The Dearly Beloved

by Cara Wall

  “No.” James said, good-humoredly. “Let’s talk about something really important: what we’re going to eat, and how we’re going to fix this godforsaken city.” He picked up his menu and grinned.

  Charles smiled kindly at Nan. “You married a live wire, too?” he asked. Nan relaxed instantly, nodded at him with gratitude.

  They ate their dishes sociably, talked about the Yankees, the Mets, the arrival of Hare Krishnas in the city. When they could eat no more, their plates were cleared and fortune cookies came. Lily opened hers with a crack and pulled out the little slip of paper. She leaned toward James.

  “Mine says: Good things will come if you tell me about your call.”

  James rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “All right,” he said. “I appreciate persistence.” He put a hand on the top of his head, looked up, thought for a moment.

  “Will you accept an incomplete answer?” he asked.

  “Certainly,” Lily said.

  “I’m not sure I really have a call,” he said, pulling his cup of tea toward him.

  Charles looked at him quizzically. “Of course you do,” he exclaimed.

  “Of course you do,” Nan said at the same time, putting her hand on James’s arm, shocked that he still felt this way, enough to say it out loud.

  “It’s all right if he doesn’t,” Lily said to both of them. “I’ll like him better for it. I like people who refuse to be what they’re expected to be.”

  “Next question?” James asked in his straightforward, impatient way.

  Lily tucked her hair behind her ear, assessing. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?” she asked.

  James raised an eyebrow, but did not look away. Nan could tell he would take this game as far as Lily wanted to go.

  “Once my father came home so drunk he could not get his key in the door,” he told her, “so he fell asleep on the front steps in his own urine. What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

  Both Nan and Charles swung their heads to hear Lily’s answer, but Lily shook her head. She turned to Nan. “You first,” she said.

  Nan hesitated. She knew Lily’s question was a test and that any answer she had to give would fail. To demur would seem cowardly, to reveal her truth felt like surrender. Lily did not want to hear about her suffering.

  “I’ve been very lucky,” Nan said. “But, really, it’s your turn.”

  Lily almost didn’t answer. She felt Charles pause and grow still next to her. She didn’t have to tell them. It had turned out to be a fine dinner. A dinner she knew meant the world to Charles. But she found herself compelled to prove to Nan that she was incapable of friendship, not at all the kind of person Nan wanted her to be.

  “My parents died in a car accident,” Lily said. She had meant for it to sound brash, but it came out flat as tin.

  Nan gasped and put her hands over her mouth, her blue eyes wide as a doll’s.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lily admonished.

  Nan looked at her, confused. “That’s awful,” she said.

  Lily sat very still, pale, her eyes fixed to the plate in front of her. Nan’s warm-hearted empathy was a tangible presence; it smelled of her vanilla perfume. It made Lily want to gag.

  “Were they religious?” Nan asked, gingerly.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Nan blinked. “Well, that must have helped.”

  “No, it didn’t,” Lily declared. “Not one bit.” She wished she could put a line through the whole conversation, crumple the paper, put it in the bin.

  “Why not?” Nan asked.

  “Because I don’t believe in God,” Lily said. She felt Charles bow his head next to her, in awkwardness and shame.

  “But you go to church,” Nan said, almost pleading with her, her face pink and worried.

  “No, I don’t,” Lily said. Her words fell to the table, flaccid and bare.

  What a privilege, Nan thought, to believe oneself completely independent, to feel unshackled by social conventions and the worry of what other people might think. What a blessing, to be lonely in that particular way.

  Charles took a loud breath, leaned across the table, and took Nan’s hand. “She didn’t mean to offend you,” he said.

  “Maybe I did,” Lily corrected him. She saw Charles’s jaw clench. But she had to be clear: She was not going back—not to Nantucket or Boston or Maryville. Not to church or courtship or grief. She was going to move forward, as fast as New York would let her.

