The Dearly Beloved

by Cara Wall

  Almost every member of the congregation wanted to speak at the funeral, but it was decided that only Charles and James would give eulogies. They set a wide wicker basket on Jane’s desk, into which parishioners slid postcards, lined sheets torn from notebooks, and monogrammed envelopes strewn with ink and pencil memories. They soon needed a second basket, which they placed next to the first, so that the congregation could see how united they were in their loss. The baskets made Jane’s absence even more conspicuous.

  At the service, James spoke of Jane’s bracing irreverence and her perennial exasperation with people’s confusion and delay.

  Charles spoke of her deep compassion, the wisdom she had gathered over decades. “Jane believed so much time and suffering could be saved by listening to one’s elders and doing what they said,” he began, and the crowd in the pews chuckled. “And she left no one to the agony of going it alone.”

  He and James went back to their utterly empty office and looked at the schedules she had left them.

  “Well,” Charles said soberly. “I guess she left us alone.”

  It was 1965. Malcolm X had been assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. had crossed the bridge into Selma. There had been riots in Los Angeles and a blackout in New York. Gemini 3 had sent two men into orbit around Earth. The two of them had watched these events on the little black-and-white television that sat on their windowsill. Without Jane Atlas to buffer them from the world, they were afraid the history still to come would seem even more unnerving.

  “People are going to expect us to figure out what to do,” Charles said.

  “They hope we know already,” James answered.

  They knew, at least, to put an ad in the paper. It was small and neatly set: Presbyterian church seeks assistant. Answering phones, keeping schedules, typing and filing.

  “Let’s put ‘Bossy okay,’ ” James said. “Jane would have wanted it.”

  Instead they put: Equal Opportunity.

  That afternoon, they got a call.

  “Your ad says equal opportunity.” The man’s voice was like a swinging pendulum.

  “Yes,” James replied.

  “But your church is predominantly white.” The enunciation was perfect, the tones round, deep, and controlled.

  “Yes,” James said.

  “White in color or in spirit?” The voice was judging, but not demeaningly so.

  James paused. “I’m going to have to say both,” he said. “But we’re working on it.”

  The man laughed. “All right, then. This is Dr. Dennis Price, from the City College of New York. I have a student here who needs a job. He’s not experienced, but he is smart. I don’t think he wants to be a minister, but he is being raised in a churchgoing family. If he doesn’t get a job, he’s going to have to quit school. If he quits school, he will get drafted. I have many boys here in the same situation, and I’ve run out of jobs to give them. May I ask you how you feel about the draft?”

  James cast a glance at Charles and raised his eyebrows.

  “We are against it,” he said.

  “Good,” Dr. Dennis Price said.

  There was a pause.

  “I would like you to meet this boy. I would like you to hire him, but I will be satisfied if you meet him. Do you have time today?”

  “Yes,” James said. It was as if the voice of Jane Atlas had been transplanted into the handset of his phone.

  That was how they met Marcus. He could not make coffee, but he arrived every morning with two blue paper cups from the Greek market on the corner. He spoke briskly and intelligently on the phone. He kept excellent schedules. He was always reading the newspaper, but somehow found time to color-code their files.

  “It wasn’t easy,” he said. “Jane Atlas had them organized in some way only old ladies could figure out. Can you read this?” he asked, thrusting a tattered file folder at them. The label, written in black felt-tip pen, looked like symbols on a mah-jongg tile.

  “She liked to be indispensable,” James told him.

  “That’s great until you die.” Marcus sat down at his desk. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with this world. The record-keepers are old ladies who don’t leave legible files when they pass on. Maybe that’s why we’re still in this war. Somebody’s old secretary filed the Get Out Quick papers under snake pumpkin child.”

  Jane Atlas would have laughed.

  Third Presbyterian did not question Charles and James’s choice. Still, the congregation could not help but notice that their ministers had hired a young black man. They did not say anything openly, of course, so Charles and James could not figure out if it was Marcus’s blackness that surprised them or his youth or his maleness.

  “Do you think we should have asked someone?” Charles said one day, after they had taken a multitude of phone calls from people just checking in to see how Jane’s replacement was doing.

  “No,” James said.

  “Do you think we should say something?”

  “What, before one of our grande dames gets whiplash from craning her neck?”

  “I’d like to stop the gossip.”

  James nodded. “I think we should ignore the gossip. They know we’re right, they just have to get used to knowing it.” He wondered why it was that the right thing often took so long to get accustomed to.

  He and Charles took Marcus to lunch at the Cedar Tavern. It was where the two of them ate together once a month to check in, to catch up on concerns, to spend time together as men instead of ministers. It was dark and clubby and served good beer and hamburgers. They let Marcus slide into their favorite booth before them.

  “What are you studying?” James asked. Marcus was eating everything on his plate as fast as he could.

  “Philosophy, history, a little bit of everything.”

  “What about when they make you decide?”

  “Money, probably. Can you study money?”

  “If you’re white.” James put his elbows on the table, which Charles recognized as him getting ready for a fight.

