Saints (2 page)

He tiptoed to the door, carrying the paintbrush and his shoes. He closed the door to his and Anna’s room and stepped carefully down the stairs. He did not open the door of Robert’s and Charlie’s room, for fear they would waken, for fear that seeing Robert he wouldn’t have the heart to leave. And he did not walk to Dinah’s cot in the kitchen. He did not need to. She was wide awake to meet him at the foot of the stairs.

“Father,” she said.

“Sh,” he answered. “Go back to bed.”

But she did not go back to bed, only stood there in her nightgown, watching him. Look at someone else with your sharp eyes, girl. I won’t be held back now. She said nothing, and the silence tore him.

“I’m not going far, Dinah,” he insisted. “And I’ll come back soon.”

A lie, of course it was a lie, he knew it as he spoke and saw that she knew it also. Oh, no, of course she
believed
him. Of course she
believed
that he’d come home. But already behind her inscrutable face she was making plans, figuring ways to get along without him. I need you, said her expressionless face; I don’t need you at all. Well, to hell with you women and your miserable dependency, your infuriating independence. I am free of you forever, free of you all.

He closed the door behind him and set out for London. Within minutes it seemed he was out of Manchester, walking on a country road. The morning dawned in his face, with all nature spread between the light and his eyes. Cows mooed, and whimsically and joyously he answered them, earning the curious stares of the farmers—the poor farmers, who understood nothing, to whom cows were nothing more than machines for consuming grass and turning it to shit. No one understands. Only God and I, and there are things that I can teach him, too.

Anna reached out in her sleep; her hand stretched out and touched the body that lay breathing warmly beside her. But it was not her husband’s body; the habitual movement was interrupted. She awoke.

“Dinah,” she whispered in surprise. “What are you doing here? Where’s your father?”

Dinah awoke slowly, as if the sleep were her fortress, and she was slow to surrender it.

“Where’s father? Where’s your father?”

“He went out,” Dinah answered.

“Went out! It’s still nighttime!”

“He had his paints.”

Innocent enough, it was surely innocent enough. Then why did he say nothing to her, if he meant to arise early and go paint? No, no, she knew it was more than a painting trip this time; knew at once, in fact, that John Kirkham had left her for good. Dinah must have seen the grief and fear in her face, for the girl began to tremble.

“Hush, be still; why are you shaking, child?” Anna asked.

“I’m cold,” Dinah answered.

“So am I,” Anna whispered. “But we’ll be strong women together, won’t we, Dinah, and help each other. Won’t we? Won’t we?” And after holding her daughter for a while, Anna felt the clenched arms grow limp, felt the girl’s hot breath get slow. Sleep, child. Sleep, child. Over and over Anna said the words to herself. Sleep, child. He said he loved me. And the children, said he loved the children. Sleep, child. He’ll be back before breakfast. Sleep, sleep, child.

But he did not come for breakfast. Charlie took it all calmly enough, but Robert’s questions showed that he could not be fooled. Dinah was quiet, of course: Who could tell what this strange child thought behind her silence?

She sent Robert and Dinah off to school, and once the breakfast dishes were cleared away, she told Charlie to bring the Bible and come with her as she did the laundry. She lugged the large basket down the stairs. Of course he’ll come back. I have all his shirts here, he must come back and get them.

“Tell me the piece you learned yesterday, from the Bible, Charlie.”

“The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s,” he said. “‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.’”

She turned on him in fury. “Who told you to learn that piece!”

“No one,” he said.

She saw that he was terrified. How could he have known? She softened toward him. “Charlie, another book. Not that one. That’s all. Just not that one.”

So he began to recite a passage out of
Wealth of Nations
. John had always sneered at her for having the boy learn Adam Smith as if he were Homer. “He doesn’t understand a word of it,” John had said. “And the Psalms! No one understands
those
but God and King David, and I’m not altogether sure about God.”

Charlie droned on about diminishing supply and increasing demand. The Song of Songs. The first time the Song of Songs meant something to her was at a picnic with John Kirkham by the River Medlock, far upriver of Manchester, up where the water was perfect and clear. They were only ten days from their wedding, and he had read passages of Song of Songs as they leaned in the grass of the riverbank. It was too much for her, his voice, his beauty, and her own desire. She let him take her—or did she force herself upon him?—she was never sure. Enough that they had sinned; immediately afterward they burned so with shame that they knelt and prayed for forgiveness of the sin. She thought that surely God would strike them down for their impudence, to pray after fornication. Yet even as she prayed, Anna had wondered how God could have been so cruel as to create man and woman in such a way that they could not resist each other’s beauty, and then command them upon threat of eternal torment not to have each other till the black-frocked pastor gave consent.

