by Cara Wall
James stared at Charles as he descended from the pulpit. The two of them stood, as they did every Sunday, waiting for the opening chords of the hymn. When the organ sounded, James leaned over to Charles and whispered, “I didn’t mean quit your job.”
Nan and James got into bed that night. James was used to Nan turning away from him, curling up on her side. Instead, she sat up close to him.
“What happens,” she asked, “if Charles is asked to leave?”
“They won’t ask him to leave.” Nan could tell by James’s face that he was trying to convince himself.
“They might. Do you think he’ll get another call?”
“He got this call. That’s what a call is.” James got out of bed and started pacing. “It means you find a church that’s right for you, and a church that’s right for you can handle a little uncertainty, a little crisis of faith.”
“Can you get a bad call?”
James stopped pacing. “Yes,” he said. And she knew from the drape of his pajamas and the harrowed set of his skin what he meant.
“I feel those things all the time, those things Charles said. And on top of it, I don’t even have Charles’s clear and certain faith that there is a God. I only believe there’s a better way to live. What if they ask me to take over? What if they ask me to do it alone?” He sat on the side of the bed, suddenly small.
Nan felt as certain as a rock. If Charles went, James went. There was only one call. They were, the four of them, married to each other, in a strange way. They had turned in their quarters and the church had given them a silver dollar. She was not James’s only wife, now; he was just as committed to the church, and through the church, to Charles and Lily. They were in it for the long haul, and something would have to be done.
The next day Nan knocked at Lily’s door.
“All right,” she said, when Lily opened it. “You’re right, I can’t stand Will. I don’t know how to stand him.” The words came out before she could stop them. Lily examined her face, hard.
“Okay,” Lily said. “I don’t know how to either some days.”
Nan looked into Lily’s eyes, really looked for the first time, and saw that she had changed. She was no longer closed off, no longer belligerent or challenging. In her eyes, Nan saw acceptance. It was not the acceptance she had known as a child: the acceptance she had earned by being perfect. It was an acceptance that acknowledged Nan’s flaws, an acceptance that saw them, simple, exposed. Lily knew the worst in her.
She pulled herself together, determined to give Lily the one thing she had to give her. “James found this,” she said, pulling a slip of paper from her purse. She thrust it forward, forcing herself to look Lily in the eye again. “It’s the name of a doctor he heard about yesterday. I know you have had a horrible time with doctors, but this one is supposed to be different.”
Lily’s eyes remained impassive. It would take more than a gesture to bridge the rift between them. But Lily did not send Nan away.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
The session asked for a copy of Charles’s sermon in writing and met to discuss their options. They solicited opinions from certain members of the congregation, wanting to discover if this admission of uncertainty was pardonable. Would their congregation be able to believe in their pastor, even when he did not believe in himself?
They met in the library, next to the fellowship room. They sat at the long, polished table. James and Charles watched from folding chairs in the corner of the room. Alan Oxman cleared his throat, preparing to read from a sheaf of notes typed onto white paper.
Marcus had typed the notes, lips pursed, shaking his head all the while. “These people need a good disaster,” he said. “They need to know what it means for life to be hard. And I’m not talking about death hard. I’m talking about suffering. Don’t they know there’s a war on?” He whipped one piece of paper out of the typewriter and started a new one. “Everybody in the world is out there doubting God. And they’re mad because their minister is doubting himself?”
“It says here,” Alan Oxman began, leafing through the sheets, “I am outraged. I am encouraged. He should be ashamed. I am amused. There is no consensus,” he said. “So I’ve invited our pastors to take a stand.” He turned to them. “Charles?”
Charles shook his head.
“James?”
James stood and adjusted his coat sleeves. He began: “If you believe in a call, you believe we were brought here for a reason. Now, you can look at us today and think you made a mistake. You can look at us and see we’ve done something that makes you uncomfortable. What you have to decide is: Was making you uncomfortable a mistake? And, if so, how big a mistake?”
He took a breath. “You expect us to have seen God, I think. But I have not. I have never had a vision or seen a miracle. Honestly, I am one of those who must concede that the stories in the Bible are, in all probability, metaphorical—fables attempting to explain the way that faith made the writers feel. And so I read them as if there were forty loaves and forty fishes, as if the water had turned into wine. I am one of those for whom this interpretation does not diminish the beauty of the stories. I do not care if they are true—I care only that this feeling is available to us: that we can feel as if we have been reborn, as if we have been saved.
“Seminary does not offer the opportunity to see God. Seminary offers only the chance to study other seekers, other walks of faith, to learn from them what we can, to examine our beliefs in the light of theirs. It does not give us certainty; it gives us the tools to deal with uncertainty. That is the call.
“Charles believes he has lost this ability. So your decision comes down to whether you believe him. Do you believe Charles is irretrievably lost? Gone from the church, from the fold?”
