Jack said mildly, as if he found the fact interesting, “It never seems to make much difference. Whether I’m at fault or not.”
“Yes, if Glory says I was cross, I suppose I was cross. It wasn’t my intention, not at all. I don’t know what it was I said. I believe I said I’d help if I could. That seems all right to me. I don’t know.” He shook his head.
Jack said softly, “It was all right. It was very kind.”
“Yes,” the old man said, “I meant to be kind to you. I certainly did.”
MORE OFTEN, AS THE DAYS WENT BY, JACK SOUGHT HER out to talk with her, and when the talk drifted into silence, sometimes he would smile at her as if to say, You and I, of all people, here, of all places, killing time for lack of anything else to do with it. A stranger might look at her that way, past the tedium of their situation, past the accidental companionship that came with their whiling it out together, to let her know in a decorous and impersonal way how glad he was she was there.
And sometimes, when they were working in the garden or doing the dishes, she would notice that he had drawn back to watch her, appraisingly, as if he had suddenly dropped every assumption about her, as if she were someone who figured in an intention of his and about whom he realized he knew nothing to be relied upon, or nothing that mattered, someone he must consider again carefully. She did not remember from her childhood the habit he had now of running the tip of his tongue across his lower lip, but she thought she did remember that estrangement of his gaze, that look of urgent calculation, of sharply attentive calm. It could only be fear, and she wanted to say, You can trust me, but that is what they had always told him, and he laughed and pretended to believe them, and wished to believe them, she was sure, and never did. Her father always said, “That loneliness of his,” and when she saw it in him now, she felt lonely, even abandoned for the moment it lasted, until the banter of comfort and familiarity took up again. He’d say, “Hey, chum,” to coax her out of her thoughts. They were indeed very sad thoughts, as his must have been, too, and he would smile with fellow feeling, her bemused and improbable companion.
He would ask her advice about how to live in that house, and usually he would take it. He asked her if she thought it would be all right if he trimmed back the vines that grew on the front of the porch, and she said, “Better not. Those are there to attract hummingbirds.”
“The old fellow can hardly see who’s going by in the road.”
“Well, he doesn’t seem to mind that. He loves those birds. So did Mama. That’s part of it.”
Jack said, “Right.” Then he said, “When we were kids, we’d have thought crazy people must live in a house that looked like that. All overgrown.”
She laughed. “I remember the Thrushes. Teddy used to make you go with him to collect for the newspaper, because those old shrubs had grown up and buried the house.”
“I was thinking about that. She used to stand on her porch on Halloween night and call to the kids in the road. She’d say she had cookies and apples for them, and they’d take off running.”
“Everybody knows about Papa and his trumpet vines, though. And the house is pretty strange-looking, anyway. In my opinion.”
Jack said, “True.” But later she saw him appraising the vines again from the edge of the road, and the next day he began cutting back at the spragglier branches, more of them the next day and the next. She noticed the trimmings stacked out of sight behind the shed. Against her advice and to her surprise, he had undertaken a furtive campaign to make the house look a little less forbidding. He even found a flower pot in the barn and shoveled up some petunias to put in it and set it on the step.
“I didn’t think anyone would mind,” he said, when he saw her notice it.
GRADUALLY HE GAVE UP ON THE HOPE THAT THERE WOULD be another telephone call. He began spending time in the barn again, leaning into the engine of the DeSoto. To work on a car where anyone might see was considered unseemly by the Boughtons, not different essentially from setting it up on blocks. And Jack was aware of the likelihood of failure and therefore careful to provide as little opportunity as possible for anecdote or, worse, for offers of help or advice. Glory mused from time to time on how often the starchy proprieties observed in her family overlapped more or less precisely with Jack’s strategies for avoiding humiliation. In any case, he spent a good part of every day in earthy, dank concealment, oiling some memory of resilience into stiffened leather upholstery, or sinking inflated inner tubes into the horse trough to find the leaks in them.
They had had a horse once, mottled white with a grayish face and stockings. They called him Snowflake for a dingy splat of near-white on his brow. He was docile when her father bought him for the first two of his children. There were photos of Luke and Faith