Oddly, she remembered, John was more ashamed of his loss of self-control than she had been, and on their wedding night he had trembled and fumbled so that she could hardly believe he was not a virgin. “Just like before, John,” she had whispered. “It should work a second time, don’t you think?” And he laughed and mumbled something about being out of his element when he couldn’t hear the rush of clear water and the singing of a bird. “It’ll be a lonely winter, then,” she had answered, “till the birds come back and the rivers thaw.” John adapted quickly. Six pregnancies, and three children who lived into their second year. We may not be good at money, but children we can make.

“Why are you crying, Mother?”

“I’m not.”

Charlie helped her wring the shirts, and they carried the heavy basket into the house together. There was Robert, books in hand, standing at the foot of the stairs.

“Why aren’t you in school?” she asked sharply.

“He’s never coming back.”

Since she couldn’t argue, she reached out and held him. He clung to her, and cried a little, hiding the shame of his tears in his mother’s shoulder.

Charlie looked on in puzzlement, and finally, to Anna’s annoyance and Robert’s rage, began to cry. “Hold me, Mother! I’m sad!” So she held him, and shook her head at Robert to stop him from saying anything cutting to his little brother.

All afternoon she kept the boys busy at household tasks. She half-expected Dinah to show up at noon, or at least before the close of school. Was she that much stronger than Robert, that she could bear to be among the other children at a time like this? But there was another reason why Dinah was so strong. She had believed her father’s final words to her.

She looked around the moment she got home. “Is he back yet?”

“No,” Anna said.

“Then soon,” she said confidently.

“He won’t be back,” Robert said.

“He said he would,” Dinah answered. That settled it. There could be no more argument. I have failed you somewhere in your education, Anna said silently to her daughter. I didn’t teach you to recognize a lie. I didn’t teach you that fathers abandon families and lie to their children as they leave.

For once, Dinah was not quiet at night. Instead she talked and talked, and the longer she went on, the clearer it became that she, too, knew that John had left them all for good. “He’ll come back and give us carriage rides tomorrow,” Dinah said. “He’ll come back with marzipan. He’ll have a beautiful painting of the king on his horse. And he won’t be tired, so he’ll be glad to play with us.”

Charlie was drinking it in, but Robert could not bear it. “Why do you lie about carriage rides?”

“It’s not a lie!” Dinah shouted back at him.

Anna was not used to hearing Dinah shout. “Children, enough of that now. We don’t know where your father went, or when he’ll bother to come home or tell us something of what he means to do. And in the meantime, it’s better not to think of him returning. That way when he comes it’ll be a surprise.”

Robert frowned. “I don’t need to have you trick me to be happy. I’m almost a man now, and I can bear the truth.”

Can you? Then try this truth, Anna thought. My time of month is five days late. Only six times in my life has such a thing happened, and each time it meant there was a child in me. See what you make of such a parting gift from my loving husband. I wonder if you’d want the truth, if you guessed even a tenth of what lies ahead of us. Less than twenty pounds in the box under the bed, after what he so kindly took. Bear that for a while, and see how straight you stand.

Those were her thoughts; her voice, when she spoke, was kinder. “You aren’t
almost
a man, Robert, you
are
a man, and must act like one for our sake. You must be strong, like a father to Charlie and Dinah and a good right arm to me.”

It was only then that Dinah openly admitted what had happened. And at the age of ten, she was already something like the woman she was going to be. “If father’s gone, then we’ll have no money,” she said. “We’ll have to stop going to school.”

“Not right away,” Anna said. “The week’s tuition is already paid.”

“And his paintings,” Dinah said. “We can sell them.”

It was a horrifying thought—the paintings, I can’t sell my husband’s paintings! How could this child think of such a thing!

But by week’s end, Anna knew her daughter was right. She sold the frames for ten and sixpence. The man took the canvases as well, but only gave her three shillings for them. Anna didn’t think twice. They couldn’t eat canvas; and if three shillings was all the paint was worth, so be it. It was the only patrimony John Kirkham’s children would ever get. Anna thought of giving a shilling to each child. Here, Robert, here, Charlie, your inheritance. Here, Dinah, your dowry. Thank your loving father.

When she came home to the bare-walled cottage, bearing the payment, Robert brought in a stack of books from the other room. “These, too,” he said.

“No,” Anna answered.

“His paintings, and not the books?” It was a quiet rebellion, but no less dangerous for all that.

