Read The Distinguished Guest Online
Authors: Sue Miller
From somewhere up the hill, Linnett heard a glass break, the woman’s rising voice break too. She tilted the book down opened on her chest.
Could
it have been this way for Lily and Paul, this civilized? This
high-minded
? When she had read this earlier, she had believed it completely. Why not? But tonight, with the
memory of Lily’s quick eyes as they waited behind her mask of illness for the effect of her remark, Linnett thought otherwise. She thought things might have been phrased just so in these
arguments, calculated to wound, to draw blood, to provoke anger and rage.
She thought of her own fights with Frank before their divorce. Near the end, spent by a struggle that had lasted for years, there was an exhausted, bemused, but true discussion of what had gone
wrong that an observer might have read as high-minded. At least they were kind to each other at that point. But before then there had been the requisite broken glasses, the names.
The names. She smiled. In desperation once, fumbling for the deepest insult, the darkest profanity she could attach to Frank and his hateful face, his whole odious physical presence, Linnett had
called him a “sneed.” It just slipped out. “You! You fucking . . .
sneed
!” There’d been a little beat of silence.
“
Sneed
, Linnett?” he asked.
She nodded, a choking laughter rising. And in a moment, they were both laughing, shrieking this epithet intermittently.
Now Linnett shook her head. A moth lightly tapped the inside of her lampshade, bringing her back. She picked up the book again, flipped through slowly, and stopped at a spot several pages
later.
What was slowly dawning on me too, was that in giving up Paul, I would also be giving up Blackstone Church, that it was his church to lead, and I could no longer be a
part of its life. This may seem a small thing to some readers—there were of course many other churches to choose from, and I might have looked forward to the pleasures of searching
for the one which challenged and comforted me in equal measure, as Blackstone had for all these years.
But Blackstone was my home in a profound sense by now. I had, in fact, grown up there, and every vault, every golden star painted on its ceiling, the slatted racks for the hymnals,
even the worn velvet cushions in the pews—each was as dear to me as someone else’s memories of the curtains or the furniture or the chipped china in his parents’ house
might have been.
I had come to Blackstone as a young woman, a child really, though I was myself the mother of two children by then, and soon to be pregnant with Alan. But there was no sense in me at
that time of understanding that my beliefs would have consequences for others which I would have to take responsibility for. I was held safe and youthful in my marriage, embraced and
protected by my love for Paul, and his for me, and the deep and—it seemed to me then—enduring connection all those feelings had to my faith. My life was seamless to me, a
fabric, all of a piece.
I did not yet know that it is by rending, tearing, and then slow painstaking repair that we become adult, that we become truly whole. And if you had told me then that the efforts to
make Blackstone an integrated church would divide me from Paul, would lead me to examine my faith and end my marriage, I would have said no, take this from me, I do not wish it.
And even in the midst of that division and examination and separation, once it had begun, I often wished I could go back to what I had begun to think of as my
girlhood
, when I
felt safe. And indeed I felt that Paul wished it too: that what he was asking from me when he asked me to accept his version of truth, of the events we were living through, was that I
return to that blinkered, girlish life which saw only the spiritual and marital path he had set out in front of me. I saw that he regarded my dependence on him, my childishness in our
early marriage, as the finest part of who I was. I saw that my own anguish and questing and growth were not steps and changes he wished to comfort me through or nurture, but were threats,
problems, inconveniences, willful and perverse defiance.
During this period, I would sometimes relax my eyes in church, and let the confusion of faces, of men and women and children, swirl into color and mass alone. I would see us, brown and
black and white and yellow, as one, together raising our voices and our faces in singing and praise. Was this not as it was supposed to be? Had I not helped to make this happen? Could I
not stay, even if Paul and I were no longer together?
But then he would begin to preach in the hard, new language he had learned, the language of power and of anger, language in which he insisted that all of us who had loved and struggled
together could be in no true relation to each other without acknowledging the falseness of our positions in society, without coming to terms with the anger and rage he insisted we felt,
without turning that anger and rage into an instrument of political action.
