The Dearly Beloved

by Cara Wall

  So she formulated a plan. She would not go back again. She would finish her undergraduate degree in three years, take her master’s degree courses in what would have been her senior year, and continue on to a PhD. If she went to summer school every year, she could be finished with all her classroom studies in eight years, and her dissertation in two after that. Then she would find a teaching position—not at Radcliffe, which still did not hire female professors, but perhaps at Mount Holyoke or Smith. She could live a life full of colleagues and students, assignments and grades given, research and footnotes to organize. Her schedule would be set, and there would be enough faculty meetings and parties for her to not be totally isolated. The prospect of it was the first taste of comfort she had found.

  In the middle of what would have been Lily’s senior year, she was well into her master’s degree. She was decidedly tired of communal living, especially now that most of her classmates were engaged and conversations in the hallways were about how to plan a day-after-graduation wedding while taking enough courses to get a diploma. She was glad her accelerated schedule meant she spent all of her time in the library, and it was there, in January 1956, that Lily met Charles.

  In the two years since Charles had last seen Lily, he had never really stopped thinking about her. During Father Martin’s talk, Charles had pictured Joan of Arc as looking like Lily, plain and indomitable. When he first read the story of Ruth, he had thought of Lily; something about the famine and the precision of the gleaning made him remember her. So, when she walked in front of his desk, wearing a grey skirt and red shirt, she had been so constantly at the back of his mind that he wasn’t actually surprised to see her.

  ”Hi,” he said without thinking. Lily stopped and turned to him, as slim and straight as the spines of the books on the walls behind her.

  “Hello,” she said suspiciously. “Do I know you?” Her voice was as low as he remembered, and her hair was as straight and brown. She had, obviously, not noticed Charles sitting there.

  “I was looking for a comic book store once, a long time ago,” he said.

  “Oh,” she answered. Charles could tell that she did not remember him at all. He watched her shift her weight to accommodate the stack of books she was holding. The soles of her shoes scuffed against the marble floor, the sound of a teacher demanding silence.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.

  “What?” Lily took a step back, pulled her books up to her throat.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Charles said, standing up as if to wipe the terror off her. His chair scraped and yelped as he pushed it back. “I didn’t mean . . . I can’t think why I told you . . . it’s just. Look,” he said, grabbing his camel jacket off the desk, struggling to put it on. “I’m not crazy. Really. I study at the Divinity School.”

  Lily turned her head, looked at him from the corner of her eye. “Divinity?” She raised an eyebrow and gave him a dismissive smile. “I don’t believe in God at all.”

  Charles was so stunned that he let her walk away.

  FOUR

  James went to the University of Chicago. It was near his house on the South Side, but his uncle had given him enough money to live in the dorms, so he did. He knew it was best to get out of his neighborhood. He wanted to start anonymous and new.

  His dorm room was shabby and historic, as big as the entire downstairs level of his childhood home. He had a roommate, Bill, from New York, who told him the building they lived in was one of the oldest on campus, that the funny little windows they couldn’t open were called casement windows, that he should take three hard classes and two easy ones, so that his homework wouldn’t take up all of the time he would need to date girls.

  James liked Bill because Bill was at ease in his own skin, could talk to anyone, and took it for granted that he and James would be best friends. Walking across the cleanly trimmed campus lawns, Bill ran monologues. “That’s Jeffries, he lives one floor below us. He’s brilliant at math and has a gin still in his closet, I hear. And that, over there, is Emmeline Waters. Her father is the dean of the English Department, but she only dates seniors. That’s your first period classroom over there; mine’s the other way. Meet back here after third and we’ll have lunch. But not at the dorm—in the pub.” James didn’t understand why Bill had adopted him, and he did not care. Without Bill, he would have been lost.

  His classes were uncompromisingly difficult, even the easy ones. He was assigned hundreds of pages of reading a week and papers one after the other, a gristmill of words and ideas he could not quite understand. His classes were small, and his professors expected discussion; they called him out if he did not participate. He was exhausted. Bill managed to finish his assignments in time to take girls to dinner, leaving James hunched over his small dorm desk, rubbing his forehead in frustration, textbooks and pencil shavings littering the floor.

  “I have every faith in your powers of intellect,” Bill said as he exited. “But could you please figure out a way to speed them up so that we can have some fun?”

  James knew that Bill’s free time was a result of careless studying and haphazard essay writing. At the end of his first semester, Bill got a raft of Cs and laughed about them. James got a raft of Cs and wrote his uncle an apology.

  I study constantly, James wrote, but I can’t figure out what they want from me.

  What do you want? his uncle wrote back. Surely not to spend every waking moment chained to your desk. There is more to college than academics.

