The Dearly Beloved

by Cara Wall

  “Fine,” Jane Atlas said. “You’re quite imposing. There’s no need to stoop to read; you can raise that podium. I’ll make sure it’s done.” She turned to James. “Now you,” she said.

  James waited at the bottom of the stairs until Charles came down, then climbed them carefully, one hand on the rail. The steps were worn smooth; the wood had a particular smell of antiquity. He took his place behind the podium and was, for a moment, overcome with panic. The box confined him.

  “Does everyone preach from up here?” he asked. The church erased his words as soon as he uttered them. Jane Atlas looked at him with a hard stare that cut through him instantly. She was slight as a child in the pew.

  “Yes,” she said. “And I’m glad you won’t need a box to stand on. You’re a normal height when you’re not next to him.” She motioned at Charles, who had not returned to the altar, but slipped into a pew across the aisle from her.

  “Come down now,” Jane Atlas said, so James did, coming to lean against the pew in front of Charles.

  “I assume you’ll alternate weeks to preach?” she asked. Charles and James nodded. She nodded back. “What about the other stuff?”

  James looked over at Charles. In the weeks since they had been given their positions, they had written to each other regularly, happy to discover that though they had their differences, they both dealt with new situations by being prepared. Still, it was one thing to make plans on paper, another to say the words aloud.

  “We thought we’d split the other responsibilities by natural affinity,” Charles said. “So I’ll take counseling and home and hospital visits.”

  “And I’ll take fund-raising,” James said. “And community outreach.” They both spoke quickly, like schoolboys hoping they had said the right thing.

  To their relief, Jane nodded. “Good,” she said. “That way everyone will know which one of you to ask about what. And Sunday school?”

  Charles and James looked at each other blankly. They had forgotten that one.

  “That’s all right,” Jane said. “There’s a committee.” She cleared her throat and stood up.

  “Now, I’ve got something to say to both of you.” She smoothed her skirt, stepped out of her pew, and walked over to look directly at them. In the stillness, Charles noticed how thin she was and that she was wearing stockings with sturdy black lace-up shoes. He was aware that, despite the resonance of her spirit, she was old. He felt the urge to reach out and help her, but stopped himself. He knew she was going to say something critical, something grave enough to cut through her good manners and her reserve. Jane raised an eyebrow, as if she had read his thoughts.

  “I’ve seen a lot of young preachers,” she said, “and none of them are very good. They’re inexperienced, insecure, and they underestimate their audience.” She gestured to the empty pews around her. Then, abruptly, she raised her hand and pointed at Charles and James. “You’ve got a congregation in trouble,” she said. “Your members are desperate for dignity. They used to have it—the minister before this last, silly one—was here for twenty years. They respected him. He had a steady hand on the rudder and he had seen God. Not over the washing line in a white robe—but in his wrestling with why we live and what is waiting for us in the end. He had conviction; he believed that God is watching, God is interested, God is kind.” Jane took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “But then he left, and they hired what’s-his-name. And now they’re angry and embarrassed and ashamed.”

  She crossed her arms in front of her and looked at them, assessing. “You two need to be the right choice. Do you think you are?”

  It was not a question she expected them to answer, that was clear. It was a doubt she wanted to plant in them so that it could bother and burrow and itch.

  “I can help you with the paperwork and the committees and the personalities,” Jane said briskly, back to the business at hand. “And if you can’t preach, I can fix that. But I can’t make them respect you. And you can’t earn their respect in a day. I suggest you start by getting them to like you. Go to coffee hour, shake their hands, tell good jokes, and listen to what they have to say. You’re young and good-looking, which will get you through the first month. Then we can see where you are.”

  By the time she had finished talking, she was already turning away. Charles and James stared after her as she shuffled out the side door.

  Charles leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. James cleared his throat. “I think I should tell you,” he said, “that I’m not entirely sure God is watching, or is interested, or is kind.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Charles said, “Surely there’s more.”

