Skinny Island Read online

  When Gordon came that day, however, they had an unexpected discussion so upsetting to Jane that she didn’t have the force to reveal to him her plan for his future.

  The subject of marriage had come up. Jane, who often sought advice from her ministers on theological subjects, had asked his opinion about a Lyle cousin, a hitherto seemingly unconsolable widow who had just contracted a respectable but surprising second matrimonial alliance with her late husband’s business partner and closest friend.

  “Will they all three find themselves together in heaven?” Jane wanted to know. “I should think it might be rather embarrassing.”

  But Gordon was categorical. “There is no marrying or giving in marriage in the next world.”

  “I know that is believed by many. And in the case I mentioned it may be just as well. But in other cases it might be hard. My brother Adam, for example, and his wife Beth. They are so close, so touchingly dependent on each other. I can hardly bear to think of them as being separated through eternity.”

  “But they will not be separated!” Gordon exclaimed with what struck Jane as an unwarranted agitation. “They will be very much together. All people who love each other truly will be together. It’s simply that there will be no marriage.”

  Jane frowned. “That doesn’t somehow seem quite … well, quite proper.”

  “But, dear Aunt Jane, there’s no propriety or impropriety in heaven! There will be no flesh, so how could there be sin? Love, true love, will always be allowed. Between any two souls that wish to unite!”

  “But supposing there were, say, two male souls that were attracted to one female soul—”

  “There are no sexes in heaven,” he interrupted.

  “But you talk about love. Love as it exists between my brother and sister-in-law. I don’t quite see—”

  “We shall all be free to love all!” Gordon leaned forward excitedly in his chair, almost dropping his teacup. “There will be no rivalries, no jealousies, no monopolies. Except that perhaps two souls, which love each other supremely, ineffably, eternally, may be allowed a special kind of union. Which no other soul will take umbrage at. Oh, yes, I like to believe that!”

  Jane shook her head dubiously. “I’m not sure how everyone would like that. Suppose, for example, that the soul of a dead wife developed this ineffable love for a soul that wasn’t her living husband’s soul? How would he feel? I mean the husband, after he died, and found the other two together in heaven?”

  “Well, of course, he wouldn’t mind because it would be heaven, don’t you see? You can’t ‘mind’ things in heaven. And, anyway, Aunt Jane, how otherwise would people like you and me have a chance to be happy?”

  “What do you mean, people like you and me?” She marveled at the idea of a common denominator between her dry antiquity and his golden youth.

  “Why, unmarried people, of course.”

  “You, dear boy? But you will certainly marry. And before very long, I should hope.”

  “Never! I shall never marry!”

  Jane was shocked by his vehemence. She changed the subject, but she could not change it in her mind. Could it be that this dear young man was endangering his precious soul with the prospect of a posthumous bliss with Mrs. Bullock? It seemed uncanny, ridiculous, but she could not rid herself of the idea, and she noted grimly, the very next time that she saw Mrs. Bullock, at her sister-in-law Beth’s house, that Gordon did not quit the side of the pastor’s wife throughout the tea party.

  Certainly the Reverend Mr. Bullock did not appear to harbor any suspicion. A vast, hearty, cheerful man, pleasantly proud of his unassailable reputation as a preacher, comfortably adored by all the female members of his congregation, he seemed to take quite for granted that his young assistant should act as a constant equerry to his silent, unfathomable young wife. He might even have insisted on it! Mrs. Bullock was neither easy nor popular, and people wondered why a rich widower should have married her, though she was certainly pretty. She had none of the social qualities needed for the wife of the pastor of so important a congregation; she behaved more like a truculent daughter reluctantly comforming herself to the pattern of a father’s life than a consort who had presumably chosen her part with eyes wide open.