And I would look around at the faces of the people I’d known so well, lifted, listening, intent. I’d search particularly for the women in my group, and seek reassurance in
their presence. Iva, with her six boys arrayed in Sunday splendor down the pew, Anne-Marie, who’d married a white man and thought she would pay for it forever, until she came to
Blackstone—all the women I’d told my most secret sorrows to, women who’d held me and comforted me when I felt most alone in the world; and in my mind I’d say to
Paul, what do you know about our love?
But then gradually I noticed what seemed to me the closing up of those faces, the tightening in rage and anger, the change that was coming, that Paul was invoking and making happen.
And so I began to understand that I had to prepare myself to leave the church, as well as Paul, in order to take that final step on my own, into what I believed. I had to force myself to
look carefully at this dear world, and accept that it was no longer mine.
Each Sunday toward the end was an agony of leave-taking. Of noticing something I’d never noticed or even seen before, of noticing it and feeling I could not be happy or whole
without looking on it every Sunday of my life. How could I?
But how could I stay? I could not.
Linnett remembered how intrigued she’d been to read this the first, and then the second and third times. The sense of Lily’s honor-driven, conscience-bound choice between two intense
attachments, between two different lives, really. For herself, nothing ever seemed so clear. She was always full of skepticism about her own motivations. Especially in any impulse toward
renunciation, she sought to discover what was self-serving. And usually found it.
Once she’d turned down a teaching gig at the university because she hoped Frank—who’d had a run of bad luck and was depressed—would be next in line. When he got the job
and took it, she allowed herself too often to remember her “kindness,” to remember that she’d been the first choice. She’d used both to feel superior to him.
Lily she had imagined as an exception to this kind of behavior, but now she didn’t know.
She thought abruptly of her various stabs at writing the article. All pathetically adulatory, she saw now.
She thought of her joke with Alan this afternoon, about starting, “Motherhood was not Lily Maynard’s strong suit.” Maybe so. At any rate, something more like that.
She sighed, and bent over the side of the bed to set the book back on the floor. She turned out the light. The woman’s voice had stopped long since at the Thayers’. There was just
the tinny, distant music, the rumble of voices. Occasionally the sound of a car starting and driving away over the crunching gravel. The way it was in childhood, Linnett thought. In bed in the
dark, listening to the grown-ups. She slept.
Alan and Gaby had started to make love and then stopped, as though by mutual agreement. They lay now, side by side, listening to the sounds from outside. Over the rush of the
water below, the night air carried only faraway birdsong and the occasional sudden flutter of wind in the trees. The room was bright with reflected moonlight.
Why hadn’t they finished, once they’d begun? They were too full, Alan might have said. They’d drunk too much wine. They were tired.
As for Gaby, she knew differently. It was her choice, she felt. She didn’t want him. Why?
Lily’s face rose in her mind’s eye. Lily, who made Alan different. And it was through Lily’s eyes that Gaby sometimes saw Alan now—as a boy. A beautiful American boy. She
smiled slightly, remembering him then, and shifted in bed to look at the black trees beyond the deck.
Of course, what Lily had said tonight was unforgivable. Cruel. Gaby understood that, and it made her angry at the old woman. How hard, how awful for Alan to have his mother
announce—openly, if obliquely—such disappointment in him. And, Gaby felt, by extension, in her. For she knew that Lily blamed her, in part, for the course Alan’s life had taken.
She saw Alan as having become, perhaps,
Frenchified
by Gaby, as having refused—what? what would Lily call it? America, of course. The good fight, maybe. Political involvement.
And it was true that it had been Gaby’s wish not to live in the city anymore, if that was any part of it. She had fallen in love with New England, with the countryside, the open hilly
farms, the amazing palette of the woods in fall. And this had turned Alan’s life in a certain direction. He’d left the firm he’d started with in Cambridge, he’d set up a
private practice in Bowman. That meant houses, vacation homes, kitchens, additions.
