The Dearly Beloved

by Cara Wall

  “That’s yellow,” Lily reminded him. “That’s a taxi.”

  “Taxi,” he said, as if it were the most marvelous word he had ever tasted.

  He reminded her of her parents: how gay they had been, how lilting and full of life. She thought of how often her father would pinch her mother’s cheek or kiss her on the back of the neck, and how often they would laugh and laugh. She thought of how comfortable they were in their skins, how they had moved in a buoyed, carefree way, like ships in a harbor.

  Bip tried to share his joy with Will. When Will sat in a corner of the kitchen, Bip ran in and out of the backyard, bringing leaves and dirt to set on the floor—far enough away that Will would not be disturbed, but close enough so Will could see them. He spoke to Will. He dragged his canvas bag of blocks into Will’s room and built towers while Will hid under a blanket. It was Lily’s greatest solace that Will did not push Bip away.

  Her greatest anguish was their difference. It was dreadfully clear to her that while Bip was like her parents, Will was like her: always serious, distracted, dissatisfied. If she had been different, if she had let her parents cajole her into going to parties, to have more fun, to try something new, would Will be normal? If she had joined in the fun, would Will not be alone? She missed them. She wanted to be more like them, but day by day she became more entwined with Will.

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that, after all her grief and loneliness, she could not just enjoy Bip, her lovely boy who played, sang songs, and held her hand. It wasn’t fair that she gave him divided attention, would never look at him without a trace of impatience or despair. It wasn’t his fault that Will had been born the very definition of a soul apart. It wasn’t Will’s fault that Bip had been given all the easiness, while he had been given all the hard. And it wasn’t fair that she knew so intimately the ways in which Will suffered, the agony of living in a world that did not offer comfort, the particular desperation that drove a person to howl.

  She wanted to believe that Will might be content in his own world, that he didn’t need the same things everyone else did to be happy. That it was possible to be happy in a million ways. Charles had preached that a hundred times, that people did not have to be alike to be connected; being different need not be a tragedy. But she could not believe it, then or now.

  She was angry. She railed at God. I married a minister, she yelled. Against all my better judgment. And he loves you. He believes in you with every fiber of his being, and this is what you do? She hated that her anger made Charles’s God seem real to her. Acid burned through her bones. But she knew how to put it away. She knew how to cry, how to pound the bed and kick the wall. She knew how to arrange herself so that her grief sat quietly behind the closed closet door. It was torture.

  Charles had given James permission to tell the congregation that Will was sick, as long as he didn’t mention autism. All day long, James took calls from people asking, “What can we do?” “How can we help?” He also spent every free minute calling experts he thought might know the answer to those questions. But he’d gotten all the answers there were on the first two days: the name of one doctor in Los Angeles, one in Baltimore, and two mental institutions. That was all. Everything there was to be known about autism could be learned in a week. The books and articles he’d found took up one lone corner of his desk. And it exhausted him. He was used to forging a path, to deciding on a course of action and chasing it as fast as he could. That was his call, and it invigorated him. Standing still drained him of everything.

  “I don’t mean to add more work to your pile,” Marcus said, one day, “but there’s a boy at my own church like Will.”

  James looked up. Marcus did not often talk about himself. James knew he lived in Harlem, took the subway to work, drank Coke instead of coffee. He arrived at work with a backpack, and James knew he studied at his desk on slow days, but he had never volunteered any specific information about his classes, or his family, or his friends. James put down his pen, closed his file; he did not want to miss anything.

  “I used to be afraid of him,” Marcus continued. “Not like he was going to beat me up or anything—he’s just a kid. But I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I should look at his mom, or not look at her; I didn’t know if she wanted me to see him as different or if she wanted me to try to see him as the same. So I just avoided her. And the more I avoided her, the guiltier I felt, and the guiltier I felt, the more frightened I became. That’s how I knew it was wrong—the avoiding. That’s how I knew I had to do something different.”

  “What did you do?” James asked.

  Marcus shrugged. “I tried to give him a cookie,” he said. “Just like I would any other little kid at coffee hour. His mom came running up to me and grabbed my arm so hard I thought she was going to twist it off. He can’t eat sugar. It makes him crazy. Lock him in the closet crazy.”

  Before he could stop himself, James laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It isn’t funny.”

  “It is funny,” Marcus said, smiling a wide smile. “I did something stupid. But now his mom talks to me sometimes, tells me a little bit about her life. It’s hard. She feels totally alone. When I told her that Will was just like her son, I thought she was going to cry.” He looked at James sheepishly. “I said I’d tell her if Charles finds a doctor, or a medicine. Do you think it’s all right to pass that kind of stuff along?”

  “Of course,” James said. “Charles would want you to. But they haven’t found anything, yet.” As the words came out of his mouth, James realized how tired he was of saying them.

  Marcus cleared his throat. “She asked about sending him away.” He looked down as he said this. “She doesn’t want to, but he bites and kicks, and she has a younger kid.”

  James nodded. “I know a couple of places,” he said. “I can give her some names.”

