Elders (24 page)

Finally McLeod spoke. “I want that Dr. Seuss book back that I gave you. It was a gift from my mother. I’m taking it back when we get home.”

Passos laughed, said, “Fine by me,” like he didn’t care at all.

“Good,” McLeod said, “and we’ll cut out the English practice too, all right?”

“Fine by me,” Passos said.

“And maybe I’ll just write my parents and tell them you changed your mind about wanting to stay with them? You wouldn’t like being around all those violent Americans.”

“You can do whatever you want—” Passos felt a catch in his throat, then a surge of private anger. He didn’t want to feel venal, dependent. Not on McLeod. Not today. “It turns out I don’t need your charity anyway. You or your family’s.”

“It’s not charity,” McLeod said, “and whatever it is, it’s not mine. It’s mostly my mother’s offer, but then again she is my mother. She values my opinion. Maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe I’ll tell her that. I thought you wanted to go to America, but I guess I was wrong. It sounds like you’d really hate it there.”

“Well,” Passos said. He only hung back for a second. “Well, Elder McLeod, maybe you’re right. With you around the house—yeah, you’re probably right.”

“Oh I wouldn’t be around,” McLeod said. “Is that what you thought? I’ll be long gone by then. Away at college, and a good one too, and with my own room, I’ll make sure of it. And reading great books, lots of them, and not burning a single one—books that don’t begin every sentence with ‘And it came to pass’ or ‘Verily,
verily, I say unto you.’ And all the rest of this? Brazil? The mission? You? You’ll all be a memory, a little
speck
on the horizon.”

Passos made the same laugh as before, a little snort. He watched the sun pass out of the puddles in the street into another drift of clouds.

That night at the apartment Elder Passos dropped the Dr. Seuss book on McLeod’s desk as he read there. The book made a loud, sharp smack against the wood.

“I’ve got most of it memorized anyway,” Passos said.

“Oh you do?” McLeod said. “Is that so? Because I do too. What’s your favorite part? Recite it for me, Elder? Please?”

Elder Passos turned back for the bedroom without a word. “ ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness,’ ” his companion called after him. “You and your false witness, huh? But don’t worry, Elder Passos. ‘Don’t worry, don’t stew. Just go right along, you’ll start happening too. Oh! The places you’ll go …’ ”

The next morning Elder Passos found on his desk the blue hardcover grammar book,
Vocabulário e gramática avançada
. A handwritten note bookmarked the first page:
You can have your gift back too. Only fair. I’ve got most of it memorized anyway
.

Passos had barely finished reading the note before he crumpled it and started, with the book in hand, for the kitchen trash.

At church that day the elders waited through sacrament meeting, Sunday school, a joint Priesthood-Relief Society meeting, waited through the full three hours of church, hoping against hope that
Josefina might just be late. After church they met Rose and Maurilho in the hallway. Rômulo stood behind his parents. He nodded at Passos and McLeod, a little sheepish, then studied the floor.

“Josefina wasn’t here today?” Rose said. She brought the corners of her mouth up in a wincing half smile, a comforting, sympathetic look meant for the both of them. But Passos turned to his companion and cocked his head, determined that the sympathy, and the blame, should belong to McLeod alone.

“No, I guess she didn’t come,” McLeod said. “We had a problem yesterday with—well, I had a problem with—”

“Rômulo told us,” Maurilho said. “But listen, we had an idea. What do you say to this? You let things cool for another few days, then you come over to our place on, say, Thursday for a big dinner, and we invite Leandro and Josefina to join us. What do you think?”

Elder Passos turned back to McLeod, his same head-cock as before, his faux-solicitous stare. He watched with satisfaction as his companion’s face flushed, his jaws gripping, ungripping.

Rose spoke up to fill the silence. “Also, I was thinking I could go over there and personally invite them. At least Josefina. Since it’s at our house, you know? If you thought that would be helpful, of course.”

McLeod turned to face him now. “Well, companion? Senior companion?”

“No, no,” Passos said, “you decide. I’m delegating this to your discretion.”

“Fine,” he said to Rose. “Let’s try it. It can’t hurt to try, right?”

“I could even pick them up,” Maurilho said. “And you guys too if you wanted. I’ll be downtown already. I’ve got day shifts this
week. And I finally got the car fixed, did I tell you?” He addressed McLeod more than Passos, as usual, rubbing his thumb back and forth against his index and middle fingers. “I’m flush now, did you hear?”

McLeod smiled a little. “How is the new job?”

“Ah, you know, mop here, sweep there. It’s a job. A stopgap, really.”

“It’s a blessing from God,” Rose said.

“So we’re on for Thursday?” Maurilho said. “I get off at seven. I could pick people up a little after that. Sound good?”

McLeod looked over at Passos again. Passos held to his mask of false cheeriness.

“Okay,” McLeod said. “That sounds good.”

“Great,” Maurilho said, and he clapped a hand on Elder McLeod’s shoulder, leading him down the hallway ahead of Passos. “Let’s just hope that the world doesn’t end before Thursday, what with that loon you’ve got in the White House …” and so on into a gentle diatribe that Passos didn’t join in on and that McLeod, for a change, didn’t seem to mind.

On Thursday afternoon the elders detoured around the drive-through en route to Rose’s house. They talked to her outside on the front stoop since Maurilho was already at work and Rômulo was still at school. They asked how the personal invitation had gone. Rose dropped her head, said no one had answered. Three times she went to the house, and every time the same.

