by Cara Wall
James found himself out of breath, his heart pounding. Nan’s father turned toward the window and gazed intently at the sky. He was giving James some privacy, and James was thankful for it; he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, breathed in and out.
“Your mother was religious?” Nan’s father asked. His voice was deeper than before, less confrontational, and James was relieved by an easy question.
“After a fashion, as much as she could be,” James answered.
“Did she pray at home, talk to you about God?”
“No.”
Nan’s father sat back. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, looked up at the ceiling for what seemed like a very long time. When he finally spoke, he said, “You are aware that most ministers feel they have a calling?”
James had to force himself to look Nan’s father in the eyes. His stomach tingled; his legs were jumpy. “Yes,” he said.
“It’s quite visceral,” Nan’s father said. “Bone-deep. Without that kind of certainty in God and God’s purpose for me, I’m not sure I could do what I do. Do you feel that you have any kind of a call?”
“I’m restless,” James answered. “I’m impatient. I want to do something useful.”
Nan’s father said nothing. James shifted in his seat and scratched his head with both hands. “I have found comfort in going to church with Nan. But at the same time, it creates this urgency in me. It’s hard to sit still, sometimes, through all the music, and the announcements, and readings they don’t edit down. I like it; I’m grateful to Nan for bringing it into my life. But sometimes I want them to just get to the things that matter, to talk about the things that are wrong with the world and how to fix them.”
“What’s wrong with the world?” Nan’s father asked.
“People don’t have enough money,” James said, pushing his hair back from his forehead. “People are sick, or in jail, people feel alone. They have given up, surrendered, stopped living in any real way. People are angry.”
Nan’s father sat calmly. “Does that matter?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because when they suffer, we suffer with them. Whether we know it or not, we suffer with them.” James was startled by the anger in his own voice.
Nan’s father assessed him, staring at him and through him simultaneously, his eyes curious. To James’s surprise, Nan’s father suddenly nodded and seemed to come to a decision.
“I’ll tell you what I’m hearing,” he said. “You feel you have a duty to work for the world, in the world. And some part of you wants to believe in God.”
“Yes,” James affirmed. “I do. Every time I go to church, I wish I could believe wholeheartedly, without reservation, without any nagging doubt.”
“And you feel you can pray, study Scripture, say the blessings with sincerity?”
“I do,” James said. “I may not believe in God, but I believe in ministry. I want to do for others what my mother and uncle did for me. I want to give them chances. I feel I have a debt to repay.”
“Fine,” Nan’s father declared forcefully. “God doesn’t always come in visions or dreams, and God rarely comes in certainty,” he went on. “God has come to you in restlessness and yearning. God has come to you in questioning. God has come to you as a challenge. It won’t be easy, but it’s a perfectly acceptable calling. Where will you study?”
James had only begun to think about this, but he knew enough to proffer an answer. “I know Nan would like to come home,” he said. “And I’m sure that would make you happy.”
Nan’s father shook his head ruefully and smiled. “Oh, no,” he said. “You can’t study in Mississippi. The Baptists will eat you alive.”
“In that case,” James said, “my uncle has offered to help me find a place at a university in England.”
“Very good,” Nan’s father said. “Intellectual, used to skeptics: a perfect fit. I give you my blessing.”
The next summer, James and Nan were married twice. Once with her family in her father’s church, where Nan wore a long white gown and veil, and once with his family, by a justice of the peace, for which Nan wore a white suit and hat. They went to Maine for two weeks, stayed by a lake, and when they came back, Nan packed to leave her world again, this time happily, this time for London.
SEVEN
For the rest of the school year, and the whole of the next, Charles and Lily had dinner every Friday and Saturday night. They sat in various booths in various restaurants, and Lily asked Charles questions like, “If God exists, why are men killed in battle? If God exists, how can we be afraid?”
To all of these, Charles answered, “I don’t know.”
He could have given her his working hypotheses. He could have said, “Men are killed because other men kill them, and I’m pretty sure God doesn’t actually want us to be afraid.” But those answers would have given her something to argue with, a logic to pick apart. Charles did not want to bicker with Lily. He was willing to discuss the failures and successes of organized religion, but that wasn’t what Lily wanted to explore. She wanted to determine whether his faith was permanent. She wanted his final answers, his certainty, and under her particular brand of scrutiny, I don’t know was the only statement he could make that hewed closely to his truth.
Sometimes, this infuriated Lily. How could Charles not know? After all his study and thought and church and prayer, how could he accept that there was no answer? What would it take to make him scoff at superstition, to make him accept the flimsiness of his worldview? She wanted to poke at his conviction with a stick until it collapsed, until she persuaded him it was fantasy. But he did not give her the chance. He indulged her in debates about history, politics, war, peace, wealth, and poverty. But he would not let her present her arguments against God; neither would he submit arguments in God’s defense. It was a fair bargain, Lily had to admit. Still, she continued to test him, to gauge the nimbleness of his mind and his willingness to accept her defiance. The tenor of their courtship was set, and it was contrary: Lily disagreed with everything Charles said.
