He was still standing there, with the book in his hand. “W.E.B. DuBois,” he said. “Have you heard of him?”
“Well, yes, I’ve heard of him. I thought he was a Communist.”
He laughed. “Isn’t everybody? I mean, if you believe the newspapers?” He said, “Now I suppose you’ll think I’m up here reading propaganda.”
“I don’t care what you’re reading. All I really care about is whether we can live in this house like civilized people.” They heard the creak of bedsprings, and they heard the clack of a cane falling to the floor. “Coming, Papa!”
Jack said, “It’s hard, Glory. I know what you think of me.”
“Well, that’s more than I know.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m completely serious.”
They heard a clatter. She shouted, “I’m coming!” and ran down to the kitchen, and there was her father standing beside a chair that had fallen on its back. He was wearing his robe and one slipper and his hair was awry. He regarded them with anxiety that was in some part irritation. He was holding the Monopoly set. “I thought we might amuse ourselves with this. A game or two. I’d better sit down now.” She helped him into a chair. “You know how it is when you jump up from a sound sleep. I thought something bad had happened—” and he fell into that doze of his that might have been prayer.
Jack took out the board, the money, and the dice. “I’m the top hat,” he said.
Their father said, “Well, I’m something. I don’t know quite what I am.” He closed his eyes. “I guess I’m going to finish that nap anyway, so I might as well get comfortable.” Jack helped him to his armchair. Then he came back to the kitchen.
Glory said, “I’m the shoe.”
“The shoe?”
“I know. But it’s lucky for me.”
He laughed. “You play a lot of Monopoly?”
“About a thousand times more than I ever thought I would.”
After four turns she had bought two utilities.
“Well,” Jack said, “that looks pretty insurmountable. I see what you mean about the shoe.”
“You’re ready to concede?”
“More than ready.”
Jack put the game away, squaring up the deeds and the money as if it mattered.
Glory said, “How do you know I’m not a Communist?”
He laughed. “You’re too nice a girl.” Then he said, “Not that that means anything. I’m not a Communist either.”
“I’m thinking of reading up on it. Marxism.”
“DuBois isn’t a Communist. Not really.”
“I wasn’t hinting,” she said. But she was. She thought if she read his book they might have something to talk about. “I’d go down to the library to see if they have anything, but the MacManus sisters work there and I can’t face talking to either one of them.”
“You go to church.”
“Last in, first out. I have to do that. It matters to Papa.”
THE CHURCH OF THEIR CHILDHOOD WAS GONE, THE WHITE clapboard church with the steeply pitched roof and the abbreviated spire. It had been replaced by a much costlier building, monumental in style though modest in scale, with a crenellated Norman bell tower at one corner and a rose window above the massy entrance. Someone whose historical notions were sufficiently addled might imagine that centuries of plunder and dilapidation had left this last sturdy remnant of grandeur, that the bell tower might have sunk a dozen feet into the ground as ages passed. The building was reconsidered once or twice as money ran out, but the basic effect answered their hopes, more or less. “Anglicanism!” her father had said, when he saw the plans. “Utter capitulation!” His objections startled the elders, but did not interest them particularly, so they drew discreet conclusions about his mental state. Nothing is more glaringly obvious than discretion of that kind, since it assumes impaired sensitivity in the one whose feelings it would spare. “As if I were a child!” her father said more than once, when the decorous turmoil of his soul happened to erupt at the dinner table.
This was a grief his children had never anticipated. Nor had they imagined that their father’s body could become a burden to him, and an embarrassment, too. He was sure his feebleness inspired condescensions of every kind, and he was alert for them, eager to show that nothing got past him, furious on slight pretexts. The seven of them telephoned back and forth daily for months. He was in graver pain than he was accustomed to, and his dear old wife was failing. He was not himself. Ames sat with him for hours and hours, though even he was not above suspicion. They pooled strategies for softening the inevitable blow of his retirement, which would have been a mercy if it had come about under other circumstances. Ah well. He came
