They glided.
“Was he, wait a second. Was he electrocuted?”
Walt nodded. “Trimmin’ trees.”
Germane stood up, circled, lay back down.
“And also how Alice was the best in our class at making those string designs, those little string things you made with string. Do you know what I’m talking about? how you hold a string over here and over here and then do something with your fingers and it makes a little, what, a little design?”
“Cat’s cradle, Jacob’s ladder.”
“Right. And she could also braid things, braid hair or strips of leather, very elaborate things.” Langston thought a moment. “There’s a connection, isn’t there? Moving her fingers, seeing a pattern where there is none.”
“She went into textiles.”
“Excuse me?” It had never occurred to Langston that Alice might have had a profession.
“She was an artist. Made baskets, some as big as a room you could walk into. Shown all over the country.”
“Are you
sure
?”
“Taught it, too. Went around to schools. Children loved her.”
This stunned Langston into silence. That little flat-faced girl with the overbite and the cowlick? She was an Artist in the Schools and children loved her?
Germane’s tail started to thump and Walt said, “That would be your mama,” and then AnnaLee came into view. Oh, she was a mess, her mother, Langston thought, but at that moment she looked so pretty. Langston didn’t look anything like her—she favored the Braverman side of the family (it was Taos who was so clearly AnnaLee’s child)— and this distance, this lack of a resemblance, allowed Langston to see her mother, sometimes, the way strangers surely did. Everything about AnnaLee was strong: her chin, her jaw, her shoulders, her upper arms. Her calves knotted into muscle with every step, even though the only exercise she took was walking and gardening. She had broad, flat hands; widely spaced, narrow green eyes, thin lips. She never wore makeup or jewelry, apart from her wedding ring. When she smiled she had thin wrinkles everywhere—they radiated out and then connected in the middle of her cheeks, and even those looked lovely on this Sunday, to her daughter.
“Hey, you two,” she said, walking up to the edge of the porch.
“How was church?” Walt asked, as he did every week, although as far as Langston knew he never went to church and probably didn’t actually care how it went.
“It was good. Amos . . . he’s a good preacher. He gets to me, somehow.”
Walt nodded.
“You should come with me sometime, Langston. I think you’d find him interesting.”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” she tried to sound pleasant, but noncommittal.
AnnaLee held out the index finger of her right hand, positioning it so that when Walt and Langston glided forward her finger touched her husband’s knee. Langston pretended to concentrate on Chimney Street. Her mother could be so
unconscious;
it was exasperating.
“The little girls are coming to live with Beulah next week, Walt,” AnnaLee said, and her eyes instantly filled with tears.
Walt shook his head in sympathy but didn’t say anything.
“It’s just . . . it’s so . . . Beulah can’t take care of those children. She was past forty when she had Alice, which would make her almost
seventy
. And she spent the past ten years caring for her own mother, it seemed like she would never die, and I think Alice was planning to do something special for Beulah this summer—send her to Ireland or something as a way of saying, ‘Okay, that’s over, now you can enjoy the rest of your life.’ ”
Walt shook his head and clucked his tongue. He was moved.
“The whole situation makes me feel like,” AnnaLee looked down the street at Beulah’s mobile home, where nothing moved, “like we’re never actually out of the woods. Beulah must have thought she’d seen the worst of it. She must have thought she was going to have some peace, and now this.”
“Wait a second,” Langston said, realizing for the first time that no one ever mentioned Alice’s husband, Jack Maloney. “Why doesn’t Jack just keep the girls? They’re his children, too.”
Her mother didn’t say anything right away, but looked at Langston as if she’d suggested the children be sent to the moon.
“What? We’re creeping up on the twenty-first century here, Mama. Men are not actually helpless. Jack can probably be taught to turn on a washing machine and make a bed. The rest of the world is examining postfeminist constructs, and Haddington is still handing out cowbells. I don’t know which is worse.”
AnnaLee shook her head as if to dislodge water from her inner ear. “Langston, don’t you know how Alice died? Where have you
been
? What goes on with you that you are so completely free of anyone else’s story? My
God
.”
Langston was surprised to see that her mother was both really angry and really crying. “For heaven’s sake, Mama.”
Walt stopped gliding and took AnnaLee’s hand.
“I didn’t really feel, I’ve already said this to Daddy, that it was my business to pry into the nature of her illness, or the details of her death, that’s all.”
Her mother looked at her a moment, then wiped her face with the back of her hand. “That’s not all, Langston. If you gave yourself even one hard look, you’d see that’s not it.” She squeezed Walt’s hand. “I’m going in and make some lunch. Come with me?”
