“Margaret, are you there?” Joan asked. “I need to talk about all this.”
“Yes, I am here,” I said. “What is it that you want of me?” I was stalling, for I knew that what Joan wanted primarily was my unvarnished evaluation of Virgil Dunlop, and that furthermore she desperately wanted it to confirm her own favorable judgment of the man.
“Please don't put me off,” Joan said. “I'm as nervous as a cat. I mean, I know what
I
think, but I've got to hear what somebody else thinks. I just don't know that I can trust myself right now. I'm afraid what I'm
feeling
might be interfering with the truth. I want you to tell me your honest opinion of Virgil without even stopping to think about how it sounds. Just give me your impression of him, Margaretâeverything. I'm ready.”
Thus, with no chart for my course and no shore in sight, I pulled up anchor and filled my sails. “Very well, Joan, I shall tell you what I think. It is only what I
think
, however, as it is impossible ever to
know
the heart of any man. It is clear to me that you are seeking an authority who will stamp Virgil with an unqualified seal of approval. I am no authority but I will give you my opinion, though I cannot give you what you really want. You want indemnity against spurious character, a guarantee in the event of defective parts, a warranty for lifelong unimpeachability. These, however, cannot be given, Joan. As I have said before, I do not generally trust men to be virtuous in private; therefore I certainly cannot trust their public image. Granted, Virgil Dunlop seems upon casual acquaintance to be of sound characterâconsiderate, steadfast, decent, and reliable. That he is intelligent, socially adept, and amiable there can be no question. You ask of me what is not mine to give, however, and that is assurance that this man will serve you well all the days of your life.” Though I felt the gale force of many words still driving me forward, I paused.
“âAnd I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever,'” Joan said after a moment of silence. I could not easily read her tone. Frankly, I was surprised that she had tossed off a biblical quotation so spontaneously, albeit irreverently. I had never known her to cite the Bible. She spoke almost flippantly, yet I sensed that she was in a most serious frame of mind and that she wished me to continue.
This I did. “He must have known that, for you, last night's dinner party was far more than a polite formality or leisurely entertainment,” I said. “No doubt he was keenly aware that he was being pinned and mounted in a display case, so to speak, and that we were all peering through the glass at him in order to classify him and to determine whether he warranted our admiration. Only a fool would fail to exhibit himself to his best advantage under such circumstances, Joan, to pass himself off as a rare specimen. It is human nature, when one knows that he is being observed and examined, toâ¦well, to borrow from an old song, to accentuate the positive.”
I halted my speech, and during the interval that followed before she spoke, Joan hummed a few measures of the song to which I had just referred. “Well, I asked you for your opinion, didn't I?” she said at last, and I heard a rustling sound as of sheets of paper. I wondered if she were indeed taking notes or if perhaps she were scanning the morning newspaper. “So I sure can'tâ¦blame you for telling me.” She spoke hesitantly, as if testing the weight of her words. “And I appreciate your honesty, Margaret, I really do. I guess I should've expected as much. You're not the kind to be won over right off the bat, and that's goodâI mean, if youâ¦
raved
about how wonderful you thought he was, I guess I'd beâ¦suspicious.” Though attempting a light note, she sounded somewhat downcast.
For a brief while neither of us spoke, and then she said, “It's funny, isn't it, to think of how much difference a split second can make?” She was, I assumed, speaking of the way that she and Virgil had met.
Joan had told all of us the story at the Field Pea the night before. Two months earlier she had stopped at the Food Giant in Berea one night after working late and had turned her shopping cart sharply at the end of an aisle, around a large display of pickles in glass jars, only to collide with Virgil Dunlop, balancing in one arm three boxes of cereal, a package of paper napkins, a bag of Fritos, and a half-gallon of ice cream while carrying a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk in the other hand. In my opinion, Joan should have taken careful note of the quantity that he carried, not as evidence of his physical coordination, of course, but of his lack of foresight. Clearly, the man needed a shopping cart, or a basket at the least.
