“No, Papa, I’m fine. I stayed home today so Jack could go.”
“Go to church? Jack?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Jack went to church?”
“Ames’s church. As a gesture of respect, he said.”
“Yes, well, that’s very good. John can give a fine sermon. That new fellow we’ve got now, I’m not so sure about him. I might go to the Congregationalists myself. If I went anywhere. Well.” He laughed. “This is something. This is quite a day.”
He sat perfectly still for a minute, smiling into space, considering. “Just when you’re about to give up entirely! The Lord is wonderful!”
“Maybe you shouldn’t read too much into it, Papa.”
“Read into it! It’s just a fact! You go to church and there you are!” He said, “I thought I must have turned him against it all. I really did. I’ve heard of that in preachers’ families. More than once.”
“Well, he seems to have had some contact with a church in St. Louis. He says he played piano for them.”
“Did he! I wouldn’t know that. He doesn’t talk to me very much. Never did.” He laughed. “Your mother used to ask me, Why do we keep paying for piano lessons for that boy? Because he wouldn’t practice, you know. If you tried to make him, he’d just walk out the door. But I said I thought something might come of it. He’d go to the lessons when Teddy went. Yes. I told her I thought we should treat all the children the same, Jack, too.” He sat there smiling, his face bright with vindication. “It’s wonderful. You make some sort of decision, just a little choice you can’t even quite explain, and years later — Well, I knew he was clever. That was clear to me. He was always paying more attention than he would let on. But I knew it, I did.” He laughed at the thought of his own shrewdness. “Yes.”
Glory said, “He seems to have friends in the church there.”
“Friends! Well, I suppose he would. That just happens in a church, doesn’t it. He didn’t really have friends as a boy, though. He never seemed to want them. I’ve prayed his whole life that he’d have a friend or two. It often came to my mind, you know, that loneliness of his. And it didn’t really occur to me — it honestly never occurred to me — that off in St. Louis somewhere my prayers were being answered! Isn’t that something!” He shook his head. “It would have been a weight off my heart, I’ll tell you that. I could have spared myself years of grief, just by having a little trust. There’s a lesson in that.” Then he said, “I do wonder what happened, though. I mean, right now he doesn’t strike me as a man who feels he has friends. Then I could be wrong.”
“He doesn’t tell me very much either.”
“Well,” he said, “here I am worrying, and this is a remarkable day! I have to bestir myself. Would you mind giving my hair a little trim, Glory? I’ve been feeling sort of shaggy. It’s probably my imagination, mostly.” He laughed. “Not much there anymore, I know. Still.”
So she brought her father into the kitchen, sat him down, wrapped a towel around his shoulders and tucked it close around his neck. She got a comb and the pair of shears and set to work. His hair had vanished, or was on the point of vanishing, not through ordinary loss but by a process of rarification. It was so fine, so white and weightless, that it eddied into soft curls. Wafted, she thought. She hated to cut it off, since there seemed very little chance that it could grow back again as it was. It was like cutting a young child’s hair. But her father claimed to be irked by the prettiness of it. Fauntleroy in his dotage, he said.
So she clipped and trimmed, making more work of it than it was in order to satisfy him that some change had been accomplished, combing it down a little with water so he would feel sleek and trim. The nape of his neck, the backs of his ears. The visible strain of holding the great human head upright for decades and decades. Some ancient said it is what makes us different from the beasts, that our eyes are not turned downward to the earth. Most of the time. It was Ovid. At the end of so much effort, the neck seemed frail, but the head was still lifted up, and the ears stood there, still shaped for attention, soft as they were. She’d have left all the lovely hair, which looked like gentle bewilderment, just as the lifted head and the ears looked like waiting grown old, like trust grown old.
“Yes,” her father said, “whenever I thought of him, he was always alone, the way he used to be, and I would wonder what kind of life he could have, with no one even to care how he was, what he needed. I realize that was the one thing I thought I knew, that he would be alone.” He laughed. “Yes, that cost me a lot of grief, and I never thought to question it. I prayed about that more than any one thing, I believe.”
The screen door opened and Jack came into the porch, then into the kitchen. He looked at