Walt stood up and Langston noticed for the first time how he favored his lower back, how he walked with a slight limp.
Dear Lord
, she thought,
he’s in his fifties
. He had been just a boy when Taos was born, only nineteen, and just twenty-two when they had Langston, and she’d always thought of them as being so young, younger than other parents, but here they were, middle-aged.
“How did she die, then?” Langston called out to her mother as AnnaLee walked into the house.
Just before the door slammed, Langston heard, “It doesn’t matter.”
Langston glided a few times. “Exactly. That was exactly my point.”
Chapter 5
THE SACRED HEART
Madeline and Eloise, eight and six. Amos had never met them, although he’d seen pictures. Alice had begun coming alone to his church a year before she died, and after a few weeks Jack came with her, but the girls had continued to go to Sacred Heart of Mary, in Hopwood, accompanied by Jack’s devout aunt, Gail. Alice didn’t want to confuse them or disrupt their lives, she’d said, and they loved Sacred Heart. They’d both gone to preschool there; they had friends; they were attached to their teachers.
Amos remembered, sitting at his desk after talking to Beulah about the fate of the children, the first time he looked up and saw Alice in the congregation, beside her mother. The sermon that day had been on sacrifice. He’d begun literally, with the animal sacrifice of the First Testament. “It is difficult to truly consider, with our late sensibilities,” he’d said, “the blood steaming on the altar; doves, goats, lambs, calves.” Then there was a whole section he’d had to remove, if he remembered correctly, that began: “Trust me: this is a
book
we’re reading.” He would have held up the Bible, a dramatic gesture of the sort he ordinarily despised. “It has a message for you, but there has to be foreshadowing, tension, resolution. We have to be exhausted, sickened by all those corpses, the slaughter of innocent animals, in order to truly recognize the new witness of Jesus in Nazareth. There must be continuity.” The typological lamb. The Hebrew people made animal sacrifices; Jesus put an end to animal sacrifice with his own innocent death. Amos quoted from the Letter to the Hebrews
9:11
, and
10:1
–
18
. He was leading up to his favorite Christological position, which is that everything recognizable is inverted in the Christ-event: the strong are made weak, the prostitute is invited to the table, the Law is replaced with the Spirit, the sacrificial animals are set free. Christ’s task is
immediacy,
he doesn’t have time for anything but
metaphor,
he doesn’t have time for actual
cows,
to literally sacrifice is demonic (or as Tillich would say, to literalize any event in the myth of Jesus is idolatry). That’s what Amos wanted to say, and then he wanted to go on saying it for a few days or a few hundred pages, at least until he or someone in the audience had some idea what he was talking about. He ended the sermon with yet another banal plea for responsible stewardship of the earth, the same sort of plea that could be heard in any vaguely liberal church on any given Sunday. As he joined the congregation in silent prayer, a small voice repeated in his head,
Are you going to write bumper stickers next? “Love The Little Animals: Jesus Did”?
And when he opened his eyes, he saw Alice staring directly at him as if he were profoundly interesting, or of another species. The stare was almost rude, and Amos had looked away long before she did.
But he had seen her long enough to form an impression he would remember, undoubtedly, for the rest of his life: her straight, blond hair hanging to her shoulders. Brown eyes, widely spaced; her face, broad and square, with high, pronounced cheekbones. A slight overbite, the sort that seems so sexy and heartbreaking in an actress in a black-and-white film. And dimples—visible even when she wasn’t smiling. Alice wasn’t beautiful, not really, but she was conscious. She took in the whole world at a glance, and in doing so, drew the world to her. How could he have known what he knew in that moment: that Alice was kind and competent, and possessed of an enviable stillness, that she was lovely all the way down to the source of her nature? He did know: he knew her right away, and he felt known by her, and that was where the trouble really began. She could have been a lingerie model sitting half-naked in that pew and he wouldn’t have noticed. She could have been exotic or worldly or a Valkyrie and it would have meant nothing to him. But that Alice saw him—that was a feeling Amos had never experienced before, and it felt like a revelation and also like a virus.
