“So I understand.”
“Well, you would remember them yourself, Jack. Your mother was always baking something. Ten of us in the house, and there were people dropping by all the time in those days. She felt she had to have something nice to offer them. The girls would be out here helping her, making cakes and cookies. All the talking and laughing. And a little fussing and scuffling now and then, too. Yes. But you were always off somewhere.”
“Not always.”
“No, not always. That’s just how it seemed to me.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, we missed you, that’s all.”
And now here he is, Glory thought, haggard and probationary, with little of his youth left to him except the wry elusiveness, secretiveness, that he did in fact seem to wear on his skin. He stood propped against the counter with his arms folded and watched his father while his father pondered him, smiling that hard, wistful smile at what he knew his father saw, as if he were saying, “All those years I spared you knowing I wasn’t worth your grief.”
But the old man said, “Come here, son,” and he took Jack’s hands and caressed them and touched them to his cheek. He said, “It’s a powerful thing, family.”
And Jack laughed. “Yes, sir. Yes, it is. I do know that.”
“Well,” he said, “at least you’re home.”
WHEN THE PIE WAS DONE AND THE ROAST WAS IN THE OVEN AND the biscuits were made and set aside and the old man had nodded off in the warmth of the kitchen, Jack went upstairs and Glory sat down to read for a while. The table was set, the kitchen was in reasonable order, Lila was bringing a salad.
She heard Jack washing up, shaving again, no doubt. That was how he nerved himself. By shaving and by polishing his shoes. He ironed his own shirts, very carefully, though not as well as she could have done it for him. He never let himself be a burden to her if he could avoid it, or accepted help he did not immediately repay with help. When she laundered her father’s shirts for him, he in return mopped the kitchen floor and waxed it, too. He did such things with a thoroughness and flair he always quite plausibly ascribed to professional experience. She tried to assure him that it wasn’t necessary to maintain this careful reciprocity, but he only raised his eyebrows, as if to say he might know more about that than she did. She realized it was not only proud but also prudent in a man so disposed as he was, by habit and experience, to doubt his welcome. It calmed him a little to know he had been useful.
And his self-sufficiency was also guardedness, as if his personal effects could be interpreted, or as if, few as they were, worn as they were, they were saturated with the particulars of his secretive life and could mock or accuse him, or expose old injury, or old happiness, which seemed to be the same thing, more or less. Once, when he had been home for a week or so, she had gone out to hang the laundry and had found two of his shirts on the line, already dry. So she took them in to iron them, since she would be ironing anyway. Collar, yoke, sleeves — this was the proper order of things, so her mother had said, and she did not depart from it. When she began to iron the first of the sleeves, she noticed that it was spangled with stars and flowers, an elaborate embroidery of white on white from the cuff to the elbow, and one final flower near the shoulder.
Jack came into the porch, stopped abruptly when he saw what she was doing, and smiled at her.
“Sorry,” she said. “I guess I’ve intruded again.”
He said, “Careful. That’s my best shirt.”
“I’m always careful. The embroidery on it is really beautiful.”
“A friend of mine said she would mend it for me, and that’s what she did instead. It was a kind of joke.”
“Very pretty, though.”
He nodded.
She said, “You can finish. You’ve made me nervous.”
He shrugged. “I’m touchy. I know that.”
“No, this is beautiful. You’re right to worry about it.”
He said, “I almost never wear it. But I lost that other suitcase.” He came just close enough to look sidelong at the flowers and stars, pressed smooth, softly bright like damask. “I never expected anything like that. She did it years ago. Years ago.” That was the first she had heard of Della.
JACK CAME DOWNSTAIRS TO HELP PREPARE THEIR FATHER for his dinner, wordlessly, since the old man slept on in the vapors and perfumes of Sabbath. He polished the old man’s shoes and brushed his jacket and rummaged through his ties. He brought out two, one a dark blue stripe and one maroon and ruby. Glory touched the gorgeous one, Jack nodded and draped it over the shoulder of the jacket. Then he rummaged again and found the tie clasp that looked like a dagger with a St. Andrew’s cross on the hilt, and the matching cuff links. She shrugged. Allusions to Scotland aroused in their father a wistful indignation, and a readiness to defend the proposition that history in general ought to have unfolded otherwise, with that one sad instance as case in point. Ames, being no Scot, nor much interested in history after the sack of Rome and before the Continental Congress, heard him out with a patience their father found trying. “Then