Virgil had managed to maintain his balance without dropping anything, but Joan's cart had been knocked off course into the pickle display, dislodging two large jars and leaving a mess of kosher dills, pickle juice, and shards of glass all over the floor. “I was mortified at my reaction,” Virgil had interjected. “I couldn't believe what came out of my mouth. I actually said, â
Oops
.'” He had been on his way to the check-out line, he explained, but had remembered at the last minute that he needed shaving cream and was trying to locate the aisle of toiletries at the moment of collision.
Joan sighed into the telephone receiver. “It's one of those things you wonder about,” she said, “the timing of it, I mean. If either one of us had been a few seconds earlier or later, or if Virgil's shaving cream hadn't run out that morningâ¦well, I wouldn't be sitting here asking you what you thought of him. I wouldn't even
know
him, and maybe that would be better all the way around. All this sure has thrown me for a loop.”
As mentioned earlier, I myself have mused upon the import of small fractions of time in the course of life. Had I not entered the doors of Emma Weldy Elementary School and offered myself to Mrs. Edgecombe at that precise moment in the fall of 1973, I would not, in all likelihood, be employed today as a school lunchroom supervisor. Nor would I have made the acquaintance of Birdie Freeman, nor would I be spending my summer vacation recording my recollections of her.
“I cannot tell you what to do, Joan,” I said. “It is your life. You must make your own choices and live with those choices. I only want you to be exceedingly cautious. My opinion applies not only to Virgil Dunlop but to every man, living or dead. As I said, one can never know the heart of another. You solicited my opinion, and I gave it. You are, of course, at liberty to form your own. You
must
form your own.”
“Don't you think he's interesting to talk to?” she asked.
“He is knowledgeable and articulate,” I said. Indeed, his intelligence seemed to be of the broad and natural sort, no doubt owing its versatility to the early introduction and lifelong attraction to books of which he had spoken.
A lengthy, though incomplete, list of topics that had been discussed around the dinner table the night before sprang at once to my mindâan amazing smorgasbord of shared knowledge and opinions to which Virgil Dunlop had been a ready, agreeably confident, and substantial contributor: the new BMW plant outside Greenville; the baseball strike during the past summer; the difference between lunar and solar eclipsesâwhich Virgil had illustrated with the aid of a packet of sugar and the salt and pepper shakers; haiku poetry; the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Northwest Territory in 1803; methods of storing solar heat; Chinese porcelain; several recent Halloween pranks in Filbert and Berea; rock formations called hoodoos; the deteriorating condition of Highway 11; the sudden death of a city councilman in Derby; nationwide jewelry fraud; a recent fire at the nearby Lena Lansford Home for Girls in Mount Chesney; General Stonewall Jackson; beach erosion; the new windows in the Presbyterian church in Filbert; and the properties of rayon fabric, among others.
And, of course, the final disturbing question that Virgil had posed over dessert. Thomas and I had shared a slice of coconut cream pie, though I am not overly fond of coconut as a rule, often because it is too coarsely ground. It pleased me to find that whoever had made this pieâthe Field Pea boasted that its desserts were “homemade from scratch”âhad used finely shredded coconut in moderation.
Let me pause at this point to explain why I am not reporting our dinner at the Field Pea, which lasted for nearly two hours, as a detailed chronological narrative, but rather through the vague and haphazard means of summary. The reason is quite simple: I cannot. Though I remember vividly the moments in the restaurant lobby leading up to our promenade through the dining room to the table where Mickey Freeman waited, his face alight with welcome, I cannot begin to place in order the minutes that followed.
Images of us around the table arise in sharp focus. I could draw a precise diagram of our seating arrangement, of the location of our table in relation to the others in the room, of the pale taupe and moss green floral design of the wallpaper. I can see Birdie's yellow blouse, a hue so intensely bright that one might expect it to cast a phosphorescent glow in the dark. I can see the small black combs in her hair that night, the touch of pink lipstick, the tiny pearl earrings that I had never before seen her wear.
But the exact course of the events that followed our arrival at the table is impossible to recall. The rapid whirlpool of talk, the waves of activity (Mickey tipped over a glass of iced tea, for example, as he attempted unsuccessfully to perform a sleight of hand that he had learned as a boy), and the great swells of laughter all but drowned me.