“Aye,” she said. “We keep the books, we sell the paintings. Because we’re not tradesmen, we’re better than that. My father was a learned man, and even wrote a book. We will read and we will write, and we will think great thoughts because those that don’t might as well be sheep.”

Then she counted out their money on the table. “Enough for three months,” she said. “If we scrimp.”

“I’ll take work,” Robert said.

“And so will I, and so no doubt will Dinah, and Charlie’s only seven but in a few years he’ll earn his pennies, too. But you’re all children, and they scarce pay grown men enough to stay alive in the sort of work you’d have to do. And what can
I
do, blessed as I am with John’s last gift to me?” She tried to laugh, to make her worry seem like exasperation, but the children were not fooled. Humble as their cottage was, it was too rich for them now. And before the money ran out, Anna found them another place.

The man wasn’t there yet to cart their goods, but the furniture was stacked in the street, ready to be loaded. Dinah went alone upstairs. She found Robert there, sitting with his back to the wardrobe in what had been his father’s and mother’s room. The wardrobe belonged to the landlord, and would stay. He did not look up when Dinah entered. Only stared at the wall where the paper had faded above the headboard of his parents’ bed.

“Sir Redcrosse,” Dinah said.

At that he stirred and looked at her. He remembered the ancient game they had played, and smiled at her. “Fair Lady Una, I fear this is no fit habitation for thee.”

“Enough for me or any Christian, if the love of God is here.”

Robert resisted the game for a moment; he was too old, he was a man, he couldn’t play with his sister as they had in the attic of the store, when they had lived above it. He laughed; he shook his head; he refused.

But Dinah’s dream was too strong for him—it always was. She showed no sign of being Dinah Kirkham at all. She was Una, and she pled with him to help her on her way. “But beware of the dread monster Error,” she warned him, and her voice was so afraid and yet so stern with authority that he could only whisper to her, “I fear you misjudge me, Lady. A knight I am called, but my armor is borrowed, and my arm is yet untried in battle.”

She reached out and touched his cheek. “Sir Redcrosse, every knight must fight his first battle, and if it is against a great enemy, so much more the worship that will come to him in victory.”

“You’re too good at this,” Robert said, making his last try at ending the game.

“If you won’t fight for my good, Sir Redcrosse,” Dinah whispered, “then I am surely alone.”

She was so mournful that it touched his heart despite his unwillingness to play. He got to his feet, he looked down at his sister, who looked upward to him with so much hope, and he believed her. She saw him as Sir Redcrosse, and so it must be true. In the hour before the carter came to load the furniture and bear them all away, Sir Redcrosse slew Error, killed the dragon, and discerned the false Duessa, restoring Una to her rightful place.

“Thank you, my lord,” Dinah said to him at the end.

“I don’t know which you do better, Dinah. Una or Duessa.”

Dinah at last returned to herself, and laughed sadly, laughed in a way that made Robert think she must surely be older than her mere ten years. “I do best with the one that’s really me.” Robert did not ask her which that was. He thought he knew.

They walked before the cart up Portland Street to Piccadilly and from there through the heart of mercantile Manchester. They had not been poor long enough for their clothing to be wretched, but Robert keenly felt the fact that the men who got in and out of carriages were dressed in a way that would have made his father look and feel rather fine, and not as tired and emptied-out as he had looked since Robert had been old enough to notice such things. The men in fine clothing greeted each other jovially on the street, but said nothing, gave no sign they even saw the many common tradesmen who passed by on errands through the streets.

“Why are they rich?” Robert asked his mother.

“Hush,” she said, not wishing to be conspicuous, though in fact no one paid them the slightest notice.

“Why are they so fine? Why not us?”

“Because they have the money,” Anna said impatiently.

“And how did they get it?” asked Robert.

“By being wise and educated and deserving and by praying to God always.”

Robert was silent for a few moments, and Anna thought she had done with the foolish conversation.

“I,” he announced loudly, shattering her delusion, “shall also be wise and educated and deserving and pray to God always.”

“You still won’t be rich,” Dinah said. Anna looked sharply at her daughter, wondering, as she always did, how much her daughter really understood.

“Why not!” Robert demanded.

“Because,” Dinah answered, “they won’t give any of their money to such a poor boy as you.”

Robert digested this idea in silence for awhile. A carriage came briskly through the street, horses atrot, and the driver cursed at their carter, who only shrugged. The man inside the carriage seemed not to notice the argument, did not seem to notice the street at all. Robert watched after him, and finally said, “If they won’t give me any money, then I’ll take it from them.”