SO SHE AND JACK MADE A SORT OF PIECEMEAL SIMULACRUM of their dozing father. Jack played solitaire beside him while Glory dressed, then Jack went upstairs while Glory finished the vegetables and the gravy. Half an hour before the Ameses were to arrive, Glory roused her father and helped him into his clothes, washed his face and brushed his hair into a fine white tousle that went handsomely with his glorious tie and the irascible look he assumed to conceal his pleasure at these attentions to his vanity.
“Jack is here,” he said, as if to exclude other possibilities.
“He went upstairs a few minutes ago.”
“He will be back downstairs in time for dinner.”
“Yes.”
Then Ames arrived with Lila and Robby, the three of them in their church clothes, and she took her father into the parlor with them, the company parlor, where they sat on the creaky chairs no one ever sat on. It had been almost forgotten that they were not there just to be dismally ornamental, chairs only in the same sense that the lamp stand was a shepherdess. Ames was clearly bemused by the formality her father had willed upon the occasion. The room was filled with those things that seem to exist so that children can be forbidden to touch them — porcelain windmills and pagodas and china dogs — and Robby’s eyes were bright with suppressed attraction to them. He leaned at his mother’s knee, lifting his face to whisper to her now and then, bunching and twisting the hem of her dress in his hands. There were remarks on the weather. Her father said, “Egypt will have consequences,” and she went into the kitchen to sauté the morels, since Jack had still not appeared.
Just when his absence began to seem conspicuous and awkward, when she had gone into the parlor to tell them that Jack would certainly be down in a minute or two, they heard him on the stairs, and then there he was, standing in the doorway. He was dressed in one of his father’s fine old dark suits. There was a silence of surprise. He brushed at his shoulder. He said, “The cloth is a little faded. It looks like dust.” Then no one spoke until his father said, “I was quite a tall fellow at one time.”
Jack was wearing one of the creamy shirts she had brought down from the chest in the attic and the blue striped tie, and his hair was parted high and combed straight to the side. He looked very like his father in his prime, except for the marked weariness of his face, his mild and uninnocent expression. Aware of the silence, he smiled and touched the scar beneath his eye. But he would have looked elegant, after a decorous and outmoded fashion, if he had not been Jack, and if they had not thought, therefore, What does this mean? what might he do next? And there was something moving in the fact that the suit fit him almost perfectly, or would have if he were not quite so thin. He was the measure of the failure of his father’s body, and also perhaps a portending of the failure of his own.
Ames said, “Well,” and looked at him for a moment before he remembered to rise.
Glory had noticed that men who were on uncertain terms with each other will take one step forward, leaning into a space between them as if the distance had been arrived at by treaty and could be breached only for the moment it took them to shake hands. “Jack,” he said.
Jack said, “Reverend. Mrs. Ames.” And then he laughed and smoothed his lapels and looked at Glory sidelong, as if to say, “Another bad idea!” He was wearing the dagger tie clasp. The brightness in his face meant anxiety. When he was anxious a strange honesty overtook him. He did understandable things for understandable reasons, answering expectation in terms that were startlingly literal, as if in him the skeletal machinery of conventional behavior, the extension and contraction of the pulleys of muscle and sinew, was all exposed. And he was aware of this, embarrassed by it, inclined to pass it off, if he could, as irony, to the irritation of acquaintances and strangers, and, she could only imagine, employers and police.
She said to her guests, feigning the same slight strangerliness they feigned, too, “Please come into the dining room. Jack will help me serve.”
“Oh, good,” Jack said. “I was feeling a little at a loss.” Then to Lila he said, “No gift for small talk, polite conversation. None at all.”
Lila smiled. “Me neither.” She had a soft, slow, comfortable voice that suggested other regions, and suggested, too, in its very gentleness, that she knew a good deal more about the world than she would ever let on. Jack looked at her with pleasant interest, with a kind of hopefulness, Glory thought. Clearly Ames noticed, too. Poor Jack. People watched him, and he knew it. It was partly distrust. But more than that, the man was at once indecipherable and transparent. Of course they watched him.
He followed her into the kitchen. He said, “Maybe I should go change.”
“No, no. You’re just fine. You look nice.” She put serving dishes into his hands. “I’ll bring the condiments. Come back for the roast.”
He carried in the huge, chipped semi-porcelain platter on which roasts and hams and turkeys had always made their entrances in that house and, after a moment’s hesitation, set it down in front of his father, in keeping with what was once family custom. But the old man was still a little grimly bemused by the apparition he had seen of himself in his relative youth. He said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that. It might as well still be on the hoof for all the luck I’d have with it. Give it to Ames.”
Jack said, “Yes, sir,” and after Lila had rearranged the serving dishes, he set the roast in front of Ames, who said, “I’ll do my best.”
Jack took the chair next to his father, and then Robby left his mother’s side and came around the table and leaned into the chair beside Jack’s.
“I could sit here,” he said shyly.
Jack said, “You could, indeed. Please do,” and helped him pull the chair a little way from the table. Ames glanced up from the roast.
Lila said, “He’s taken to you. He don’t often act that friendly. Doesn’t.”
Jack said, “I’m honored,” as if he meant it. Then he stood up from the table. “Excuse me. One minute. An oversight,” and left the room. They heard him leave the porch.
His father shook his head. “He’s up to something, I suppose. No idea in the world what it could be.”
They sat waiting for him, and in a few minutes he came back with a handful of sweet peas in a water glass, which he put down in front of Lila. “We can’t have Mrs. Ames as our guest and no flowers on the table!” he said. “It’s not much of a bouquet. A little better than nothing, I hope.”
Lila smiled. “They’re nice,” she said.
Ames cleared his throat. “Well, Reverend Boughton, since I have carved, maybe you could offer the blessing.”
Boughton said, “I was thinking you might do that, too.”
There was a silence.
Jack took a slip of paper from his pocket. “In case of emergency,” he said. “I mean, in case this should fall to me, the grace. I’ve written it out.”
His father looked at him a little balefully. “That’s excellent, Jack. Perhaps it won’t be necessary.”
Jack glanced at Ames, who shrugged, and he began to read. “‘Dear Father,’” he said. He paused and studied the paper, leaning into the candlelight. “My handwriting is very poor. I crossed some things out. ‘You are patient and gracious far beyond our deserving.’” He cleared his throat. “‘You let us hope for your forgiveness when we can find no way to forgive ourselves. You bless our lives even when we have shown ourselves to be utterly ungrateful and unworthy. May we be strengthened and renewed, to make us less unworthy of blessing, through these your gifts of sustenance, of friendship and family.’” And then, “‘In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.’”