The fiancé had a habit of sitting with his heels together and his toes pointing outward. This was truer when he wished to seem content or ingratiating. She could never help feeling this meant something disheartening about him that would not be fixed even if she sometime mentioned to him that he might arrange his feet more gracefully and he complied. If she gave him a cup of coffee, he would lean there, elbows on his knees, holding the saucer under the cup, and he would grin at her, and those feet would seem to mimic the grin, which was excessive in itself. He told her she was a snob about her family, and that was true. And not without reason. They were all graceful people after their shambling style, and they did not grin.
The fact was, all the same, that she would have married him, that for years she had had no other intention, except when doubts emerged that reduced intention to hope. How miserable that was to remember, and how miserable the relief when a letter came, the phone rang, she heard his knock at the door. He was a pleasant-looking man, robust and ruddy, with clear blue eyes and red hair that crinkled against his scalp. If in person he did not altogether answer to the idea of him she took from his letters, he was agreeable enough. Sometimes he made her laugh. She would almost like to know how much money she had given him, only to be able to gauge the depth of an infatuation that seemed so remote to her now. It was for the children and the sunlit house that she had been diligent at discerning virtues and suppressing doubts, ready to give up mere money if it could put aside the obstacles to her happiness, or if it could keep the thought of happiness safe from disruption. God bless him, Jack had understood it all and laughed, a painful but companionable laugh, as if they’d been whiling away perdition together, telling tales of what got them there, to forestall tedium and the dread of what might come next. The sweet thought of sunlight and children she had cherished in secret was now utterly dispelled. No, she wanted to tell Jack about them, to dispel them, as if they were spirits of the kind that perish in daylight. But for that reason she could not and never would betray them. Let some sleep of oblivion overtake them, finally.
So Glory would live out her life in a place all the rest of them called home, a place they would mean to return to more often than they did. If she spoke discreetly to the high school principal about the fact that the marriage she intended had not in fact taken place, the information would pass through town and be absorbed and cease to be of particular interest. She could start teaching again.
She heard Jack walk into the kitchen, put his hat on the refrigerator. She heard him go down the hall, speak to his father, then come back to fill a glass with water and take it to him. After a few minutes, he went to the piano and began to play a hymn. “‘When all my trials and troubles are o’er, and I awake on that beautiful shore.’” Things must have gone well enough, thank God. So she went downstairs.
When he had finished the hymn he turned and looked at her. “It wasn’t bad,” he said softly. “He was very kind. He couldn’t do anything for me, but he was kind. It was all right. Better than I expected, really. Ames’s heart is failing, he said, so he won’t be around much longer. I thought he might, I don’t know, vouch for me. Help me overcome my reputation. But I have to leave here anyway. I don’t know why I bothered him.” He shrugged.
She said, “I’m glad it was a good conversation.”
He nodded. “I called him Papa, and this time I think it may even have pleased him a little.” He smiled to himself, and then he said, “I told him almost everything, and when I was done he said, ‘You are a good man.’ Imagine that.”
“Well, I could have told you you are a good man. I’ve said it in so many words, surely.”
He laughed. “You’re a miserable judge of character. Mine, especially. No objectivity at all.”
WHEN THEY HEARD THEIR FATHER STIR AND WAKE, JACK carried him to his chair on the porch and settled the quilt around him and read to him from the newspaper while Glory made potato soup almost the way he had always liked it, without onions but with butter melted into it and crackers crumbled on top. Jack fed him, held his cup for him. The old man accepted these attentions without comment. Then Jack changed into his work clothes and went out to the garden, where his father could watch him, as it seemed he did until he began to doze off. After a little while Jack came back and found him asleep and carried him to bed again, slipping the crooked body out of the robe with great care. It seemed to her there was a peacefulness about him that came with resignation, with the extinction of that last hope, like a perfect humility undistracted by the possible, the unrealized, the yet to be determined. He worked on the DeSoto, then sat in the porch and read till the sun went down. He went out for a stroll, just to look at the place, he said, and came back in an hour, stone sober. It may have been the saddest day of her life, one of the saddest of his. And yet, all in all, it wasn’t a bad day.
THEN IT WAS SUNDAY AND JACK WENT TO CHURCH. THIS was to show Ames his respect and, he said, appreciation. He asked her for two dollars for the offering, since he had made her put all money away out of sight, and had even, despite their sentimental value, given her dollar bills he had hidden years before in the pages of the Edinburgh books, the proceeds of youthful thefts, which he had put where he knew no one would find them. Twelve dollars scattered through The Monstrous Regiment of Women and nineteen in On Affliction. From The Hind Unloos’d, which their father had told them to revere as a great work, he took a few desolate report cards and a note to his father from a civics teacher who saw only the darkest clouds on his moral and educational horizon and asked urgently for a conference. He shook his head. “I guess I was a pretty cynical kid,” he said, and laughed. Glory suggested he put the money in the collection plate as a sort of penance, but he thought the amount was large enough to arouse suspicion. “Coming from me it would be, anyway.”
She stayed with her father, who she thought had reacted to the news that Jack was at church with a brief and tentative cheerfulness. Jack came home as calm as he was when he left, to his father’s apparent relief, and when she asked him what the sermon was about, he laughed and said, “It wasn’t about me.” Then he said, “Well, it was about idolatry, about the worship of things, on one hand the material world, in the manner of scientific rationalism, and on the other hand — chairs and tables and old purple drapes, in the manner of Boughtons and totemists. It did cause me to reflect.”