Over months of debate, Charles’s mind sharpened. He understood that, with Lily, he had to be clear and quick. He could not speculate or equivocate; he had to take a stand and support it with facts. He could tell he had become a worthy adversary when Lily took a little longer to formulate her rebuttals. In the pauses, Charles loved to watch the expressions move across her face as she searched for her defense, found it, and wrangled it to run her way.
He did wish he could share more of his uncertainties with her, wished he could tell her the things he wanted to believe even though he did not, yet. For instance, he did not quite believe the Bible was the word of God. He wanted to; his career would be so much easier if he could, but the Bible was full of a God that bore no resemblance to his feeling of faith, to his sense that, in the midst of any agony, there was a part of every being in which all was well.
He also did not quite believe, yet, that he could be a good minister. He was worried he had spent too many years steeped in academia, too much time studying the past, not enough time in the real world. He wanted to believe that he was right about his call, that he understood his mission correctly, that it was, indeed, to put into words the alchemical comfort he felt when he prayed. But sometimes he worried he would do the worst job of his life in the pursuit of the life he most wanted.
He knew Lily would not understand his wanting to believe something that he did not already. She would not accept that, in lives of faith, wanting to believe was everything, when in lives of academia, wanting to believe was a failure of scholarship. So he kept his doubts from her. To share them would cloud the issue, which was that he had no question about his faith in God. He simply let her measure him, discern how much room he would take up in her life.
Lily accepted his patience. She understood that he would not give up God for her, that their future was hers to decide. In many moments, she felt crazy for dating him. Wha
t did his faith have to offer her? God had not eased her grief. God had not renewed or healed her, even in Charles’s presence. In fact, in trying to decide if she could love him, she had thought of her parents every day, wondered what they would have thought of him, decided they would have found him steady, calm, and intellectual, just like her. And so, in the months they had been dating, she had felt more bereft than ever.
Still, she did not send Charles away. Dating him was lectures and dinners and long evenings in the library. It was insight and breadth of knowledge and desire to learn. It was exactly what she had wanted out of Radcliffe, only it was with a boy. A boy whose height and voice and scent had become familiar, whose hand she held, for whom she honed her best ideas so that she could earn his respect. She had never felt this way, even with her family. With them, she had felt different; with him, she felt entwined.
It was preposterous. He had an entire part of his life that he could not share with her, that she could never understand. But then, so did she. She had told him, of course, how her parents had died, what her life had been like beforehand, and then after. She had given him the history of it. But just as he did not tell her about God, church, ministry, and colleagues, she did not tell him that she often woke at night with a tar-dark dread inside her, as blistering as her first moments of orphanhood when she realized that no one was alive who truly loved her, that she could be forgotten, that she was lost and no one would claim her as their own.
Thus, their scale was equal. He had his faith and she had her grief, the parts of them that were unspeakable, in the face of which words were flimsy and inept. They both understood what it felt like to change in an instant, to become an entirely different person, to be shown a landscape they had not asked to be revealed. Without his faith, he could not understand the depth of her grief. Without her grief, she could not fathom the lightness of his relief. In this way, they were each other’s mirrors, each reflecting back to the other a pilgrim on an unsought road.
One spring night they went to a lecture on contemporary art, which Charles had chosen because it was one topic about which they had not yet argued. They sat in the first row, listening to the strangely rasping voice of the lecturer as the slides shone for a moment then disappeared. Lily smelled, as she always did, of gardenia. When the lights came up, they were the last to leave the auditorium; as they waited in the line up the aisle, Charles scratched his cheek and said, “I didn’t like that very much.”
“I didn’t either,” Lily answered.
Charles looked at her, clearly surprised. She laughed. Sound came out of her in a burst, and she clapped her hand over her mouth to muffle it. Her eyes were bright; she looked ten years old.
“What?” Charles asked.
“I just never thought we’d agree on anything,” she said. “It’s a shock.”
This Charles knew, as he stood in the sloped, carpeted aisle, was a miracle. Lily did not laugh often; now her face was bright. There was a pocket of quiet around him; the moment was completely still. Lily had laughed, and it reignited his sense of purpose. He would serve God and he would serve her. He would do anything to make her laugh again.
They found themselves outside as the crowd dispersed, standing together on a campus path as the loudly chattering groups faded away. It was cool, and Lily had brought a cardigan. Charles held it so she could slip her arms inside, and as she did, there was a moment when his arms formed a circle around her, when he felt her warmth in the cool night air, when he wanted, desperately, never to have to let her go.
And yet, he asked her this question: “Do you truly not believe in God?”
