by Cara Wall
“These are some of our easier ones, really,” the director said, giving them time to take in the room. “Everyone here is prone to outbursts, but these boys respond to medication quite well.”
James understood she was talking about sedatives, not medicines to make them speak or learn.
“Do you teach them anything?” Marcus asked, his voice smaller and tighter than James had ever heard it.
“Of course,” the director said. She took a small notebook from the pocket of her skirt and read from a list she had written in pencil.
“And is that enough?” James asked when she was done.
“Enough for what?” the director asked. Her voice had changed, become hard, almost challenging. She pointed into the room. “Before he came here, this boy never had a bath. Most of them arrive with mats in their hair, severely malnourished. I’m not saying their parents don’t love them. All the parents love them, Reverend MacNally. But they don’t know how to care for them. We do.”
As she spoke, James heard a banging—loud, insistent—and voices yelling over it.
The director’s eyes flew to the ceiling. “Now, those are the boys who were kept in closets,” she said. “Those were the ones who came here with concussions and broken arms.” She put her notebook back in her pocket. “Tell your friends we keep them separate here—the quiet ones and the violent ones. Some places don’t have enough space, have to keep them together. That results in injuries, as you can imagine. As long as he’s calm, your friend’s child would be kept here. You should tell her that. Tell her we hardly ever have to use the locks on the doors.”
Afterward, James and Marcus stood on the greyed marble steps of the building, unable to say a word, trying to absorb what they had seen. The river in front of them was the color of steel, its currents the shape of hooks and cords. James felt that he would drown in what he had seen: the ignorance, the callousness, the cunning. He was short of breath, suffocated by the understanding that some things should break a man—that to remain whole would be inhuman.
“How can this be?” Marcus asked faintly. James felt cruel for bringing him here, for making it an outing, for thinking Marcus was prepared. He wanted to apologize, but that wouldn’t do either of them any good.
“It can’t,” he said.
As soon as he got home, he called Charles and shouted, “If you ever send Will to a place like that, I’m going to punch you in the throat.”
NINETEEN
Another year passed. Lily spent every hour she could at the library. Marcus had agreed to watch the boys during his lunch break and for a few hours on Friday afternoons. He needed the money, and she needed someone who was not utterly shocked by Will’s affect. She fed both boys before he arrived, put them down for their naps, and called every hour from the phone booth next to the ladies’ room in the library lobby to see if she needed to come home.
“We’re fine,” Marcus said, even when she could hear Bip bouncing a ball in the background. “You know kids are always better for the babysitters.”
So she stayed at the study tables as long as possible, reading every study about children’s medicine, every footnote, just in case there was something to glean. At home, she set the alarm to wake up in the middle of the night to call doctors in Zurich or London, had learned to take notes while cradling the phone on one shoulder and holding one of the twins in the other arm.
She lugged home bags full of books. This produced in Charles an aching wave of nostalgia. As she sat at the kitchen table turning pages, the smell of book dust and marble floor cleaner drifted across to him. Immediately, he was twenty-two again, secure in his place at the university and in the world. He was the boy who loved the girl with the furrowed brow and the hunch of concentration. He was the boy who loved her so much his throat constricted when she walked by and whose head went light when she spoke. Now, when she spoke, his heart was lead.
One night, late, when the living room was dark except for their two reading lamps, Lily looked up from her latest medical journal.
“Maybe we should go back to the psychiatrist,” she said. “It says here that there are hidden benefits to psychiatry, surprise results.”
Charles did not answer. He was lying on the couch reading a plumbing manual. He liked, now, to read manuals, to imagine assembling parts into systems. He was hoping to fix the pipe under the kitchen sink, which leaked when the weather was cold. He wanted to repair one thing in their house, the house that had been here long before them, and would be here long after them, its sturdy bricks and good windows sheltering families, children running up and down the stairs. He wanted to preserve it, because that was how he had once felt inside of it: protected and preserved.
It was the way he used to feel about God. He wished he still did. He tried to; he tried to pray in the bathroom at night, leaning on the sink, head bowed in front of the mirror. He wanted to bring prayer into this house, like heat from the radiators. But the words did not come. Or rather, the only words that came were the ones to the prayers of intercession, prayers he used to make every Sunday, prayers for the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the suffering, for prisoners and those who imprisoned them, for those who were dying and those who mourned.
But Will was not any of those things. He was not poor; he was not dying. He was not hungry or oppressed. He wasn’t even sick, not really. Autism was not a disease, it was a condition. Charles supposed it could be said that Will was imprisoned in the state of being called autism and that he suffered there. But no one was sure. No one knew what Will thought, because Will did not tell them. All their worry about him could be unnecessary, or it could be wildly insufficient. They would never know.
Charles did not want to go back to the psychiatrist; their first visit had been the worst day of his life, the day he had discovered a chasm in the middle of his soul. On one side sat Will. Will who would never be normal, would never be the boy Charles had wished for, would never even know how much Charles loved him. Will, who would feel, despite all Charles’s best efforts, exactly the way Charles had felt around his own father—overlooked and misunderstood.