He found himself calming down. He smoothed his tie and tugged the back of his jacket into place. He put his hands in his pockets. “Don’t you want to know what happens?” he asked them. “Don’t you want him to preach about his journey? Don’t you think there will be a great reward at the end of that road? He could come back empty, but what if he comes back full? What if he struggles and is given a sign, is given a feeling, is given an utterly new way to believe? Don’t you want to hear it? Isn’t that your call?”
They were retained by a vote of six to four.
“Thank you,” Charles said to James afterward.
TWENTY
The name on the piece of paper Nan had given Lily was Dr. Madeline Foster. Lily arranged to meet Dr. Foster without Will, this first time. She felt like she was going on a date. She stood in front of her closet, trying to get dressed. For the past six months, she had worn tan Capri pants with a blue or white button-down oxford shirt every day. These clothes could withstand toddler detritus and did not ride up or pull down as she grabbed and was grabbed by little hands. The butterflies in Lily’s stomach felt exactly like those she had encountered when she’d met Charles. She took this as a good sign.
She was beginning to believe in signs. There were signs in Will all the time: signs of temper, signs of joy, signs that passed over him as quickly as the shadows of clouds on water. She had come to understand the importance of being attuned. When she was attuned, she could sense Will’s moods, even when he was out of the room. She could sense when he had found a little space, when he was quiet, calm. She could sense when Bip was encroaching on that space—his exuberance too close, too loud, too there—and knew she had to separate them.
She could see now that when her parents died, she had become dis-attuned. She thought of it as static, the kind that creeps from the radio when you’ve spun the tuning knob instead of the volume and are left in a limbo of crackling, patchy grey. Her parents’ deaths had bumped her radio, and she had not had the energy to move the dial back, had seen no purpose, had forgotten where the channels were, what they sounded like.
Charles had tuned her to his station, and she had listened. Bip had a station, too—a clear, bright station full of brass sections
and music you could dance to. But Will had no single station. She had to sit, urgently patient, painstakingly shifting the dial millimeter by millimeter, listening for the finest modulation in static, the sign of a channel far away, one that she could get, if only she lived in Fiji or in Britain. Sometimes she came across clear ones, like tantrums, spasms, or sleep. But mostly she crept slowly up the dial, listening for the hiss and whine, inching as close as she could before she lost it, holding the transistor to her ear, listening, listening, as if it could one day become clear.
She expected Dr. Foster to understand this. The other doctors had not. They had been interested only in why Will didn’t have more channels, what was wrong inside his little steel-and-wire box. Maybe someday they would know what caused autism, but not in time for Will. Scientific studies were marathons, and childhood was a sprint. She knew that saving her son’s life depended on learning his language, meeting him under his own sun.
Lily finally chose black pants and a white shirt of a finer fabric. They were sober clothes; she did not want to appear too bright, too cheerful. She wanted to appear educated but desperate. And that was exactly how she looked.
Dr. Madeline Foster wore a white lab coat and tortoiseshell glasses. She came out from behind her desk to shake Lily’s hand. She had trim legs underneath her skirt. She had no time for chitchat.
“I’ve been reading about Will,” she said without looking at her notes. “I think I might be able to help him.” She spoke matter-of-factly, like someone Lily might have met at college: serious, but open to a good time. She leaned across her desk.
“It’s not easy,” she said. “It’s totally experimental. I have no idea how it works and no idea if it works for everyone. I’d be using your son as a guinea pig. Some people consider me a total quack.”
“Some people consider me an unfit mother.”
Dr. Foster smiled. “I know those people,” she said. “They accept the status of the child. They accept the reality of symptoms, and so go looking for their roots. I say: Let’s not accept symptoms. Let’s break through stasis. Pathology takes years. These are children. Let’s try behavior.”
Lily looked at her and saw the woman she herself might have been if she had listened to all the stations as a child, if she had lived outside of books, experimented every once in a while. Her father had wanted her to be a doctor. He said she had a clinical mind.
“What is the one thing you most want to change?” Dr. Foster asked her.
“The howling,” Lily said.
“Howling is the only way he has to express himself,” Dr. Foster said. “We must give him another way.” She took a notepad out of her desk drawer. “I’m going to give you the number of a girl.”
Annelise Winny was a student of Dr. Foster’s. She had wanted to be a teacher when she took Dr. Foster’s child psychology class in college.
“She wrote an essay on crying,” Dr. Foster told Lily. “She said crying distresses us because we don’t do it all the time. When we do cry, it seems abnormal, a rip in the fabric of daily life. Therefore, we interpret a baby’s cry as an emergency. Perhaps, she wrote, if we cried all the time we would not view it as such. Perhaps, if every time we wanted something and could not get it for ourselves, we too would cry. Perhaps what mothers really need to do in order to understand their children is to be strapped to a bed and told to cry whenever they need something.”
Lily laughed; Dr. Foster smiled. “Naive, yes, but there was something to it. An understanding that most students don’t have—of a baby as an intelligent being—and a willingness to say things others would censor as inappropriate. She’s brilliant. I wouldn’t place her with just anyone, but you strike me as a family who can handle a mind being spoken.”
