The Dearly Beloved

by Cara Wall

  Third Presbyterian was in trouble. Five years earlier, the church’s search committee had hired Sebastian Taft, a minister from Connecticut. Their previous minister had retired after twenty years, and Third Presbyterian wanted a fresh point of view. Their city was changing: It was the age of skyscrapers, cars, and highways, which required whole city blocks to be razed and colonized by diggers, cranes, and jackhammers. Third Presbyterian had lost many members to the suburbs, and many more had also begun to dream of quiet lawns, tall trees, places for dogs and children to run.

  Even the members committed to staying in the city found they wanted their church to become a haven, an escape from the disruption. They looked, specifically, for a pastor from outside the city, someone who could tell them what life was like in a prettier, cleaner place. They had wanted a village feel, someone who could preach the wisdom of a small town.

  Sebastian had interviewed with five glowing letters of recommendation on distinguished, heavy paper. One elder from his previous church actually wept on the phone, moaning, “He’s such a stalwart; I just can’t believe we’re going to lose him.” He arrived with thirteen black robes and fifty-two bright, colorful stoles hand-embroidered by his old parishioners, one for each Sunday of the year. He shook everyone’s hand enthusiastically, with quick, sharp pumps. He cocked his head to one side when spoken to, nodded with affected interest, and ended every conversation with a loud Thanks and a jovial slap on the back.

  He enjoyed pageants and enlisted children to march through the sanctuary in costumes, with their pets—goldfish and hamsters and guinea pigs. He festooned the church with purple wall hangings and white satin bunting. He shined the crosses; he oiled the pews. He wrote poems in the shape of the cross and manger, candle and flame; he printed these on the fronts of the worship programs. He wrote his own loose, casual prayers to replace the ones that had been said for fifty years.

  As promised, he increased attendance, but the new additions were members from his old church, groupies who drove in on Sunday to hear him preach. He did not bring in students or young families; he did not stem the tide of defection to towns nestled safely above the Triborough Bridge. As promised, he preached a message of hope, which the congregation found too hopeful. At Easter he declared, “Even in death there is a happy ending.” The few city-dwelling members these meditations did bring in were as brightly optimistic as Sebastian. They complimented his sermons about lambs and harvest, the ark as a symbol of everlasting hope. They appreciated his gaudy decorations and jovial hellos.

  Long-time Third Presbyterian members came to recognize that Sebastian hailed from a church where suffering was cushioned by green lawns and plushly upholstered cars. He wasn’t equipped to help Third Presbyterian think through the upheaval it was experiencing. He did not understand the friction of the city, its grey stone stress and the agony of its disrepair. They came to understand that he had no desire to wade into rough waters. He simply wanted, like Noah, to ride out the storm.

  As a full year passed, they began to suspect that Sebastian was not writing new material: his sermons were general and somewhat glib. They made no mention of events they read about in the newspaper, good or bad. They asked him politely to reinstate the traditional prayers. He refused, as placidly as a mule. They asked him to curtail the pageants. He refused, with a stubborn smile. And then, at Christmas, he made his boldest move.

  For a hundred years, the Third Presbyterian congregation had sung Joy to the World as the last Christmas Eve hymn, then emptied triumphantly into the silent streets of New York full of life and hope and the clear brass notes of the organ. It was their most treasured tradition, a night when they felt emboldened in their faith, empowered to scatter it in front of them onto the streets of the city like gold. Instead, Sebastian decreed, the last hymn would be Silent Night, and as they sang they would light candles, filling the church with a soft, shimmering glow. It was beautiful; it was sophisticated; it was reverent. But where was the celebration? They tiptoed out into the New York night, lonely and perturbed.

  The magnitude of their mistake in hiring Sebastian was shocking. He had no respect for Third Presbyterian’s cherished identity, no desire to further its long-standing mission. He wanted to create a church in his own image, pleased and facile and smug. Third Presbyterian’s congregation discovered that they did not want a shiny, Christmas-ornament version of faith. They wanted to talk about belief, how to find it and what it meant for their lives in a changing world. When, four years later, Sebastian contracted gout, they knew they should feel sorry for him. Still, there were various quiet celebrations when, for medical reasons, he retired early.

  “We want,” the new search committee wrote, “a minister with the highest academic credentials, who struggles with the incongruity of faith in the modern world. We want a minister who looks for answers in a dignified way. We are not interested in the trappings of religion, only in the deep, incisive examination of Christian principles and the ways we may apply them to our lives. We want to restore our self-esteem.”

  To this call, both Charles and James had answered.

  Scheduled for their Third Presbyterian interviews on the same day, Charles and James sat in a wide, second-floor hallway, outside a heavy wooden door, waiting to be invited in. They had not been introduced and took that to mean they should not speak. But they saw each other.

  Charles saw a wiry man, a wound-up clock ticking with purpose. He could see it was an effort for James not to pace, thought he could hear him humming with energy, like a light bulb. He saw the kind of man who made him most nervous, who formulated his thoughts quickly and voiced them with force. If this was the kind of man the church wanted, then he, Charles, with his love of obscure texts and academic analysis, did not stand a chance.

