Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [59]
“He’s got so … shadowed, he’s got this haunted look. Is everything all right?”
“Of course it’s all right, don’t be silly,” I said.
He studied the ceiling a while. “I don’t suppose it’s easy, being a preacher’s wife,” he said.
“Why would you think that?”
“Well, having him so, well, saintly. Right?”
I stared straight through him.
“Or for him, either; it wouldn’t be easy married to you. Selinda says you aren’t religious. Doesn’t that scare him?”
“Scare him? It makes him angry,” I said.
“It scares him. Of course it does, the way you coast along, no faith, all capability, your … sparseness, and you’re the one that makes the soup while he just brings home the sinners to eat it. Isn’t that so? He forever has to keep wrestling with the thoughts that you put in his mind.”
“I don’t! I never touch his mind! I deliberately keep back from it,” I said.
“He wrestles anyway,” said Amos. He grinned. “His private devil.” Then he grew serious. He said, “I don’t understand married people.”
“Evidently not,” I told him, stiffly.
“How they can keep on keeping together. Though it’s admirable, of course.”
What he meant was, it might be admirable but he didn’t admire it. Well, I didn’t admire him, either. I disliked the careless way he moved around the room, examining various cabinets no bigger than matchboxes. Faced with Amos’s scorn, I underwent some subtle change; I grew loyal, stubborn. I forgot the plans for my trip, I reflected that it would be pointless: no matter where I went, Saul would be striding forever down the alleys of my mind, slapping his Bible against his thigh. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” I told Amos.
But Amos just said, “No, probably I don’t,” and went on easily to something new. “Whose dog is that?”
“Selinda’s.”
“Peculiar kind of animal.”
Well, it’s true that Ernest wasn’t worth much. He was a mongrel—a huge black beast, going gray, with long tangled hair and a mop-shaped head. When Ernest wagged his tail, everything at his end of the room fell and broke. Some form of hearing loss led him to believe that we were calling him whenever we called Amos or Linus, and he always arrived drooling and panting, withering us with his fish-market breath, skidding and crashing into things and scraping the floor with his toenails. Also, he’d become unduly attached to me and any time I left him alone he lost control of his bladder. Oh, I admit he wasn’t perfect.
Still, I didn’t see what business it was of Amos’s. “Tell me,” I said, “is there one single thing here you approve of? Shall we throw the whole place out and start over?”
Then Amos held up one hand, backing off, and said, “All right, all right, don’t take it wrong.” He was smiling his shy, sweet, hitch-hiker’s smile, lowering his head, looking out from under his shaggy eyebrows. Instantly I felt sorry for him. He was just new here, that was all. He had left home longer ago than his brothers, traveled farther, forgotten more. Forgotten that in every family there are certain ways you shrink and stretch to accommodate other people. Why, Linus for instance could remember back to his nursing days (Alberta’s nipple like a mouthful of crumpled seersucker, he claimed) but Amos couldn’t stand to remember and told me so, outright. He hadn’t liked being a child, he said. Their mother had been pushy, clamorous, violent, taking over their lives, meddling in their brains, demanding a constant torrent of admiration and gaiety. Her sons had winced when she burst into their rooms. She breathed her hot breath on them, she laughed her harsh laugh. She called for parties! dancing! let’s show a little life here! Given anything less than what she needed, he said (and she was always given less, she could never get enough), she turned mocking and contemptuous. She had a tongue like a knife. The sharp, insistent colors of her clothes and even of her skin, her hair, were painful to her children’s eyes. They had hated her. They had wished her dead.
Alberta?
“Why are you surprised?” Amos asked me. “Do we look like four normal, happy men? Hasn’t it occurred to you? The