She came to the door in dungarees and an oversize white shirt, knotted at her midriff. That she was wearing pants, like a man, was inordinately incredible to him.
“I knew it would be you,” she said. “I woke up this morning with the strongest feeling I would see you.”
Her lack of surprise reminded him again of his mother, her serenity. If Marion’s presentiment could be credited, it suggested that Russ’s coming to see her, which had felt to him like an act of personal agency, had merely been part of God’s design. She led him through a parlor hung with landscape paintings, all similar in style, and into a kitchen with a view of a mountain. At the rear of the back yard, which was strewn with rusty metal forms, perhaps sculptures, stood a tin-roofed structure.
“That’s Jimmy’s studio,” Marion said. “He won’t come out till dinnertime. Antonio’s at work, and I am—studying.” She indicated an open textbook on the table. “We also have two cats, who seem to have disappeared. They were just here.”
Jimmy was her uncle, but Russ wondered about the other man. An unpleasant new feeling, possessiveness, came over him. “Who is Antonio?”
“Jimmy’s companion. They’re—you know.” Marion looked up. “Or maybe you don’t.”
How was he supposed to know anything?
“They’re like husband and wife, except Antonio’s a man. It’s a terrible abomination.” She snickered. “Are you hungry? I can make you a sandwich.”
There were, at camp, two Quaker boys whom Russ’s cabinmates referred to as fairies. Only now did he understand that the appellation might encompass more than just their manner. He felt a queasiness, not only at the abomination but at Marion’s snicker.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if sensing his discomfort. “I forgot where you come from. I’m so used to Antonio, it seems ridiculous that anyone could disapprove.”
“So, you, uh—what part of Catholic teaching do you actually accept?”
“Oh, lots of it. The Eucharist, Christ’s absolution of our sins, Father Fergus’s authority. Jimmy and Antonio would definitely have things to repent if they were Catholic, but I don’t see that it’s any of my business. Jesus says I shouldn’t cast stones.”
Russ’s empathy for homosexuals began with Marion. Once he was in love with her, it became axiomatic that every conviction of hers deserved strong consideration for adoption. Alongside his craving to bury himself in her was a wish to be filled up with her—to feel his heart pumping her essence, as if he were a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, into his unfurling, birth-damp wings. She’d spent three and a half more years on earth than he, had lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and was a deeper and more incisive thinker. Because she swore by Roosevelt, Russ registered to vote as a Democrat. Because she read secular literature— Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck—he read it, too. The same thing with jazz, the same thing with modern art, the same thing with clothes, and the same thing, especially, with sex.
They passed his first visit at her kitchen table, talking about the soul and teachers’ college, about his grandfather and his doubts about his family’s faith. On his second visit, five days later, they hiked so far up the mountain behind Jimmy’s house they had to race the setting sun back down. Marion then sent him a letter in which there was little of substance, just a breezy account of her day, but he couldn’t stop rereading it. Each detail—that one of the cats had coughed up a hair ball on her bed, that her uncle had asked her to cook lamb chops for his birthday, that she might stop at the butcher on her way back from the post office, that she thought it might snow again—was more magically interesting than the next. He remembered hungrily rereading his mother’s early letters to him, which were likewise full of the quotidian. Now his mother’s letters so bored him that he barely skimmed them once. He couldn’t have cared less if she thought it might snow.
His mother had taken to mentioning that one girl or another in their community had “really grown up,” a short phrase that encoded a longer message: he was to finish his service, choose a wife from one of a score of acceptable families, and settle down in Lesser Hebron. What he could write back to his mother without revealing his doubts had dwindled to the point of his repeating, essentially verbatim, not just sentences but whole paragraphs. Of his time with the Navajos, he’d written little more than that they were a proud and generous people who had great respect for the Mennonites. Of Marion, he wrote nothing at all. His sense that he and she had been ordained to meet was growing stronger by the day, and his family’s community didn’t forbid marriage to outsiders, merely discouraged it, but Marion was a pants-wearing, half-Jewish Catholic who lived with homosexuals. The safe course was to conceal her existence and hope for the best.