  There had been no one in whom Jane dared confide, but there was one person whom she thought she could indirectly sound out, her favorite brother, John. A huge man with a large belly who had once been handsome and was now imposing, John had a way of barking out banalities in response to questions he hadn’t really listened to, but she knew that if she kept at him he would eventually be sympathetic and even kind. He used to take Jane for walks in Central Park on Sunday afternoons when the weather permitted, and on one such outing she asked.

  “Gordon Muir told me an odd thing the other day. He said he would never marry. Why do you suppose an attractive man his age would be so sure of that?”

  “Oh, plenty of young bucks are that way. I was myself. We imagine there’s nothing in the world like a man’s independence. But then Flora came along and put a stop to that nonsense. Same thing will happen to young Muir. You can bet on it.”

  “And yet he struck me as being almost passionately sincere.”

  John did not reply; he was too busy clearing his throat, a serious and noisy business. She waited until he had finished.

  “I said he seemed so sincere, John.”

  “Sincere? Who?”

  “Gordon Muir. About never marrying.”

  “Oh, fiddle. Lot of nonsense. He probably imagines he’s sweet on Mrs. Bullock.”

  Jane was so aghast at this abrupt and casual confirmation of her most dire suspicions that she did not trust herself to say another word on the topic. Back home again, she found herself positively indignant with her favorite brother, and her indignation spread rapidly to all gentlemen of his age and class. It struck her now that they were apt to show a throat-clearing (half belching, really), skin-scratching indifference to all the necessary order of a moral society, that they liked to retreat after dinner to their dark libraries and drink whiskey and brandy out of decanters and tell off-color stories, leaving the drawing room and the ladies and civilization itself to fend for themselves.

  At the annual fair held for the benefit of the church in the gymnasium of the Plaza Settlement House Jane had her final confirmation of the threat that she had envisaged to Gordon’s soul. She found him, as she feared, seated complacently by the booth at which Mrs. Bullock was rather languidly trying to sell kitchen pots and pans.

  “Do you think I could deprive you of Mr. Muir’s company for a minute, Mrs. Bullock? There is something I should very much like to ask him.”

  The pastor’s wife’s large black eyes met hers with a serene stare behind which Jane, with a sudden jump of her heart, was startled to flare a bold hostility. “Can’t you ask him in front of me?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane mumbled, much taken aback. “I don’t really think I can.”

  “Then you have secrets with Mr. Muir?”

  “No, not secrets exactly…”

  “What then?”

  “Just … just things I can’t say in public.”

  “Am I public? Dear me, what abysses!”

  “We have business to discuss,” Jane exclaimed, grasping for anything.

  “Ah, business.” Mrs. Bullock threw up her hands. “When I left Virginia my daddy told me to expect everything up here to give way to business.”

  “Not quite everything, Ellie,” Gordon put in.

  “Yes, everything!” she retorted, almost angrily. “I leave you to Miss Lyle. Shoo! Off with you!”

  Jane and Gordon walked to a bench by a wall of the great chamber, apart from the din of the booths. There he indicated that she should take a seat.

  “Will this do for our ‘business,’ Aune Jane?” he asked with a smile.

  “Very nicely, thank you. I’m sorry to take you away from your friend, but I have been terribly worried about what you told me of your never marrying. It seeme
d to me that you might be giving up some happiness on this earth in favor of an imaginary union in the hereafter. Is that really wise, Gordon?”

  He did not seem to feel her interest in the least intrusive or the subject an odd one to be discussed by a young man and an old maid at a church fair. “You misunderstood me. I’m not giving up anything on this earth.”

  “But I mean,” she continued, very much perplexed, “if you had formed an attachment for, say, a lady, who was … well, not free…” Her voice trailed off. She could not cope with the topic.

  “She and I could still have our friendship, couldn’t we?”

  “You mean what they call a ‘platonic’ one?”

  “Call it what you like. I believe we shouldn’t be so afraid of our bodies. I believe that is something that is wrong with our culture. We would not have been given desires if desires were evil.”

