spoke, might have sent Holly into a depression over the inevitable
direction of every human life-if not for his eyes, which revealed an
unbowed soul. And his conversation, though slowed somewhat by his
impediment, was that of a bright and humorous man who would not give the
fates the satisfaction of his despair; his treacherous body was to be
cursed, if at all, in private.
“I’m a friend of Jim’s,” she told him.
He made a lopsided “O” of his mouth, which she decided was an expression
of surprise. At first he did not seem to know what to say, but then he
asked, “How is Jim?”
Deciding to opt for the truth, she said, “Not so good, Henry. He’s a
very troubled man.”
He looked away from her, at the pile of poker chips on the table.
“Yes,” he said softly.
Holly had half expected him to be a child-abusing monster who had been
at least in part responsible for Jim’s withdrawal from reality. He
seemed anything but that.
“Henry, I wanted to meet you, talk to you, because Jim and I are more
than friends. I love him, and he’s said that he loves me, and it’s my
hope that we’re going to be together a long, long time.”
To her surprise, tears brimmed up and slipped from Henry’s eyes, forming
bright beads in the soft folds of his aged face.
She said, “I’m sorry, have I upset you?”
“No, no, good lord, no,” he said, wiping at his eyes with his left hand.
“Excuse me for being an old fool.”
“I can tell you’re anything but that.”
“It’s just, I never thought. . . Well, I figured Jim was going to spend
his life alone.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Well. . .”
He seemed distressed at having to say anything negative about his
grandson, completely dispelling her lingering expectations that he would
be a tyrant of some kind.
Holly helped him. “He does have a way of keeping people at arm’s
length. Is that what you mean?”
Nodding, he said, “Even me. I’ve loved him with all my heart, all these
years, and I know he loves me in his way, though he’s always had real
trouble showing it, and he could never say it.” As Holly was about to
ask him a question, he suddenly shook his head violently and wrenched
his distorted face into an expression of anguish so severe that for an
instant she thought he was having another stroke. “It’s not all him.
God knows it’s not.” The slur in his voice thickened when he grew more
emotional.
“I’ve got to face it-part of the distance between us is me, my fault,
the blame I put on him that I never should’ve.”
“Blame?”
“For Lena.”
A shadow of fear passed across her heart and induced a quiver of
angina-like pain.
She glanced at the window that looked out on a corner of the courtyard.
It was not the corner to which Jim had gone. She wondered where he was,
how he was. . . who he was.
“For Lena? I don’t understand,” she said, though she was afraid that
she did.
“It seems unforgivable to me now, what I did, what I allowed myself to
think.” He paused, looking not at her but through her now, toward a
distant time and place. “But he was just so strange in those days, not
the child he had been. Before you can even hope to understand what I
did, you have to know that, after Atlanta, he was so very strange, all
locked up inside.”
Immediately Holly thought of Sam and Emily Newsome, whose lives Jim had
saved in an Atlanta convenience store-and Norman Rink, into whom he had
pumped eight rounds from a shotgun in a blind rage. But Henry obviously
was not talking about a recent event in Atlanta; he was referring to
some previous incident, much further in the past.
“You don’t know about Atlanta?” he asked, reacting to her evident
mystification.
A queer sound chittered through the room, alarming Holly. For an
instant she could not identify the noise, then realized it was several
birds shrieking the way they did when protecting their nests. No birds