“Did you say who it was?” Passos asked her.

“Yes,” Rose said. “Every time.”

“What did you say?”

“I’d knock on the door and call out ‘Hello, Josefina? It’s Rose.’ I’d try that two or three times, and I’d wait a long time between each try.”

Elder Passos sighed, just slightly, and shook his head, his hands on his hips, arms akimbo. He noticed his companion out of the corner of his eye, head hung and sad-looking too. They had both been hoping against hope.

“I’m sorry,” Rose said.

“It’s not your fault,” McLeod said.

“I know, but I still feel sorry. The two of you will still come tonight, though, right? I’m making
feijoada
. We won’t be able to eat it all by ourselves.”

“Of course we’ll come,” Passos said. “We’re grateful to you.”

They shook hands with Rose and started back across the courtyard. Rose called after them, “Oh, and Elders? Maurilho said he still wants to pick you up downtown tonight, if that’s where you’ll be working? At around seven? I’m supposed to find out exactly where.”

“Tell him we’ll be knocking Rua Branca,” Passos said. “And tell him thanks.”

Passos noticed the flash of annoyance in his companion’s eyes. He had made the decision about Rua Branca just now, and he’d done it despite the fact that McLeod had told him about his and his last companion’s fruitless slog up that long, hilly street. But Passos knew nothing about McLeod’s last companion, and he could imagine McLeod dragging his feet to various degrees of success. And he didn’t mind annoying him either.

On the inbound bus the late sun slanted through the windows,
strobing the passengers in light and dark as the bus passed buildings, open lots, more buildings, overpasses, more open lots … A few minutes later Elder Passos caught sight of Rua Branca through the broad flat frame of the bus’s windshield, the bus slowing down for the last stop before the river. Rua Branca meant “White Street,” though most of it lay in shadow now, dark gray against the gilded orange houses and property walls. The street climbed up the sudden steep rise of the far bank, looking to Passos like the seam of a giant basketball.

The bus came to a stop. Passos stood and moved to the middle door.

“There’s a closer place to get off,” McLeod said. “On the other side of the bridge.”

“We’re getting off here,” Passos said, and started down the stairs as the hydraulic doors sighed open.

In the street Passos turned away from the river and began walking in the opposite direction. A moment later he heard his companion behind him. Not a word of protest, no air through his nose. He must have sensed where they were going.

“I figure we’ve got time,” Passos said. “It’s not even six yet. Then we’ll do Rua Branca.”

The elders turned onto Josefina’s street a minute later, both of them slowing their pace. They took the last hundred yards to her door in silence, walking at half speed, lightening their footfalls, as if the house might spook and run away. At the door Elder McLeod lowered his voice to ask Passos what he planned to say if someone did answer.

Passos hovered his fist a few inches from the metal of the outer door. “I’ll say what the Spirit tells me to, Elder.”

He knocked and waited. He knocked again. Waited. Nothing at all moved on the street, or on the main street behind them. The sound of the river came up. A few birds. Nothing at all from the house. After another minute Passos felt his companion’s eyes on him. He turned and saw a look of apology on McLeod’s face.

“Do you think she’s heard us?” McLeod said.

“Hold on.”

Passos knocked the door one more time, and hard, a loud series of raps that stung the air like gun reports. He waited again—a full minute, two—until something clacked from inside the courtyard. A door handle. The sound of the front door scraping back across the threshold and onto the poured-cement floor. The elders perked up, held their breaths. They heard a few staccato scrapes on the dirt of the courtyard. Then Josefina’s voice in the air: “Who is it?”

Passos hesitated a moment.

McLeod said, “It’s us, Josefina. The elders. We’ve come to apologize. We want to apologize to both of you. Josefina?”

The silence stretched out like something living, a dense, coiling, spring-loading thing. Passos stared straight at the door, steeled. But after a minute more his companion called out again, “Josefina? Please. Please let us apologize.”

The steps in the dirt started up again, steadier now. They changed pitch, hitting cement, it sounded like, slapping once, twice, three times. The sound of sandals on the entryway floor. The sound of the front door clattering shut.

Passos stopped to check
his watch again. Eight sixteen. He blew air through his mouth, turned around. Not halfway up the steep Rua Branca and the city below already looked miniature, the web of streets and alleyways radiating out from downtown like tiny tidy spokes, the kinks in the roads ironed out by distance. The rows of orange boxy houses, too, improved from this height, looking more like concerted complexes of houses, like freight cars running parallel to the roads. The whites on the teeming clotheslines shaded blue, and the river, dark brown since the sun had set, kept traces of the afterglow, warm seepages, like gold dust at the bottom of a prospector’s tray. The scene was tranquil, quiet, and utterly at odds with Elder Passos’s mood. Most of the people on Rua Branca weren’t home, or at least didn’t answer their doors; the few who did begged off in short order. It was an ordinary stretch of tracting, in other words, but tonight it was almost unbearable to Passos. The only solid presence in their teaching pool had sunk, and who could take her place on this street? The man who’d closed his door as fast as he’d opened it, saying “No, no, no, no—”? Or the woman who’d frowned at McLeod’s Portuguese, then at
his
Portuguese? “But I’m Brazilian,” he’d said. The woman held out her palms, shook her head, shut the door. Or the little girl who’d peered through a gap in the gate, conferred with a parent back in the house, then returned to report that no one was home? “But
you’re
home,” Passos had said.