by Cara Wall
“Where are you, Charles?” she asked, as he walked through the kitchen door.
“I’m here,” Charles said, stopping short.
“No, I mean, where are you with God?”
Charles stared at her with the same astonishment he had that night on Nantucket when she had told him she was losing her mind. He pulled out a chair and sat down across from her. His face was heavy; his hair was dull and dark. His eyes, which had once been so encouraging, were desperate.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I know,” Lily told him. She put down her wineglass and folded her hands in front of her, a schoolteacher in front of a class. “You’re going a little bit crazy,” she said. “You’ve decided God is dead to you, and I have to tell you—I think that’s ridiculous. It is ridiculous to decide someone’s dead when they are not. To act like they’re dead when they are not. Why would you want to live that way? Why would you want to deny yourself their life? The joy of their existence?”
“Are you talking about Will?” Charles asked.
“No,” Lily said forcefully. “I’m talking about God. I’m talking about the way you’re punishing yourself.” She stood up and walked to the garden door, turned around to look at him. “You spoke badly of God. You abandoned God and now you’re sequestering yourself out of some noble sense of shame.” She came back to the table and sat down, leaning forward. “God isn’t your father, Charles,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to God if you always get it right.”
“How would you know?” Charles asked. His voice was almost mean. Lily sat back.
“I know that Will’s not my parents,” she said. “I thought he was, for a little while. I thought he had abandoned me. I treated him like he had. I missed him; I grieved for him. I missed him and grieved for him just as badly as I did for them. I missed him and grieved for him because I missed them.
“And now you’re grieving because Will made you question God. You’re avoiding him because every time he won’t look at you, you feel the loss of God. You won’t work with him because every bit of progress makes you feel like abandoning God was the wrong thing to do.”
She could tell by the twist of his face that she was right. She could tell by the tears in his eyes, so she stopped talking and sat still in the moment of knowing him completely. It was still, and silent, and beautiful. She wanted to give him the same feeling.
“I accept your faith, Charles. I understand it now, because I have faith in Will. Because I will choose to believe, for my entire life, that we can help him, and that he loves us, in his own way. If I do not, I will go crazy. I understand, now, what your faith in God gives you—what it gives everyone who believes. It’s worthwhile, Charles.”
Charles did not answer. This was a miracle. Even without God, he could see that. He put his face in his hands.
“You have me, and your sons, and there is progress—real progress—and you are not happy. You are missing something. I want to give you something as substantial as this house you gave me. And the only thing I can think of is God.”
Charles took his face out from behind his hands. He knew it was the hardest thing she’d ever said to him, and she deserved for him to look her in the eye.
“I wish I could believe,” Lily said quietly. She laid her hand on the table and he took it. “I wish I could believe with you. I wish I could share it with you. I wish you didn’t have this whole part of your life in which you feel alone.”
Her face was earnest and open. He wanted to turn toward it, to let it lead him back to her, to his sons, even back—however improbably—to God. “You still don’t believe?” he asked. It was the question he had not asked since they had been dating, since they had first been married. The one that had been like a tiny pebble in his shoe. She shook her head. There would be no easy path to grace.
“Still, I needed a miracle,” Lily said. “And Annelise came. It’s not exactly a coincidence. But I think we die, Charles. I think we die and are buried and become fertilizer for grass and home for worms. I think we go to sleep forever.” She paused. “And it doesn’t scare me. It happens to every one of us, and that’s comforting to me. Isn’t that what it’s all about?” she asked, sounding tired. “Don’t we just have to find the thing that lets us not be scared to die? The thing that lets us not be scared, so we can live?”
No, he thought, that wasn’t all faith was. But he wasn’t sure he knew anything about the rest of it anymore. He squeezed Lily’s hand to let her know he was still listening, that he wanted to hear the rest of what she had to say.
“I’ll pray with you,” she said. In his astonishment, he almost pulled his hand away.
“Well, I’ll let you pray with me,” she continued. “If you want to. I’ve barricaded myself against it forever, as if it would attack me. But it won’t; it’s just you.”
