The Tree of Forgetfulness (17 page)

The priest stood in front of the altar, holding the gold plate piled with consecrated wafers. He nudged his father, mouthed, “Come on.”

“You go,” his father whispered.

Rather than disobey or argue and sin on the way to Communion, he kissed his father on the forehead and left the pew and got in the line that inched toward the altar. He folded his hands and looked down at his shoes and tried to prepare his heart and mind to receive the Host, but before he could stop himself, he began to worry about eternity. Sometimes in catechism class, after they'd each pricked a finger with a straight pin and tried to magnify that small, sharp pain into the agony our Lord had endured at His crucifixion, the nuns would make them close their eyes and imagine eternity. Given a choice between pain and eternity, he'd take the straight pin any day. Trying to imagine time without end made him queasy and panicky, as though he were falling and falling, grabbing at air as he fell. Eternity was where you went when you died, the nuns said. And whatever you found there, bliss or torment, would never end.

He was almost to the altar rail when the thought hit him like a punch to the chest: If his father died with a mortal sin on his soul, he would go to hell for eternity. The church was clear about that. Although sometimes a very good and holy person could beseech God on behalf of a sinner and God would forgive the sinner, even at the hour of his death, and whisk him to paradise. The nuns said it had been known to happen.

He checked his posture to make sure it was correct: eyes downcast, hands folded, small reverent steps. Receiving Communion properly
was the first step toward becoming the person who might be able to save his father's soul, and he would offer up the rest of the day as well. He would respect his elders, provoke no one, offer no occasion of sin.

At his grandfather's house, where they always went for Sunday dinner, he pressed the doorbell four times, heard it jangle way in the back. He stood on tiptoes and looked through the thick glass of the door into the dim interior. At the end of the hall a light burned, and then someone was coming because the light came and went. And then Marie opened the door, and his grandfather was right behind her, leaning on his cane. He had a pale face and a bony nose, long white hair brushed back from a high forehead. He had bright eyes, and he always looked like he was about to tell you a big secret. “Good afternoon, young sir,” he said, and Lewis bowed the way the old man had taught him—a quick dip forward with one hand held at his waist. “That's my boy,” his grandfather said.

While his grandfather greeted his father and mother, Lewis ran into the parlor off the hall to wait. There were ferns on stands, heavy plum-colored drapes pulled across the windows. Where the drapes didn't quite meet, a bright strip of light pushed through. That was where he wanted to be, outside in the light and air, not trapped in here with the grownups where the talk was as heavy as the drapes.

Today, however, he would not be restless. He would wait patiently for his grandfather to come in and open the top drawer of the highboy and take out the wooden box, creak open the lid, lift the pistol out of the faded red lining, and hand it to Lewis. He would hold the pistol and listen patiently to the story of how Dr. Hastings's father, his own great-grandfather, had carried it in the war and then how Dr. Hastings had carried it at places called Hamburg and Ellenton and how one day the gun would belong to Lewis. He must honor the gun, his grandfather would say, and give it to
his
son and tell him the story and never allow the gun to leave the family. Every Sunday Dr. Hastings told this story as if Lewis had never heard it, and every Sunday Lewis had to promise to do what his grandfather asked, as though he'd never made
that promise before. The story bored him. It bored the
snot
out of him, but today he would offer up the boredom and wait patiently for his grandfather to come and show the gun and tell the story.

While he waited in the parlor, he heard his father's voice in the hall. It sounded tight, the way it did when he was trying to keep his temper, the way it sounded coming through the vent. “Dr. Hastings,” he said, “I would prefer if we skipped the gun today, sir.”

“Now, Howard,” he heard his mother say. “Why spoil it for them?”

“Haven't we all had enough of guns for a while?” his father said.

He went and stood in the parlor's wide opening, where the two heavy pocket doors had been pushed back on their tracks into the wall. He pulled them out and pushed them back with both arms, like Samson pushing down the pillars of the temple in his illustrated book of Bible stories. He did this a few times until his mother warned him with her eyes. Down the hall he watched his father turn carefully toward his mother. “Just for today, Libba, if you will indulge me, please,” he said.