  “I believe in the urge to be good, to stay good, to do good in the world,” James continued. “But I don’t think God exists in the way people would like to believe; I don’t think God saves the day. I think it’s up to us. We know the rules, and we’re the ones who have to play the game.”

  “My wife is going to like you,” Charles said.

  “Really?” James asked. “That’s something of a relief.”

  Charles smiled and then said, “I believe in God. I think God gives us wisdom, infinite numbers of entirely different ways to understand the world. It’s an absolutely clear feeling for me, like walking into a room full of books all opened to exactly the page I want to read.”

  They were silent for a moment. With only two people in it, the church felt cavernous. They both looked at the crack in the floor and wondered how to become the kind of men other people respect.

  “Well, thank Saint Pat for that,” James said. “One of us certainly should.”

  They heard Jane Atlas’s shuffling stride as she returned. Instead of coming all the way back to them, she leaned in the side door and spoke loudly. “I forgot to ask,” she said. “Which one of you is taking the manse?”

  The spell of camaraderie was broken; the two men looked down and away. This was the most awkward circumstance of their shared position: that the church had a house for only one minister, and one of them had to live there. In all the letters they had written, in all the phone calls they had made, they had not broached this matter, because it seemed so fraught. Because it was of so much importance to each of their wives.

  ELEVEN

  Third Presbyterian’s manse was a small rabbit’s warren of rooms, each with a tight coal fireplace. There were casement windows on both floors; the one in the living room had a window seat. Upstairs, there were three bedrooms, one large, two small, and one bathroom with a window that looked out on the garden. Nan fell in love with it right away.

  She was beside herself that James and Charles hadn’t agreed on who would live there, that the church hadn’t pressed them to do so. Didn’t they understand that it was urgent? She could not stay much longer in the apartment that she and James had sublet, the one that belonged to a professor friend of Nan’s father who was on sabbatical in Italy. It was sunny and genteel, lined with books and carpet, but Nan could not appreciate it. Like everything else in her life, it reminded her that she did not have a child.

  There were two bedrooms, but one was empty. The hallway was long and wide enough to accommodate a tricycle, but there was no toddler to ride one. The kitchen had a window seat next to which she could have pulled up a high chair; the table at which she ate with James was sterile and bare. For the most part, she kept her desperation to herself. She went to museums and the movies; she made dinner. But in the evenings, James liked to rifle through the bookcases, piecing together the personalities of their absent hosts by the titles they had chosen, the inscriptions on the first pages, their handwriting in the notes taken in the margins. It made Nan want to scream.

  Outside, cars honked in the street; people shouted beneath windows. Bottle tops and cigarette butts clogged the gutters; the city smelled of sewage in the heat. James told her to think of the city like a piece of music, the traffic as its tempo, the shouts and slamming doors its percussion. She could have done that, once. Now she saw
everything off-kilter, the treble clef on its side.

  She wished James had been called to a small town. She had known they would not go home to Mississippi—her mother said it had changed too much, and her father protested that it had not changed enough. She had known they could not choose where James would work, but she had prayed for a bright church in a welcoming village that had hymn sings and potlucks and prayer circles. If she could not have that, she needed her own house, one for which she could make curtains and choose pillows. One that felt like a beginning, instead of the lobby of a station in which she was waiting for a train. She needed coffee hours, committees, and a position in her community. She needed the manse.

  “Please don’t be magnanimous,” she begged James. “Please don’t just give it away.”

  New York had come to Lily like a miracle. She could not stop marveling at her good fortune. She loved the long, wide avenues that pointed like arrows, up and down. Go here, they prompted her. Try this. And so she walked all over, stopping in green grocers, art galleries, antique book dealers, rare-print shops. She walked along the promenade by the East River, watching its strong currents swirl and billow. She walked up and down the Hudson River, past the block-long meatpacking buildings that stank of rancid blood and leaked sawdust onto the old city streets. She walked through Central Park, rode the merry-go-round, tried to throw the brass ring into the hole in the wall. She wanted to see all of New York—all of it—old Trinity Church, the new skyscrapers, Grand Central Terminal, the tall, straight row houses in Harlem. She walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and through the old cobblestone streets of that borough. She walked everywhere, imagining herself a nomad, a Bedouin.

