Then he said, “You know, Jack’s not right with himself yet. Still not right.” And he shook his head.
I said, “We’ve talked about that.”
“Oh yes, he talks,” Boughton said. “But he’s never told me why he’s come back here. Never told Glory either. He was supposed to have some kind of job down in St. Louis. I don’t know what’s become of that. We thought he might be married. I believe he was, for a while. I don’t know what became of that, either.
He seems to have a little money. I don’t know anything about it.” He said, “I know he talks to you and Mrs. Ames. I know that.”
Then he closed his eyes again. The effort of speaking seemed to have been considerable, and I think it was because he hated to have to say what he had just said. I took it as a warning. I don’t know another way to look at it. And I took his coming to the house as a way of underscoring his words, as it certainly did. And now I am persuaded again that I must speak to your mother.
Young Boughton came walking up the porch steps while we were still sitting there. I said, Come in, and pushed a chair out for him, but he stood by the door for a minute or two taking us in and drawing conclusions, which were pretty near the mark, as I could see by his expression. He seems always to suspect that people are in some sort of league against him. And no doubt that’s true, often enough, just as it was true at that moment. And there is an element of frustration and embarrassment in his manner, when he looks past the pretense, as he seems always to do, that makes me feel ashamed to be a part of it, and sorry for him, too. There is also anger, and that concerns me.
Jack said, “I came home and there was no one there. It was a bit of a shock.”
Boughton said, in that hearty voice he can still muster when he wants to sound as though he’s telling the truth, “I’m sorry, Jack! Ames and I have been looking after each other while the women are out at the movies! We thought you would be gone a little longer!”
“Yes. Well, no harm done,” he said, and he sat down when I asked him to again, and he kept his eyes on me, with that half-smile he has when he wants you to know he knows what’s really going on and he can’t quite believe you persist in trying to fool him. Boughton sort of nodded off then, as he does when conversations get difficult, and I can’t blame him, though I do have my heart to consider, too. Because it was a considerable strain on me to think what to say to Jack, as it always is and always has been, it seems to me. I felt sorry for him, and that’s a fact. It seems almost a curse to me the way he can see through people. Of course, I couldn’t be honest with him, so there I was being dishonest with him, and there he was watching me as if I were the worst liar in the world, as if I were insulting him, as I suppose in fact I was.
“Your father felt like he needed to get out of the house,” I said.
He said, “Understandable.”
In fact, that was a ridiculous thing for me to have said, considering that it’s about all Boughton can do to walk from his bed to his chair on the porch.
I said, “I suppose he wanted to take advantage of the good weather while it lasts.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“Well,” I said, after a minute, “this is some year for acorns!” which was perfectly pitiful. Jack laughed outright. “The crows have made an impressive showing,” he said.
“And the gourds are particularly shapely and abundant, I think.” And all that time he was looking at me as if to say, Let’s just be honest with each other for five minutes.
Now, I excuse myself in that I don’t know what the truth actually is. I do believe his father came here to, in effect, warn me about him, but I am not absolutely certain of it. And in any case, I can hardly betray a confidence, especially not one as inflammatory and injurious as that one, certainly not with poor old Boughton sitting there three feet from me, quite probably listening to the whole conversation. But dishonesty is dishonesty, a humiliating thing to be caught at, especially when you have no choice but to persist in it, and to salvage as much of the deception as you can, under the very eye of indignation, so to speak.
On the other hand, as an old man, his father’s senior by a couple of years despite my relative vigor, such as it is, I feel I have a right not to be deviled in this way. If the point was to make me angry, I am angry as I write this. My heart is up to something that is alarming the rest of my body, in fact. I must go pray. I wonder what he knows about my heart.
Well, of course he must know a good deal about my heart, since your mother did enlist him in bringing my study downstairs. When I pray about all this, it is a sense of the sadness in him that keeps coming to my mind. He is someone who must be forgiven a great deal on the grounds of that