But it was he who had wooed her with the countryside. That first fall when she’d followed him over, he’d borrowed or rented cars nearly every weekend, and they’d
driven—up the coast of Maine, in the Green Mountains in Vermont, through the Berkshires. Gaby had been dazzled and amazed at the piercing bright colors, the clear hard air, the vast reaches
of green pine and red and purple forest, dense and promising and mysterious in a way completely unfamiliar to her—in France there would have been fields under cultivation, or another village
just over the hill. The country here invited Gaby, made her feel a sense of possibility. When Alan finished architecture school, she began to try to persuade him to make the move out of the
city.
But he’d been tired of Boston too. He’d agreed when the children got close to school age that it was too expensive. Besides, he’d never had much success, anyway, in that world
of competition for public buildings or public spaces—that other, more glorious life of the architect.
Still, she’d never heard him say before what he’d said tonight, that he regretted some part of it. And this house, which she’d always thought of as connected, somehow, to her
affair—his wish to bring her home after it—must also have been a kind of concession of the possibility of that public life, a sign that he saw that it wasn’t going to happen that
way for him. It was, then, a kind of giving up. A giving up that was part of his love for her.
Gaby thought of her brothers, her father. Her father still worked in the pharmacy he owned, her brothers were both bankers. They were all private men, like Alan. They went to work, they worked
hard—or perhaps not so hard, it occurred to her—they came home and were family men.
But French family men. Different. In fact, this was precisely what Gaby couldn’t stand anymore when she visited—their self-importance, their ponderousness, their endless delivering
themselves of opinions on this and that, while the women did everything at home. She knew she had not made her choice accidentally, finally. She had chosen America, and Alan. Escape.
Alan had chosen her and her Frenchness. In part, then, for escape too. And they were stuck somewhere in between.
No, not stuck. She would never say stuck. But each had given up a great deal, apparently. There were disappointments. Things you couldn’t know you had wanted, or even things you were quite
certain you hadn’t wanted, but still, as you discovered, missed some aspect of.
Had her mother ever, ever, thought of her father as a boy?
Yet wasn’t this part of what had drawn Gaby to Alan? His boyishness. His openness. And certainly it was part of the adventure she hoped for when she said she would go with him to America,
that she was moving into something with no familiar form, no predictable shape. Just what she chose.
And what he chose too, of course.
She thought again of Lily’s empty face at the table tonight, of Linnett’s shamed face as she spoke Lily’s words. Of Thomas, playing in answer to that. That was enough, surely,
that she and Alan had raised a child capable of this? This beauty, as well as this generosity?
Gaby was beginning to drowse in the silver light.
Suddenly there was a piercing shriek from outside. She started violently and turned to touch Alan’s arm. “My God!” she said. Another cry of high-pitched pain and terror
followed quickly. “My God! What is it?”
Alan stroked her arm. “An animal.” His voice was hoarse. He’d been asleep. “Maybe a squirrel. Something’s killing it.”
“My God,” she said again, as the long, bright, rending screams filled the night air. “Oh! Can we do nothing?”
“No. We can’t,” he said.
They listened together. It stopped, then started again, over and over, the shrilling, agonized cries.
Gaby cried out and turned into Alan’s chest. He held her until finally it ended, until the screams died into a throaty last whimper and stopped.
Until they both turned on their backs and lay still and exhausted, but now wide awake.
As for Lily, she slept the dreamless, deep sleep of a played-out child.
Alan’s office was on the second floor of a house in the village, above an antique shop. The stairs up were steep. They were made of uncovered, scarred wood, and they
twisted sharply into darkness at the top. Was it worth it? Linnett wondered. She didn’t even know that he was there—she hadn’t called ahead for fear he’d tell her not to
come. She stood for a long moment weighing it; and then spun, suddenly, and lowered herself into sitting position on the third step. She was surprisingly quick going up this way, hoisting her
bottom from step to step and pulling her crutches along with her. At the top, though, she had to struggle to get up. She stood resting on her crutches, almost panting for a moment with the effort
of accomplishing this. The hall light was out up here, but one of the four doors had a frosted glass pane through which a pale light filtered. Alan’s name was stenciled on this pane, though
she could hear nothing when she bent her head toward it. She knocked. She heard footsteps and then he opened the door.