  James saw a tall, hale man whose good navy blue blazer, monogrammed shirt, and khaki pants evoked a wealthy, literary upbringing. Charles’s slight stoop and the glasses in his breast pocket spoke of intellectual ability; his steady gaze suggested a deep respect for the thread of history. If Third Presbyterian wanted an academic, James thought, then why was he here?

  Alan Oxman, the chair of the search committee, came out to greet them. “Sirs,” he said, “please come in.”

  James and Charles stepped into the church’s library. After the bare hallway, the room was a surprise: warm and welcoming. To their left was a large fireplace with a marble mantel; to their right was a wall of leather-bound books. In front of them was a long, polished table flanked by the church members who would decide if Charles and James deserved a job. The two men stepped onto the thick carpet and, making their way around the table, shook hands with their interviewers. They were each given a chair, in which they sat without taking off their jackets. Though the windows on the far wall were open, the room smelled distinctly of wood and wax.

  “Let’s get started,” Alan Oxman said. The interviewers opened their file folders, positioned their pens in their hands. The room stilled. A woman with short brown hair and a plaid dress turned to Charles. “How do you picture God?” she asked.

  Charles answered, “I don’t picture God; I just believe.”

  A man in a pin-striped suit and red tie turned to James. “What are your thoughts on dying?”

  James answered, “Scares the hell out of me.”

  The interviewers chuckled, nodded, wrote notes on their yellow legal pads.

  Alan Oxman flipped through some pages in his folder, then looked up and leaned forward, put his elbows on the table, and steepled his hands under his chin. “Tell me,” he asked, “What do you consider to be your most personal mission?”

  Both Charles and James paused to think before they answered.

  Charles answered first. “To help people think clearly,” he said. “To help them see past fear and disappointment to possibility.”

  “Thinking’s not enough,” James exclaimed. He exhaled impatiently, sat forward in his chair. “We can’t just think about a man living on the street corner. We can’t ju
st think about war and race and cruelty,” James continued. “I’m going to preach about social justice.”

  Alan Oxman sat back, looked at the ceiling, cleaned his glasses on his tie, gave no impression that he felt the tension in the room. Finally, he said, “I’d like to know what each of you considers to be your greatest personal flaw.”

  Charles thought, suddenly, of a story his father told to all his classes, about a professor who kept a rabbit. The rabbit had been the professor’s childhood pet. It ate from the professor’s hand, went into its cage quietly at night, and twitched its ears when called, as if it recognized its name. But the rabbit never accomplished anything the professor could really brag about. It had gotten old and fat, but the professor allowed it to roam the house freely, and would as long as he earned enough money for a maid to pick up the pellets.

  One night, as the professor sat reading in front of the fire, the rabbit shuffled into the room and stopped directly in front of the grate, one hind paw on the hearthstone. The firelight cast its shadow on the floor. As the professor watched, the rabbit leaped farther than the man had ever seen any rabbit leap, and spun in the air before landing heavily on the ground. Then the rabbit leaped again, straight up, in front of the red and gold flames, and turned another pirouette, the fire casting shadows on the turn, as if there were three dancers twirling before the professor.

  When the professor invited a friend over for dinner the next night, he invited his friend to sit in a chair by the fire to finish his wine, anticipating the rabbit’s next appearance. The rabbit made its way to the hearth and sat down, looking at the two men.

  “Just wait,” the professor said. “Last night, he did the most incredible thing.”

  The men waited for hours, but the rabbit did not move and finally the friend went home to bed.

  “In this story lie all the foibles of history,” Charles’s father told his students, assigning each of them a paper positing what they were. There were various correct answers, but Charles’s father’s favorite was: Never assume success, especially when its circumstances are not under your control.

  Charles brought his attention back to the search committee and said, “I tend to assume that things will work out the way I hope they will.”

  Before anyone could respond, James said, “I’m impatient. I can’t let anything be.”

  They left the room together and shook hands at the door.

  After some weeks, during which the search committee considered references, reread mission statements, and combed through CVs, Charles and James were called in again. They sat in the same warm library, surrounded by books and windows and people who might give them a job. Alan Oxman stood at the head of the table.

  “We want, as you know,” he proclaimed, “a certain dignity and intellect.” He nodded at Charles. “Which we believe we have found.”

  He turned to James. “We also find we need a call to action, a certain spark to pull us from our reveries,” he said, “which we believe we have also found.” He cleared his throat and looked at the others around the table. One or two nodded at him and he nodded back. He turned to James and Charles, some of the ceremony gone from his face.

  “We have, as you may or may not know, been through a trying time, and entered this process with a large degree of trepidation.”

  “The last guy was an idiot,” the woman in the plaid dress—Betsy Bailey, they now knew—exclaimed quietly. The search committee laughed; James and Charles shifted uncomfortably.

  Alan Oxman continued. “We find you each have qualities we admire, and we are not willing to choose one over the other. We find we would like to protect ourselves by building in a choice. So, gentlemen, we are offering you a joint pastorship, the job split fifty-fifty. We think it’s going to take more than one minister to restore us to our former glory.”

  In this way, James and Charles found themselves standing in the doorway of a small office into which two desks had been squeezed, facing each other.