“No, I want to see it, really,” he said. “Please show it to me, Grandfather.” But that was the wrong thing to do. His father walked past him down the hall, shaking his head, unhappy with Lewis. Again.

The dining room was dim; the whole house was dim. It smelled like the clay pots stacked in his mother's greenhouse, like the cellar under his house. When he went into it, he always felt like he was holding his nose and going underwater. In the blazing summer heat the house stayed cool, which was nice, but in the winter the stuffy heat and the dimness and the heavy drapes and the hissing radiators made him drowsy. In the dining room there were more ferns on stands and a long, polished table, a tall, austere sideboard where the silver service shone on its silver tray. His father pulled out his mother's chair then sat down and spread his napkin on his lap and waited, looking as though he had a stomachache, for Dr. Hastings to say grace. He would have to try harder, Lewis thought. He would offer up his boredom and his restlessness and hope that the fragrance of his sacrifice would rise like incense to God's nose.

His grandfather spread his own napkin on his lap, folded his hands, and was about to recite the blessing when, without thinking, Lewis
crossed himself. Dr. Hastings frowned at him; he didn't like to see the Sign of the Cross made at his table, and when he frowned, his thick white eyebrows bunched together, his whole face hardened. What if Dr. Hastings turned into the Roman emperor Hadrian and forbade him to make the Sign of the Cross? What if his grandfather demanded that he renounce the Catholic faith? Would he have the courage to refuse and be torn apart by lions or shot with arrows, stoned or boiled in oil or driven naked onto a frozen lake? It might be good to be a martyr, he thought, to die for your faith and cancel all your sins at once. And then he would be a saint—all the martyrs were saints. He could intercede with God on his father's behalf, and God would have to listen.

They were all looking at him: his mother signaling
Behave yourself
with her eyes, his grandfather frowning. Arms folded across his chest, his father watched as Lewis lifted his hand and moved his arm in a wide, slow, exaggerated motion—forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder. “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he said.

Dr. Hastings pushed back his chair and stood up, his mouth gone grim. “At my own table,” he said. “Shame on you.” And he left the room.

Now, Lewis thought, the hour was upon him: His grandfather would come back with the old gun. He would aim it at his grandson's heart, but Lewis would spread his arms, unafraid, and welcome the bullet that would end his earthly life and save his father's immortal soul. He crossed himself slowly again. His mother looked at his father with tears in her eyes.

His father jerked him out of his chair so hard his napkin flew off of his lap. He marched Lewis down the hall and into the room where the gun stayed and pushed him down onto the maroon settee. He was as angry as Lewis had ever seen him: angrier than he'd been about the photograph, the fears, the bed-wetting, about anything. “What's gotten into you?” His father's face was very red. “What do you mean bedeviling your grandfather? Embarrassing your mother that way? Now you stay here until I tell you to come out. If I hear a peep out of you, I'll tan your hide.”

After the pocket doors rumbled shut, Lewis sat on the settee the way he'd been told, while the big bag of tears inside his chest got heavier. He'd provoked his elders again, and now his soul was probably as stained and corroded as his father's. The least he could do now was to obey the letter and the spirit of the law his father had laid down.

He sat there quietly for a long time, watching the sun push through the gap in the velvet drapes. Marie bustled and sang in the kitchen, and he wished he could go sit with her and eat two pieces of cake and talk about Jesus. His mother went into the room next to the parlor and opened the upright piano and began to play “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” the way she did after every Sunday dinner. If he went in, he'd find her playing quietly and singing to the photograph of his dead uncle Lewis that sat on top of the piano, as though the man with the pink lips, the yellow hair and sky blue eyes could hear her. It worried him to see her do that; he should go in there and lean against her arm to show that he was sorry. But if he went into the parlor, she might grab him and hold his chin and look into his eyes and tell him how much he looked like his uncle. Besides, he'd been banished; he didn't deserve to do any of the normal Sunday things. He deserved to sit on the scratchy settee in the stuffy room and contemplate his sinfulness.

