Grace (28 page)

He believes what he says, and, in this instance, he is practicing what he believes. The more will not be the merrier for Giselle. She will have one mother, one father. He will have a history beyond the five years he has already had with Sally.

“Yes,” Mark says. “That’s what I will do. Dig deep, not wide.”

A new intimacy is sealed between them, yet all through breakfast, while Mark devours the omelet they have made together and Justin sits next to him sipping orange juice, a question hovers over the stories they swap, still unasked, threatening to put a lie to the honesty from which this new friendship was forged. They are standing near the front door when Justin finally gets the courage to ask it.

“Why did you do it, Mark? Why did you try to kill yourself?”

“Depression. I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t see any reason for living.”

“But why that way?” Justin comes closer to Mark. “Was it the poems, Mark? Was that it?”

“I had been reading them. But no, it was not the poems.”

“Then what I said about Plath?”

“I can’t remember what was going through my mind. I was in a fog. I was looking for a way out.”

“And then you remembered what I said. Is that what happened, Mark?”

“I don’t know. A lot of people do it that way. I was in the kitchen. I saw the oven.”

He puts his arm across Mark’s shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he says. It is an apology this time; it is not an expression of sympathy. “Truly I am, Mark.” He wants to say more. He wants to say he should not have been so irresponsible. “I should have said something. Explained. I should not have said it that way. I was not thinking.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I told you …”

“Chaa, Professor.”

“I should have been more careful.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t say that.” Mark returns his embrace. He puts both arms, not one, around Justin’s shoulders, and draws him close to his chest.

Justin’s throat constricts; the tears do not surface, but after Mark leaves, he berates himself. He is guilty, in spite of his protests to Helen Clumly. He must bear some responsibility. He is the mentor; Mark is his student. How lightly he had considered his pain, how little significance he had given to it, dismissing the furrows that rose on Mark’s brow, the anxiety in his voice, as no more than melodramatic expressions of the pangs of an adolescent infatuation.

He should have taken the time to tell him that the way Plath ended her life was tragic, an immeasurable loss of a future that promised so much.

But Mark has taught him. With his selfless assumption of responsibility for Sandra, he has exposed his teacher’s self-centeredness.

He was not wrong to tell Mark he had not caused Sandra to
be a lesbian, but he could have listened more carefully. When Mark blamed Halle for Sethe’s unspeakable act, the murder of her infant, he could have paid attention. He could have heard his point about the rightness of Sethe’s rejection of her husband’s excuse: Halle was not there to help her.

Is it enough for a man to say he has troubles of his own, pain of his own, that
Things get to him?
Shouldn’t a husband be responsible for the safety and happiness of his wife and children?

“God,” Sally’s mother said before they were married, “will make you responsible for my Sally’s happiness.”

He had vowed for better or for worse. He had promised to honor and cherish. Sally is responsible for finding her life’s work, but he, her husband, ought to help her. He should cherish her.

God’s sprinkling of stardust, as Ursula Henry had called it—His grace—falls on Justin then, so Justin will think years later. For his confidence soars after this admission, after this acceptance of the part he played in Mark’s descent, in Sally’s un-happiness. And though he will admit there was nothing he could have done to earn it, it is, nevertheless, now that he receives this gift of an unshakeable certainty in what he is about to do. He will not look back.

He must act, he tells himself again. He knows what he must do to stop the unraveling of his marriage.

He has four hours: two before Anna returns with Giselle, J-two before it is time for him to meet Sally at the bus station.

When Mark leaves, he increases his pace. He picks up four, then five, books at a time and piles them in the crook of his arm. He bends down and deposits them in the boxes on the floor and straightens up again. His back aches from the bending and the reaching, for he has to stretch his arm to get to the ones on the top shelves, near the ceiling.

He could have asked Mark to help him, but he wants to do this alone. This is his responsibility. This is something he has partially caused. He had offered to share his den with Sally, but he had done nothing to prove he meant it. Maybe, perhaps, perhaps if Sally had a room that was hers where she could think, dream, she would not have lost hope.

The den is the same as it was when they married and Sally
moved in. The desk he used in his office, at his former college in New England, is here, in the corner, at an angle that gives him the advantage of the windows and the door that leads to the rest of the house. It is a small desk, mahogany, with brass fixtures. There are books and student papers on it. They crowd the desk, but do not make it untidy.

The space in front of the desk, where he works, is covered with a brown leather-bound mat that Sally had given him one Christmas. The matching container, filled with pencils and pens, is at the left of the mat, his computer to the right. There is no space on this desk for Sally’s things. There is no space in this room for Sally’s things.

The Oriental rug on the floor came from his old apartment, the gray-and-white striped sofa was in his old living room, the pictures on the wall have sentimental value to him alone: an old photograph of his parents, a picture of his aunt, two of him, one with his schoolmaster at St. Mary’s when he won the scholarship to Harvard, the other when he graduated from Harvard. There is a framed watercolor on one wall. It is a painting of the sea, Maracas at dawn in Trinidad, the eastern end, where the fishermen pull in their seines before the beach becomes cluttered with bathers and their paraphernalia: boom boxes, umbrellas, plastic chairs, pots of food served from the trunks of cars, liquor that makes the laughter raucous.

If Sally wanted to use this room, where would she sit? On the chair at his desk that is locked to his height? On the cushion softened to his weight? Where would she work? Among the
clutter on his desk, and when she cleared it, in the space that seemed to have his name on it? And her books? Where would she put them? On the bookshelves already crammed with his?