  “You could move the desks,” Alan Oxman said.

  Charles shook his head. “No need.”

  James continued, “If we’re going to preach together, I suppose we should be able to look each other in the eye.”

  They were given a secretary.

  “I am Jane Atlas,” she declared when they met her. “I am seventy-two years old. I have been at this church since 1920. I wore a short skirt and bobbed hair to my interview,” she told them. “They thought I was scandalous. But I typed better than anyone else who’d accept the pay.” She handed each of them a blue ceramic mug of coffee. “Still do.”

  She was a tiny woman, with a neat silver bob and the deepest, fullest voice either of them had ever heard; it commanded from them the same awestruck silence as a large chieftain beating slowly on a round, ceremonial drum.

  “Elocution lessons,” she told them. “My mother made me take them. She wanted me to be an actress. She wanted me to be in silent films. I told her I didn’t need elocution lessons for those and she said, ‘But of course you will—everyone will be watching your lips move.’ She took me around to every shady man she knew, and a few she didn’t, and every single one of them pinched my rump. That was it for me. I came to work at a church. She squawked like a chicken, but here I am. I don’t think she ever understood that all I wanted was a little bit of peace.”

  From this information, James understood that Jane didn’t feel the need to earn their respect; she simply expected it. Charles understood that she had left a chaotic life for some serenity, which they were not to disturb.

  “The first thing we’ve got to do,” she told them as they set their coffees on their desks, “is take down that dreadful man’s flibbertigibbets. You carry those,” she said, pointing to six empty boxes sitting in the corner of their office. They each took three and followed her as she led them through the door that connected the church building to the church itself. The sanctuary was cool and quiet, a long rectangle with a marble floor and high, vaulted ceilings. The dark wood pews were set with faded blue velvet cushions and red hymnals with frayed spines. James and Charles were to sit apart from the congregation, up three marble steps, behind a large mahogany altar. To the right of this altar was the small pulpit, carved of freestanding marble. This was for the lay reader and announcements. To the left of the altar was the preaching pulpit, up twelve rickety stairs, from which James and Charles would impart wisdom every other Sunday in turn.

  Charles was relieved to be starting the day in the sanctuary. He always felt comforted by places of worship, reassured by their thick walls and calm air. He enjoyed the privilege of spending time in them on days when there were no services, when he had no responsibility to inspire others and could let himself relax. James was glad the building was not too grand. Large and impressive, yes, but seemingly designed by practical men to be sturdy rather than ornate, a simple building built of wood and stone. He could see why Jane wanted so badly to remove the white satin bunting Sebastian had hung from the balconies and the tasseled gold banners he had pinned to the doors.

  “Take all of it down,” she ordered, so Charles and James each climbed up to a balcony and untied the bunting, letting it fall to the floor as Jane stood on a stepstool to wrest the gaudy banners down. When they were finished, they gathered the material up and dropped it into the boxes, closed the lids, and taped them shut.

  “Good riddance,” Jane said, as they stacked the boxes in a neat row. “Now sit.”

  She gestured to the high-backed wooden chairs behind the altar. Charles and James did as they were told. From that vantage point, they could see the whole of the church more clearly: the very back corners of the balconies, the small stained glass circle above the closed front door, the way the pews lined up like the strings of an abacus, with Jane Atlas staring intently at them, the lone counting bead.

  She walked over to the first pew, opened its little wooden door, and took a seat inside. Charles had rolled his shirtsleeves up to dismantle Sebastian’s sets. His pants were
wrinkled and had a smudge of dirt on the knee. He began to tuck his shirt in, ran a hand through his hair. James glanced over at his movements and hurried to do the same.

  “It doesn’t matter what you look like,” Jane said, her deep voice echoing in the empty hall. “I’m not going to take your picture. I just want you to get the lay of the land.”

  Charles was used to preaching from behind a music stand set in front of the altar, close enough to touch the parishioners in the front pew. Here, the congregation would have to turn their faces up to him, as if to the sun. The anticipation of it was disconcerting; people who looked up expected more.

  James could not take his eyes off the center aisle, down the middle of which ran a long fracture, caused by the unsupportable weight of the crowd in the balconies on a day when Third Presbyterian’s most famous minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, had caused the church to be especially full.

  “Intimidating, isn’t it?” Jane asked, following his gaze.

  It was, indeed, James thought. An unavoidable reminder that there was once a man who so filled the church he nearly broke it down.

  “Now, stand up there,” Jane told them, pointing to the steps of the high pulpit. James and Charles glanced at each other. Jane pointed to the high perch again. “You first,” she said to Charles.

  Again, Charles did as he was told, rolling his shirtsleeves down as he climbed the rather fragile spiral staircase to the octagonal wooden box. He took his place behind the brass podium and placed his hands on either side of it, looking down. The sanctuary seemed even more formal and vast from this height but Charles, to his surprise, found the vantage point a relief. The pulpit was cramped and hot, but it encircled him almost completely and in it he felt protected. He thought he might be able to speak well from here, able to give sermons that leapt up into pirouettes, inspiring in his congregation moments of fire-lit, incredulous awe.