The Second Coming

goodbye. She figured she had another thirty seconds. And she did, time enough to reach her father’s pink-crinkly jacket still carefully draped over the back of her wooden chair, from it take out the blue-leather passport-size wallet she knew he used when he wore a jacket and from it four of the one-hundred-dollar bills she knew he took on a trip (You know what I would do with American Express?), and was out and down the hall and halfway up the stairs so quickly and yet so silently that she could hear their voices as the inner door of the office opened.
    In her bathroom she folded the bills lengthwise once and put them under the loose leather lining in one of her slippers. Then she lay on her bed and waited for her parents to come tell her goodbye.
    After they left she sat at her window, head wedged in the corner of her wingback chair, took out her notebook, and began to write.

V
    NOW THAT HE WAS making his weekly visit to the nursing home his wife’s money had built, he realized that he was doing exactly the same things he did when she was alive, taking the same route through the gleaming halls, even visiting the same patients. The only difference was that instead of pushing Marion ahead of him in her wheelchair, he had Jack Curl the chaplain in tow.
    But something was different. Ordinarily Jack Curl would have distracted him. All his life he had waited on people, tuned in on them, attended them. Now for some reason it didn’t matter.
    As Jack Curl talked, Will Barrett stood in the hall moving his head a little to make the bright sunlight race like quicksilver around the beveled glass of the front door. He seemed to remember halls, the hall of the hospital where his father stayed in Georgia, the hall of the hospital where Jamie died in Santa Fe. How odd, he thought smiling to himself, that then I didn’t know what to do with myself and now I do. The only time I knew what to do was when something bad happened to somebody. Disaster gave me leave to act. Between times I didn’t know what to do. Now I know.
    Now he remembered that after he had gone to find the Negro guide and sent him for the sheriff, he had returned to his father lying in the pin-oak swamp. He sat down beside him to wait. The man’s eyes opened. His father did not speak but in his eyes there were both sorrow and certitude. Now you know, the eyes said. I’m sorry. I was trying to tell you something and I didn’t. Now you’ll have to find out for yourself. I’m sorry.
    Very well, he thought. I found out. Now I know what to do.
    â€œWhat?” he said. Jack Curl had asked him something.
    â€œI said what I remember about Marion was the way she not only knew about all the patients but the help too. You were wonderful with her. I’m so glad you’ve continued her wonderful idea of inviting patients to your home. She’d have liked that. This week it’s Mr. Arnold’s turn, isn’t it? Do you remember how she always asked about the janitor’s grandchildren—by name? Now I’m the janitor. She’d have liked that too. Do you remember?”
    â€œYes.” No. What he remembered was the weight of her, the angle and set of his own body when he levered her out of the Rolls and in one motion around and into the wheelchair.
    A tuft of bronze hair curled through the zipper of the chaplain’s jump suit. Jack Curl’s muscular jaw swelled like a pear under the temples just as his lower body swelled like a pear in the jump suit. Yet he was as light on his feet as a good dancer. He danced around in front of him like a child to catch his attention. Today for some reason it was possible to observe the smallest detail about Jack Curl, for example, the way he was letting his sideburns grow longer by shaving a little below them. The short new hair did not match the long hair of the sideburns. But more than that: he suddenly saw the purpose of the jump suit and Jack Curl’s shambling way of walking and his not quite clean hands and the pliers in his hip pocket and the way he moved his shoulders in the jump suit. Jack Curl was saying: I am more than a clergyman going about doing clerical things. I am also a handyman, a super, something of a tough really. Somebody has to fix the plumbing and wiring. To do God’s work, it is necessary to come off manual work. Like Paul fixing tents.
    He took a good look at Jack Curl.
    How did it happen that now for the first time in his life he