When I find it difficult to fall asleep at night, I choose among three mental exercises. First, I may envision in exact sequence the plot of a favorite book or of one of the few movies that I have seen in my lifetimeâfor example,
Sergeant York
or
The African Queen
. Second, I may stroll in my mind through one of the neighborhoods in which were located the various apartments that my mother and I considered home during my childhood, passing a dry cleaner here, a park bench there, and so on. Or third, I may put in order the minutes and hours of a particular day in my life, most often the very one that I am at the time attempting to bring to a closeâcalling to mind each specific word spoken, each observation noted, and so forth. In the process of layering detail upon detail in one of these three exercises, I most often succeed in conquering sleeplessness.
I remember quite clearly, however, my failed efforts that night after our dinner at the Field Pea to summon sleep by the third means: that of reconstructing the events of the evening. I could not begin to grasp them all and set them to rights. I could not recall, for example, whether Birdie had admired Joan's garnet ring before or after Mickey had given Thomas the black ball-point pen inscribed with
Barker Bag Co
. in an incongruously fancy gold script.
I had no idea whether Virgil had told the story about his father's hiding in a German barn during World War II before or after the waitress had mispronounced
parmigiana
, or whether Joan had teased Mickey about his bow tieâa large, flashy affair dotted with tiny colorful flags and contrasting ridiculously with his unfashionable, brown acrylic cardiganâbefore or after Thomas had given his silly recital of knock-knock jokes. I did recall perfectly the last thing Birdie had said that evening as she stood beside our car. “I sure liked that knock-knock joke you told about the Mona Lisa, Thomas!” Then she had shot me a teasing look and said, “You never told me your husband was such a card, Margaret. I don't know if we could stand much more of him and Mickey together!”
Aside from the flammable combination of Thomas's and Mickey's silliness, the mix of personalities in our sixsome had been diverse but compatible. Birdie and Mickey had been ebullient upon learning that Joan had visited the Church of the Open Door, where they attended, and from the expression upon their faces when they discovered that Joan's father and Thomas's uncle had been none other than Mayfield Spalding, a former church member and friend, one would have thought that they had just viewed the Seven Wonders in close succession. “Well, it's a small world, as they say in Outer Mongolia!” Mickey exclaimed. Both Mickey and Birdie had lavished liberal praise upon Mayfield for his generosity and “all the nice things he did behind the scenes,” as Birdie put it. Joan had fastened upon their every word, I noted, though she said very little.
Virgil Dunlop informed Birdie and Mickey that he, too, had recently visited the Church of the Open Door, though not in Joan's company but rather during Jesse Goodyear's revival campaign. It also came to light that Virgil Dunlop, though his residence was in Berea, was actively involved in the Community Baptist Church of Filbert, a small, yellow brick establishment only five blocks from our duplex on Cadbury Street. This news was greeted by Birdie with cries of joy. “Why, one of my dearest friends used to go there!” she said.
Joan's quandary concerning Virgil Dunlop became clear to me as the evening progressed. The expression upon her face throughout the dinner was one of warâbetween honest and open esteem on the one hand and heartsick dismay on the other. Though he was personally engaging, neither too brash and self-consumed nor too meek and flaccid, Virgil was unreservedly ardent concerning his religion. With no hint of apology, he made frequent reference to “God's will” for his life, “answered prayer,” and “the Lord's direction.” For a woman like Joanâindependent, nontraditional, and quick to doubt and criticizeâto be attracted to a man with strong church ties defied logic. Though we had never discussed the subject, I believe I can assert with confidence that at this point in her life Joan Spalding considered churches to be on the same level with institutions for the mentally incompetent.
Though the order of events during the course of the dinner is largely a jumble in my memory, I do recall the exact point at which Virgil made his most startling statement. We had all finished our respective dinners (I had ordered an entree called Grilled Polynesian Chicken, served with rice and steamed vegetables, all of which proved to be surprisingly satisfactory for restaurant fare) and were in the process of being served our dessertsâin the case of Thomas and me, the coconut cream pie of which I spoke earlierâwhen Virgil put to the rest of us a question that was, I suppose, actually an extrapolation from an earlier interrupted discourse concerning the free will of man.