Outside the window he heard his father's voice and his grandfather's. He got up and crept to the window and inched it open. Beyond the camellia bush that grew outside the window, he could see his father and his grandfather walking back and forth. “Somebody better watch himself,” his grandfather said.

His father said, “Why tell me this?” And his grandfather said he was just saying that man better watch his step, and anyone stepping along with him should watch out too, because when you knock down a hornet's nest, what do you expect to fly out?

“He sought
me
out,” his father said. “Not the other way around.”

“So I've heard. I am only looking out for your best interests and the safety of my daughter and grandson. People are talking, Howard,” his grandfather said.

Just then he heard his mother's light, quick footsteps coming down the hall. “And I'll tell you something else, the sheriff—“ was the last
thing he heard before he shut the window, ran back to the couch, and lay face down, with a pillow over his head. Was the sheriff coming to take his father? Was he going to jail, possibly to the electric chair, with a mortal sin on his soul? Lewis cried for a while then fell asleep with his cheek pressed against the wet spot on the scratchy fabric of the settee, and when he woke up, his father was carrying him. His hand pressed Lewis's head against his chest, and Lewis could hear his father's heart beating slowly, reliably, as though it would beat forever. But Lewis knew better. One of the devil's evilest tricks was to lull us into believing things were fine so we'd think we had nothing to worry about. But the nuns had taught him to be vigilant. He would have to start over again, confess and make a good Act of Contrition and double the penance the priest gave him. He would have to free his own soul from sin if he hoped to be strong enough to save his father.

F
IFTEEN YEARS LATER
, when Lewis is about to be married, he will send his son a letter of fatherly advice. “You are taking on a big responsibility, but it is one that will make you a better man. Remember you have to be tolerant and respecting of her wishes at all times regardless. Just play the game square, and I know you will.” He will mail the letter in complete confidence of the soundness of his advice, for who knew how to play a square game better than a man who had done it every day of his adult life? Who played it square all day at the office and then went home to square things with his wife? A man who would get out of bed at 10 p.m. to take the rich man's call then drive across town to the man's estate to listen while the man's wife sketched out an idea for improving the grounds.

Playing the game square was what he was doing at exactly four o'clock on November 5, 1926, when he walked through the French doors into the Highland Park Hotel ballroom, holding Lewis by the hand. Every year he paused just inside these same doors and looked down the length of the ballroom and was pleased by the orderly way the crowd moved among rows of tables arranged to place the yellow chrysanthemums next to the pink dahlias, the dahlias next to the maidenhair ferns, the red chrysanthemums, then the white. How harmonious it all looked in the light coming through three tall arched windows and showering down from the crystal chandelier in the center of the ceiling. The harmony, the beauty, the artistry, was all Libba's doing, and he admired that most of all.

Onstage a piano, drums, and guitar waited in a spotlight, and on the wall behind hung the banner: 15
TH ANNUAL AIKEN FLOWER SHOW
painted in green letters above a row of golden-yellow daffodils. From somewhere up front he heard Libba's bright voice, threaded through the hubbub of the crowded room. “You don't mean it,” she said. “Well, aren't you sweet?” and he tracked the voice to Libba herself, in her new green velvet dress and creamy stockings, her bright mouth and dark, upswept hair. “Run go find your mother, scoot,” he said to Lewis. “I'll be along directly.”

He looked down the ballroom again and was pleased with the part he'd played in helping his beautiful wife make the world beautiful again. He'd paid Zeke to wax and buff the bright pine floor, to climb a ladder and wash the windows. He'd paid Minnie to wash and starch and iron the fifty heavy white tablecloths that covered the tables that held the flowers. He'd paid ten dollars to have the banner painted. Seven dollars for engraving the name of the grand prize winner on the silver tray. Fifty dollars to the band. He'd paid, and he was glad to pay; ponying up was part of playing the game square. All he asked in return was to be allowed to appreciate the beauty and harmony of the world for a few hours.