The Dearly Beloved

by Cara Wall

  They had spoken little after their meal with James and Nan; Charles had made a point to wake before Lily, dress quietly, and head to work before the alarm clock rang. He had stayed at work later than necessary, coming home just in time for dinner, which they ate while reading their separate books.

  But she loved her job and had not been able to stop herself from telling him about it, even when his disppointment had been at its freshest.

  “One of my students has long hair,” she said. “With flowers in it, and he’s a boy.”

  She grinned at him, lit up with interest and excitement. He could not help but let his anger thaw. He loved seeing her busy and fulfilled, loved watching her grade papers with alacrity and passion, curled up on the floor by the sofa with a pencil behind her ear: a professor, but the exact opposite of his father.

  So they cobbled together a stable routine. Lily did not have drinks with her colleagues as often; Charles left coffee for her every morning. She saved the paper until he got home and, after dinner, they spread it out on the floor around them, read passages to each other and snipped articles that might be useful for sermons or lectures. Lily had bought them each a brown accordion file and a pair of scissors.

  “Now this,” she said, “is a pleasant way to spend an evening.”

  It was not perfect, but it was better than Nantucket, so much better than the way she had faded and dissolved before his eyes.

  Nan and James moved into the manse in October. It was small and dark, but after Nan washed the windows and hung peach curtains in all the rooms, it looked cheery. She made sure to get a flat of tubers and bulbs into the ground before the first frost: purple crocus, yellow tulips, white iris, lily of the valley. She also planted two lilac bushes and a bed of peonies, because the man who owned the nursery said they flowered better their first spring if they were planted in the fall. The thought of all those flowers lying dormant, gathering the sleep they needed to bloom, cheered her as the ground hardened and the snow fell.

  Life was beginning to feel easy again. She woke at eight, had toast and coffee with James, then walked him to work, which was twenty steps along the stone path that connected their house to the church. Jane Atlas was always ensconced behind her desk before they arrived. It was clear she did not welcome Nan’s presence in the office space. Her Good mornings to James were hearty and efficient; to Nan she nodded coolly. If Nan brought James’s lunch and stayed to talk while he ate it, Jane knocked on the door to remind him how busy his afternoon was going to be.

  “I think you’re supposed to stay at home,” James said, shrugging helplessly in the face of Jane’s disapproval.

  “That is not something I’m going to do,” Nan said.

  Winning the manse had energized her: She had a vision for her role at the church and a plan to make it happen. Jane Atlas might not want another woman around, but Nan had been well trained in ways to convince her.

  “I recognize that this is your domain,” Nan said, gesturing to the elevator, the waiting room, and the offices beyond. “But I would like to have a role in the life of this church.”

  “Choir?” Jane Atlas asked.

  Nan shook her head. She had decided, early on, that she should not sing in Third Presbyterian’s choir. If she processed in in robes, as James did, and sat on the dais behind him, parishioners would be reminded that he was an ordinary man, instead of a man of God. Her mother had agreed. I think you’ll find that you’ll be too busy for it, anyway, she’d written.

  But Nan was not busy, and she wanted to be. “Could you at least consider giving me the tasks you cannot stand?”

  Jane Atlas stared at Nan for a long moment. Then she opened her desk drawer, pulled out a note card, and wrote down a phone number.

  “Let’s see how this goes,” she said dubiously. “Good luck.”

  In this way, Nan became very familiar with those parishioners who cared deeply and specifically about which type of polish was used to shine the cross, which brand of cracker should be served on Communion Sundays, whether and how much the sanctuary lights should be dimmed during the sermon, and if the babies being baptized should be required to wear gowns. Nan was aware that Jane Atlas had set these people upon her as a penance for being presumptuous and too full of cheer, but Nan liked these conversations. She believed that these small issues mattered. Each complaint meant a member of the community cared about the church, and her response signified that the church cared for them in return. This was how Nan had been taught to build community; it was the same as gardening, planting one seed at a time.

  Part of Nan’s job was to comfort the members who had joined the church under Sebastian’s leadership. They were unnerved by their two young ministers, confused by the bookishness of Charles’s sermons and James’s brusque, impatient handshakes on the receiving line. They missed Sebastian’s decorations and his merry outlook. When Christmas arrived, Nan made it clear to Jane Atlas that, though the Christmas Eve service should, undoubtedly, conclude with the fanfare of Joy to the World, they also needed to include Silent Night if they did not want a mutiny.

  “With candles?” Jane Atlas scoffed.

  “And in the dark,” Nan insisted.

  The service was a success, and in mid-January, while she was manning the urn at coffee hour one Sunday, Nan was approached by Dr. Rose, the church’s round, elfin organist who wore bow ties and tweed suits and a pencil tucked behind his ear. He blinked quickly and often. Nan did not know him well, but it seemed he was there specifically to see her.

  “I hear you are the tamer of the Sebastian folk,” he whispered conspiratorially, as he took his cup and saucer. “And I’ve just discovered that you play the piano.”

  “I do,” Nan said, somewhat wary.

  “And sing. Your husband says you sing very well. That, in fact, you have a degree.”

