“It’s right here.” She brought it out and hung it on the back of the chair. Then she took the slim leather case out of the breast pocket and, being careful first to dry the place very thoroughly, put it down on the arm of the chair.
“Thank you, Glory,” he said, and he covered it with his hand and closed his eyes again.
“I’ll just get some clothes out of your room. If you don’t mind.”
He said, “You might notice a bottle or two in there.” He laughed. “I’ve been getting into the piano bench lately.”
“You stay right here. I’ll be back.”
She had stopped crying, but she had to sit down in the porch. She put her head on her knees. She imagined him in that bleak old barn in the middle of the night, stuffing his poor socks into the DeSoto’s exhaust pipe, and then, to make a good job of it, his shirt. He’d been wearing his favorite shirt, the one with the beautiful mending on its sleeve. All the drunken ineptitude and frustration, his filthy hands, everything he could reach in the engine pried at, pulled loose. She couldn’t leave him alone for more than a few minutes, but her father needed her, too. She might call Lila. Not yet. Her family was slower to forgive a failure of discretion than they were to forgive most things actually prohibited in Scripture. If Jack’s notions of privacy were generally indistinguishable from furtiveness, there was only more reason to be cautious about offending them.
Was this what they had always been afraid of, that he would really leave, that he would truly and finally put himself beyond the reach of help and harm, beyond self-consciousness and all its humiliations, beyond all that loneliness and unspent anger and all that unsalved shame, and their endless, relentless loyalty to him? Dear Lord. She had tried to take care of him, to help him, and from time to time he had let her believe she did. That old habit of hers, of making a kind of happiness for herself out of the thought that she could be his rescuer, when there was seldom much reason to believe that rescue would have any particular attraction for him. That old illusion that she could help her father with the grief Jack caused, the grief Jack was, when it was as far beyond her power to soothe or mitigate as the betrayal of Judas Iscariot. She had been alone with her parents when Jack left, and she had been alone with her father when he returned. There was a symmetry in that that might have seemed like design to her and beguiled her with the implication that their fates were indeed intertwined. Or returning herself to that silent house might simply have returned her to a state of mind more appropriate to her adolescence. A lonely schoolgirl at thirty-eight. Now, there was a painful thought.
She recalled certain moments in which she could see that Jack had withdrawn from her and was looking through or beyond her, making some new appraisal of her trustworthiness, perhaps, or her usefulness, or simply and abruptly losing interest in her, together with whatever else happened just then to be present and immediate. She found no consistency in these moments, nothing she could interpret. He was himself. That is what their father had always said, and by it he had meant that Jack was jostled along in the stream of their vigor and purpose and their good intentions, their habits and certitudes, and was never really a part of any of it. He had eaten their food and slept beneath their roof, wearing the clothes and speaking the dialect of their slightly self-enamored and distinctly clerical family and, for all they knew, intending no parody even when he was old enough to have been capable of it, and to have been suspected of it. A foundling, she thought, even though he had been born in that house at memorable peril to himself and their mother, alarming her two older sisters so severely that for years they had forsworn the married life. Oh, it was the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that wry distance, as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native to their life as he never could be. She was almost disappointed that she couldn’t be angry at him. He had very nearly brought a terrible conclusion to his father’s old age. It would have been an inexpressible, unending grief to the whole family to have the old man’s patience and his hope recoil on him so mercilessly. How resigned to Jack’s inaccessible strangeness she must be to forgive him something so grave, forgive him entirely and almost immediately. They all did that, and he had understood why they did, and he laughed, and it had frightened him. She thought, I will not forgive him for an hour or two.
She took Jack his glass of water. He was dozing in the sunlight, lacquered with sweat. He opened his eyes, only a little, but she saw a glimmer of his familiar, wry despair at himself. “I’d forgotten how much I sweat,” he said. “It’s disgusting.”
She set his feet on the towel and dumped the filmy water out of the pail and went into the house and filled it. She found a sponge. She took them outside and began to bathe him again, his hair, which looked surprisingly thin when it was wet, and his face, his beloved and lamented face. Ah, Jack, she thought. He looked like destitution. He looked like the saddest fantasy she had ever had of the worst that might have become of him, except that he was breathing, and