  Charles was furious. He did not help Lily with her coat after dinner. He let her pull the glass door of the restaurant open and step out onto the sidewalk without him to block the wind.

  “You got what you wanted,” he said tautly as they crossed Sixth Avenue, the oncoming traffic restrained, momentarily, behind the straight white line. “We won’t have to be their friends.”

  “You can be his friend,” Lily said, one pace ahead of him. “I can’t be hers.” She stopped once she reached the safety of the other curb, standing under the grey metal streetlight. He stepped up to face her. The traffic rushed by. She shone like smooth and polished marble in the evening light.

  “She needs someone to have tea with, Charles. She needs a friend to be glad when she enters a room. She needs someone who will smile and invite her in if she drops by.” Her voice, which had been strident, softened at the end. “Am I that person, Charles?”

  She was not, he knew. Lily did not want friends. She barely wanted him. She was turning to New York, finding her excitement in the hum of the city. She said things like, “I walked over to the river today. It felt so great I almost kept on going.” She said them carelessly, as she came in, unbuttoning her coat, dropping her bag on the floor. Empty space was creeping in between them, as if the ligaments holding them together might dissolve.

  It was a dangerous weakness, he realized, this desire he had for Lily to find happiness in the ways that he found happiness. If he did not want to lose her, he would have to learn to let her be.

  The office that Charles and James shared was an ascetic one: two metal desks, metal bookshelves, light grey walls, dark grey floors. Only their books saved it from grim desolation. When they moved in, Charles had been almost embarrassed by his endless collection of theology and philosophy, until James had unpacked his huge arsenal of sociology and economics. Their books had seemed to intertwine instantly, weaving them a leather-bound tent, offering them provisions, leaves and leaves of stores.

  The next morning, Charles approached its door slowly, embarrassment hot and close to his skin. He liked James, liked him easily and straightforwardly. He believed they would work well together, or he had believed it, before the disaster that dinner had been.

  He opened the door. James was sitting at his desk, jotting something down in the dull green notebook he kept for random thoughts.

  “So, your wife does not believe in God,” he said.

  “No,” Charles answered, standing in the doorway, uncertain, reluctant to discover how much damage Lily had really caused.

  “You might have told me that before, when I was laying out my own confessions.”

  “It’s not the same kind of disbelief.”

  “I suppose.” James put his pencil down.

  James liked Lily. She was stubborn, like he was, and for the same reason, too: She already knew the worst that could happen. She had seen the impact of death, the surrender it demanded: blank eyes, stale clothes, heads laid on tables in exhaustion. She had seen the practicality it left in its wake: a world cleared of procrastination and excuses. Her outlook would not shift, had already shifted, was resting on bedrock. Her eyes were unclouded by the expectation of favors or deliverance.

  “She’s like the girls from my old neighborhood, and I was glad to meet her.”

  Charles took a deep breath and relaxed. “I suspect Nan may not feel the same way.”

  “Nan’s been through worse,” James said. Then he asked, “Is Lily’s lack of faith hard for you?�
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  “Yes,” Charles told him.

  “I’ve been thinking about it. I hope that doesn’t offend you.” He looked up, and Charles was relieved to see his face held only concentration and concern. Charles shook his head.

  James continued, “I’ve been thinking about doing this job with just my own flawed faith to carry me through. Sometimes I think it would be easier.”

  “Really?” Charles crossed the room quietly, sat down in his chair.

  James ran his hand through his hair. “Nan’s faith is nurturing,” he said. “It’s kind and comforting, accepting and giving. My own is challenging. My urge is to confront, to push, to shake people until they wake up. If I could be that way wholeheartedly, it would be easier. Instead, I think of her faith—every time I meet with someone, every time I write a sermon—I think of her faith and remember that there are people like her in our congregation who need nurturing, who need comfort, who need faith to be quiet and still. The nature of her faith makes me doubt my ability to do my job.”