  “But you know what our Lord said. That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her—”

  “Yes, yes, but he meant the man who intended to commit adultery. Not the man who feels a desire but will not give in to it. All that condemnation of what we cannot help feeling is Jansenism or Puritanism, a survival of Old Testament Hebraic hatred of the body. I doubt if it even existed among the Christians of the Roman era. I like to think of that as a pale, clear time when chaste youths and maidens met in grave communion to worship God in gardens secluded from the persecuting eye. There must have been a cheerfulness in their courage, a quiet humor in their conviviality, a high seriousness in their acceptance of both happiness and martyrdom. It must have been the furthest possible thing from those smelly hermits living on locusts in the desert and hurling anathemas!”

  Gordon spoke with such fire and eloquence that Jane wondered if he were not rehearsing a sermon. She thought she might have read something not unlike what he was saying in that beautiful novel, Marius the Epicurean. But literature was one thing, and playing with fire another.

  “Some of those hermits were saints,” she pointed out in mild reproach.

  “Ah, yes, they triumphed! More, in spite of what Swinburne wrote, than the pale Galilean. But that needn’t mean that the pale ones weren’t equally valid. Indeed, I maintain that they were more so! And I suggest further, Aunt Jane, that when an attraction existed between two of them, an attraction, let us say, that could not be lawfully indulged, they would use it to intensify their Christian love so that love became a radiant flame! It may even have been so between the beloved disciple and our Lord. St. John may have adored the master with all his soul, with all his heart, with all his mind, and, yes, with all his body!”

  “But they were men,” Jane gasped.

  “There can be such affections among men, Aunt Jane. Look at the Greeks.”

  “Gordon!”

  “Now don’t get excited. I am talking about sublimated things.” The young man’s eyes now flashed with such authority that Jane felt subdued. She looked about at the stylish ladies in the booths and around at the tall brown dead walls of the gymnasium and wondered that this undeniable slice of reality could encompass so ethereal a soul as Gordon’s. But was it ethereal? Wasn’t it too fevered? Too ecstatic? He might scorn the filthy hermits of the desert sands, but did they not have expert knowledge of the devil? She closed her eyes and moved her lips in prayer.

  “Aune Jane! Are you praying for me?”

  “No, dear boy. For myself. I am praying that you will accept the offer I am about to make to you.”

  “Accept? You mean it’s a present?”

  “A kind of present.”

  “Dear Aunt Jane! Of course I accept. What is it?”

  “A trip to the Holy Land. Oh, more than that. A year in the Holy Land! If you could take a leave of absence from the church.”

  Gordon stared at her, his eyes full of surprise and questions. “I’ve always wanted to go to the Holy Land,” he said gravely.

  “I know that. And you could learn about those early Christians you admire so. Oh, my child, it could be the—” She stopped herself. “It could be the making of you.” She had almost said the “saving.”

  “But how could I accept such a gift? And how could you afford it?”

  “I have my savings.”

  “Your savings? Oh, Aunt Jane, how could I take them?”

  “To make me happy. And to please God. I believe he wishes you to go.”

  Again he stared at her, and she seemed to make out a tiny diamond glittering in each pupil. He was so intense that he had to moisten his lips before he spoke. “You mean you’ve had guidance?”

  “Yes!” she cried recklessly. “Guidance!” She elapsed her hands. “Oh, my boy, I know you must go!”

  He looked down for a long time at the floor in silent study. “I suppose a true friend would understand if God really meant me to go.”

  “A true friend?” She was afraid that she might have exposed herself by the very rigidity of her failure to glance in the direction of a certain booth.

  “A friend who really loved me would have to appreciate the necessity of my going,” he continued pensively.

  “Like those early Christians.”

  He looked up suspiciously. “Aunt Jane, you’re not laughing at me?”

  “Never, dear boy. Not for all the world!”

  “But of course you can accept them, Jane! He took them expressly for you!”

