The idea of an innocent girl’s mistake, for which she was now piteously remorseful, further softened his heart. But his anger and disgust had a life of their own. He’d thrown away his virginity on a woman who’d given hers to someone else, and now her nakedness was repellent, her smell appalling. He wished to God he’d never left Lesser Hebron. He swung his legs off the bed and roughly dressed himself.
“Please don’t be angry with me,” she said in a calmer voice.
He was too angry to speak.
“I made a mistake. I made lots of mistakes, but I’m not wrong about us. Please try, if you can, to forgive me. I want to marry you, Russ. I want to be yours forever.”
He’d wanted the very same thing. Disappointment welled up in him and erupted in a sob.
“Sweetie, please,” she said. “Sit down with me, let me hold you. I’m so very, very sorry.”
He stood shaking and crying, torn between disgust and need. The self-pity in his tears was new to him—it was as if he’d never appreciated, until this moment, that he, too, was a person, a person he was always with, a person he might love and pity the way he loved God or pitied other people. Feeling compassion for this person, who was suffering and needed his care, he unlocked the bedroom door and ran out through the house, jumped into the Willys and drove a few blocks. He stopped beneath a cypress tree and wept for himself.
She sent him two letters, on consecutive days, and he opened neither of them. The woman he loved was still there but occluded from him, separated by her own doing. It was as if his Marion were imprisoned in a Marion he didn’t know at all. He could almost hear his dear one crying out to him from inside the prison. She needed him to come and rescue her, but he was afraid of the other Marion—afraid of finding that it was she who’d written the letters.
He’d done very little praying since he met her. Returning to it now, he laid his situation out to God and asked Him what His will was. The first insight to emerge was that God required him to forgive her. In trying to explain to God why he was angry, he saw that Marion’s offense—she’d been too embarrassed to mention her marriage sooner—was paltry; that, indeed, the greater offense was his own hard-heartedness. This led him to a second insight: for all his doubting, for all his liberation, he was still a Mennonite. At some level, he’d assumed that he would one day bring Marion home with him and there, although they might not settle in Lesser Hebron, receive his family’s blessing. Now the fact of her divorce had snuffed any chance of that. The extremity of his disappointment pertained not to her but to his parents, because he hadn’t yet fully broken with them. He was angry because her divorce compelled him to make a hard choice.
Unready to make it, still afraid to open her letters, he wrote to the only person who might understand his quandary. His grandfather must have replied to Russ’s letter immediately, because the reply arrived in camp just eight days later. The advice in it was unexpected.
You don’t have to marry her—I’m here to tell you the sun will still rise in the morning. Why not enjoy the moment and see how you feel when your term of service ends? You’ll have plenty of time for marrying if you still feel the same, but a young man doesn’t always know his heart. Your gal already made her own mistake, and it sounds like she knows how to look after herself. That’s pure gold—yours to enjoy if you’re careful. So long as she’s not in a family way, there’s no reason to be hasty.
A year earlier, Russ might have been alarmed by how tumorously his grandfather’s debauchery had consumed his moral principles. Now, instead, he felt a fraternity. It seemed to him that Clement was right in every respect but one—Russ already knew his heart, and it belonged to Marion. But there was more.
As to your parents, I don’t guess they’ll forgive you if you marry her. Your father doesn’t look to our Savior but to what other men think of him. He preaches love but holds a grudge like no man’s business. I know firsthand the vengeance in his heart. Your mother’s a good woman, but she lost her mind to Jesus. She’s so deep in her faith you can scream at the top of the lungs and she won’t hear you. She thinks she loves you when she prays for you, but she only loves her Jesus.
Russ didn’t need to reread Clement’s letter, then or ever. One reading was enough to burn every line of it into his memory.
What the Bible meant by joy, and by the related words that recurred in it so frequently, joyful, joyous, rejoicing, he learned the following afternoon, when he went back to Marion’s uncle’s house. There was joy in his unconditional surrender to her—joy in his apology for the hardness of his heart, joy in her forgiveness, joy in his release from doubt and blame. How many times had he read the word joy without having experienced what it meant? There was joy in making love on a thunderstormy afternoon, and there was joy in not making love, joy in just lying and looking into her fathomless dark eyes. Joy in the first trip they made together to Diné Bikéyah, joy in the sight of Stella on Marion’s lap, joy in the sweetness of Marion’s way with children, joy in the thought of giving her a child of her own, joy in the desert sunset, joy in the star-choked sky, joy even in the mutton stew. And joy in George Ginchy’s invitation to a private dinner with him, joy in seeing her through Ginchy’s eyes. Joy when she first put her mouth on Russ’s penis, joy in her wantonness, joy in the abjectness of his gratitude, joy in its sealing of the certainty that he would never leave her. Joy in the corroborating pain of being apart from her, joy in their reunions, joy in making plans, joy in the prospect of finishing his education and catching up with her, joy in the mystery of what might happen after that.