She didn’t speak to him that Sunday, or the next, or the Sunday after that. She just stood up when the service was over, kissed her mother on the cheek, and left. Amos didn’t ask anyone about her and mostly didn’t think about her during the week (but his nights were worse, and this was something he admitted to himself when he was able to admit anything at all). He wasn’t in love with her—no, no,
not
in love with her—because although he was capable of any sin or transgression or
pettiness, he thought, he would never have allowed himself that one. He was not that sort of man. He had never, ever been the sort of man who fell in love, and that was what plagued him when he saw Alice, that was what kept him awake at night, during those first few weeks. No woman had ever moved him to such thoughts. Alice was another of those wrenching shadows, the shade of a pure possibility unchosen and unlived, and at night he was almost able to feel her lying next to him in his bed, nearly in his skin: the heat and the pull and the breath and the sanity of a woman. Life. Life itself.
*
On the fourth Sunday, Alice brought her husband, Jack, to church with her. While they sang and even during his sermon, Amos surreptitiously studied this man who was married to a woman like Alice. Jack was tall and broad, very handsome in a rugged way, nearing forty. All through church he kept a hand on Alice, sometimes rubbing one of her shoulders, sometimes clutching her fingers. He wasn’t just proprietary; he was worried about something. Alice permitted all of Jack’s various physical manipulations with a pliant unresistance. She sat up when he wanted to put his arm around her waist. She leaned in when he pulled her, offered her hand when he reached for it, but didn’t initiate any contact.
What does this mean?
Amos wondered, trying to imagine how it would feel to have another person controlling his body.
Alice and Jack stood around in the pews talking to Beulah until all the other church members had gone through the receiving line, until just the four of them were left in the church.
“Pastor Townsend, I don’t believe you’ve officially met my daughter, Alice Baker-Maloney,” Beulah said, as he approached them.
“How do you do,” Amos said, offering her his hand. Her handshake was firm; her palm hot and dry.
“And this is my husband, Jack,” Alice said, directing Amos’s attention away from her. Jack wore dusty cowboy boots, blue jeans with a hand-tooled leather belt, and a soft, white cotton work shirt. Either he was a man who always looked a part, or he was the thing itself. As they shook hands, Jack nodded his head once at Amos.
There is something so grim in his
— Amos was interrupted before he could finish the thought.
“I’ll be going, Alice,” Beulah said. “Come by the house when you’re done here.”
Beulah turned and walked down the aisle toward the swinging doors that led to the vestibule. Alice and Jack were there for him, apparently.
“Could we have a moment of your time, Mr. Townsend?” Alice asked.
“Of course, yes. Of course. Do you want to go to my office?”
“No, thanks. This will be fine.” She smiled at him, and then looked at Jack. “We’re seeking your guidance, actually.”
Amos was struck again by how completely at ease she seemed. There she stood, a virtual stranger, asking Amos for a favor, and she didn’t seem the least nervous or sheepish. But she also didn’t appear to feel entitled, and that was a line Amos had seen few people walk successfully.
“I don’t know how much guidance I’ll be good for, but please. I’ll help if I can.”
Genuine,
he thought.
She’s just genuine
.
“Jack and I are having problems—we’ve been having problems for a few years now. We’ve done pastoral counseling with the priest at our own church—at the Sacred Heart of Mary, in Hopwood—that’s Father Leo, a dear man. We’ve seen him once a week for a year, and also we’ve seen a, what do you call him, a secular therapist, I guess you’d say. Robert Collins? Do you know him? We’ve gone together and Jack has gone alone. And Jack also has a, well, mentor in this organization he belongs to—”
“My goodness.”
“Yes. I think we’ve explored the range of possibilities. My mother said you had been very helpful to a number of people in this congregation, and I just thought. You know, the people in this church didn’t really have anyone to talk to for years.”
“I’ve gathered that.”
“Pastor Schaeffer didn’t, it wasn’t that he didn’t care about people, it’s just that he didn’t see how anything was going to be solved with talking. He believed you just found the piece of Scripture that applied to the situation, applied it, and went on living a righteous life.”
“I’m starting to feel the same way myself,” Jack said, surprising both Amos and Alice.
Amos tilted his head at Jack as if Jack had said a puzzling thing, something that required examination, hoping Jack might say more, but he didn’t. He looked down at his boots, squeezing the back of his own neck as if he were developing a migraine.
“Do I understand that you’re asking me to provide you with marriage counseling? Or additional marriage counseling, something like that?”
“Well, yes, I guess so. I, for one, would just like to hear what you have to say about a life, about our life. Marital problems are often religious problems, aren’t they?”
“How so?” This was actually a thought Amos himself had entertained on occasion, without knowing how to articulate it.
