She said, “How do you know I didn’t do that? Cohabit.”
He said, very gently, “Call it a wild guess.”
Condescension, she thought. But kindly meant. Brotherly.
He said, “I don’t recommend it. There are laws. A person could end up with the cops at his door.” He smiled.
“Sorry.” Poor Jack.
The truth was, she wished there had been more to her endless supposed engagement. That there was not her fiancé’s extremely scrupulous respect for her to, in retrospect, embitter her sense of the fraudulence of it all. Still, she wished she had the letters back, and the ring. Sacred, she thought. Strange to think of it that way. Time and again she had read through the half dozen letters that moved her, and even they sometimes seemed so commonplace that it frightened her, as if a precious thing had been lost and she could not find it, search as she might. Then she would notice a phrase, something about loneliness or weariness or the view from a train window, the intimacy of the ordinary, and her heart would stir. She had ticked the margins beside these lines to spare herself the vertiginous sense that there was nothing in the letters at all worth cherishing, and then when she looked at them again she could not always see why she had chosen these passages, and again she would be frightened. He was at the center of her life, and who was he, after all? Why did it comfort her to trust him? The letters were so precious to her, and what were they? They were bland and prosaic, three readings out of four. But when they touched her, she was suffused with joy. There was no other word for it. She knew that if she had kept them, she would still look at them to see if there was anything in them to account for the sweet power they had had for her, and that if she did not find it, she would read them again. When she thought of them, she put aside all bitterness and folly and disillusionment, as no one else ever could, no one who listened to her with compassion. Sympathy would corrupt something wonderful, which secrecy and a kind of shame kept safe for her.
She said, “I’ve wondered if it might not be easier to be somewhere else. Where my life would be my own, at least.”
“My thought, too. And I gave somewhere else a pretty good try. Now I’m home again in Iowa, the shining star of radicalism. It is the desire of the tattered moth for the shining star that has brought me home, little sister.”
She said, “Well, Iowa is a pretty big state.”
He laughed. “Yes, why am I here when I might be in Ankeny? Ottumwa?”
“That strikes me as a fair question.”
“Maybe because I have no sister there.”
“I’d visit.”
He nodded. “Kind of you.” Then he said, “I knew I would need help. I thought the old gent might help me, but I didn’t realize — that he was so old. I couldn’t find work on my own. So I decided to place my hopes in the kindly Reverend Ames. Which brings us to the present moment.” Then he said, “And I just wanted to come home. Even if I couldn’t stay. I wanted to see the place. I wanted to see my father. I was — bewildered, I suppose.” He laughed. “I was scared to come home. It was as much as I could do to get on the bus. And stay on it. I was largely successful at that, all in all. Too bad. Too bad for the old man. It’s amazing to me that I can still disappoint him. I knew I would.” He touched the scar beneath his eye.
“Well,” she said, “he’s worried. I left him at the kitchen table. He’s probably uncomfortable. I should go inside.”
“What will you tell him?”
“What should I tell him?”
“Oh, let me think. Tell him my life is endless pain and difficulty for reasons that are no doubt apparent to anyone I pass on the street but obscure to me, and that I am flummoxed and sitting in the DeSoto but will probably be in for supper.”
“It would be simpler if you just came inside with me now.”
He sighed. “No doubt you’re right. And I do know why my life is the way it is, Glory. I was joking about that. I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t. I’m fresh from a sermon on the subject.” He glanced at her.
Glory said, “I’ll never forgive him.”
Jack said, “Thank you. I’m touched.” Then he said, “I’ll forgive him. Maybe I’ve forgiven him already.” When she looked at him he shrugged and said, “He might take it as a sign of character. It might look like generosity or humility or something. Anyway, neither one of us can risk upsetting the old man by holding a grudge against Ames. I mean, one that he or Ames might be aware of.” He said, “I have thought this over pretty carefully. Either my manly pride insists that I confront him, which even I would not descend to. Or it obliges me to leave town —
