Della said, “We’ll go back to St. Louis. He might come there, to the old neighborhood.” Then she said, “Was it because of my letter that he left? Because, you know, I’d be very worried about that.” Her voice was almost a whisper.
“It was hard for him. But he said the letter wasn’t unkind. And he was going to leave anyway. He had his own reasons. He didn’t blame you for anything.”
“Thank you. God bless you,” Della said. Then she said, “We’d better leave now. It was so kind of my sister to come up here with me, and I don’t want to upset her. She didn’t think it was a good idea. My whole family thought it was a bad idea.”
“If you could just wait another minute, though. I should give you something to take with you, since you’ve come all the way here — please wait.” She went into the house, and there were all the books, there was the everlasting jumble of small things. She had meant to take anything at all. She had seen the little boy pocketing acorns. Anything would be a memento. A pagoda. A swan. But all the knickknacks were so odd and ridiculous. None of the big old books would do. She went upstairs to the room Jack had had as a boy and took the framed photograph of a river off its nail and brought it downstairs. When she gave it to Della she said, “Jack always liked this. I don’t know why, really. But he kept it in his room.”
Della nodded. “Thank you.” The boy came up the walk to see what it was his mother had been given. She gave it to him and he studied it. She said, “It’s a picture of the river.”
Glory bent to the child and offered her hand and he took it. “You’re Robert,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Glory. I’m your father’s sister.”
“Yes, ma’am.” And then a long look, as if he were remembering, or preparing to remember.
Jack had a beautiful child, a beautiful son, who would some time turn Boughton, no doubt, and lose his prettiness to what they called distinction.
“Are you a baseball player, too?” she asked.
He smiled. “Yes, ma’am. I play some ball.”
His mother said, “He thinks he’s going to be a preacher,” and she stroked his hair. The sister opened the door on the driver’s side and stood out of the car to stare across the roof at them. Della said, “We have to be leaving now.”
“Yes. Will Jack know how to reach you? If he does call here.”
Della put the boy in the backseat, and then she took an envelope from the glove compartment and wrote on it, some numbers and some names. Her sister had started the car. Della handed her the letter. “It was a pleasure to meet you. I hope your father will be feeling better. If you have a chance to get this to Jack, I’d be grateful.” Then she closed the door, and the car pulled away.
GLORY SAT DOWN ON THE PORCH STEPS. SHE THOUGHT, IF Jack had been here, he’d have felt that terrible shock of joy — no, worse than joy, peace — that floods in like blood pushing into a limb that has been starved of it, like wild rescue, painful and wonderful and humbling — humiliating as she remembered it, because she had been so helpless against it. But that was the fiancé. Della was Jack’s wife, she said so herself, and it made all the difference. Della had looked at the world of his old life tenderly, all the particulars there to confirm themselves, proof of his truthfulness, which always did need proof. I used to live here, I wasn’t always gone, I was usually closer to home than he thought I was. So Jack had said, and how could he have seemed so estranged to them? And how cruel it was that he loved the place anyway. His little boy touching that tree, just to touch it. The tree that sounded like the ocean. Dear Lord in heaven, she could never change anything. How could she know what he had sanctified to that child’s mind with his stories, sad stories that had made them laugh. I used to wish I lived here, he said. That I could just walk in the door like the rest of you did.
And they would not walk in the door. They had to hurry, to escape the dangers of nightfall. The boy was with them, and his father would not want them to take chances. She knew it would have answered a longing of Jack’s if he could even imagine that their spirits had passed through that strange old house. Just the thought of it might bring him back, and the place would seem changed, to him and to her. As if all that saving and keeping their father had done was providence indeed, and new love would transform all the old love and make its relics wonderful.
Della had met Jack on a rainy afternoon. He was just out of prison, and he was wearing the suit — almost new, he said — he had bought with the money that was supposed to have brought him home for his mother’s funeral. The suit he sold because it made him look like a minister. And he had come by an umbrella somehow. Just the terror of his release into the world, certain he had lost his family for good and all this time, would have made him wry and incandescent, and so would the inadvertent respectability of
