Jack by Marilynne Robinson

Author:Marilynne Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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He came back the next Sunday for two reasons. Actually three. He could drop those coins into the collection plate, putting various things right even if no one noticed he had done it. A metaphysics is a great help in rationalizing scruple-driven behavior. Then there was dinner. And there was the fact that that whole week he had been feeling “Blessed Jesus” and “Sweet Hour of Prayer” and even “Holy, Holy, Holy” in his fingers. So he had thought he might as well go back the next Sunday and put himself in the way of some moral edification. He remembered glorious soprano voices rising out of the congregation to second the choir. He even liked the feeling that he stirred that tentative interest, that bated warmth, church people feel toward a stray in their midst.

Things were going well enough at the dance studio. The instructors came early to sprinkle a powdery wax on the floor and walk or waltz it slippery, playing at elegance in preparation for feigning it when customers appeared. They studied charts and followed them out till they could do the steps with a little ease and flair. He would repeat them all day long with his arms around perfumey women. One two three, one two three. It was an innocuous proof of the oddness of the world, and there was music. On his way home one evening, he bought a small geranium plant with a red blossom on it and set it on his windowsill. This was a first step toward improving the impression his room would make on Della, if he ever actually nerved himself to bring her into it. But the plant deeply changed his own impression of the room. He even dreamed one night that he heard those heavy shoes on the stairs, the police, but this time when they came through the door they were distracted by the sight of the geranium, as if it refuted suspicion, dispelling the mild aversion felt toward him and his kind by the constabulary. Assuming he had a kind. Its implications seemed so great to him, even by light of day, that leaving it where it was was an actual decision. It had its effect when he set it on the dresser and on the bedside table.

Saturday came and he had a little money, so he went to a used bookstore, as he had often done lately, with the thought that he might find something to leave on Della’s front step. Nothing was adequate, no très riches heures. Nothing quaint and curious, no gem of rarest ray serene, in that musty little cave walled with failed efforts of every literary kind, growing drabber together as the years passed. Still, the sheer mass of books and the smell of them always made him imagine the existence of the pure and perfect book, poetry no doubt, just barely translated from some ancient tongue, an earthy strangeness clinging to it. The owner of the place, a large,

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