On the other side sat God. In spite of everything, Charles had not lost his faith. He felt its solace shimmering across the divide, warm as a campfire. Oh, how Charles wanted to walk into the expanse of peace he had once known. It was still there, as beautiful and delicious as it had been on the first day he had experienced it, the first day he had stepped into it and felt all his doubt melt away. He knew he could give himself to God and God would make him at peace with Will’s suffering.
He said nothing to Lily.
He understood, now, that he had failed her. He had never understood her grief. He had not fathomed how distinctly it defined her. He had thought he could heal her. Now he knew he had been a fool, useless to her and to so many others he had counseled, asking them to look beyond their suffering, believing that his empathy was any kind of balm. He did not want to count the times and ways in which he had been wrong.
And he had failed Bip. He had no energy for running or singing or jumping up and down the front steps. He did not want to tell stories at the dinner table or kneel at the side of the bathtub to play with the blue and yellow boats. The thought of teaching Bip to throw a baseball was grief incarnate. How could he take joy in one son’s childhood, when his other’s was so bleak? But also, how could he not?
Shame was the ground in which he now lived. Its dirt was dry and coarse and laced with an arsenic that paralyzed him, so Charles did not try to rise. He laid his head on a cushion and let the darkness hollow him out.
Lily threw a pencil; it hit him just above the ear. He dragged himself upright and forced himself to look at her. Her face was dark and jagged. She was no longer sturdy; she was gaunt and fragile. He realized he had not kissed her for months, or held her hand, or hugged her. These thoughts came from far away and took a long time to reach him. Long enough for him to realize that he was, once again, failing.
“You’re just like Will,” she
said. “You’ve gone cold and stony and silent. I can’t have two of you like that, Charles. I really can’t.”
Charles watched her lips move and knew she was the perfect mother for Will: ordered, precise, uncomplicated by God or any sense of calling except to arrange Will’s life to make it bearable. She had not given up on him for one second since he had been diagnosed. And, despite her tireless efforts to find a treatment, she wasn’t desperate to change Will; she just wanted to help him be happy.
Charles was not even a mediocre father. He was a man whose life had been propelled by love and God. Two ideas never seen, never proven to exist. He lived entirely in the abstract, and therefore, he was a man with a life his son could never share.
For the entirety of their marriage, he had wondered if Lily had as much to offer him as God. Now, it seemed, she was offering him more.
“Okay,” he said to his wife. “Hand me a book.”
And so he began to study with her, to learn medical words and phrases, to read between the dry, clinical lines. They were both aware of how closely this paralleled their courtship: days researching, nights of discussion. And they were both aware of how much they’d changed. Then, there had been hundreds of books on the topics they had debated; now there were two. Then, books had been full of possibility, now they were cruel and dire. But it felt familiar, an echo of who they had been when they were young, even if, now, they were ancient.
Charles had not been in the church for weeks. There was nothing James could do to hide it, no excuse he could give the parishioners who called. They were tired of seeing James in the pulpit; they coughed as he spoke, turned the pages of their programs to find the number of the next hymn. Without Charles’s deep insight, James’s calls to service seemed chaotic, his explication of the scriptures ordinary.
James no longer begrudged Charles his absence. Having seen the reality of the options, he knew Charles had chosen the right one, and if it meant Charles had to stay at home, James would help him. He took Bible study back from Betsy Bailey, he lengthened his own office hours, he thought about offering to read one of Charles’s sermons for him, so that the congregation could hear Charles’s words without his having to come to church. He thought about writing a sermon for Charles, himself. He would do anything to keep the session from officially declaring that Charles was not doing his job.
It didn’t work. Alan Oxman came to see James. He sat in the chair in the corner, crossed his legs, wiped his glasses on his tie. “Charles is not . . . around,” Alan said.
“No,” James answered. He closed his eyes. “He needs some time.”
“We’ve given him time.”
James opened his eyes, angry. “He’s in the dark, Alan. His son is ill and he doesn’t know what to do.”
Alan nodded. “I understand,” he said. “But this isn’t what we signed up for.”
James realized he meant that he wasn’t what they’d signed up for, at least not without Charles’s tempering hand. “I’m doing the best I can,” he said.
“But you can’t go it alone for much longer.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“Ask Charles to take leave, officially, and then we can bring in an interim.”
James shook his head. He was afraid that if Charles knew the church was in good hands, he would never come back.
“Just hang on,” he said. “Let me talk to him some more.”
Alan Oxman nodded again.
As soon as Alan had left the building, James strode straight to the manse, paced through the rooms looking for Nan. He found her sitting on their bed, annotating sheet music.
“They want to let Charles go,” he said. He realized he was more afraid than he’d ever been of anything, except going to war. He sat down on the end of the bed. “I’m afraid they’re going to let him slip away.” He took a deep breath to crack the hard surface of his foreboding. “I can’t let that happen. We have to find the doctors and the scientists, the teachers and the nurses and the politicians. We can’t make him do all of that on his own.”
