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.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t change a thing.”
“If you want to, feel free.”
“Of course.”
She made a beef roast and dinner rolls while Jack worked in the attic, clearing space for whatever in her hardness of heart she might decide to put out of sight. Again he was purposeful. The picture of the river was back in its old place, so she glanced through the open door of his room and saw the volumes of Kipling on his dresser between the Lincoln bookends. Nothing to be said, nothing to be done. Her father, who hardly spoke at all, watched their comings and goings with irritation and distrust. She served dinner in the kitchen, careful not to stir memories if she could avoid it. When they were seated and she had said the grace, her father sat impatiently with his hands folded in his lap until Jack offered to feed him his mashed potatoes and gravy. These last few days his gentleness had been especially striking to her, and why should it be? She had always known he could be gentle. She would tell the others in case they had forgotten, so that they would all hope someday to know him as well as she did. Then if he ever came to any of them he would be deeply and immediately welcome, however disreputable he might seem or be. Finally her father gestured at the meal she had made and said, “I guess this is goodbye.”
Jack said, “Not quite yet.”
The old man nodded. “Not yet,” he said bitterly. “Not yet.”
“Teddy will be here soon.”
“I’m sure of that.” His head fell. “With his stethoscope. As if that solved anything.”
Jack cleared his throat. “It’s been good to be home.