  She and Charles were renting a small, one-bedroom apartment that looked out onto Sixth Avenue and was loud with the blaring of car horns, bright with the red neon signs of tattoo parlors and pizza joints. Lily, despite her penchant for neatness, loved it. She reveled in the stained bathtub, the sticking windows, the tiny kitchen. She rejoiced at being awakened by deliverymen shouting outside. She liked buying her coffee instead of making it, drinking it out of a blue-and-white paper cup. It felt temporary, anonymous, as if she could fold her life up like a tent, tuck it in her pocket, and move on.

  She had found a job teaching composition to undergraduates at the New School. Her students were eager and engaged. Her teaching colleagues were academics exiled by oppressive European regimes. They wore decades-old tweed jackets, pants that hung below their bellies. They drank after class and faculty meetings.

  “Dr. Barrett, you must come with us,” they said in intriguingly accented English, and she did, following them to bars set below the sidewalks, full of smoke, where they drank vodka and she drank Kir or Lillet from stubby, spotted glasses. They paid in change fished out of pockets full of keys and ticket stubs while she took clean dollar bills from her leather wallet. But they got along very well.

  Lily listened, mostly, for they talked without pause, interrupting one another, never asking questions, only interjecting. Lily loved the rat-a-tat-tat of it, the efficiency, the lack of indecision. One week they would be sure of one thing, the next week another, changing their minds without a single Sorry or I was wrong. They talked like speeding trains, veering to the left or right whenever confronted with a switch. They were arrogant and cynical. They were the opposite of church, of God.

  “Tell me about the evils of religion,” she asked them, after they had drunk enough to lean back in their chairs, close their eyes, let their cigarettes burn out in the ashtray.

  “It weakens the mind,” one said. “All that belief in delayed gratification. We should work quickly and reap our reward. Religion makes us complacent about suffering.”

  These ideas were familiar to her; they fit into the jigsaw puzzle of her own principles.

  “And it’s naive,” another began, “to believe you have a supernatural parent who takes care of you and teaches you right from wrong. I imagine all of these people on the operating table or lying on the side of the highway, thinking, Soon I will be with God. Then, just as everything goes black, they think, How could I have been so wrong? Well, I am not going to die a dupe. I’m going bravely. I will not be humiliated.”

  Under the practiced impassiveness she wore as her second skin, Lily was ardently in love with these men. They were the opposite of Charles. They had escaped, erased old histories, constructed new ones. They had filled the ragged space around them with cigarettes, drinking companions, lectures, and fountain pens. But inside, they were angry and bitter and superior; they knew they would never be fully healed. For the first time, Lily had found a place where she belonged.

  “I can’t live in a house next door to the church,” she told Charles. “I’ll be fair game. People will want me to make tea.”

  The problem of the manse was still not solved when Charles and James decided they should all go to dinner together, so Lily and Nan could meet for the first time. Lily suggested Chinese, so they met in Chinatown at a neon-signed restaurant with a bright green door. Nan and James arrived first and waited in the vestibule, a fluorescent light flickering overhead. Despite the plainness of the decor, the diners at tables were wearing suits and silk dresses. Nan’s white cotton skirt, blue cardigan, and pearls branded her an outsider, hopelessly out of place.

  She had felt this way for months, long before they had come to New York, though New York had made it worse. It was an odd, silent loneliness, as if she had been locked in an isolation booth on a game show stage. She took James’s hand. She had to rejoin the world, and tonight was the place to start. She might be inappropriately dressed, but she knew how to make a good impression.

