“I’m a Stevenson man, myself,” Jack said.
“Yes. That’s excellent.”
She ought to have closed her eyes during that prayer, or lowered them, at least. But there was Jack, just across the table from her, studying his hands, then glancing up at the oddnesses of the room, the overbearing drapes and the frippery glass droplets on the light fixture, as if the sound of the old man’s words were awakening him to the place. When he met her eyes he smiled and looked away, uneasy. Why did it seem like an elegance in him, that evasiveness? How would he look to her, seem to her, if he had not been, for so many years, the weight on the family’s heart, the unnamed absence, like the hero in a melancholy tale? It seemed to her as if he ought to have been beautiful, and he was not. He had the lank face that was to be looked for in a Boughton, and weary eyes, and the coarsened skin of middle age. He put his hand to his brow as if to shield himself from her attention, then he dropped it to his lap, perhaps because it trembled. She was glad when he said “Amen,” grateful. When her father spoke to the Lord he spoke in earnest — out of the depths, as he said sometimes. Out of a grief so generous it embraced them all.
When dinner was over, Jack helped her clear away the dishes, and he washed them, too, while she was helping her father to bed. She came into the kitchen and found him almost done, the kitchen almost in order. “Amazing,” she said. “This would have taken me an hour.”
He said, “I have had considerable professional experience, madam. I share the Boughton preference for the soft-handed vocations.” She laughed, and he laughed, and their father called out to them, “God bless you, children! Yes!”
GLORY HAD OFTEN REFLECTED ON THE FACT THAT Boughtons looked very much like one another. Hope was the acknowledged beauty of the family, which is to say the Boughton nose and the Boughton brow were less pronounced in her case. All the rest of them, male and female, were, their mother said, handsome. They all passed from cherubic infancy to unremarkable childhood to gangling youth to that adult state of Boughton-hood their mother soothed or praised with talk of character and distinction, Hope being the one exception. So adolescence was a matter of watching unremarkable features drift off axis very slightly, of watching the nose knuckle just a little and the jaw go just a bit out of square. So Glory’s face had transformed itself in its inevitable turn. She remembered her alarm.
And then the brow. Their grandfather had once happened upon a phrenologist who found, in the weighty pediment of brow resting upon the tottered pillar of his nose, so much to praise that over the next few months he had dabbled in metaphysics and even considered running for public office. Fortunately, he was the sort of man who noticed the absence of encouragement and drew conclusions from it. But he did have his photograph taken, three times, in fact, twice in profile and once full face. This sepia triptych hung in the parlor in a gold frame with laurel wreaths in the corners, like a certificate of merit, and also like a textbook illustration. From the full-face portrait the sepia eyes still burned with a gleeful and furious certainty — he in his own prudent person bequeathing a higher solvency to his descendants, a remarkable soundness of spirit and of intellect. One might suspect that there was also visible a joy in the fact of discovering that the features he presented to the world were not simply heavy and irregular, whatever the uninformed observer might have thought of them. It was many years before he had even one heir, their father, the only child of a marriage approached with a caution and deliberation on both sides that was the clearest proof the parties to it ever gave of being suited to each other, or so the story went. In any case, genius might well make its abode in so spacious a cranium, though in his case as in theirs, the tenant had so far been competence, shrewd in one case, conscience-racked in another, highly refined in another, but always competence. He might have found his hopes dwindling in the moderated forms his visage took in the course of generations. His offspring were all grateful to be spared, to the degree they felt they had been spared, what was sometimes called his slight resemblance to Beethoven, though they did find comfort when needed in the thought that it might be a predisposition to genius that had put its mark on them all. Phrenologically speaking, physiognomically speaking, Jack was as plausible a claimant to character and distinction as any of the rest of them, as he must have known. Perhaps that is why he seemed mildly sardonic when he looked at her, knowing with what interest she looked at him. Yes, he seemed to say, here it is, the face we all joked about and lamented over and carried off as well as we could, the handsome face. Does its estrangement disturb you? Are you surprised to see how it can scar and weary?
AFTER TWO DAYS IT WAS CLEAR THAT JACK WOULD STAY IN his room until his father woke up, and then
