Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,138

a few years later, after I’d lost two of my brothers in the Second World War over Anzio, and after the bombs had been dropped on Japan, after the speeches and the glad-handing. I was on my way up north to attend college in Syracuse, New York, and they had written on a little sign with my father’s favorite paint, the precious gold that he kept for high-class jobs, and they held it up at the bus station, the placard built strong like a kite with a diamond-shaped back so it wouldn’t flap in the wind: COME HOME

SOON, GLORIA.

I didn’t come home soon. I didn’t come home at all. Not then, at least. I stayed up north, not so much running wild as having my head in books, and then my heart in a quick marriage, and then my soul in a sling, and then my head and heart in my own three little boys, and letting the years slip by, like folk do, watching my ankles puff up, and the next time I truly came home, to Missouri, years later, I was freedom-riding on the buses, and hearing stories about the police dragging out the water cannons, and I could hear my mother’s voice in my ears: Gloria, you’ve done nothing all this time, nothing at all, where have you been, what have you done, why didn’t you come back, didn’t you know I was praying for rain?

—

I’VE GOT A BODY NOW, near thirty years later, that people think is church-going. I’ve got dresses that pull tight in the rear and keep my bosom from swaying. I thread the left shoulder of my blackest dress with a gold-colored brooch. I carry a white handbag with a looping handle. I wear hose stockings right up to my knees and sometimes I pull on a set of white gloves that go high to my elbows.

I’ve got a voice, too, with an undertow, so people look at me and think that I’m about to break into some old cane-field spiritual, but the truth is I haven’t seen God since those early days when I left Missouri and I’d rather go home to my room in the Bronx and pull the bedsheets high and listen to Vivaldi slide through the stereo speakers than listen to any preacher ranting on about how to save the world.

In any case, I can hardly fit in pews anymore: it’s never been comfortable to slide my body through.

I lost two marriages and three boys. They left in different ways, all of which broke my heart, but God isn’t about to patch any of it back together. I know I made a fool of myself at times, and I know God made a fool of me just as often. I gave up on Him without too much guilt. I tried doing the right thing most of my life, but it wasn’t in the Lord’s house. Still and all, I know that churchy is the impression I’ve come around to giving. They look at me and listen and think I’m leading them towards the gospel. Everyone has their own curse, and I suppose—for a while at least—Claire saw me fitting in that peculiar box.

She wasn’t a woman with whom I had any dispute. She seemed perfectly fine to me, as gentle-wayed as they come. It wasn’t as if she tried to beat me upside the head with her tears. They came natural, like anyone else. She was embarrassed too, I could tell, with her curtains, her china, her husband painted on the wall, the teacup rattling on her saucer. She looked like she could fly out the window to Park Avenue at any time, with the streak of gray in her hair, her thin, bare arms, her long neck with blue veins. There were university diplomas on the wall in the corridor, and anyone could see that she was born on the right side of the river. She kept her house neat and scrubbed and she had a tiny southern lilt to her voice, so if there was any one of the ladies I felt a kinship with, it was her.

That morning glided by, like most good mornings do.

We had our flipflap with the tightrope man and then we wandered down from the roof and ate the doughnuts and sipped the tea and rattled on some. The living room was flooded with light. The furniture had a deep sheen to it. The ceilings were high and trimmed with a fancy