  Marcus smiled and kept chewing. “I understand what you’re saying.” He shook his head. “But you’re not going to rile me up today. Right now, I’m taking care of myself. I’m keeping my head down, I’m going to college, and I’m staying out of Asia. When this war is over and I have a degree, I’ll figure out how to change the world.”

  Charles and James were silent. They had not thought of Marcus as much younger than they were, but in that moment they felt how considerably they had aged. They were not old, by any stretch of the imagination, but they were substantially more worn and weathered than Marcus, had loved and hoped and worked and lost and failed and made amends.

  James saw himself in Marcus, at least he saw the part of himself that was scared and desperate, that chose a point and threw himself toward it with single-minded energy, so that nothing and no one could knock him off course. And he saw the dread of war, the panic that his whole life could be stolen from him with one tumble of a lottery ticket in the looming brass wheel. How could another generation of young men live in fear? After all James had done, why had nothing changed? Why did the injustices of the world circle like roller-coasters at a carnival—passengers off, passengers on, the track designed to frighten and delight in equal measure, but never to give the riders the controls?

  Marcus made Charles feel wistful. He missed being a student, immersed in his own mind, opportunities stacked up in front of him like catalogs. But he was content. He was a minister, a husband, and soon to be a father. These three strong ropes tied him to pier and post, kept him safe at harbor. He glanced at James and saw a fierce protectiveness on his face. He knew their hopes for Marcus were different, but their role in his life would be the same: They needed to shepherd this boy as Jane had shepherded them.

  Lily understood that Jane Atlas had not approved of her, but she attended the funeral anyway. As always, she was surprised by Charles’s visible joy in speaking to people, in comforting them, in being strong and patient. She
was impressed by how completely his voice filled the church when he spoke, how careful he was with his words and tone. She realized those church qualities were no longer just for his congregation—they had a purpose in her life as well: they would make him an excellent father.

  She would not be an excellent mother. She would be short-tempered, quick to criticize, uninterested in toys and nursery rhymes. She had not even been a good cousin. But she recognized that Jane’s advice was true: It made no sense to avoid the inevitable.

  Construction was finished on the brownstone, and she began to decorate the rooms, taking trips to the Garment District for soft white linens, taupe flannels, thick cotton lining for drapes. Every weekend, she went to the Twenty-Sixth Street Flea Market for furniture, maneuvering herself among stalls crowded with mismatched sets of silver, brass sconces, and hulking cabinets full of chipped china figurines. There, she found two red leather club chairs for Charles’s office and a long, smooth, unvarnished wood table for their kitchen. It was pale pine, assembled long ago for a farmhouse somewhere, she assumed, because it was worn to the texture of velvet. She painted eight spindled wooden chairs a glossy white; they circled the table like candles.

  She did not decorate a nursery. She knew it would be the room closest to hers and Charles’s on the second floor, because it had two windows and was wide enough to accommodate two cribs, two dressers, and a good-sized rocking chair. But she could not bear looking at paint chips, carpet samples, lampshades printed with hot-air balloons and stars. She allowed Charles to believe it was because she did not know if they were having boys or girls but, really, she could not stand the cheerfulness of the showrooms, the pantomime of excitement the saleswomen required of her, and her own disdain for their assumption that life could be full of joy.

  James watched Nan carefully. She hardly left the manse. He came home from work to find her asleep on the couch, the music for the junior choir on her lap. She started books but did not finish them; they lay around the house, spread open to the pages on which they had been abandoned. These days, when he came near her, she looked away. When she did meet his eyes, hers were full of longing.

  He watched her working with the choir, despite her sadness, tending to other people’s children. He saw the strain it put on her. For so long, all he had wanted was to be useful. But now, it seemed, he could not help his own wife.

  “Do you think,” James asked Charles one Monday, trying to be nonchalant, “that God has a plan?”

  “I don’t know,” Charles said.

  “But if you had to guess.”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  James shook his head. “No. I see suffering that is not caused by anything—not caused by anger or ignorance, not caused by greed. Just suffering. And it is hard to think of that as some sort of strategy. It is hard to think that the church wants me to tell people it is part of a plan.”

  Charles nodded, but did not say anything.

  “I thought,” James continued, “that if I chose this life I would always feel . . . full. Connected to something, directed.”

  “And you don’t.”

  “Nan suffers, and I cannot comfort her. It overwhelms me. It overwhelms this,” he said, gesturing around the room. “I thought this work would fix everything.”

  “But it doesn’t,” Charles said, certainly.

  “No.”

  “I understand,” Charles said, and he did. “Why don’t you take a week off? Why don’t you and Nan go away?” Get away from us, he thought to himself. “That’s why there are two of us.”

  But Nan had no desire to get away. “I can’t bear to pack,” she said.

  Instead, she planted a tree. It was November, and the ground was cold, but she bought a shovel at the hardware store, put on canvas gloves and rubber boots, and dug a hole, stepping on the blade of the shovel, pushing with her heel. It took an hour. Halfway through, she took off her thick sweater and laid it on the ground.