Only his books are here: the ones he used at Harvard, the ones he taught in New England, the ones he teaches in Brooklyn, the ones he was given as presents, the ones he is currently reading. These are the books he is packing, though he has not yet considered where he will put them. He has cleared three shelves and filled two boxes when where finally occurs to him. He will put some on the bookshelves in the living room, some in his office at the college, and some, because there are too many, he will leave here, in the den, on the top shelves, where they are not as accessible. He unpacks the books and re-sorts them.

He is replacing the last of them on the top shelf when Anna rings the doorbell. He does not hear her. She rings again, three more times. He still does not hear her. She bangs on the door. She shouts. “Justin!” Giselle shouts. “Daddy!”

He is thinking of Sally. Of what he will say to convince her.
Stay
, but he does not want to force her.
Stay
, but he wants her to do so willingly.

A book falls out of his hand and tumbles down the height of the room. The thud it makes merges with the banging on the door. When the book settles, the noises separate. In seconds he is at the front door.

“Lord, I thought you’d gone deaf, or had gone out somewhere,” Anna says.

Giselle jumps into his arms.

“She was getting nervous,” Anna says. “She was worried you had moved with your furniture.”

“Oh, Giselle, Daddy’s never, ever moving from you.” He kisses his daughter.

“Told you, Aunt Anna.”

Anna shrugs and makes a feeble attempt to explain she had suggested no such thing.

“I know.” Justin shakes his head. “Children.”

“I was sure you were home, Daddy. Extra, positively, very sure.” She remembers these words from the ending of a story he read to her.

“Did you like the movie?”

They walk into the living room, Anna following closely behind them. “There were monsters,” she says, and makes a face.

He looks at Anna. “She wanted to see it,” she says.

“My friend Carol said her Mommy took her,” Giselle says. “But I didn’t like it. Not at all.”

“Why didn’t you leave?” he asks Anna. “She’ll have nightmares.”

“She wanted to stay.”

“I had to see it all,” Giselle says. “Carol will call me a crybaby.”

“You are not a crybaby.” Justin hugs her and puts her down. “You are a big girl.”

“I’m sorry, Justin,” Anna says.

But he is chastened now. He, too, should have been more responsible for the charges in his care.

“I took her for pizza,” Anna says.

“Good. So you’re not hungry, Giselle? You can wait ’til we have dinner with Mommy?”

“Told you Mommy’s coming today,” Giselle says to Anna.

Anna laughs. “And I told you that, too.” She tugs her braids. “She’s looking forward to seeing Sally,” she says to Justin. “When she wasn’t talking about the furniture you’re moving, she was talking about Sally coming home tonight.”

“I’ll eat with Mommy,” Giselle says to Justin, and she pulls Anna’s hand. “Come see the plants, Aunt Anna. They got real big.”

Anna passes close to Justin. “Making some changes?” she asks Justin.

It is evident she has noticed the new row of books on the top shelf of the bookshelves in the living room where there were photographs.

“For the better,” he says.

After Anna leaves, Justin continues to reorganize the bookshelves in the den. Giselle helps. She gets excited when he tells her it’s a surprise for Mommy. Can she keep a secret? he asks her. She will not say a word, she says. Then it will be your secret and mine, he tells her. But when will he tell her mother? she asks. Late at night, he says. Can she keep a secret until morning? Cross her heart and hope to die, she says.

When he is finished rearranging the bookshelves, he begins to work on the pictures. He takes down the photographs of his parents and his aunt, and the painting of the beach at Maracas. He will hang the photographs and the painting in the hallway,
outside the bedroom, but only after he has shown Sally the changes he has made in the den.

He removes the print of jazz musicians in New Orleans from the bathroom wall. It is a cheap copy that most certainly has no value, but it belonged to Sally’s mother. Sally wanted it hung on their bedroom wall. He opposed her.

The space it leaves is obvious and he realizes immediately it will be obvious too to Sally. He wants to talk to her first. He wants to explain before she misunderstands his intentions. He replaces the print on the hook, adjusts it to its original position, and, satisfied, bounds down the steps to the dining room, Giselle following closely behind him. He picks up the framed photographs of Sally, at her graduation at Spelman, from the credenza, and bounds back up the stairs again.

He is breathing heavily when he gets to the den. His heart is racing. He presses his finger into the pulse at his wrist. Giselle looks up at him, worried. “Just need to sit a moment,” he tells her. But first he arranges the three photographs of Sally carefully on the desk.

This is right. This feels right.
The fear in Giselle’s eyes when she flew into his arms had unsettled him. If he finds the right words, if he says the right things, Giselle will know—he and Sally will make her secure in knowing—they will always be here for her.

He slumps down on the couch and Giselle snuggles next to him. He is not a young man. He is approaching fifty. His father’s age, he reminds himself.

Later, on the way to pick up Sally, he stops at the soul food restaurant. He has not had time to cook, but he does not want to eat surrounded by strangers. For tonight he means to make a change. For tonight—the thought comes to him in the simplicity of a platitude he despises—he and Sally will begin the first day of the rest of their lives.

Sally is the fourth person to come out of the bus. She smiles and waves at them. He waits for her in the car. Giselle is jumping up and down in the backseat. When Sally slides in next to him, Giselle throws her arms around her neck.

“Not so tight,” Sally tells her and turns to kiss her.

“Glad you’re back,” Justin says.

“Me, too.”

“I missed you, Mommy.” Giselle kisses her again. “Daddy missed you, too.”

“I missed you all,” Sally says. She looks rested. The darkness under her eyes has faded. The furrows on her forehead have disappeared.

Giselle is bubbling over with news. She tells Sally that her grandmother said it was too bad for the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. “Nana didn’t know that is the names of Colum-bus’s boats, Mommy,” she says. “I had to tell her.”