by Cara Wall
“Hm,” Charles said.
“Not what you want to hear.” Harold Evans clapped his hands together. “Right, then. Here’s how it applies to you. You love Lily, but you do not yet have faith in her, or in your marriage. You must find it. Faith will allow you the room for anger, for disappointment, for hate. Love will not. You must believe your marriage will succeed, even through hardship, sorrow, loss. Do you believe that?”
Charles was silent. Then he said, “Not if we stay here.”
“Ah, well,” Harold said, “that’s why this post turns over.”
Charles looked up at him. Harold smiled. “It’s fine, Charles. I’m used to it. This is my life. I live it out in the community with people, and that is what I preach. How to live. We don’t live a big life here, but it’s a cycle. Sickness then healing, sadness then joy. And to do it well, I have to get out there and see people. I have to be at the hardware store and the baseball games; I have to go to people’s houses and to the hospital. And if I tried to do it alone, I’d be lonely. So, I have rotating associates and I have Evelyn. It’s a two-person job. If I want to have any time to preach—to really think about what I’m going to preach, it’s definitely a two-person job.”
“Is it like that everywhere?” Charles asked.
Harold said, “I don’t know.”
Lily decided to write her dissertation on the careers of Thoreau’s critics. “It’s easier to commit to a point of view with which I agree,” she told Charles.
”Indeed,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
She began taking the long ferry trip to Boston once a month to search for new books and return the ones she had finished reading.
“How is it out there?” Eileen, the librarian, asked, keeping tabs on the couple she had introduced.
“Bleak,” Lily answered. She thought of the seagulls crying into the blurred fog of cold mornings on the beach, their pleas echoing into her empty days.
Back on the island, she researched and wrote. When someone shouted and waved to her on the beach, she waved back but did not stop. She went home, spread her books out on the kitchen table, and wrote. She would finish this paper, defend it, and earn her degree. This is something to do, she told herself.
She knew she was worrying Charles. When he passed her at the kitchen table he often patted her hair, as one would with a child, and kissed her on the top of her head. She wished he wouldn’t; it didn’t help. His kind of comfort could not cancel her kind of distress. Why had she married him? She had known that someday he would want her to be happier and she would want him to be more sad. She had known that, despite what they told each other, he would want her to believe in God and she would want him not to. She had known they were different, as direly different as stone and water.
Now she was his wife and, no matter how hard she worked, she was no longer free to choose her future. She lay awake at night thinking about Charles’s next call, terrified it would take them to Nebraska, Alaska, Idaho. She had nightmares of small white churches surrounded by shorn winter fields. She tried desperately to keep the anxious look off her face. She fought the hope that he might not like being a minister after all, that he might wake up one day and change his mind.
One quiet night, after dinner, Lily and Charles sat reading in their living room. Charles had moved a stack of journals to make himself a spot on the couch, his feet up on the table in front of him. He was comfortable; he was often comfortable at night when the two of them sat together without talking, when Lily seemed content, when he did not have to worry about her. He was used to her silence, to the academic crowdedness in which they lived.
He put his book in his lap, rested his head on the back of the couch, to pray or sleep—whichever came easier. Suddenly, Lily stood up. The stack of paper beside her collapsed to the floor. She paced to the wall and back, her pen still in her hand.
“I’m going sort of crazy,” she said.
Charles stared at her, registering her panic.
“I’m in the middle of realizing that you’re going to be a minister forever,” she said. “You’re going to be a minister for life. And we might always live in a place like this, a place where I don’t have a life of my own, where I only have your circumstances.” She sat back down on the sofa across from him. The enormity of her dilemma hung like a cobweb in the room.
They sat together, silently.
“What did you think would happen when we moved here?” Charles asked Lily, finally.
“I thought I could accept it. Or adapt. I know that this is the job you have chosen. But part of me is hoping you would realize it is . . . untenable.”
“Untenable.” Charles’s voice was very quiet. He was picking at a thread on his trousers.
Lily felt herself grow still. “Let me tell you what I wish,” she said.
“All right,” Charles answered.
Lily cleared her throat. “I wish I could accept the ministry as a noble profession and be proud of the help you give people.”
“But.”
“The truth is, I hate this place. And I hate that we are here because of a religion you believe in . . . are able to believe in because nothing bad has ever happened to you.”
Charles nodded. “You’re right. Nothing bad ever happened to me. Nothing ever happened to me. Until I found God.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true,” Charles said. “My father never asked me a personal question. My mother started each day at the kitchen table writing a list and spent the rest methodically working her way through it. Every Sunday they went for a long walk and had lunch at the club. I assume they loved each other, but how would I know? All they ever taught me was to respect intellect, good manners, and privacy. And that’s what I would have done if I hadn’t found God.” He let his breath out heavily, held up his palms.