  “Have you seen them?” Marcus asked. “She can’t pay, and she’s afraid that the free ones . . .” He lifted his shoulders and trailed off.

  “I haven’t seen them,” James said, straightening in his chair. “I haven’t.” He couldn’t believe this was true. He couldn’t believe there was an option he hadn’t explored.

  “Let’s go,” James said to Marcus. It was something useful to do.

  But first, James went to see Charles. The brownstone was as Nan had described it: solemn and tired. Lily’s lean furniture gave no quarter for comfort, and James was relieved to walk into Charles’s office, in which there were two leather club chairs and a brass-tufted ottoman on which to rest one’s feet. Charles looked more alive than he had at church in the past weeks, but still frail.

  “How are you?” James asked.

  “Not well,” Charles answered, clearly far away. “How are you?”

  “Tired,” James said. “Pretty much alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Charles said. His eyes were sunken and empty. He looked at James, his whole body an apology.

  “Tell me,” James said.

  Charles took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “The appointments are agony. Every time they examine Will, they put him in a hospital gown. It’s torture for him to change clothes, but they make him. And they don’t let us stay in the room. We have to sit in the waiting room and listen to him howl. Can you imagine what that does to Lily?”

  James wanted to take Charles’s hand, to enfold him in a hug, but the strain had starched them both into formality. “What does it do to you?”

  Charles shook his head like a dog shaking off water. “I can’t explain why we just sit there.” He paused, now vibrant in his pain. “Except that we want them to see that we can handle this. They think we can’t. They think we’re endangering our family.”

  “Are you?” James was searching.

  Charles let his head hang. “I don’t think so. Not now, not while the boys are little. Bip loves him. But when Will gets bigger . . . the prognosis is so dire.”

  “Who makes the decision?” James asked, softly, gatheri
ng information, hoping to ground them in the present.

  Charles laughed, the clang of a spoon on a tin can. “There’s the rub. I do. Just me. Because I’m the husband, the father, the man. They only need one signature.”

  James could not imagine a world in which either of them would do that to their wives.

  “I have an appointment to see one of the homes,” James said. “I’m taking Marcus with me. Do you want to come?”

  Charles put his fist up between them. “He isn’t your son.”

  It was the first time James had ever seen Charles angry, and it was terrifying. “No, he isn’t. But Marcus knows another boy like him. And you know me, Charles. I have to do something.”

  Charles stared at him. Of course he wanted to go with them. Of course he wanted to know what the future held; he needed to prepare, to research, to form a thesis, to prepare an argument. But he needed Lily more than he ever had or had ever thought he would. He could not betray her.

  “Tell me how it is,” he said.

  Charles and Lily saw more doctors.

  “Autism,” one told them, following the words in the medical dictionary with his fingertip, “is absorption in fantasy to the exclusion of reality.” He looked up and stared at them.

  They stared back. Charles did not speak. He had stopped speaking, for the most part. He said Good day to people on the street and inquired whether Lily wanted coffee in the morning, though he knew she always did. But he did not ask for people’s thoughts and did not share his own. He did not want to say the words that now defined him: sick, harrowed, apart. Apart from the church, which expected him to work, though he could barely hold his eyes open. Apart from his city, which had once seemed full of possibility and now seemed full of hopelessness and incompetence. Apart from his wife, who was persevering in spite of everything—who had picked herself up and was carrying on. Most of all, apart from his own sons, one of whom sat like a gargoyle in his room, and one of whom needed a gladness Charles did not possess.

  Finally, Lily said, “I don’t mind that definition, except that it’s completely inadequate.”

  The doctor looked back down. “Mental introversion in which the attention or interest is fastened upon the victim’s own ego.”

  Lily shook her head. “Victim,” she said.

  The doctor raised his eyebrows. He moved his finger down the page. “A self-centered mental state from which reality tends to be excluded.”

  Lily turned to Charles. “Do you think that’s true?” she asked. “That he’s just created his own world?”

  Charles did not answer, though he thought it might be possible. Will did not seem vacant. He was focused on something, cared enough to demand sameness, monotony, day after day.

  “Do you think he’s happy in there?” Lily asked.

  Charles did not answer.

  The doctor said, “I don’t see how anyone could be happy, not in this abnormal state.”

  Lily stood up, almost flung her chair across the room.

  Finally, they went to see a young psychiatrist who had long hair and wore a brown tweed jacket. He ushered them into a brightly lit office, motioned them to a hard, shallow couch, and sat across from them with his elbows on his knees, ready to listen. Charles and Lily sat stiffly, hands on laps.

  “What we want to know,” Lily said, “is if Will’s happy. Or if he can be happy like this. In his condition.”

  The doctor sat back in surprise. “Oh,” he said, “I thought we were going to talk about you.”

  Charles and Lily looked at him questioningly.

  He fumbled in his jacket pocket, found his datebook, opened it. “Yes, right here. The Reverend and Mrs. Barrett.”

  “Doctor,” Charles said.

  “Doctor and Mrs. Barrett.”

  “No,” Charles corrected him. “The Reverend and Dr. Barrett.”