Alice shrugged. “A life well lived, a life badly lived. General confusion. Despair, regret, failures of sympathy or empathy. Kindness, good humor. Those are all religious issues. And in a marriage, too.”
Amos nodded, pushed up his glasses, tapped his finger against his nose. He was just about to lean against the pew, to settle in comfortably and discuss it more, when Jack cleared his throat and put his arm around Alice. “We need to go. The girls are waiting for us,” he said, without room for discussion.
Alice didn’t seem offended. “Thanks for your time, Pastor Townsend,” she said, extending her hand.
“Amos. Call me Amos, please.” He shook her hand a second time. “Could you come in on Wednesdays, early evening? After work, Jack?”
Alice looked up at Jack, who gave his assent. “Thanks,” she said. “That would be fine. And thank you for agreeing to talk to us. I know it’s probably strange to be approached by people unfamiliar to you, but who do you know, finally, in this life, right?” Alice asked it in a lighthearted way, her face tipped up toward Amos’s, not expecting an answer.
I know you,
Amos could have said, but didn’t.
*
The parsonage Amos occupied in Haddington seemed modest from the outside; a two-story rectangle, built in the
1930
s on a long, narrow lot. The exterior was covered with gray asbestos shingles, the roof was gray, and the small front porch was painted a blue that might as well have been gray, as if the church had decided, long ago, to make the house invisible to everyone but its occupants. Inside, the house was tasteful and spacious. The living room ran the width of the front of the house, with hardwood floors and aging wallpaper patterned in reckless peonies. In the dining room a chandelier hung in elegant torpor over the oak dining table (which sat eight); the wallpaper in that room was cream with a pattern of maroon velvet pheasants. The railing on the walnut staircase had been rubbed smooth by sixty years of hands. Upstairs there were three large bedrooms, each fully furnished and comfortable (preachers almost always have families), and the study facing Plum Street. The kitchen was Amos’s favorite room, although when he first moved into the house he thought he’d enter it only to keep from starving to death, so intimidating was the design: white tile floor, white tile halfway up the white walls, glass-fronted cabinets. Someone in the past twenty years had replaced the sink and countertops with stainless steel. The room was a single, continuous, hard-bright surface, except for the old, butcher-block table at which Amos took his meals with a book. (The most intractable aspect of his bachelorhood was that Amos was uncomfortable eating without reading; he felt as if he were wasting both time and food.)
In the two years he’d lived there, Amos had added a screened porch onto the back of the house, facing the narrow backyard and the gardens he planted, and the white, tumble-down garage he used as a storage shed. Living there in Haddington, in this beautiful house, Amos was happier than he felt he had any right to be, or he had been happy, anyway, and for quite a long time. In the late afternoon and early evening, when he didn’t have obligations at the church, he loved sitting on the screened porch with a glass of wine and a book, although he had to be discreet about drinking wine. He was a Pietist by profession, and the peace churches felt strongly about sobriety. (The authors of the Bible seemed not to have felt so: wine is mentioned
520
times in the First and Second Testaments.) And there was virtually no social or casual drinking in the small towns of eastern and central Indiana; either one was a drinker, and belonged to a drinking class, or one was a teetotaler.
An alley ran next to Amos’s house, and there was another at the south end of his property, where the gardens ended. On the opposite side of that alley was an abandoned warehouse, large and constructed of wood so dark it appeared to have been dipped in creosote. Amos faced this building when he sat on his screened porch, and he spent a long time studying it. In certain lights he could see the faint traces of an old Pepsi advertisement shining up like chiaroscuro: the bottle (at an odd angle, as if it might be flying through space) surrounded by bubbles that were probably dazzling when first painted, and the logo, unchanged for decades and instantly recognizable. The logos of soda. It was a funny idea to a man like Amos, the changing location and extension of the sacred. The Pepsi sign suddenly revealing itself in the dying light, intruding on his evening, had the potential to haul up a freight car of cynical resignation in him, but for some reason it never had.
Indiana was a world-class firefly state, and time and again Amos watched them come out in the evening. There were always a few moments, warm from the first drink of wine, when he felt he was living in the fantastic air between seasons: there were the morning glory vines in the collapsing fence; the beans climbing the poles; the slate flagstones that led to the porch, silvered; the white shed; the lightning bugs’ green bellies; and suddenly, out of nowhere, the airborne Pepsi bottle, a knock from the past. For Amos the painting was both more and less than the merely commercial: it was nostalgic, and thus served to remind him that he was lost and far from home. More importantly, it was a message.
The signs are fading, just like you always knew they would.