“I have a call, Lily. I suppose it would help if I could tell you about a moment of proof—a dream, a light where it should have been dark, a vision, a voice heard in silence. Maybe I could convince you if I had prayed for something and it had come true.” He shrugged. “There were lots of guys at seminary who believed they had visions, heard voices, who experienced their call physically, through one sense or another. But I never had that. My call isn’t one of proof. It’s one of possibility.”
He stood up, walked away a little, then returned. “It’s possible there’s something more to life than moving from room to room, placing myself in front of people, but still finding myself empty at the end of the day. It’s possible I can find out why people accouter their lives with houses and dogs and needlepoint pillows, and it’s possible this will help me understand why my own life once felt so bare. It’s possible that other people want the same connection I long for and that I can give it to them. It’s possible that if I treat people kindly, patiently, and with compassion, they will do the same for me. And it’s possible that what I can’t find in others, I can find in God.”
Lily stood very still, waiting for the blaze of his anger and humiliation to wear off.
“That’s what keeps me going. That’s what makes this possible.” He waved his hand between them. “I can love you because I can love God. I can love you because, despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s possible this might work.”
“I don’t hate you,” she said. She didn’t. They were like two planks of wood, cut from the same tree, now pressed back together.
“We won’t always live in a place like this,” Charles told her.
“We might have to.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“You might get a call . . .”
“No,” he said firmly. “If it will make you unhappy, it is not my call.”
Lily drew out the chair next to him, sat down, and laid her head on the table.
“I’m sorry,” she said. He put his hand on the back of her hair.
Once back from the hospital, Nan felt a little better. She could sleep without the racket of nurses in the hall, drink very sweet tea,
and eat cookies. Her mother sent fudge that melted in transit, but which Nan scooped out of the tin with a spoon.
The doctors prescribed fresh air, and she obeyed them. While James went back to school, she took the train out to the old manor houses—Ham House, Chiswick, Sissinghurst—to explore their gardens. There she found acres of silence surrounded by hedgerows and crushed gravel paths. On cold days the dampness seeped up under her skirt; on hot days, leaves hung heavily on their branches. She bought a map and guidebook at each one, followed the walking path, knelt down to examine the flowers closely: gentian, purple aster, clover. She touched each leaf, each petal, felt them fuzzy or spiny or sticky in her hand. Her coats absorbed the dark scent of soil.
“You smell green,” James told her.
Nan kept a small brown notebook and sketched the paths as she walked them, feeling her way through their angles, searching for their centers. Each garden had one, a point from which all else grew, the stitch where symmetry began. She knew when she found it, recognized the moment when the heft and breadth of the quadrants equalized around her, when she became the fulcrum. For long moments, she reveled in the order, breathing deeply in the straight equation of the tending and the reward.
She started to grow herbs on her windowsill, calling farms and nurseries to find certain cuttings; she ordered a raft of seed catalogs in advance so she could read them through the winter. It was what she would have done if they had stayed in Mississippi. She would have planted her garden and watered it: tomatoes, sweet peas, radishes, and beans. She pushed tiny seeds into dark potting soil, found some comfort in the idea that each small plastic pot held a grafting of her old life and her new.
In the spring, Phillip found the letters he had promised James at the country home of two book-collecting members of his church, who invited them all to lunch and a viewing of their shelves full of diaries. Nan and James and Phillip took the train up together; Phillip brought the paper and shared a section with each of them. Nan put hers in her lap and looked out the window, wanting to watch the iron outskirts of London turn into the damp grey roads of the countryside, full of dull white houses, soft green trees.
Phillip rustled his paper, clicked his tongue. “Tell me,” Nan heard him say to James. “I’m interested in Dr. King.”
Nan was tired of this topic now. She was tired of being a novelty; her home considered an outrage. She did not turn to join the conversation.
“I expect you find him quite inspiring,” Phillip said to James.
“Indeed,” James said. “I’m in awe of his determination.”
“Do you think he will succeed?”
“I do.”
James was right, Nan knew. Dr. King would succeed; he had to. Her father wrote her letters about it every week, calling the movement a commitment to human dignity. Nan was worried about him, preaching those things from his particular pulpit, standing determined and measured in front of his congregation, asking them to admit that they were wrong. Painfully aware that wrong was one of the worst possible things to ask a person to be.
Phillip put his head to one side and said, “Change can be violently difficult.”
The two men sat silently for a moment. Then James said, “I disagree.” His voice was tense and restless. He had turned sideways, his tweed jacket stuck on the rough mohair of the train seat. “It can happen so easily. Faster than you even want it to. Once you ask for it, everything can turn on a dime. The whole world could be different tomorrow.”
He was right, Nan thought. Change did come fast and easy, as fast and easy as the flow of blood.
She turned back to the window. I’m glad you’re not here, her father had written. People we know are saying such terrible things, Nan, doing such inconceivable wrongs. You wouldn’t recognize them. She didn’t read these letters to James, because James would rejoice in them, full of the wonder of justice and courage. He wouldn’t understand that her world was slipping away, like the fields outside this train window. Soon there would be nothing to go back to. Mississippi would be a different place. Better, fairer, healthier for all, but not one she would recognize.
