Page 203 - A Little Life: A Novel

“JB, it’s so, so beautiful—thank you so much,” says Julia, and Harold
echoes her. He is finding it difficult, as he always does when confronted
with JB’s pictures of him, to separate the beauty of the art itself from the

distaste he feels for his own image, but he doesn’t want to be ungracious,
and so he repeats their praise.
“Wait, I have something, too,” Willem says, heading for the bedroom,
and returning with a wooden statue, about eighteen inches high, of a
bearded man in hydrangea-blue robes, a curl of flames, like a cobra’s hood,
surrounding his reddish hair, his right arm held diagonally against his chest,
his left by his side.

“Fuck’s that dude?” asks JB.
“This dude,” Willem replies, “is Saint Jude, also known as Judas
Thaddeus.” He puts him on the coffee table, turns him toward Julia and
Harold. “I got him at a little antiques store in Bucharest,” he tells them.
“They said it’s late nineteenth-century, but I don’t know—I think he’s
probably just a village carving. Still, I liked him. He’s handsome and

stately, just like our Jude.”
“I agree,” says Harold, picking up the statue and holding it in his hands.
He strokes the figure’s pleated robe, his wreath of fire. “Why’s his head on
fire?”
“It’s to symbolize that he was at Pentecost and received the holy spirit,”
he hears himself saying, the old knowledge never far, cluttering up his
mind’s cellar. “He was one of the apostles.”

“How’d you know that?” Malcolm asks, and Willem, who’s sitting next
to him, touches his arm. “Of course you know,” Willem says, quietly. “I
always forget,” and he feels a rush of gratitude for Willem, not for
remembering, but for forgetting.
“The patron saint of lost causes,” adds Julia, taking the statue from
Harold, and the words come to him at once: Pray for us, Saint Jude, helper

and keeper of the hopeless, pray for us—when he was a child, it was his
final prayer of the night, and it wasn’t until he was older that he would be
ashamed of his name, of how it seemed to announce him to the world, and
would wonder if the brothers had intended it as he was certain others saw it:
as a mockery; as a diagnosis; as a prediction. And yet it also felt, at times,
like it was all that was truly his, and although there had been moments he
could have, even should have changed it, he never did. “Willem, thank

you,” Julia says. “I love him.”