It was the wrong time to ask it, but he was beginning to doubt that the right time would ever come. They had been dating for months, skirting around the fact that their entire courtship hung on this one question. He knew the answer, but he wanted to hear her say it; he wanted to gauge the way it hit him, hoping it would not feel heavy or hard.
Lily frowned harder than usual, made to turn away. Charles kept his hands on the lapels of her sweater, lightly, just enough so she could not retreat.
“I don’t,” she said, and, to his relief, it did not gut him, not in the way it might have done, before he knew her.
“Do you truly not want to?” he asked.
She nodded. He felt oddly calm, somehow glad that the parameters of their relationship were clear and strong; that he had not been mistaken or misled.
Lily’s face was grave, all trace of laughter gone. “Let me ask you a question,” she said. Charles braced himself.
“Do you believe that someday you’ll convince me to find faith in God?”
He was startled. It was one of the easiest questions she could have asked him.
“No,” he said.
“Do you secretly hope that someday I will find it on my own?”
This was not an easy question. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that’s possible. But I do hope that someday you will find relief, deep peace, and joy.”
Lily took two steps back and put both hands on top of her head. “That’s ridiculous,” she said.
“Why?” he asked. She shook her head so forcefully he was certain she would leave, almost put his arm out to stop her. But he had to ask her one more question, the question that mattered, the question that had slunk behind him as he walked through his days, lingered, persistent as a black cat at the door.
“Do you think you can ever love me?”
She let her hands drop to her sides.
There it was, she thought, the crux of the matter, the X on the map. How could she bear to love him when love brought loss? How could she love him, when she lived in the dark and he lived in the light, when the fact she believed most certainly in life was that love led to agony?
She was exhausted. “I don’t know,” she said.
Charles was acutely aware that, after almost two years, he had still not kissed her. He had not yet seen any look in her eye to convince him she longed for him. She had never once accidentally grazed his leg while reaching for the salt or leaned close to him at the movies. But still, how could she not know? She, who had plotted the course of her life in excruciating detail, her trajectory predicted in a series of indelible, straight lines?
“Why not?” he asked, suddenly angry with her, hurt by her primness and her intellect and her seemingly complete disregard for his feelings.
“Because you want too badly to make me happy,” she said. Even now, witnessing his anger, she could feel his desperate hope. He had accepted that she would never believe in God but could not bear the fact that she would always be sad. It was a pity, because she did love him. That truth had lurked in her for months. But what did it matter?
“You’ll never be able to make me whole.”
They did not speak for weeks. The end of the school year was approaching. Lily received her admission to the PhD program, and found a room in a boarding house on Irving Street where she could live when her four years of allotted on-campus housing ran out. She met the women living there already and liked them. One was studying Eastern art, the other theoretical physics. They were as serious about their academics as she was. While the bent-on-marriage girls steamed their white dresses and chose names for their future babies, Lily asked her new roommates if they thought it was actually possible for her to finish her coursework and dissertation in five years.
She had not abandoned that plan. Charles had three more years at Harvard after this one, and then he would be called to a church as an associate pastor for two years. If they were still together when he got the call, she would have to decide whether or not to go with him. She had done her research: If she continued her tradition of summer school, she could finish her coursework and teaching the same June that he would graduate, and then she would have only her dissertation to complete, which she could do anywhere. It would have been possible to finish her studies and support his career.
Now, it was impossible. Charles had let go of her sweater and left her standing on the
sidewalk alone. He had not been waiting for her outside her class the next day or the day after. She did not see him in the library. He did not call. And she missed him. He loved her, and she had told him the one thing she knew would drive him away.
Graduation approached. Lily ordered her robes and booked a room for Miriam and Richard, who were coming up for the ceremony. As she had not told them about recent events, they were looking forward to meeting Charles. Lily found herself wishing she could introduce the three of them, that they could eat lunch together and drink champagne while she felt proud.
Exam week came and went; Lily passed every subject with straight As. She did not celebrate. She packed her suitcases, sat on the edge of her stripped bed, and stared at her bare walls. The dorm was hot and stuffy. Parents had begun to arrive, and girls were laughing merrily in the halls. In her room, though, all was quiet, except for Lily’s billowing acres of loneliness.
She did not want to love Charles. Love was packed up tightly in brown boxes in Miriam and Richard’s attic, boxes she had no desire to open. She didn’t want to be like every girl in her family, all of whom had grown up, found a husband, stayed in the same town, never spent one moment alone. For her, alone was no longer a state of being cured by company; it was her definition, it lived in her very flesh.
She turned on her light and sat very still on the edge of her bed. She thought about Charles, about his familiar face with its plain chin and its nose flattened where it had once been broken by a baseball. She thought about his carefully ironed collars and the straight line of his new haircut. She thought about his patience, his quick wit, his willingness to listen to what she had to say.