  Nan wondered what else James was telling people about her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  The music director put down his coffee and clapped his hands. “You can help me,” he said with delight. “Those people are constantly after me to plan sing-alongs and shows, both of which I abhor. But I have to give them something, and I’m thinking it could be a junior choir. At least then they can perform in robes, like civilized human beings.”

  It was not a role Nan had envisioned for herself. Her mother had never been involved in the music of Nan’s childhood church. But then, the organist had never asked her. And Nan still had more free time than she knew what to do with. The idea of playing music for a purpose, of arranging and conducting was irresistible.

  “Did you ask Jane Atlas?” Nan pressed him.

  “Of course,” he said.

  Nan looked around the room, at the blue carpet, the people in suits and ties and hats. She realized this was a call, simple and straightforward—God wanted something from her and Jane Atlas approved.

  “All right,” she said, “I’ll do it.”

  Before she could even catch her breath, she was choosing music and ordering robes. There were fifteen singers from six families. The girls behaved better than the boys, who swung their feet as she talked, elbowed one another, and forgot to spit out their gum. But it was the boys who were the best performers, who sang with the most gusto when Nan said Louder, who she knew would grin when they stood on the steps in front of the altar, faces scrubbed and hair combed. Nan was teaching them two hymns and “Sheep May Safely Graze” in parts for Easter; they practiced on Sunday and Wednesday afternoons.

  At first, they sounded worse than an orchestra tuning up. Anne Hammet sounded like a violin bow shredding itself across the strings, Tommy Ahlers couldn’t keep time to save his life, no matter how often Nan made him march around the room while he sang. But slowly, slowly, with Nan’s endless exhortations to Listen, listen. Just close your eyes and listen, they learned to follow Nan’s cues: to start only when she pointed at them, sing louder when she raised her hand, and stop when she closed her fist—Even if you weren’t in the right place and thought you
had one more line to go. I’m talking to you, Tommy. Slowly, Nan learned that Brenda Eades, who was in eighth grade, could carry the sopranos, her sister Hillary could ferry the altos along behind, and if she put Tommy Ahler’s brother, Peter, in the front row, he would wave adorably at his mother and make the whole congregation smile.

  Nan threw herself as best she could into her work. She wrote nonsense lyrics to make warm-ups fun. She gave out stickers after rehearsals, brought lemonade and lollipops on birthdays, and gave each child a chance to play the organ, even the ones who had to stand on the foot pedals because they were too short to reach them from the bench. She complimented them to their parents at coffee hour. Mothers beamed when they saw her. Children ran up to her in the church building to give her pictures they had drawn. She began to get thank-you notes and cookies left outside her door. On her own birthday in March, she got handmade cards from every one of her students and a huge basket of flowers from their parents.

  They love you, the card said.

  It was bittersweet to be loved by other people’s children, but Nan chose to see it as a sign that her own were on their way. She wrote to her mother about her gains, and her mother replied: Good girl.

  While Nan made a life for herself at church, James prowled the streets. He strode down Fifth Avenue, loped through Washington Square, followed Christopher Street all the way to the Hudson River, stopped for a moment to consider the abandoned shipping piers. He followed the river downtown for a few blocks, picking his way through broken bottles and scruffy weeds: the city’s outskirts, its shredded hem.

  Everywhere he saw men in stained pants standing by pay phones, waiting to sell drugs. He saw the men who bought these drugs sleeping, mouths open, in the park. He saw cramped buildings with broken windows, fire escapes hanging off walls, women too scared of knives and fists to take the subway alone. He saw graffiti everywhere, its wild, scrawling colors echoing, reflecting, perpetuating all of the uncertainty—a broken geometry of danger. They were details he recognized, the shrapnel of his childhood. After six years of clean classrooms and intricate assignments, he was back in the clutter and clang of littered streets, filled again with impatience and anger.

  In contrast to what he saw on his ramblings, Third Presbyterian seemed privileged and staid. The sturdiness of the brick sanctuary and its fellowship building seemed incongruous in the face of the disrepair around them. The more office hours James endured, the more he realized how insular the congregation was, how alike they were to one another. If plotted on a graph, their needs fell in one high quadrant.

  He asked Jane to make sure that, one day a week, his schedule was cleared. He used these days to work the telephone, comb the city. “What can we do?” he asked everyone he came into contact with. “How can we help?”

  First, he created a list of groups that needed donations and volunteers: the Foundling Hospital needed clothes and diapers, the Henry Street Settlement needed tutors, the YMCA needed swim instructors. He organized food, clothing, and toy drives. This was a success. Parishioners arrived on Sunday morning with grocery bags full of canned goods, socks, and paperback books, smiled and chatted with one another as they placed their offerings in the crates set out to receive them.

  “Thank you,” they said to James on the greeting line. “We didn’t know how much there was to do.”

  And how much more there is after this, he thought. At home, he complained to Nan. “How can they be so completely unaware?”

