Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [42]
On my daily walk that the doctor had ordered, I would pass the radio shop and see Julian bent low over tubes and wires, dimmed by a picture window as grainy as an old photograph. In the well of this window was the same display they’d had when I was a child: a plastic knob, a twist of wastepaper, and the dusty innards of an RCA Victor phonograph. I wanted to go in and pull Julian out of there. I almost did, sometimes.
But Julian said he had settled down, was here forever, planned to join the church, even. “In Texas,” he said one night, “I thought about church a lot. I thought about those songs they sing, all those hymns I never used to care for. One morning I woke up in jail, not even knowing how I’d landed there, and I said to myself, ‘If I get out of this I’m going back where I came from, join the church and straighten out my life. Going to stay with my brother till I die of old age,’ I said to myself.”
I looked at Saul.
“You tell them that on Sunday,” Saul said.
“I got to know a few of the prisoners. Why, they’d been in and out of jail all their lives, had no hope any more. Know how they passed the time? They’d chew up their bread and make it into statues, get the guards to sell it outside.”
“Stop,” I said.
“Little statues of Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, people like that. Little chewed-up statues.”
“I don’t want to hear about this,” I said, and started crying. Everybody stared at me. “Why, Charlotte,” said Saul, and my mother fumbled at her bosom for a Kleenex.
I really was very peculiar during those months.
Our daughter was born June 2, 1961, at the Clarion County Hospital, where I refused all anesthesia including aspirin so I could be absolutely sure nobody mixed her up with any other baby. We named her Catherine. She had fair skin and light brown hair, but her face was Saul’s.
From the first, it was clear she was bright. She did everything early: sitting, crawling, walking. She put short words together before she was one, and not much later began to tell herself long secret stories at bedtime. When she was two, she invented a playmate named Selinda. I knew that was normal, and didn’t worry about it. I apologized when I stepped on Selinda’s toes, and set a place for her at every meal. But after a while, Catherine moved to Selinda’s place and left her own place empty. She said she had a friend named Catherine that none of us could see. Eventually she stopped talking about Catherine. We seemed to be left with Selinda. We have had Selinda with us ever since. Now that I think of it, I might as well have taken that anesthesia after all.
They have this free offer on the radio sometimes: you send them a self-addressed envelope and they’ll send you a pamphlet called “What If Christ Had Never Come?” That always makes me laugh. I can think of a lot we’d have missed if Christ had never come. The Spanish Inquisition, for one thing. For another, losing my husband to the Hamden Bible College.
Oh, I did lose him. He wasn’t the old Saul Emory. He’d adopted a whole new set of rules, attitudes, platitudes, judgments; he didn’t even need to think. In any situation, all he had to do was rest back on his easy answers. He could reach for his religion and pull it around him like his preacher’s robe.
When I was in the hospital having Selinda, Reverend Davitt lay dying one floor above me. (Lung cancer: one of God’s little jokes. Reverend Davitt didn’t hold with tobacco.) By the fall of ’61, Saul was pastor of Holy Basis. He wouldn’t be ordained till June but already had his own little flock, his tarpaper church