  She wanted to give up. Her life was no longer lovely; it was a drought. She woke each morning, scrambled eggs, served them on a plate, set out a fork and napkin, watched James eat them, then washed the pan. She changed sheets, then vacuumed. She ironed; she washed her face, brushed her teeth, pulled back covers, lay down in bed. As she completed each action she thought, This used to matter.

  She tamped the clodded earth down with the back of her shovel. This used to matter, she thought. Hard work, faith, and perseverance had, at one time, been significant. Jane Atlas’s whole life had once made a difference, had interlocked with other lives, helped them turn easily, shifted them into gear. Now it was over.

  James had told her about the doctors. He said there were small surgeries they could each have. The doctors could clear away some tissue, try to increase blood flow, ease circulation. Nan hated speaking of it, hated the charts and illustrations in the pamphlets the doctors sent. James read them carefully; Nan turned out her light, pretended to be asleep so he could not pass them to her. She was not a line-drawn system on a glossy piece of paper. She was not a collection of veins and vessels, cells and bones. Except they all were. They would live fewer years than this tree, and the earth would disassemble them. Jane was already just a cup full of ash.

  SEVENTEEN

  Lily’s twins were born just after New Year’s. Boys. The hospital was stark and smelled of bleach. The fluorescent lights and linoleum floor tiles were identical to those Lily had stood under and upon on the day of her parents’ deaths. She closed her eyes against them, tried to put the memory out of her mind. She struggled on the bed, nauseous, pushing for so long—too long. The doctor approached her with a black mask and said, “This will be easier if you are asleep.”

  Before she breathed in whatever gas the mask held for her, she gripped the nurse’s hand and begged, “Please don’t let my babies die.” It was the second most terrifying day of her life.

  When she woke up and they handed her sons to her—one for each arm, all wrapped up in striped blankets—she was amazed. They were real; they had come. She had children. People had told her she would recognize them instantly, but she did not. They were complete strangers, red and wrinkled, skeptical, with fingers as long as elves’. She did not know them, and they did not know her, could not recognize her before and after, her brokenness, her tragedy. They were two beings from whom she did not have to hide. If she chose, she could return the book called Orphan to the library. She could fold that blanket and put it away.

  She looked at Charles, sitting in a chair by the side of her bed and realized that this was how he always felt: grounded and purposeful. She was now a mother, in the same way he was a minister; neither of them would ever be separate from their role. She did not know how she felt about that, yet. But she was, in that moment, so grateful for him, for the house he had found, for the things he had forgiven.

  They named the boys Benjamin, called Bip, and William, called Will. They arrived home to baskets of gifts from the women of the parish. Lily took her boys instantly into bed with her, and there they stayed for the first few weeks of life, cuddled together, sung to by Lily, read to by Charles. Lily fed them, changed them, dressed and redressed them, did laundry, cooked meals, wiped the table, put them down for naps, had naps herself, tried to read the newspaper, but settled for watching the news as she fed one and then the other at her breast. In everything she did now, she thought to herself: My boys will know I did this. Will they be proud? It was the way she imagined some people felt about their parents.

  James and Nan went to visit them. It was a cold day, and Nan was glad for the coats, the scarves, the mittens. They protected her on the way over and gave her something to do in the awkward moments after they arrived. Nan had not been invited to visit the brownstone before. She had not seen Lily since the day she had found out Lily was pregnant. She had hoped the baby shower would build a bridge, but instead the space between them had grown wider, and now Nan was here only because it was something her father would have wanted her to do.

  “Com
e in, come in!” Charles said. He opened the door, then his arms, wide. He hugged them both. “Lily’s in the kitchen.”

  Nan paused in the entryway. It was strange to be inside Lily’s new home; it was completely different from the apartment she had seen before. The ceilings were high. The walls were white and there was clean, stark space between them, not quite filled with furniture. There was not a single rug on the floor. The only touches of color were the lush, celebratory vases of flowers. It made the manse seem trivial.

  A baby cried. Charles hurried to the kitchen and Nan and James followed him. Lily’s counter was marble; her table was a blank plane of honey wood. Lily was holding both babies, sitting on a hard, straight chair.

  “I’m sorry,” Lily said. Nan thought, for a moment, that Lily was apologizing for her appearance, which was disheveled and stained.

  “It’s all right,” Nan said, unable to take her eyes off the babies, who were both swaddled in white crocheted blankets. She could smell their soap and powder from across the room. One had wiggled a hand free, his tiny fingers grazing the air.

  “No, it’s not,” Lily told her. “I’ve been rude to you. I didn’t understand; I thought you were being desperate. I didn’t know what it meant to have a child, and I thought you were foolish for missing something you never had. But I understand now.”

  Nan knew Lily still didn’t understand at all. How could anyone comprehend another’s longing when their own had been fulfilled? She felt James’s hand on her back, the familiar rub that told her they could go if she needed to.

  “I hope you have one,” Lily continued. “I will hope for you as hard as I can.”

  Nan felt like the surface of Lily’s table, sanded bare. She did not want Lily’s pity.

  “Can I hold one?”

  Lily held out the little bundles she was cradling. “As long as you want to,” she said. Nan put the baby on her shoulder and placed her cheek next to his head. He was warm and breathing.