Saving Grace (49 page)

As if the audience were a single beast, its eyes shift to Jonathan, sitting in the shadows in the back of the stage. Only Grace does not look. She folds her hands on the podium and says shortly, “I prefer to write fiction.”

“Why? Why trivialize important political issues by novelizing them?”

“Good fiction doesn’t trivialize, and it has one advantage at least over nonfiction: it never pretends to be the one-and-only right way of seeing things. I think it was Einstein who said, ‘Imagination is greater than knowledge.’ I believe that. It’s at the heart of what I do. And you know, we all do what we can.”

Slowly, staring at her, the young man sits. The questions that follow are ones she’s answered many times before. Where do you get your ideas? Are your books autobiographical? Do you know when you start a book where you’re heading, or do you just go with the flow? She answers graciously, without thought.

Afterward there is a wine-and-cheese reception: faculty members and a few handpicked students. Then her father takes her home.

Jonathan lives in a little country house in northern Columbia County, a forty-minute drive from the university where he teaches three days a week. It’s a simple two-story farmhouse, with wide- board oak floors and fireplaces in the living room and the library. The house is set on twelve open and wooded acres; behind it stands a small apple orchard. “Macouns,” Jonathan tells her. “Their season’s short, they’re hard to grow, and the apples don’t store well. But they’re the best damn apples I’ve ever tasted.”

Grace has never seen this house. The last time she visited, Jonathan lived in a rented apartment in Albany. The land and the house, which he owns, speak of a life regenerated, if solitary. “It’s lovely,” she says; he answers a bit defensively, “I like the quiet. In prison it never was. You develop a lust for peace.”

In the living room he kneels to light the fire, then holds his hands out toward the flames. They are liver-spotted and translucent, an old man’s hands grafted onto a younger man’s body. The rest of him looks vital, strong. The years of suffering have carved deep lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth, and his hair is completely gray. But his back is straight, his eyes are clear and full of light.

The telephone rings and Jonathan goes into the kitchen to answer it. Gracie pokes around the room. The furniture is a pleasing hodgepodge: woven Navajo rugs and Shaker cabinets, a padded deacon’s bench that does duty as a sofa, a heavy oak rocker, and two wing chairs set before the fireplace. None of it comes from their old houses. In a box of kindling and old newspapers, she spies a desiccated copy of the
Probe.
She carries it to the rocking chair and flips through. Barnaby’s name is nowhere to be found.

Her father’s voice drifts in from the kitchen. “Of course they say that, what would you expect them to say?... It doesn’t work that way. The whole point of bureaucracy is obfuscation and delay.... Sure, if that’s what it takes…If you get a good show of students, you can count on most of the tenured faculty. The untenured obviously have more to lose.... That’s not nearly enough.... Yeah, but if you want to get their attention, you need numbers....”

When he returns, Grace tosses the paper aside hastily.

Jonathan laughs. “Afraid I’ll slap your hand? He doesn’t work for them anymore.”

With elaborate disinterest she replies, “Who does he write for?”

“No one, as far as I know. While I was still in prison, he left the
Probe.
There was some talk about a book, but it never materialized. For a while he did a radio talk show, but that fizzled out, and I guess at some point he gave up and left town. That name you pinned on him stuck, you know. Mosquito Man, they called him. It didn’t help his career.”

Gracie nods toward the kitchen. “I thought you swore off politics.”

“I did. It’s just a student thing. The university has endowment money in nasty places and the kids are agitating for divestiture. Well,” he says with a lopsided smile, “they asked for help, I didn’t thrust it upon them.”

“You can take the man out of politics, but you can’t take the politics out of the man.”

“Look who’s talking.” He sits beside her on the deacon’s bench. “I meant what I said today about your work.”

“I had a good teacher.”

Jonathan laughs. “In the ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ mode.”

“I don’t
do
anything. I just write.” Lately, Grace has felt a growing dissatisfaction with the safe and sheltered life she’s fashioned for herself. Her father’s apprentice, she was intended for a larger life than the one she has chosen to live. Her books are her emissaries; they march out into the world like obedient toy soldiers, but it’s no longer enough. Month by month her country grows more polarized. The second-class status of Israel’s Arabs compares itself to that of southern blacks before the age of civil rights; and Grace is one of those who has always said enviously, “If only I’d lived in that era... ” Like a war horse, she quivers at the call to arms.

He regards her closely. “Just? You must know your books are more effective than another body on a picket line.”

“Maybe.” She changes the subject. “Do you hear from Paul?”

His face freezes. “Not much. Do you?”

“Christmas cards. With pictures of Theresa and the children gathered around the tree, and a cheery little mimeographed note.” Her brother lives in the Midwest, an executive for Philip Morris.