Annelise had long blond hair that she wore in two ropelike braids fastened with office-issue rubber bands. She wore loose-fitting bellbottoms and a wide leather belt with a plain white T-shirt. She had a phenomenal, long-legged, high-chested body. She looked like a cross between Heidi and Supergirl. She had incredibly clear skin and said everything that popped into her head.
When Charles and Lily first met her, Annelise said, “You’re terribly good-looking.” Then she said, “I don’t really want to live in anyone’s house, but I need to see autism in the home. Can you imagine what it’s like for these kids to come to offices—all that carpet and antiseptic smell?”
They signed releases allowing her to use the knowledge she gained from Will in any papers she might write, providing she changed their names. “I’ll think of something excellent,” she said. “Like Thor and Vera.” Lily liked her immediately. It was decided that she would live in the basement apartment Lily had fixed up with the intention to rent out.
Annelise arrived at the brownstone two weeks later, with a small, leather-piped suitcase. She said, “Good grief, your house is big.”
She was wearing jeans with a white peasant blouse. “I know,” she said when she caught Lily looking at her outfit. “It’s plain. I wish I could wear tie-dye. I love tie-dye. But it drives kids like Will mad.”
Lily felt like a cool autumn breeze had blown between her eyes. No one had ever said “kids like Will” before. No one had ever referred to him as part of a group. She could have wept with gratitude; instead, she took Annelise’s suitcase and carried it downstairs.
Annelise looked at the little apartment with its tiled floors and white-curtained windows.
“What an amazing place,” Annelise said. “You own this?”
“With the church,” Lily said.
“Oh, hey, about that,” Annelise said, “I hope it’s okay that I’m not into it. I mean, Will should go to church, if he likes it. Some kids like the music and the repetition, but I just don’t go in for that kind of thing.”
“Neither do I,” Lily said. “You and I can spend Sundays at home. I’ll tell them we’re trying some treatment with Will.”
“If you don’t go to church, how come you married a minister?”
“I didn’t marry a minister. I married the man.”
Charles wanted to like Annelise. She was eminently likeable. She laughed when she said hello, leaned forward when people talked to her. She sang when she walked down the street, picked leaves off trees and wore them in her hair. She cooked good food and listened to good music, so the smells and sounds that came up through the floor from her apartment were appealing. She always found a brightly colored windup toy for Bip to play with while she worked with Will.
She reminded Charles of Harold Evans. They were both extravagant and abundant. They both had a surfeit of energy and ease of being. As soon as either of them entered a room, it felt more relaxed, potent, and full of opportunity—the same way libraries had once felt to Charles, or prayer. Still, he shied away from her, kept himself out of her gaze. She was too of God—too curious, too sincere, too accepting, too forgiving, too encouraging, too involved. She could help Charles feel better. She could give him hope.
And so Charles managed to be out of the house during the hours she worked there. When she stayed late for a glass of wine, he volunteered to put the boys to bed. He made eye contact with her as little as he could. He felt guilty for it; he knew she was insulted by his reserve. Worse than that, he knew she understood it. She saw exactly what he was going through, knew precisely how awkward he felt, how tortured, how confused. He knew it took every ounce of willpower for her to let him avoid her so completely.
“We want to train Will,” Annelise said to Lily and Charles. She pointed. “Look at Bip. You have trained him to say please and thank you, to sit at a table, to ask for things nicely.”
“We’ve taught him,” Charles said.
“Before they have language, I call it training,” Annelise said, “because there is no reasoning. You can have the same results with Will. But you have to let yourself be trained. You must let him teach you what will please him. You cannot train the boy’s reaction to life. You must train your life to elicit the reaction from the boy.”
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��How do we do that?” Charles asked.
“That’s what I’ll find out,” Annelise said. “I’m going to test him. We’re going to see what happens. And then we’ll build a life around him that we all can live with.”
They started with food. Annelise said, “Kids like Will often eat anything, but not in combination.” And she was right. They gave him peas, then potatoes, then carrots, and in that order he ate each one.
“Remember the order,” Annelise said, “and do not change it. Give him the same thing until he seems disinterested, and then change only one.”
Lily wondered if that was the way Bip might have liked to eat, too, if they had given him the chance. She wondered if Bip would have liked to sit quietly, but they had encouraged him to play. They had trained him, she saw, and it was just that Will had refused to be trained.
Annelise spent two hours a day with Will, behind closed doors, painstakingly trying out stimuli to see what he could handle and what he couldn’t. When they emerged, she would say things like, “He likes classical, but not jazz. He likes pickles, but not gherkins. He likes cats, but not dogs.”
One evening, after the boys were asleep, Annelise joined Charles and Lily for dessert and a cup of coffee. She was good company: She spoke only when something was on her mind. “I think Will likes trains,” she said.
Lily finally had to ask, “How do you know?” It pained her to admit she did not know what her son liked, or how to tell.
“I assume that stillness is happiness,” Annelise said. “Things that don’t bother him he doesn’t react to. That’s different from other children—most children will grab what they like. Things Will finds disturbing agitate him, and he protests. That’s very much like other children, don’t you think?”