. It was another sensitivity, like the privacy of that bare, orderly room upstairs. Fine. She was sorry she had forgotten. He felt for the slight weight in the left breast pocket, about which she did not let herself wonder, and put the jacket on. “I’ll shake out this towel,” he said. “Then I’ll sweep up a little.”
JACK BROUGHT HIS FATHER’S ARMCHAIR INTO THE KITCHEN so he could be present for the paring of apples and the rolling of pastry. “I have always enjoyed that,” the old man said, “the sound of a knife slicing through an apple.” He asked for a look at the pie before the top crust went on—“More fragrant than flowers!”—and for a look at it afterward, when the edge had been fluted and the vents were cut. He said, “My grandmother used to go out and gather up windfall apples. Our orchard was too young to produce much, but she’d pick them up wherever she found them and bring them home and make a pile of them out there in front of the shed, and they’d stay there till they fermented, and then she’d make them into cider. She said it was medicinal, tonic for her achy bones, she said. She’d give me a taste sometimes. It tasted terrible. But when the morning was chilly, the steam would pour off those apples like smoke. A smoldering pyre of apples. The chickens would roost on it, for the warmth.” He laughed. “The cats would sleep on it. She always had her own little projects. She’d eat kidney when she could find it. Tongue. Mutton. In spring she’d be out in the fields, along the fences, picking dandelion greens as soon as the sun was up. She’d come in with her apron full of purslane. My mother thought it was embarrassing. She’d say, ‘You’d think we didn’t feed her!’ But she always did what she wanted to do.” He talked on with the intermitted constancy of a pot simmering. Jack trimmed mushrooms he had brought in and washed them, and washed them again until he was sure there was no trace of sand left in them. He chopped the onion. The kitchen began to smell of pie baking.