  James waved, suddenly, and Nan saw Charles and Lily opening the door. Charles was every inch as tall as James had described him, and Lily was poised and stylish in slim black pants and a matching sleeveless top. She looked like Audrey Hepburn.

  Nan marshaled her manners and put out her hand. She wanted this to be the first of many dinners, for it to lead to lunches and barbecues and weekend getaways. They would be working together for years, hopefully, and Nan wanted them to be a team. She wanted it for James, who already had so much respect for Charles, and she wanted it for herself, because she needed friends.

  “Hello!” she said, stepping forward.

  Lily took a step back. She disliked Nan’s hair and her shoes and her bag. She disliked how hesitantly Nan stood next to James, as if she might fall and needed him to catch her. She disliked Nan’s pleasant, open face and the eagerness in her eyes. Nan was the spitting image of the girls at Radcliffe who had married early and had babies instead of careers, and she exuded the gentle consideration Lily’s aunts pressed upon her in seemingly endless supply.

  She forced herself to shake Nan’s hand. It was one dinner. A dinner that embodied everything Charles held dear: a job he loved, a colleague he respected, a cheerful social circle. Surely she could give him one dinner, after he had given her the glittering possibilities of New York. But she knew she could not give Nan one inch, not one conversation. Even one gesture of friendship would lead to the expectation of more, to Nan hoping Lily could give her what she needed. Lily couldn’t stand other people’s need. It made her angry. It rose around her like floodwater.

  “Look,” James said, abruptly, pointing to a group of people at a table in the far corner.

  “We shall return,” Charles said, putting his hand on James’s shoulder. “We’ve got to tend the flock.”

  They walked off, leaving the two women alone. The restaurant’s foyer smelled of fish and oolong tea.

  “I’m so glad to meet you,” Nan said.

  Lily nodded. A waitress in a blue satin dress waved them over to a round table in the center of the crowded room, pulled out their chairs, set crispy noodles and a bowl of sweet and sour sauce in front of them. Nan smoothed her napkin on her lap. Lily poured water from a plastic pitcher into glasses on the table without speaking.

  “James tells me you have a job,” Nan tried again,
looking at the slim gold bracelet on Lily’s wrist.

  “Yes,” Lily answered.

  “Teaching English?”

  “Yes.” Lily set the pitcher down and picked up her red-wrapped chopsticks.

  Across the room, James and Charles were standing by their parishioners. James was shorter than Charles by half a foot, but more animated. Nan could tell by the rhythm of his hands that he was telling a joke. When he finished, the table laughed. Charles put his hand out to quiet them, then told one of his own. The table laughed again; James and Charles nodded and rocked casually on their heels. Nan could see they were already a pair.

  “Congratulations,” Nan said.

  She knew she was being snubbed. She could see it in every inch of Lily’s body. But it would not deter her. She settled her gaze on Lily and kept her eyes steady. It took a moment, then two, but finally Lily raised her head and Nan could look at her straight on. Lily’s eyes were brown, and for one split second they were startled. Then they froze.

  “Thank you,” Lily answered. What she wanted to say was Don’t like me. Don’t ask me to like you. Don’t make me feel guilty.

  The men came back smiling.

  “That went well,” Charles said, hanging his jacket on the back of his chair.

  “Absolutely,” James exclaimed. He slid in next to Nan and put his arm around her. Nan returned to herself, jostled out of range of Lily’s frost, held close to the warmth of her husband.

  Lily put her hand on Charles’s knee. It was just one dinner. “Let’s talk about something important,” she said, as she popped a crispy noodle in her mouth.

  “All right,” James said, loosening his collar and pushing up his sleeves. Nan recognized the look in his eyes that said I’m game. “What do you have in mind?”

  Lily slid the sleeve off her chopsticks and laid them on her plate. “Will you tell me about your call?”

  Nan understood, instinctively, that Lily was trying to make them uncomfortable. That she was going out of her way to make this conversation hard.