“No. No, sir. Another time.”
“You know there won’t be another time. You’re planning to leave now.”
“I might not be here much longer. I’m trying to make some decisions.”
His father’s head fell to the side. He said, “I hope very much you will decide to stay. Stay for a while.”
Jack said, “That’s very kind.”
“No, it is just a hope of mine. It will be kind of you to give it a little consideration, if you can. Now Glory will help me to bed.”
THE NEXT MORNING THE OLD MAN POKED HIS SPOON AT his cereal for a little while, and then he said, “I want to talk with Ames. You can take me there in the DeSoto.”
The car worked well enough for errands, and Glory had used it to drive the Ameses to the river for a birthday picnic. Her father had not felt comfortable enough to go along that day, and when she mentioned it to Jack, he laughed at the idea—“Et ego in Arcadia”—but at least everything had gone well enough with the car to encourage her to make more use of it. Her father thought often about the DeSoto. In his mind it was an open promise of mobility, a puissance that could also be a boon to his good friend. So his thinking about it was generous and agreeable, tonic. He had not, however, consented to ride in it since the day Jack took them out to the country.
“Mrs. Ames and the boy will be there,” he said.
“I’ll take them to the matinee.”
“Very good.”
Glory arranged the day to her father’s specifications, and after lunch she helped him down the stairs and into the car. There was a ringing loneliness in the house with Jack always away somewhere, and it felt good to her to leave it for a while, to take her father away from it. She drove him past the church and past the war memorial to let him admire the gardens and the trees, and then she took him to Ames’s house and helped him again, out of the car, up the walk, up the steps. Ames seemed startled to find him at his door.
“Yes,” the old man said, “I thought you and I could look after each other while the women are out at the movies. I came over here in the DeSoto.”
Ames pulled a chair away from the table. “Unless you would rather sit somewhere else.”
Boughton said, “No, this has always been my chair, hasn’t it. My pew.” He sat down and hung his cane from the edge of the table and closed his eyes. Lila and Robby came downstairs, Robby with his hair neatly parted and his cheeks pink with scrubbing. Glory took them off to the musty little movie theater, where they watched good triumph over evil by means of some six-shooters and a posse. “Say your prayers!” said the bad guy to the harmless citizen trapped against a canyon wall. And in the moment he so graciously allowed his captive, horses came clattering up from behind him and he was made to drop his gun. Robby was amazed and gratified by this turn of events, which was as much as Glory could hope for. With previews and newsreels and a cartoon, and a short second feature in which good triumphed once again, more than two hours had passed by the time they came blinking out into afternoon sun.
The old men were still sitting at the table, and Jack was with them. He looked at Glory and smiled. “There was no one at home, so I thought something must be the matter. I came here—” She had not seen him for three days, except when he walked past her on the way to the door, saying nothing, tipping his hat as he left, or walked through the kitchen on the way to his room, saying only good night. It had never crossed her mind that he would come looking for them. If they had been there, it might have been the beginning of better times. Just the thought gave her a twinge of blighted joy. She wanted to look at him, to see how he was, but his smile was cool. He might be angry. He must think she had betrayed him. Well, she had betrayed him. Dear God, she hadn’t meant to, and what did that matter, when her father was here confiding in Ames again, telling him under the seal of old friendship what he suspected and what he feared, just as he had done in the endless, excruciating past. It was bad enough last night, the way he spoke to Jack. And now this. If her brother had had one surviving hope, she knew it was that he could find some way to speak to Ames himself, in his own right. She was so glad to get her father out of the house, to give him the comfort of a visit to Ames’s kitchen — how long had it been? She hadn’t thought it through. Her father just sat there with his eyes closed.
Ames was visibly relieved to see the three of them. Robby scrambled into his lap full of the unspent energy the movie had summoned up in him. “You should’ve gone, Papa. You should’ve seen it.” He slapped the bottom of his Cracker Jack box and a few sticky morsels fell out on the table in front of his father. “I’m saving some for Toby.” Then he said, “Here,” and slid off his lap and went to Jack and dug out a few morsels for him. “There’s supposed to be a prize in here,” he said. “Do you see any prize?”
Jack took the box and tilted it to the light and looked into it. He said, “I believe you must have eaten it.”
Robby laughed. “No, I didn’t.”
“You were so interested in that movie you didn’t notice. It could have been a silver dollar and I bet you wouldn’t have noticed it.”
“Oh yes, I would. I’d notice a silver dollar!”
“It was probably a rubber snake. I bet it was a tarantula.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Robby said. “Let me see,” but Jack held the box away from him, peered into it, then extracted something between two fingers. “You’re a pretty lucky kid,” he said. “I’d like to have one of these.”
“What is it? What?”
Jack laid the little toy on the table. “That,” he said, “is a magnifying glass.”
Robby looked at it. “It isn’t very big.”
“Well, you have to start somewhere.”
“Start what?”
“Looking for clues. Here. I think I have a spot on the cuff of my shirt. What does it look like to you?”
Robby peered at it through the little lens. “It just looks like a spot.”
Jack shrugged. “Well, there you are. Case closed.”
Robby laughed, and so did Lila.
Ames said, “Robby, why don’t you run off and find Tobias. He’ll want to see what you’ve got there. Maybe you can find a bug to look at. Now run along.” The boy hesitated, and then he left.
Jack turned to look at Ames, a bland, weary look that meant, “I understand why you do that, why you send your child away.” No doubt Ames and Boughton had just prayed for his soul, probably slandering before heaven whatever life he had had, and had lost, the life he mourned. Deploring it under the name of sin, or some milder word they had agreed on. Transgression. Dishonor. Unmet obligation. He had walked in upon this conjuration of himself in the bleak light of his father’s suspicions, which were innocent and uninformed and therefore no doubt exaggerated to ensure the sufficiency of his intercession. Jack had walked in on a potent thought of himself, like Lazarus with the memory of cerements about him no matter how often he might shave or comb his hair.
“Mrs. Ames,” he said, “did you enjoy the movie? I’ve seen it a few times myself. The newsreel was interesting. A little strange for a matinee, I thought.”
Lila said, to Boughton and Ames, “The newsreel was terrible. It showed an atom bomb going off, and all the buildings that would have been burned down by it. There were dummies inside, like families eating their supper. They shouldn’t be showing that to children.”
“They shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Boughton said. “They love those mushrooms. All that racket.” He still had not opened his eyes. “Dulles.”