  James exhaled for the first time in months. Then he turned off his desk lamp, lay down on his narrow bed, and slept for twenty-four hours. He awoke stiff, dry-mouthed, and disoriented. It was early afternoon; outside his window, dry February snow blew in circles on the ground. The stack of textbooks on his desk was as strict as ever, but he did not want to study. He smiled; it was the first time he had admitted that. He did not want to study. But then, what did he want to do? He thought for a moment and realized he wanted to be himself. For months he had been nobody: a reader, a listener, blank and amorphous, painstakingly translating the instructions that would help him take on form. He felt deaf and dumb. The silence in his room unnerved him. How could he have spent so many months motionless and alone? He wanted to be in a room full of people, to be part of a pack, to roughhouse as he had with his brothers, to joke and laugh and be loud.

  Bill was dating a tall girl named Millie, who studied music. Every weekend, Bill got together with a group of guys to hang out with Millie’s friends, all of whom also studied music. James started to tag along. It was too cold to walk anywhere, but Bill had a car, into which could squeeze four guys and four girls, if they were willing to sit on laps. The boys wore button-down shirts; the girls wore plaid circle skirts and bright sweaters. Their breath fogged the windows; their perfume crept into James’s hair. The group never went too far from campus, just four or five blocks. It was far enough to feel like an adventure, but close enough that the pizza was cheap and the bars were filled with people they knew.

  His classes were not any easier, but his uncle had been right; there was more to college than the library and the classroom. On his nights out, James learned much about his new world. For instance, he discovered that no one in Bill’s crowd was going to shoulder him up against the bar and dare him to do something about it. There was no need for James to hang back, size people up, figure out whom he could take easily or who might knock him down.

  At first, it was disconcerting. James felt uncomfortable. He stood at the edge of groups, laughing at other guys’ jokes, deciphering what they considered funny and what they considered coarse. He discovered that he should sit back in a booth and relax, that he could cross his legs without it meaning anything, that drinks were bought in rounds, beer in pitchers instead of pints. He got used to guys shaking his hand in greeting, clapping him on the shoulder. He began to trust that if one of them borrowed five dollars, it would always be repaid.

  Still, James felt uneasy. He had thought that once
he learned to fit in, there would be more. That once they had all gotten to know each other, conversations would move past sports and cars, perhaps expand to include politics or careers. James wanted to learn how these men’s minds worked: What did they worry about, if they did not have to worry about money or fighting or food? They did not tell him, and James could not figure out if it was because they were not that interested in him or they were not that interested in the world.

  Nan spent her first semester at Wheaton writing letters to her mother. She told her mother about her roommate, Carol, who was from New York City and so would have her coming out at the Plaza. It sounds very grand, Nan wrote, but intimidating. She wrote that her room was cozy, the food fine, and the girls friendly; someone was always on hand to zip up a dress, lend a bobby pin, hold a door. She wrote that she enjoyed literature and French and that daddy had been right: the music department was terrific. She did not write any more about it, because she did not think her mother would understand. Her mother had grown up in a church that had discouraged listening to music, beyond hymns, of course, and so her mother thought of music simply as one of the sounds of worship. Nothing more.

  Nan had joined her church choir when she was seven, partly to have something to do besides sit by her mother in the front pew, partly so that she could stop wearing itchy stockings, since her legs would be covered by robes. But from her first rehearsal, she was overwhelmed by the harmonies and the descants, dissonance and resolution, how so many different notes sat together in one chord and how each one was necessary for that chord to sound whole. She, herself, sang second soprano, but she was fascinated by the depth and intensity of the basses. In the sanctuary, their voices blended with the low notes of the organ, steady as a metronome; in the practice room, the power of their sound was startling, even more so as she matched voices to faces and discovered that the most luxurious tones were sung by the plainest, smallest of men. There were, it seemed, many secrets in music, and she wanted to know all of them.

  At eleven, she asked for a piano and had taken lessons twice a week, learned to read time signatures and clefs, rests and fermatas, sharps and flats. She had been given solos at church and in the musicals at school. She was known as the girl who could sing. But, at Wheaton, she was discovering that her experience was the equivalent of a mechanic knowing how to change a tire. Now, she was in classes where they were assigned symphonies to read like books. They picked them apart like taking out stitches, laying the sleeves and collars and skirts out flat, then learning to put them back together. They compared different composers who worked in concurrent years and compositions in the same style that had been written hundreds of years apart. One of her professors held class in an auditorium that housed three pianos, so that students could play different pieces of music simultaneously and then talk about how they fit together, where they fell apart.

  Nan did not have the words to explain how this affected her. She could say that it felt like she was a piece of muslin and the lessons were embroidered onto her. Or she could say that her assignments felt like a thousand-piece puzzle, and every time she put one together, it became a part of her. But she was afraid those words would sound crazy to her mother, and that the intensity with which Nan would write them would sound crazier. So she wrote about the weather, how the trees were encased in ice and there was hot chocolate in thermoses on the dining room sideboards all day long. She did not want her mother to worry, because Nan wanted to stay.

  She was making friends in her music classes, and she liked the church on campus. The congregation was almost exclusively students, which was new for Nan, and somewhat strange, but it meant that there were parties every weekend. Not Kappa parties, but parties just the same.