  She was standing with her brother John in her dining room, on whose cleared table she had laid out the photographs of the fourteen stations of the cross that Gordon had sent her from Jerusalem.

  “But they’re so beautiful, John. They should be hung in the parish house.”

  “Well, of course, they’re yours to give to anyone you want. But I think Mr. Muir would like you to keep them. After all, if you were inspired to send him on that trip, couldn’t he have been inspired to take these pictures for you?”

  Was John smiling at her? She turned back to the pictures, so eerily moving in their blacks and pale whites. They showed the simplest of street scenes, empty of people: a doorway, an archway, a bit of wall, cobblestones, an ogee against the sky, a sidewalk, glassless gaping holes for windows. Why were they so powerful? She recalled the moving passage of Gordon’s letter:

  I walked every day in the steps of our Lord until I could almost imagine that I felt the weight of the cross on my shoulders and the prick of the thorns on my brow. I wanted to give you something of that wonderful experience.

  And Jane indeed felt he had succeeded when the pictures had been framed and hung by the stairs from the hall to the third floor. She made it a habit, when she came down for breakfast, to pause each morning before a different station and say a prayer.

  The prayer was said for Gordon. She made her little daily plea to the Almighty that he would meet and marry a fine young woman who would be worthy of him. She was beginning to dare to hope that the trip to Jerusalem was accomplishing its real purpose and that her pilgrim would return cured of his insane infatuation, and hope waxed stronger on the afternoon when her brother John called to give her the great news that the Bullocks were to be transferred to a parish in Georgia.

  “It will be a great loss to us all, of course,” he said, “but Mr. Bullock himself requested the transfer. He believes he has been stationed long enough in a rich community. He feels he must work now with the poor. I must confess, I find that an admirable sentiment.”

  “But poor Mrs. Bullock, won’t she miss New York?”

  “I don’t suppose so. You know, she’s from the South.”

  “I must call on her right away.”

  “You won’t find her. Mr. Bullock told me she’s gone south to make things ready in their new house.”

  Jane now began to wonder if she had not been wrong from the beginning. And was it possible that the small flat feeling in her heart was disappointment? Shame on you, Jane Lyle! The next morning she paused before two stations of the cross and said two prayers. One was for Gordon’s future bride. The other was to beg forgiveness for herse
lf, a suspicious, meddling old fool.

  She found she had favorites among the stations. The seventh, where Jesus stumbled for the second time, particularly held her attention. Under the glazed white of a dead sky, the large rusticated stones that framed an arched doorway leading into blackness stood out so sharply that she seemed to touch their coarseness, feel their dankness. As in the other thirteen there was no living creature to be seen, not even an ass or a dove, and it was as if no living thing could have existed there. Yet there nonetheless emanated from the simple scene an aura of intense emotion; Jane felt her heart quicken. Did it come from the blackness that filled the archway? What was that darkness? What was in it or behind it? Although it seemed to throb with power, it did not inspire fear but simply awe. The stones on the street and in the walls gave out a thick sweet essence. Gordon must have been right. Jesus had passed there, stumbled there. Jesus was still there.

  Jane would now feel a weight in her heart that was not entirely unpleasurable when she was walking in the neighborhood and happened to think of the prints. She had always considered the brownstone façades with their curtained windows as stern, rather formidable walls whose function was to keep out all but the very distinctly invited. But now these exteriors, as if responding to her vision of the streets in Jerusalem, seemed russet rather than chocolate, and the slant of afternoon light across the panes of their windows gave her spirits an almost joyous lift.

  Yet these sensations did not make her feel altogether easy. What had a redoubtable Scotch Presbyterian old maid to do with this softening of the fibers, this faster pacing of the blood, this desire to smile benignly at total strangers? What had such lightness of heart to do with the anguished tread of our Lord through those grim alleyways?

  Nor was she at all reassured by the long letter that she received from Gordon in answer to hers about her mixed reactions to his pictures.