Gilead - Marilynne Robinson [94]
Jack said, "I came home and there was no one there. It was a bit of a shock."
Boughton said, in that hearty voice he can still muster when he wants to sound as though he's telling the truth, "I'm sorry, Jack! Ames and I have been looking after each other while the women are out at the movies! We thought you would be gone a little longer!"
"Yes. Well, no harm done," he said, and he sat down when I asked him to again, and he kept his eyes on me, with that half-smile he has when he wants you to know he knows what's really going on and he can't quite believe you persist in trying to fool him. Boughton sort of nodded off then, as he does when conversations get difficult, and I can't blame him, though I do have my heart to consider, too. Because it was a considerable strain on me to think what to say to Jack, as it always is and always has been, it seems to me. I felt sorry for him, and that's a fact. It seems almost a curse to me the way he can see through people. Of course, I couldn't be honest with him, so there I was being dishonest with him, and there he was watching me as if I were the worst liar in the world, as if I were insulting him, as I suppose in fact I was.
"Your father felt like he needed to get out of the house," I said.
He said, "Understandable."
In fact, that was a ridiculous thing for me to have said, considering that it's about all Boughton can do to walk from his bed to his chair on the porch.
2 I said, "I suppose he wanted to take advantage of the good weather while it lasts."
"I'm sure he did."
"Well," I said, after a minute, "this is some year for acorns!" which was perfectly pitiful. Jack laughed outright. "The crows have made an impressive showing," he said.
"And the gourds are particularly shapely and abundant, I think." And all that time he was looking at me as if to say, Let's just be honest with each other for five minutes.
Now, I excuse myself in that I don't know what the truth actually is. I do believe his father came here to, in effect, warn me about him, but I am not absolutely certain of it. And in any case, I can hardly betray a confidence, especially not one as inflammatory and injurious as that one, certainly not with poor old Boughton sitting there three feet from me, quite probably listening to the whole conversation. But dishonesty is dishonesty, a humiliating thing to be caught at, especially when you have no choice but to persist in it, and to salvage as much of the deception as you can, under the very eye of indignation, so to speak.
On the other hand, as an old man, his father's senior by a couple of years despite my relative vigor, such as it is, I feel I have a right not to be deviled in this way. If the point was to make me angry, I am angry as I write this. My heart is up to something that is alarming the rest of my body, in fact. I must go pray. I wonder what he knows about my heart.
Well, of course he must know a good deal about my heart, since your mother did enlist him in bringing my study downstairs. When I pray about all this, it is a sense of the sadness in him that keeps coming to my mind. He is someone who must 2 be forgiven a great deal on the grounds of that strange suffering. And when the three of you came back, which you did fairly soon, things were much better. Glory seemed a little startled at first at finding Jack there, but your mother was pleased to see him, as she always is, I believe.
You liked the movie. Tobias isn't allowed to go to movies, so you brought him almost half your box of Cracker Jacks, which I thought was decent of you. I wonder whether you should go to movies. But with television in the house, there seems no point in forbidding them. Of course Tobias can't watch television, either. Your mother promised his mother we'd see to that whenever he comes over, which is often enough to make you miss the Cisco Kid a lot more frequently than you would like. You're not the most sociable child in the world, and I'm a little afraid that, given a choice, Tobias or television, your best chum