  Most weekends, one of the girls in James’s group performed in some sort of recital. These were given in various small concert halls on campus, all of which were hushed and carpeted, with a blue curtain that opened to reveal a piano spotlit on the stage. To his surprise, James enjoyed these. It was easy to sit in the darkness and listen to girls sing. There was no mystery to it, nothing to decipher, he could close his eyes and simply feel the fullness of the chords, notice the way the melody wound its weblike way around the room.

  He had never been exposed to serious music before, never heard Italian arias or cheerful German folk tunes. It was a relief to encounter something new and not be expected to remember it, to take notes on it, to answer questions about it, or analyze its salient points. After a while, James stopped accepting the mimeographed programs the ushers handed out as the audience walked in. He didn’t care what the music was called or who wrote it; he just wanted to listen.

  It was at one of these recitals that James first saw Nan. She was the accompanist. She sat in the spotlight on the shiny black piano bench, her back straight, fingers poised over the keys. She had wavy blond hair held back from her eyes by a rhinestone pin. She wore a plain navy blue dress, a simple gold necklace, and no nail polish. She was almost plump and as pale as milk.

  James was used to paying attention to the singer, the girl who clasped her hands beneath her breasts and pushed her voice up and out, flinging it to the back of the room. The singers always wore nail polish, bright pink or red. Nan looked at the singer while she played, nodding her head as the other girl did, waiting for her to catch a breath before she continued playing. Nan held her mouth slightly open, leaned forward, almost, but not quite, mouthing the words of the song. James could not take his eyes off her. She was not singing. She was accompanying. Accompanying, he said to himself, what a wonderful word.

  After Nan’s recital James’s group went to the pub on campus, as usual. James knew, now, that the way to approach a girl was to buy her a Coke. If he asked if she wanted a drink, she might say no. If she said yes, he had to leave her and spend ten minutes at the bar while she talked to everyone who wasn’t him. Some girls said no to a beer, but no one said no to a Coke, so he bought two and searched the topography of heads until he saw a blond one wearing a rhinestone pin.

  James had never noticed just how many girls there were. They circled around Nan like geese, a maze of pale cardigans and pearl earrings. Bill had managed to infiltrate the circle, to sit on a barstool with Millie on his lap. James watched him whisper something in Millie’s ear that made her peal and blush. James hung back; he was afraid that once he got close to Nan he might crowd her, break something, lean too close and spill ice on her skirt. His head felt loose, too large for his body. But he forced himself to push forward, edging between couples, smelling the mix of perfumes.

  As soon as he got to her, Nan looked up. Her eyes were blue.

  “Great recital,” he said, handing her the tall glass, which was sweating.

  “Oh,” she answered brightly, “I missed four chords, but I was happy with the timing. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” James said. “Having fun?” He felt wooden.

  “I am!” Nan said. “We don’t do this kind of thing at Wheaton.”

  “You go to Wheaton?” It was an hour-and-forty-five-minute train ride away.

  Nan nodded. “I just filled in tonight, for a friend of a friend.” She was smiling at him, small, neat, and clean. The top of her head came to his shoulder. She smelled like vanilla.

  James was already working out a plan to borrow Bill’s car.

  On Tuesdays, the day on which he had no afternoon classes, James drove forty-five minutes to Wheaton, paid for visitor parking, and met Nan outside her French class to walk her to her dorm. He sat on a bench outside while she went upstairs to change for dinner, and they ate at one of the places in Wheaton’s small campus town. He drove up again on Saturday mornings and they spent nice days in the park, rainy days in the library.

  Nan seemed to think this behavior was perfectly normal. Girls from James’s old neighborhood would have teased him, accused him of pestering them, mocked him for the persistent gleam in his eye. Bill raised his eyebrows every time he handed James the car keys and said, “She better be wort
h it.” Bill was the only other person who knew that James was now cramming all of his schoolwork into four nights a week because, in order to afford all this courtship, James had taken a job bussing tables at a pizza parlor Friday and Saturday nights.

  It was worth it; Nan was the gentlest and most considerate person James had ever known. She listened to him as he talked about his academic struggles and lingering sense of alienation. She did not speak until she had thought for a moment or two; then she said things like Some people don’t think about how their actions make people feel and Obviously, you’re going to do well in school, it may just be harder than you want it to be. James could have taken them as platitudes, but when she spoke, she looked him in the eye with an expression that was neither pitying nor patronizing. She meant what she said; she wanted to help him look at his life in a different way.

  James wasn’t stupid; he knew Nan was too good for him. From first glance, he could tell she had money and a lineage, grace, kindness, and generosity. He knew what it meant to date girls whose fathers had money. He needed more than a job—he needed a career.

  He wrote to his uncle for advice, as he often did. I must find something to do, and no one here wants to help me. The professors are caught up in ideas and theories; their students run in circles around them, barking to be heard.

  I wondered when you’d outgrow them, his uncle wrote back. More quickly than I thought. What are you studying?

  Philosophy, James told him. Anthropology, Rhetoric, Latin II.

  His uncle answered, Philosophy, anthropology, Latin—the underpinnings of religion, the very subjects that drew me to God.