She could be you or me. She lives in fear of disapproval, in a world where love is conditional. She wonders what the point is. The only one she can think of to ask is a licensed physician.
Is this what we've come to, finally? Are we so far removed from God?" I yawned, and wove the fingers of my gloves together.
That was the last sermon of Saul's I ever listened to.
Which is not to say I didn't go to church. Oh, no, I showed up every Sunday morning, sitting between my mother and Julian, smiling my glazed wifely smile. I believe I almost enjoyed it; I took some pleasure in his distance, in my own dreamy docility and my private, untouchable deafness. His words slipped past me like the sound of a clock or an ocean. Meanwhile I watched his hands gripping the pulpit, I admired his chiseled lips. Plotted how to get him into bed with me. There was something magical about that pew that sent all my thoughts swooning toward bed. Contrariness, I suppose. He was against making love on a Sunday. I was in favor of it. Sometimes I won, sometimes he won. I wouldn't have missed Sunday for the world.
I had a lot of foolish hopes, those first few years. I imagined that one day he might lose his faith, just like that, and go on to something new. Join a motorcycle gang. Why not? We'd travel everywhere, Belinda and I perched behind him. I would be hugging his waist, laying my cheek against his black cloth back.
Black cloth?
Oh, it was ingrained, by now: even on a motorcycle, he'd be wearing his seedy suit and carrying his Bible. He would never stop being a preacher. And even if he did, I wasn't so sure any more that it would make a difference.
Often Saul invited people for Sunday dinner-homeless visitors, sinners from the mourners' bench. Sometimes they stayed. We had an old lady named Miss Feather, for instance, up on our third floor-evicted froja her aparI'ment the spring of 'xx, just borrowing a room until she found another. Which she never did. Never will, I suppose. We had soldiers, hitchhikers, traveling salesmen-country people lonesome for their family churches, passing through, glad for a taste of my buckwheat pancakes. And one Sunday, a bearded man in work clothes came to the mourners' bench while the congregation was singing "Just As I Am." Saul stopped his singing and descended from the pulpit. He set his hands on the man's shoulders. Then he hugged him, gripping the dark, shiny head which was-why, of course! An Emory head. Linus Emory, the one who'd had the nervous breakdown, freed by his aunt's death to wander back. Depressed as ever, but lit by this reunion like a bone china cup held up to a candle. We took him home for dinner. He spent all the mealtime looking around the table at us, staring into Selinda's face, hanging on our words so closely that he almost seemed to be speaking them with us. Even Mama-even old Miss Feather, passing him the beaten biscuits-could make his eyes too shiny. It was so good to be home, he told us.
Then he went upstairs and claimed another of Alberta's old beds, and unpacked his cardboard suitcase into a bureau.
Are you keeping track? There were seven of us now, not counting those just passing through. Amos was still in Iowa, teaching music, I believe. And Alberta was someplace in California. But otherwise we'd transplanted that house of theirs lock, stock, and barrel. We had their beds, their hats, their sons, their one-way window eyes. Even my mother appeared to have solidified into someone darker, and Miss Feather had taken on their proud way of standing, and Selinda's face was as seraphic as something in a locket. "Have you noticed?" I asked Saul.
There seem to be so many Emorys here." But Saul only nodded, thumbing through his date-book, no doubt hunting another funeral or Youth Group meeting. "I always did want a place for my brothers to come home to," he said.
That was what he'd always wanted?
Oh, I saw it now. Finally I could sum him up: he'd only been a poor, homesick G. I., longing for house, wife, family, church. A common type. Every mourners' bench has one. "You're just looking for a way not to be alone," I told him.
But Saul said, "There is no way not to be alone," and shut his datebook and looked out across the dark hallway. Then I was unsure again, and saw that I couldn't sum him up after all. Whatever he was once, it had taken me all these years to find it out and now I couldn't say what he was today. I would be several steps behind forever.
"And the-and the money!" I cried, to keep from being drawn to him. "How can we feed them?" (Thinking meanwhile of the shallow brass collection plates, his only income; of the nickel-and-dime studio; and the radio shop that barely paid Julian's gambling debts, which shrank and swelled like something alive according to his lapses.) The Lord will provide," said Saul. He left for his meeting.
I gave up hope. Then in order not to mind too much I loosened my roots, floated a few feet off, and grew to look at things with a faint, pleasant humorousness that spiced my nose like the beginnings of a sneeze. After a while the humor became a habit; I couldn't have lost it even if I'd tried. My world began to seem… temporary. I saw that I must be planning to leave, eventually. Surely I wouldn't be with him very much longer. At all times now I carried a hundred-dollar traveler's check in the secret compartment of my billfold. I had bought my walking shoes. I planned to take nothing else but Selinda-my excess baggage, loved and burdensome. When would the proper current come to bear us away?
In the studio, sometimes, I found myself stopping work as if to listen for its arrival, raising my head and growing dazed and still. Then the customer would clear his throat or shuffle his feet, and I would say, "Hmm?" and quickly wheel closer the camera that I still didn't think of as my own. It was my father's. This was his room. Those were his yellowed, brittle prints curling off the walls. I was only a transient. My photos were limpid and relaxed, touched with that grace things have when you know they're of no permanent importance.
Eleven
The Dorothea Whitman Home was a mansion on a hill, landscaped, framed by trees. "Sheesh!" Jake said, peering at it through the windshield. We had parked at the gateposts, which were topped with spongy stone balls. It was six o'clock in the morning, and both of us were half asleep and chilled through. Also, we hadn't had breakfast yet. We could have, but Jake had spent the time shaving instead. He had shaved without water and his face had a new, raw, inadequate look. I thought we'd have done much better going to a Toddle House. And there wasn't a sign of Mindy Callender.
"Now, here is what she told me," said Jake. "Said, *Park at the gatepost and I'll come on down.' Well, ain't this a gatepost? Ain't it?"
"Looks like one to me," I said. "Maybe she meant the front door."
"Why would she call the front door a gatepost?"
"But if she has to make a fast getaway, see. Then we ought to be parked a mite nearer."
"I would stay by the gatepost," I said. "Well, I tell you this much," said Jake. "Five minutes more and I'm going. I can think of lots of places Td rather be than here." High on the hill, the great scrolled door of the mansion opened and someone stepped out. From this far away she looked like one of those little figures in a weather house. Her stomach was circular, flower-shaped, preceding the rest of her by a good two feet. She wore a straw hat and a pink dress, and carried a suitcase and a bundle of something dark.