  Charles felt heavy with relief. “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” James replied, his face genuine, intent.

  In Nan’s world, people made visits. Her mother made them constantly. To visit, one put on a dress and baked something and put it in Tupperware, which would be returned by means of a short visit to prove the original offering had been consumed. Nan’s mother had an entire closet devoted to Tupperware.

  To smooth things over with Lily, Nan baked a coffee cake, cocooned it in Tupperware, and walked over to Charles and Lily’s apartment. When she buzzed up, Lily did not answer, so Nan left it in the lobby. The Tupperware was returned the next week through James with a thank-you note from Charles. A thank-you in a man’s handwriting seemed odd to Nan. Lily had not even signed her name. Nan flipped the card over; the back was blank. Lily had not written anything at all, had not even taken a few seconds to appreciate a cake she had eaten and the time it had taken to bake.

  Nan realized, suddenly, why her father had forced her to shake all those people’s hands—all those sick people, all those stiff-dressed days—why her mother had taught her to begin a conversation with a compliment, accept the gifts she was given, always use a coaster, smile when others were speaking to her. They had understood what she had not: That people needed permission to exist. Every welcome enlarged their world, widened the hallway around their suffering, saved them from suffocation. Lily made Nan feel invisible.

  The two women did not meet again until two weeks later, on the first Sunday after Labor Day, when their husbands were going to preach together for the first time.

  Nan put on a yellow shift dress, a matching coat, and a little orange pillbox hat. Her parents had called earlier to wish James luck, to say they wished they could be there. Nan was, in a way, glad they weren’t, for the same reason she had accepted that she and Lily would not be friends. This was her church now. She would not have to ask for Lily’s opinions or permission; she could organize things the way she liked them, choose the groups she wanted to lead and the meetings she wanted to join. She would have to go to more of them, of course, since she would have no help, but perhaps this was why she did not yet have a child—so she could be present here, fully present for a while. She made the choice to believe that, and it comforted her.

  She walked over to church early, hoping to meet a parishioner or two before the service began. But when she arrived, there was only one person sitting in the church lobby: Lily.

  “I didn’t think you were coming,” Nan said. In the plainness of the room, her clothes were very bright.

  “Charles asked me to,” Lily said. She did not want to be at church. It was sunny and warm outside; the trees were vibrantly green and the streets not yet crowded. Lily wished she could bolt down the garden path, past the black fence, out into the city. But she had never seen Charles so angry, and she had to do something to make amends. She had to give him one gift, after she had taken so many others away. She could give him one Sunday—a tithe of gratitude.

  “I hope it won’t feel like too much trouble.” Nan held her yellow purse at her waist with both hands. Lily wasn’t carrying one. Nan wondered where she put her money. They stared at each other.

  In the sanctuary, the organ burst into sound. Nan turned toward the music.

  “They’re starting,” Nan said. “I’m going to sit in the front,” she said. “Will you sit with me?”

  Lily sighed and set her shoulders. “Just this once,” she said.

  They sat politely next to each other throughout the service. Nan smiled and leaned forward during each piece of music, tapping her foot as the organ played, hands clasped under her chin as the choir sang. Lily remained impassive, standing and sitting as the bulletin directed, holding her hymnal open to the right page, but not opening her mouth to sing.

  James and Charles processed in in their plain black robes, tall and impressively stately despite their youth. The sermons were good: brief, introductory, with little jokes that made the congregation smile and nod at one another. They both chose to speak without microphones, filling the church with their deep, unadorned voices, their words carrying without the hiss and crack of artificial authority.

  At the end of the service, they pronounced the benediction together: “The Lord bless you and keep you; The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you; The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”

  As the choir was recessing, Nan turned to Lily and said, “Do you know my father is a minister?”

  “Is he?” Lily asked.

  “Yes. And I’d like to live in the manse. I suppose I should ask you nicely, but I’m not a politician. Say no, of course, if you want to. We can always let the men work it out.”