“We’ve arrived,” Phillip said, as they pulled into a station. They all stood up. James put his hand on the small of Nan’s back.
The book collectors lived a little way off the road in a cottage with climbing ivy framing the door. The wife, Leonora, met them on the walk, wearing an old skirt and rubber boots.
“Come inside!” she said heartily. “Arthur is just trying to decide what you might like to see first.”
“I hear you have some letters,” James said, shaking her hand eagerly. “From men studying to be pastors.”
Leonora winked at Nan. “A man after his own heart, is he?” She spread her arms out to herd them inside, a border collie nudging sheep. “You two go in there.” She pointed James and his uncle toward the library, where Nan could see Arthur bent over a manuscript set on a music stand.
“You,” she said to Nan, “come with me. We’ll leave the boys to those crispy letters. I have something just for you.” She went over to a bookcase in the hall, far away from the dangerous light of the window. She pulled down a blue box tied up with a matching ribbon.
“Collector’s box,” she said. “I don’t much go in for them—bloody expensive to have made, but this was an exception.” She carried it to a table. “Close those curtains, will you?” she asked. “The English countryside is a wonderful place for books—hardly any sun at all—but you can’t be too careful.” Gingerly, she undid the ribbon and opened the box, revealing what looked like a school notebook with a grey-green cardboard cover.
“Phillip mentioned you’ve taken to English gardens,” Leonora said. “So I thought you might like this.” She opened the cover. “Vita Sackville-West. She wrote gardening articles, you know, and she wrote them all by hand, all out in books like these. There are four of them. Museums have three, but we found this one. Lucky.” Nan pulled up a chair. The book looked so fragile, so pale, and yet so inviting.
“Come on then,” Leonora said. “I’ve got to get lunch on, but you have a read.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t,” Nan said.
“Why not? Books should be read. That’s why we collect them. Don’t want them all to go into museums, under glass. Go ahead; learn something. It’s what keeps writers alive.”
Nan sat down and read. The pages were soft as satin in her hand. There, in delicate, green-inked handwriting were fourteen articles, with spelling corrections penciled in, whole sections crossed out and rewritten in the margins. The words were ordinary. They spoke of soil temperatures and angles of the sun. They explained methods of composting, the effect of eggshells buried close to roots. There were odes to oak trees and Queen Anne’s lace, advice on which gloves to wear when pruning holly and ivy, all the plants with bushy, sharp edges and the fruit trees with the stickiest of sap. There were pages about the greenhouse, where roses and hollyhocks, orchids and iris were carefully seeded, their beds thoughtfully planned. Vita Sackville-West believed she could grow anything anywhere, that hostile climates could be tended and made to bloom. A whole life could be created and made meaningful around doing so. It was almost comforting. But Nan was not a seedling in Vita’s calloused hands.
Most of Nan’s life had been lovely, as lovely and easy as a walking tour. She had grown up in a climate where gardens were obvious. Where every neighbor’s backyard was fertile; where any corner of land could yield daylilies, lemon trees, magnolias, plums. She reached out to touch an ink spot on the page. There were no secret tricks, no miracles revealed, but as she read Nan felt, for a moment, as if she herself had been put under glass. As if she were as sheltered as the flowers growing in the moist heat of greenhouses. She felt as if she were on a stage, slowly rotating, knowing the curtain would open onto a completely different place in time.
My life is no longer easy, she thought. She had been trying to make her days as tidy as patches of land in the countryside, as windproof as their farmhouses’ tig
ht thatched roofs. But James was trying to make himself as powerful as the train they had ridden in on—as loud, as fast, as scene-changing. He had a vision; he believed he was right, and he would spend his life trying to make it come true.
“Do you know what I’d like to have?” she said to James when they got back to the flat. “Ice cream. Real American ice cream on a fresh-baked sugar cone.” English ice cream was watery and bland.
She was really saying: I want to go home.
PART TWO
1963–1965
TEN
Third Presbyterian sat on the corner of Twelfth Street and Fifth Avenue: a dull, brown, brick building with a tall, square steeple. To its right was the church office building, a four-story rectangle of newer brown brick, with double glass doors and a balcony off the second floor. To its left sat the manse, built at the same time as the church and in the same style, with a gable roof and gothic windows. The three church buildings were set apart from the city streets by a black wrought iron fence, which would have rendered them overbearingly formal and somber except that the church gardens were full of dogwood and hydrangea, which in spring bloomed uncontrollably, white and pink. Charles and James and Nan and Lily had first seen the church at the messy end of winter, 1963, when the buildings and branches stood out starkly against the grey city snow.
Third Presbyterian was well respected and traditional; a place where women wore hats to Sunday service and men wore suits and ties. It resembled its uptown, society-church cousins in the quality of its organ music, its choir, and the success of its fund-raising. But since church attendance was not a social requirement downtown, Third Presbyterian members believed their faith was more authentically chosen, a little deeper, more closely held.