So they sat across from each other at the kitchen table, holding hands, and he said, with trepidation in his chest like sandpaper, “Lord, help us. Make us useful even when we do not know what to do. Make us perceptive when we are dull, make us compassionate even as we try to turn away. Make us intelligent. Our ideas are so small. Yours are limitless. Please help us learn the things we need to know.”
TWENTY-TWO
In the second week of October, Nan went into labor and, sooner than they had expected, they were parents. It was a girl. She lay in a tightly wrapped pink blanket in Nan’s arms, wearing a tiny pink hat.
“Let’s name her Louise,” Nan said.
“And call her Lola,” said James.
“That sounds like a woman of the night,” Nan objected. But the name stuck.
Lola came to the yellow nursery in her Moses basket and slept and ate and cried her tiny newborn cries. Nan sat in her window seat, Lola in the basket on the floor beside her, musing about babies. She had thought, after all they’d been through and witnessed, that Lola would be a bit less magical—less like an elf or a fairy and more like a human being. She thought they would see, simply, a small person—someone to hold and nurture and raise.
But this was not so. After so many years of bracing herself for bad news, of tempering expectations, Nan found that her fondest dreams had come true. The part of her that had been cold was now warm. She could not imagine a more wonderful sensation than holding her daughter, bouncing her gently around the room. Lola had, in the space of one tiny day, completely restored Nan’s hope. Nan, who had stopped wishing, stopped dreaming, now imagined Lola in a school pinafore, in ballet class, running in the park, swinging on swings. She imagined her curled up in the corner with a book. She imagined her in her first high heels, on her wedding day. She imagined her happy, happy, happy.
And as she imagined Lola happy, she herself became happy. In the little child were boundless opportunities, and so there were for her, too. For every time Lola was happy, she would be happy. Every time Lola was unhappy, she would be unhappy. Her life was doubled, instantly, and she felt the new length of it, the breadth of it, like opening a door one day and discovering her kitchen had turned into the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. She wanted to wander the halls endlessly. She wanted to know everything, everything there was to know about her child. She felt as perfect as Lola’s silver spoon.
James sat cross-legged by the basket, Lola’s finger in his hand.
Before she was born, James had been working on yet another sermon about action—about medicine, medicine as God working through man. He was thinking about Nan as he wrote it, and about Will. It was not difficult. His faith was rooted in the idea that God worked through man. God did not act upon people; God inspired them, existing only as an animating force. Therefore, medicine was a miracle. But what, then, was the failure of medicine? He thought of Charles, whose soul was crying out for progress, who wanted to lock doctors in their offices and make them study harder, faster, who wanted people to give money, to call congressmen. Charles, who had given up on ideas and wanted, now, for action to lead to success. When it didn’t, whom would Charles blame?
/> Now, James would have to rewrite it. Children, he understood, didn’t engender action. They engendered awe. They engendered reverence. He felt, looking at his daughter, that he could let the whole of world history pass him by, if he could just sit and look at her like this forever.
“You can’t be serious,” Nan said. “She makes me want to go out there and fix everything. I understand now,” she told him. “I understand why you want the world to change. How can you look at her and not want to erase every terrible thing that’s ever been?”
“She erases them for me,” he said.
Nan was willing to forgive this insanity because James hadn’t been carrying a baby for nine months, hadn’t felt it roll and twist in his stomach, hadn’t felt it grow, day after day. He was just now experiencing the magic of it. She would give him a couple of weeks. But as soon as she was back on her feet, they were going to get cracking.
The first thing Nan and James did was take Lola to meet Will and Bip. Together.
“Is a baby going to freak Will out?” Lily asked Annelise.
“I have no idea,” Annelise said. “Why do you keep thinking I know things?”
“Because you’re brilliant,” Lily said. She accepted this now, as complete fact. Annelise had transformed Will from a gargoyle into a child.
Nan dressed Lola in a white dress and brushed down her fuzzy newborn hair.