James stopped, because Nan was frozen. She had put her music aside as he talked, moved to sit on the edge of the mattress as he had paced in the small space between the bed and the wall. Now she was staring straight ahead, back stiff, hands clasped tensely in her lap. He stepped forward to touch her shoulder, but she bent over until her head was almost touching her knees.
“I already let them go,” she said, her voice muffled. “I went to Lily’s house, and I held Will, and he was so awful. I couldn’t bear it. I didn’t help. I ran away.”
James knelt in front of her, as quickly as he could, and put one hand on her hair.
“I’ve just been pretending,” Nan said, woodenly. “My father took me to see all of those people, made me shake their hands. He cared about them, really cared. But I was afraid of them. I hated looking them in the eye.”
It was not a small confession; James knew Nan had been carrying this gnarled pith of shame almost as long as she had been alive. For once, he took a moment to think before he spoke. She needed him to absolve her.
But he needed her more. He needed her diplomacy and tact, her clear-headed composure, her stubbornness and poise. He needed her faith to be unclouded and insistent. He needed her, just for today, to not need him.
“You have to tell me what to do,” he said.
To his relief, Nan straightened up and looked him in the eye.
“You have to get Charles back,” she said.
So James made another trip to the brownstone, sat across from Charles in one of the low-armed chairs.
“Don’t leave me,” he said.
“What?” Charles said.
“I can tell you’re thinking about leaving, and I don’t want you to.” James was gripping the leather with both hands.
Charles smiled wanly, looked James in the eye. “I’ve seen the limits of my faith,” he said. “I see the end of the illusion—where the sea turns to cardboard, peters out, is left to sand. I see the desert. I see how close it is. One more disaster, one more sickness, one more death to grieve—one more piece of my faith given away and I will be lost. I no longer have enough to share. One more person asking me to confirm the love of God, and I will be empty.”
All James could do was nod. “You’ve always said that doubt, the limit, was in us, not in God.”
“It is,” Charles said, “and that’s the tragedy.” He looked at the ceiling. “Can you do it alone?”
“I don’t want to,” James said.
Charles nodded, but James could tell from the length of his face and the hollows in his eyes that Charles did not have any reassurance to give him.
“You need to preach,” James said.
“I don’t have anything to say,” Charles told him.
“You have to think of something,” James countered, his voice urgent. “You have to tell them what’s going on. You don’t have to be wise or inspirational, but you have to tell them something about Will.”
Charles looked at him blankly. “I don’t want to parade him about like a monkey at the zoo.”
James sighed. “You can’t keep pretending,” he said. “They think he’s going to be cured. They think you’re going to stand up one day and say he’s better. So they don’t understand what you’re going through. You have to tell them the truth. This is your life. Preach about it.”
At a loss for what else to do, Charles took James’s advice. He put on his black robe, sat through the hymns and the readings, prayed over the offering plates, and climbed the stairs to the pulpit.
“If you haven’t seen my son Will lately,” he began, “you might be startled. He keeps his head down, looks at the floor instead of meeting your eye. He moves awkwardly, jerks his hands and legs.” Charles looked out at his congregation, saw those who had bowed their heads in hopes of evasion, and those who looked straight at him, bright-eyed with pity. He saw people who understood, the people who could not understand but wanted to, people who wanted him to j
ust stop talking. He cleared his throat. “He has been diagnosed with autism.” The church seemed twice as large to him. He was aware of the darkness of its pews, the dullness of its marble, the somber grey suits, the sparkling rings and bracelets. He was aware of the echo of his own voice.
“There is no treatment.” He took a slow breath. “I have seen enough doctors to know that Will cannot be cured. That prayer will not be answered.” He felt the church grow still, the faces of his congregation attentive, waiting.
“I expect that what you want to ask me is, have I lost my faith in God? Despite this evidence to the contrary, do I still believe God is with me?”
The congregation rustled, sat forward, looked at him with apologetic fervor in their eyes.
“Yes,” Charles said. “I do. God can ease this suffering, as God has eased all of my other suffering. God can help me to believe that there is a reason and a plan. God can help me be happy. The lure of that is almost irresistible.”
He put down his notes, put his hands on either edge of the pulpit. “If I turn to God, God will allow me to look at my son, to watch him playing, solitary, in his room, and think: This is all right.”
Charles found that his throat was tight and the rest of him was electrified. This was why he had not spoken for so long: because this was the only truth he knew.
“How can I let that happen?” he asked, urgently. “How can I ever let Will’s suffering be all right? How can I ever let my son struggle alone?”
The church was silent. Charles felt hollow and small. He wished Lily were there.
“I cannot,” he said. “I do not want to find solace in Will’s condition. That seems, to me, abandonment. I do not want to leave Will’s future in God’s hands. I want to take it in my own. And that is a failure.
“I want to be clear,” he continued. “This is not a failure of God, but a failure of man. I have come here, today, to admit that I have turned away from God. That is why I have turned away from you. I am ashamed of it. God, I believe, could give me all the possibilities of thought, of interpretation I could ever need. It is just that I don’t want to hear them. I want to close that door.”