“I get those too. Fine-looking children.” There’s a silence, uncomfortable on her part, forlorn on his. Jonathan has never met these grandchildren, never spoken to them. He doesn’t know their birthdays. He used to send Christmas presents but they came back unopened. Paul’s phone number is unlisted and he doesn’t answer letters.

“Jerk,” she mutters; but she’s thinking that Jonathan has met her own son only once, Talia never. If she’s the white sheep, it’s only by comparison.

Jonathan shrugs. “He means well.”

“No, he doesn’t. He’s rubbing salt in the wound is all.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I know. Though I expect that if my books ever make me really famous, he’ll decide I’m worth knowing again.”

Gracie spends the night beneath her father’s roof. She tosses and turns but cannot fall asleep. When she was small and sleep wouldn’t come, she would creep into her parents’ bed and take comfort from their slumbering warmth. They were her rigid poles, the moorings against whose fixity she could rail and buck, secure in their fastness. When they broke, she was cast adrift. Was it fair that now, in the safe port of her marriage, in the harbor of her own motherhood, she should feel such unanswerable longing?

Toward morning she falls into an uneasy sleep. She dreams of her daughter, who has recently discovered her hands, but cannot yet control them. Talia lies in her crib, eyeing the mobile strung across it. Her little mouth puckers with desire, her tongue protrudes, her whole body begins to quiver and shake. She kicks her feet and arches her back, and suddenly her two arms fly out and brush the mobile, which rattles and chimes. Seeing what she herself has done, the infant laughs aloud.

Waking, Gracie knows at once that she was dreaming of herself. At eighteen she had the same passionate, haphazard coordination, not physically but morally. She saw no difference, then, between a person and his deeds, recognized no degrees of guilt. Good and evil were absolute, and to the perception of evil she reacted with blind and spastic indignation.

Given time, she would have gained coordination. Given time, she would have seen for herself what her mother tried to show her, that Jonathan’s failures were of judgment, never love. But they were given no time.

Gracie loves her father. She never stopped, even when she betrayed him. The ocean she keeps between them is the measure of her love, and of her fear.

When she thinks of family, she thinks of Micha, Tamar, and the children, not her parents. And yet she is aware that the family we are born into is the template for the one we create. This theory fills her with dread, for if it is true, then she is bound to lose the ones she loves. Grace believes in free choice and binding love, but she has seen how one erodes the other.

Jonathan wakes her, knocking on her door. “We have so little time,” he says by way of apology, and leaves a cup of steaming coffee by her bed.

The house is full of winter light, so quiet that with her eyes shut she can imagine herself back in the desert. Barefoot, Gracie carries her cup to the window. Outside, the ground is covered with a thick white quilt. The trees in the orchard are silver filigree. The road cannot be seen. She wonders how she will get to the airport, and decides, with an odd satisfaction, that she probably won’t. The smell of bacon drifts in under her door. She dresses quickly and goes downstairs.

The kitchen is pungent with burning wood, and the table is set for two, with a covered dish of scrambled eggs, a plate of bacon, sliced tomatoes, thick-sliced sourdough rye bread, and creamery butter. Grace sits down and says, “Tell me you don’t eat like this every day.”

Jonathan looks over from the counter, where he is pouring fresh coffee into mugs. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s a great treat, but have you checked your cholesterol lately?”

A slow smile spreads over his face, deepening the lines around his eyes.

She says, “What?”

“For a moment, you sounded just like your mother.”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

He sets the mugs on the table and sits beside her. “I’m in perfect health.”

“You look it, actually.”

“So do you. Israel agrees with you.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re happy,” Jonathan says; it is neither a question nor an answer, but something in between. “It’s still your choice to live there.”

“Come see for yourself,” Grace says, looking at him.

The room is so quiet she can hear the snow fall.

Her father says, “I’ve never been asked.”

“You have, lots of times. Tamar’s asked you, Yaacov’s asked you... ”

“You haven’t.”

“No,” she says. “But I’m asking you now.”

Jonathan gets up from the table and feeds the wood-burning stove. When he returns, his face is flushed.

“Feeling sorry for the lonely old man?”

“Not at all.”

“I’ve got a life, you know. I have friends. I have work. I have my books and my own writing.”

“That’s nice. All you need is a dog and you’re set for life.”

She catches him with a mouthful of coffee. When he laughs, the coffee spurts out over the table. “God, Gracie, I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too, Daddy. I love you.” As she speaks these words, Grace is seized with dread. It comes to her that no sooner did she say them to her mother than Lily slipped through her arms and died.

But her father shows no signs of succumbing. He doesn’t melt away, clutch his head, or crumple to the floor. He just takes a slice of bread and butters it thoughtfully.

“How about April?” he says.