  To Nan’s surprise, Lily smiled. “Good grief,” she said, “isn’t it obvious? I wouldn’t live in the manse to save all our lives.”

  TWELVE

  True to her word, Jane Atlas put together the most productive and seamless ministerial schedule James and Charles had ever seen. After a month, it became second nature. From nine to noon, the two men attended to paperwork, letter writing, and staff meetings. From noon to one, they had lunch and, since Jane believed no one should sit around after eating, they made site visits from one to three—to the hospital, other churches, and people’s homes. Jane had taken Sebastian’s taxi fund out of the budget. “You’re young,” she said. “It’s a neighborhood church. Walk.”

  From three to five, the men had office hours. The one who was preaching that Sunday retired to the library to work on his sermon while the other straightened up his desk and cleared his mind for the onslaught of other people’s problems. Jane ran those two hours as crisply and efficiently as typeset. The sofas and chairs of the church lobby accommodated eight people. Those parishioners who arrived early enough to sit could stay. Latecomers were told to return tomorrow and to be on time. Once vacated, seats were not refilled. “Eight is all you can handle,” Jane told Charles and James. “You’re young. Nine would make your heads explode.”

  On a normal day, there were eight people waiting by two forty-five. They ranged from young to old, and their purposes were as varied as their ages. Adam Clayton, a young man just out of school, wanted guidance on a career that won’t make me feel I’ve gone into the dark. Don Fergus had lost his paycheck at the track and needed the help of church funds. Jane sent him into the office with a folded note admonishing: Do not give him more than thirty dollars. You may take it from petty cash.

  Charles liked walk-ins. He listened quietly while people poured out their stories: mothers whose children were sick, men with drinking problems, old women and men who came because they had nowhere else to go during the day. He made them coffee and watched carefully as they spoke, tried to honor their anguish, the need for help that had overcome their need for privacy. It was not that different from being in class; he was listening to histories, striving to interpret what was said, percieve what was not, a
nd offer compassion and empathy for it all.

  James hated walk-ins. The people who came to see him needed things, or thought they needed them: cars, clothes, school tuition. They wanted to find love so that they could feel less lonely. They wanted new jobs so they could feel less adrift. They wanted more money in the bank so they could be generous without it feeling like a sacrifice. They wanted to rail and complain. And they wanted a witness.

  “How do you listen to all of it, over and over and over?” James asked Charles.

  “I’m good at it,” Charles said.

  He was. Though he had entered ministry thinking his call was to guide others toward the peace of the faith he had been given, he thought now that his daily calling might be even more simple: pay attention and offer hope.

  Ironically, he was deep into a cycle of sermons about doubt. He had begun to address the lingering bitterness of Sebastian’s tenure, to meet the congregation’s distrust head-on. “Many of you doubt James’s and my ability to do this job,” he said. “We are too young to understand futility, too healthy to understand illness, too successful to understand failure. In short, we lack the instruction manual of personal experience.” The congregation chuckled at that one, which made Charles happy.

  “Your last minister left a rift, and you do not yet have faith that we can fix it. Neither do we, but we shall try. Perhaps you could put your trust in that, for the time being.”

  As the months passed, he spoke about the consequences of doubt: uncertainty, anxiety, emptiness. “It is important to search for the antidote,” he said, “and choose to administer it.” Had Lily been there, she would have rolled her eyes. But his ideas were well received by the congregation, many of whom congratulated him after services, asked him to lunch, sought him out when they had a joke to share.

  In addition, to Charles’s great relief, no one seemed to mind that Lily was not there. On the receiving line after services, one or two parishioners asked after her when they shook his hand, but their curiosity was pro forma, and they were perfectly happy with his Very well, thank you. Because of this, all of this—the congregational goodwill, James’s collegiality, Jane’s artful steering of their boat—Charles could enjoy his work fully. And because of that, he was once again beginning to enjoy his wife.