Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [57]
“I’m sorry!” he cried. “I’m really sorry!”
His mother moved her lips, which seemed unusually wrinkled. No sound emerged.
After a while, he rose awkwardly and left the table. He paused in the dining room doorway, just in case they wanted to call him back. But they didn’t. He crossed the hall and started up the stairs.
For the first time it occurred to him that there was something steely and inhuman to this religion business, Had Reverend Emmett taken fully into account the lonely thud of his sneakers on the steps, the shattered, splintered air he left behind him?
The little lamp on his desk gave off just enough light so it wouldn’t wake Daphne. He leaned over the crib to check on her. She had a feverish smell that reminded him of a sour dishcloth. He straightened her blanket, and then he crossed to the bureau and looked in the mirror that hung above it. Back-lit, he was nothing but a silhouette. He saw himself suddenly as the figure he had feared in his childhood, the intruder who lurked beneath his bed so he had to take a running leap from the doorway every night. He turned aside sharply and picked up the mail his mother had set out for him: a Playboy magazine, an advertisement for a record club, a postcard from his roommate. The magazine and the ad he dropped into the wastebasket. The postcard showed a wild-haired woman barely covered by a white fur dress that hung in strategic zigzags around her thighs. (SHE-WOLVES OF ANTARCTICA! In Vivi-Color! the legend read.) Dear Ian, How do you like my Christmas card? Better late than never. Kind of boring here at home, no Ian and Cicely across the room oh-so-silently hanky-pankying … He winced and dropped the card on top of the magazine. It made a whiskery sound as it landed.
He saw that he was beginning from scratch, from the very ground level, as low as he could get. It was a satisfaction, really.
That night he dreamed he was carrying a cardboard moving carton for Sid ’n’ Ed. It held books or something; it weighed a ton. “Here,” Danny said, “let me help you,” and he took one end and started backing down the steps with it. And all the while he and Ian smiled into each other’s eyes.
It was the last such dream Ian would ever have of Danny, although of course he didn’t know that at the time. At the time he woke clenched and anxious, and all he could think of for comfort was the hymn they had sung in the Church of the Second Chance. “Leaning,” they sang, “leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms …” Gradually he drifted loose, giving himself over to God. He rested all his weight on God, trustfully, serenely, the way his roommate used to rest in his chair that resembled the palm of a hand.
4
Famous Rainbows
Holy Roller, their grandma called it. Holy Roller Bible Camp. She shut a cupboard door and told Thomas, “If you all went to real camp instead of Holy Roller, you wouldn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn every day. And I wouldn’t be standing here half asleep trying to fix you some breakfast.”
But it wasn’t the crack of dawn. Hot yellow bands of sunshine stretched across the linoleum. And she didn’t look half asleep, either. She already had her hair combed, fluffed around her face in a curly gray shower-cap shape. She was wearing the blouse Thomas liked best, the one printed like a newspaper page, and brown knit slacks stretched out in front by the cozy ball of her stomach.
One of the words on her blouse was VICTORY. Another was DISASTER. Thomas hadn’t even started second grade yet but he was able to read nearly every word you showed him.
“If you all went to Camp Cottontail like the Parker children you wouldn’t have to leave till nine A.M.,” his grandma said, inching around the table with a stack of cereal bowls. “An air-conditioned bus would pick you up at the doorstep. But oh, no. Oh, no. That’s too simple for your uncle Ian. Let’s not do it the easy way, your uncle Ian says.”
What Ian had really said was, “Camp Cottontail costs eighty dollars for a two-week session.” Thomas had heard the whole argument. “Eighty dollars per child! Do you realize what that