Literary Interlude

            Glory arranged the day to her father’s spe­cific­a­tions, and after lunch she helped him down the stairs and into the car. There was a ringing loneli­ness in the house with Jack always away some­where, and it felt good to her to leave it for a while, to take her fath­er away from it. She drove him past the church and past the war memori­al to let him admire the gar­dens and the trees, and then she took him up to Ames’ house, and helped him again, out of the car, up the walk, up the steps. Ames seemed startled to find him at his door.

            “Yes,” the old man said. “I thought you and I could look after each oth­er while the women are out at the movies. I came over here in the DeSoto.”

            Ames pulled a chair away from the table. “Unless you would rather sit some­where else.”

            Boughton said, “No, this has always been my chair, hasn’t it. My pew.” He sat down and hung his cane from the edge of the table and closed his eyes. Lila and Robby came down­stairs, Robby with his hair neatly par­ted and his cheeks pink with scrub­bing. Glory took them off to the musty little movie theat­er, where they watched good tri­umph over evil by means of some six-shooters and a posse. “Say your pray­ers!” said the bad guy to the harm­less cit­izen trapped against a canyon wall. And in the moment he so gra­ciously allowed his cap­tive, horses came clat­ter­ing up from behind him and he was made to drop his gun. Robby was amazed and grat­i­fied by this turn of events, which was as much as Glory could hope for. With pre­views and news­reels and a car­toon, and a short second fea­ture in which good tri­umphed once again, more than two hours had passed by the time they came blink­ing out into the after­noon sun.

            The old men were still sit­ting at the table, and Jack was with them. He looked at Glory and smiled. “There was no one at home, so I thought some­thing must be the mat­ter. I came here—“ She had not seen him for three days, except when he walked past her on the way to the door, say­ing noth­ing, tip­ping his hat as he left, or walked through the kit­chen on the way to his room, say­ing only good night. It had nev­er crossed her mind that he would come look­ing for them. If they had been there, it might have been the begin­ning of bet­ter times. Just the thought gave her a look of blighted joy. She wanted to look at him, to see how he was, but his smile was cool. He might be angry. He must think she had betrayed him. Well, she had betrayed him. Dear God, she hadn’t meant to, and what did that mat­ter, when her fath­er was here con­fid­ing in Ames again, telling him under the seal of old friend­ship what he sus­pec­ted and what he feared, just as he had done in the end­less, excru­ci­at­ing past. It was bad enough last night, the way he spoke to Jack. And now this. If her broth­er had one sur­viv­ing hope, she knew it was that he could find some way to speak to Ames him­self, in his own right. She was so glad to get her fath­er out of the house, to give him the com­fort of a vis­it to Ames’ kitchen—how long had it been? She hadn’t thought it through. Her fath­er just sat there with his eyes closed.

            Ames was vis­ibly relieved to see the three of them. Robby scrambled into his lap full of the unspent energy the movie had summoned up in him. “You should’ve gone, Papa. You should’ve seen it.” He slapped the bot­tom of his Cracker Jack box and a few sticky morsels fell out on the table in front of his fath­er. “I’m sav­ing some for Toby.” Then he said, “Here,” and slid off his lap and went to Jack and dug out a few morsels for him. “There’s sup­posed to be a prize in there,” he said. “Do you see any prize?”

—From Home, Marilynne Robinson, 2008, FSG