  The psychiatrist looked panicked and confused. “I’m not an expert in children,” he said. “I treat parents coping with abnormal offspring. I thought we were going to talk about you.”

  “We want to talk about our son,” Lily said.

  The psychiatrist did not meet her eyes. “I imagine you are asking ‘Why did this happen to me?’ ”

  “No,” Lily corrected him. “We are asking why this happened to Will, and what we can do.”

  “But you must not ignore your own needs.”

  “What I need,” Lily said, “is for someone to tell me how to help my son. I need someone to tell me how much help is enough, to tell me what will make him happy. I don’t care what happy looks like. I don’t care how uncomfortable his happy will make other people feel. If he wants to swing from the lamppost every day at five o’clock—if doing that will make him laugh, will make him feel something—then he can swing from the lamppost every day at five o’clock. We are not concerned with what other people think of him. We are concerned only with how he feels within himself.”

  Charles forced himself to speak. “We want to know more about him. To understand how his mind works; how he might express his needs. Things we might not be able to guess on our own.”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible,” the doctor said. “These children give us so little; it’s almost futile to study them.”

  At the word study, a part of Charles collapsed. Study was his bulwark, his chart, his compass. If Will could not be studied, what kind of father could he be?

  He felt Lily looking at him and knew she sensed this sharp splinter of pain. It was ironic that they understood each other so well, now; that intimacy had come to them through the suffering of their child.

  “I think you should just tell us what you want to tell us,” Lily said. “Tell us the worst thing you have to tell.”

  “All right,” the psychiatrist sighed deeply, adjusted his glasses. “Children like Will can’t interact with others. They can’t look outside themselves. So, I think the worst I can tell you is that he will never love.”

  Charles felt his eyes jump, his heart slow.

  “We love him,” Lily said.

  “But he cannot love you. He cannot even know you. He cannot understand abstract concepts. He will only ever connect to the concrete. He will not know friendship or passion or God.” The doctor closed his book.

  Lily put a hand on Charles’s arm. It was a gesture so vulnerable he almost pulled away.

  “God knows him,” Charles said quietly.

  The doctor shrugged.

  In that moment, Lily vowed she would put her anger to good use. Since she could not be a gracious or patient mother, she would be a determined and tenacious one. She would prove these doctors wrong. She would find other doctors, commission studies, raise money, and find a cure.

  James and Marcus decided to start at the home with the best reputation, so they had something to compare the others to. James made the appointment. The school, as it called itself, was housed in an old hospital far uptown, on the edge of the East River, where it had been built so that the current could carry infections swiftly away.

  “Don’t worry about the money,” James told Marcus when they met on the subway platform. “If this is the right place for your friend’s son, we’ll get her the money. That I know I can do.”

  The director met them on the front steps of the building, which was smaller than James had expected, and shabbier. The columns holding up the porch were chipped and scuffed, there was moss growing on the foundation. In contrast, the director was a crisply starched woman with a white headband holding back her curly hair.

  “Good morning,” she said, shaking their hands. “We’re so glad you’re here.”

  “Really?” James was surprised. “May I ask why?”

  The director opened the door and led them inside. “We don’t get much recognition from the churches,” she said. “Or from the government. There are so many other things to be outraged about today.”

  James and Marcus followed her down a marble hallway that smelled of disinfectant. She took a key ring from her belt and unlocked a
metal door.

  “This is the nursery,” she said. James looked past her into a wide, square room full of light. There were cribs pressed next to one another along every inch of wall. In the middle were four rocking chairs, and two old blankets lay on the ground. A nurse was sitting in one of the rocking chairs, dangling a rattle in front of a baby who had crawled off the blankets and was sitting on the floor. “Mostly, we have mongoloid children here,” the director said. “That’s really the only condition we can diagnose at birth.”

  She turned and led them back into the hall, up a wide staircase with an ornate banister. The building, obviously, had once been very grand.

  “It’s a nice thing you’re doing,” the director said as they followed her up the stairs, “touring for your friends. Very thoughtful. Parents have a hard time making a decision. So often they pick the first name on the list, wherever their doctor tells them to go. They don’t know they have choices.”

  When she reached the landing she stopped, turned, and smiled. “We keep everything clean—you’ve seen that. The floors are mopped daily, beds are changed at least twice a week, more if necessary.” James could tell she had begun her standard speech. She stood with one hand on the banister; her voice was practiced and a little loud for the space. “We’ve passed every health inspection,” she continued. “Not that we do it because of the inspections. We’d do it without the inspections. But it’s a feat. We spend most of our time handling our students.”

  James took note of the word students and the word handling. “Do parents visit?” he asked.

  “Not often,” the director said. “They’re always welcome to make an appointment, but most don’t. Most don’t want to know.”

  She led them down another hallway, this one darker and narrower. James could feel Marcus starting to lag behind.

  “These are the boys you asked about,” the director said grandly, opening another door. Inside the room were ten boys. Half were sitting on their beds, staring into space. One boy was at the window, pushing his finger in and out of a sunbeam. One was sitting on the floor, a meticulous stack of blocks in front of him. There were no nurses.