  Though Nan loved James for his fierce integrity, there was an outrage in his tone that worried her. Something had changed in him. In London he had been jubilant and determined; now he was brooding and critical, unfulfilled, even by his parishioners’ enthusiasm. He was missing her father’s deep well of patience and unflagging belief in God’s grace.

  “Be patient, love,” she said, as he had once counseled her.

  But James itched to confront the darker issues in the neighborhood: children out of school, parents out of money, muggings, shootings, burglaries, the boys getting high in Washington Square Park and the girls turning tricks on the Bowery. He knew these were hard issues to tackle, ones that involved social services, federal funding, and getting the police to do their jobs. But he couldn’t ignore them; he needed to do something more than preach about them, something beyond the monthly allotment of offering funds the church sent to organizations in need.

  As far as he could tell, other than money and volunteers, the major resource Third Presbyterian had to offer was space. He, Charles, Jane, and their office hours took up the first floor; coffee hour, the musical director, and the choir room inhabited the second. Above that, there were two more floors of closets full of files, Christmas decorations, and meeting rooms that lingered empty most of the day and every evening.

  “What’s going on with those?” James asked Jane. “Can we use them for things other than church business?”

  “Yes.”

  “At whose discretion?”

  “Yours.”

  James smiled and commandeered them quickly. Within a month, Third Presbyterian was hosting ten meetings a week. First, James invited the ministers of nearby churches to coordinate social outreach efforts, or at least not step on one another’s toes. Then he gave space to community advocacy groups combating juvenile delinquency, street crime, and the spread of disease in the single room occupancy hotels. He organized an AA meeting and a gambling addicts group. Finally, he agreed to let a feminist group meet every Thursday evening on the top floor.

  Nan knew this would be a mistake. James’s first groups had made sense; they increased the church’s outreach and its reputation. But the feminist group was secular, provocative, revolutionary. The first seminar they gave was on women in the workplace, which, to Nan’s surprise, many in the congregation attended and enjoyed. They followed up with women in the clergy, which, as Nan could have predicted, stirred up tart criticism at coffee hour.

  “You do know that church members attend those meetings?” Nan asked James.

  “Of course,” he said. “I hope so!” And Nan realized that he did not understand how harshly church members whispered to one another, and what a wind those whispers could stir up.

  When the group screened a documentary about prostitution, which was both graphic and salacious, Nan forced herself to attend, so that she could support James and prepare herself for the consequences he refused to see were coming.

  To her shock, Lily was also there. Nan had felt secure in the fact that Lily would never be at church, ever. But now Lily was there, and Nan felt so panicked that she slid quickly into a chair in the back corner of the room. Lily sat third row center, chatting with the women on either side of her.

  Nan regarded Lily carefully: her hair was still cut in a straight bob; her slim pants and white sweater were neatly pressed. She carried herself with the same precision Nan had seen in her before, but there was more confidence in Lily now, less stiff arrogance. She moved easily, laughing often; she had even kissed one of the women next to her hello. When had Lily made friends, Nan wondered, and how, and why was she gracious to these women but not to her? Why was she here at all? Just by being in the building, in the room, Lily had put Nan on edge, siphoned off her ease, left her brittle and resentful. This was Nan’s sanctuary, and Lily’s presence made it itch and burn. Nan made sure to leave before the film ended, before Lily could even get out of her chair.

  THIRTEEN

  To Charles’s great surprise, Lily had become a protester. She stayed up late at night making giant placards demanding school integration and denouncing the Vietnam War.

  Charles was proud of her but bewildered. A Lily full of purpose was like a sail caught by a stiff wind. She woke up before him each day, was dressed before he went to work. The phone rang incessantly, and she answered it. She talked to people, called them by name. Last week, when he had arrived home from Wednesday Prayers, there was a group of women in the kitchen, drinking tea and stuffing envelopes. Lily had looked up at him and smile
d.

  “We’re flooding the congressional mailboxes,” she said. And when the woman sitting next to her said, “For forty days and forty nights, like the Great Flood. They’re going to drown if they don’t give us peace,” Lily had actually laughed.

  Charles knew she had been attending the feminist group, so he made a point of being out of the church building before the meetings began. He did not want to crowd her. Though he longed to put his arm around her in the lobby, to show her off to everyone they might see, he knew that would push her away. And so he went home.

  But he heard about the meetings. Partly because James was mentioning them in his sermons and partly because Charles had taken over office hours, which Jane Atlas had renamed the Committee of Complaints.

  “He’s not speaking for all of us,” the new members cried.

  “No, he’s not,” Charles answered. “He’s speaking about what he thinks is right.”

  “He’s asking us to change views we’ve held all our lives,” some of the older members told him.

  “Yes, he is,” Charles said. “That’s what you hired him to do.” His optimistic manner never flagged, but inside he was worried. Attendance on the Sundays James preached was falling off. Charles was used to the vicissitudes of the pulpit. He knew that sometimes his sermons would succeed, that there would be a moment of reflective silence as he gathered up his notes. He knew he would sometimes fail, would be chastised by the rustle of programs and the blowing of noses before the hymn began. James had moved beyond failure into affront, with parishioners standing a little way off during coffee hour, not quite meeting his eye.