She knew she had made a grave mistake in giving her father’s anxieties some grounding in fact. She said, “The woman is a minister’s daughter.”
Her father nodded. “And Jack is a minister’s son.” Then he said, “There are no children involved.” This was a statement of the kind that meant he did not want his hope contradicted.
“No,” she said. From time to time she had wondered, too.
His face settled into that grave look it took on when he felt some sort of moral intervention was required of him. It was a sad, even a bitter look, because only the lack or failure of other approaches could induce him to fall back on this one, and because he knew it had never yielded any wholly good result. It might be that Jack had obligations he could not meet. If he did, then the family must act on behalf of those to whom he was obligated. Especially since they were no doubt also family. The old man would have to know what he was dealing with here, even though Jack was sure to be offended. His questions would inevitably sound like accusation. Such misery, just to learn what he did not want to know.
IF JACK HAD MARRIED THAT FRECKLED CHILD, OR AT LEAST if they had managed to bring her and her baby into their household, then he could have gone back to college and the girl could have finished school and gone to college herself, if she wanted to. “She seems bright enough,” Glory’s mother had said. That was her interpretation of the precocious, intractable hostility toward the Boughtons that would not be moved or swayed by any kindness they could contrive. She was a hard, proud, unsmiling girl, and she may well have hated them all for their benevolent intentions, which were indeed condescending, reflecting as they did their awareness that her circumstances could be improved, that she might benefit from being gently instructed in the proper care of an infant even though this would involve overruling her mother.
Once, Glory had talked that freckled child into coming to her house to pick apples, she said, and bake a pie. Annie was her name. Annie Wheeler. She came out to the gate dressed the way schoolgirls dressed on Saturdays, in dungarees and an oversized shirt. She carried the baby on her hip. They sailed off to Gilead, the girl acknowledging no pleasure at all at having the top down on a bright afternoon, or at stopping for ice cream cones to eat as they drove. The baby gummed at the ice cream and put her hand in it, and her mother said, “Now look at you!” and licked a smear of ice cream off the baby’s chin and the palm of the baby’s hand.
It was all Glory’s idea. Her parents were gone for the day to a wedding in Tabor. She had not spoken to them about her plan. She drove very carefully.
They went out to the orchard, and the girl stood silently with the baby on her hip and watched Glory pick apples. When she said she had picked enough for the pie but would pick a few more for the girl to take home, she said, “We got apples.” Well, of course they would have them. There were apple trees everywhere anyone had ever thought to plant them, like lilac bushes and gooseberries and forsythia and rhubarb. She and the girl went into the house and set the baby in the sunlight on the kitchen floor. Her mother gave her a toy she pulled out of her pocket, buttons on a string, and said, “At home she’s got a milk bottle.” So Glory decanted a pint of cream into a drinking glass and rinsed it out and put it on the floor by the baby’s knee. The girl knelt beside her and poured the buttons from her hand into the bottle, then out again, and the baby laughed and did awkward and purposeful things for a while with her toys, and Glory started to make pastry, talking aloud as if to remind herself of the fine points of the process, the need for careful measurement. The girl sat at the table, sipping a root beer.
Then the baby’s back began to round with the weight of her head, and she pitched over on her side and began to kick and fuss. Glory said, “Oh, poor thing!” and took her up and swayed with her and kissed her teary cheek. And the baby struggled and wept and yearned away from her with a weight and strength that surprised her, holding out her arms to her mother. The girl took her and settled her on her hip, and the baby leaned her head against her shoulder, sucked her hand, and drew her breath in gasps of relief. “You just ain’t her mama,” the girl said. “No use crying about it.” She never gave any sign that Glory’s efforts at befriending her were more than an irritation till that morning when she called her and said, “I wish you’d come over to my house. My baby’s got something the matter with her.” She had walked three miles down the road to ask the use of a telephone.
It was an infection a little penicillin could have cured, but there was no penicillin then, or for years afterward. No one was at fault, really. Something like it could have happened even if those two children had come to live in Gilead. Every family had a story that would have ended differently if only there had been penicillin. Chimerical grief — now guilt, now blame, now the thought that it could all have been otherwise.
But how had Jack ever involved himself with that girl? That was where fault lay, impervious to rationalization, finally even to pardon. Such an offense against any notion of honor, her father had said, and so it still seemed to her, and to him, after all those years. She had followed her father’s thoughts back to that old bitterness, and bitterness simmered in his half-closed eyes as he reflected on the inevitability of his disappointment.
IT WAS LATE EVENING WHEN THEY HEARD JACK COME INTO the porch. He might have expected his father to be in the parlor, reading in his Morris chair. The other evenings he had spoken to Glory as he passed, called good night to his father, and gone up to his room. But this time the old man would not leave the table. “I’m going to wait for him. I’m going to stay right here.”
Finding the old man still in the kitchen when he came in, Jack paused, reading the situation as he had always done, aware of having fallen into some frail web of intention. He looked at Glory, then he simply stood there, hat in hand, and waited. Distant, respectful and tentative.
“Jack,” his father said.
“Sir.”
“I think we need to have a conversation.”
“A conversation.”
“Yes. I think you had better tell me how things stand with you.”
Jack shrugged. “I’m tired. I hope to sleep.”
The old man said, “You know perfectly well what I mean. I want you to tell me if there are — obligations that require the help of your family. Things that might have happened there in St. Louis that you haven’t told me about. That trouble you.”
Jack looked at Glory. There it was, however mild and kindly meant, the aspersion he dreaded. He put his hand to his face and said, very softly, “Another time.”
“Sit down, son.”
He smiled. “No.” Then he said, “My obligations are my problem, I’m afraid.” It was his sadness that made him so inaccessibly patient.
His father said, “Your obligations are your problem if you can meet them. If not, they become my problem. Things must be seen to. It’s only decent.”
Fealty to kin, actual and imagined, and the protection of them, possible or not, were their father’s pride, his strongest instinct, and his chief source of satisfaction, frustration, and anxiety. He had drawn himself up so that his words would have the force and dignity of their intent, but his eyes were closed and his mouth had turned down and the rectitude of his posture exposed his narrowed shoulders and his fallen throat. Jack gazed at him as if his father were the apparition of all the grief and weariness he had cost him, still gallant in his weakness, ready to be saddened again, ready to be burdened again.