“This way Lily won’t think I’m afraid of Will spilling on her,” she told James.
Charles met them at the door. “A girl,” he said stoically. “I always wanted one of those.”
Lily, Bip, Annelise, and Will were in the kitchen. Lily and Bip were stirring a bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough. The batch in the oven perfumed the air. Annelise had Will on her lap and was showing him cards. They did not stop when James and Nan came in the room.
“We’re not supposed to react suddenly,” Charles explained, offering them a seat at the table. “Will knows you’re here, but if we skid out of our routines, he’ll think you’re dangerous.”
“Not dangerous, Charles,” Annelise corrected him, “just different. Kids like Will hate different.”
Bip finished stirring and noticed Lola. “Baby!” he cried.
“Yes,” Nan said. “Do you want to see her?”
Bip came to her side and peered at Lola with wide eyes. He put a hand out to touch her face. “She’s like Will,” he said.
Lily looked at him. “What do you mean, Bippo?”
“She can’t talk,” he said, “and she gets carried.”
All five adults suddenly realized he was the only child in the room not being held. Lily came and knelt beside him. “Do you want to sit on my lap?” she asked, her face stricken. “No, I’m a big boy,” he said and toddled out of the room.
Lily stayed on the floor and looked at Lola.
“She’s beautiful,” she said to Nan. She had not known how she would react to a perfect, shining new baby, all wrapped up, warm. But she found herself instantly drawn to her.
“Will hasn’t moved,” Annelise said. “I think that means he likes her.”
Lily looked up at Nan. Nan met her eyes and finally, awfully, understood her. She understood the drawn face and the grey clothes, the terse words and the sharp turnings away. Nan did not need to fear her, pity her, or look away in shame. She understood. She, Nan, would know everything about her child. She knew every minute of her life already, short and contained as it had been. But Lily had a son whose life could never be known, nor even imagined. In Lily’s house, it must feel as if every door had been flung closed.
Lily watched Nan’s face rearrange itself from round bliss into the sturdier architecture of empathy.
“It is not subtraction for one of us to be completely happy,” Lily said. “It’s almost—not quite, but almost—more.”
After James and Nan had gone home, after the coffee cups and napkins and Bip’s tricycle and Will’s dominoes had been put away, Charles and Lily found themselves alone in their bedroom. It was an awkward place to be. For so long they had lived separate lives—under the same roof, their minds distracted by different things. For months, when they looked at each other they did not see anything beyond the basic arrangement of features, the color of shirts, the length of hair. Now they looked at each other and saw two landscapes of emotion.
They looked away from each other. Charles went into the bathroom; Lily opened her dresser drawer. They dressed for bed silently. When Charles came out of the bathroom, he sat on her side of the bed and asked, “Have you forgiven Nan?”
Lily sat down beside him. “Yes,” she said. “I can’t stand myself for it, but I have.” She stood up, went into the bathroom, washed her face.
When she came back, Charles said, “She knows she was wrong.”
“I know,” Lily answered, pulling back the covers on her side of the bed. “She looked so sheepish and well-meaning. I can’t help but forgive her. Even though I still think I should hold a grudge. I’m supposed to stand up for my children.”
Charles pulled down the covers on his side of the bed and got under them. Lily slid in next to him. “Are you going to have an affair with Annelise?” she asked.
Charles stared at her. “Are you kidding? Annelise is a Swiss Amazon who could smite me with one look of her eyes.”
“But she’s beautiful.”
“Not as beautiful as you.”
“I’m mean.”
“Sometimes.”
“She’s kind.”
“I don’t care. I love you. I’ve loved you since that day in the library.”
Lily knew it was true. She knew that every doubt she had allowed herself, every moment of desperation, had been her own. Charles worried and puzzled, but he had never wanted to leave her, never needed to be untangled, never thought it would be easier on his own. She rested her head on his shoulder.
As soon as Lola started sleeping through the night, Nan joined James and Marcus on the school project. It wasn’t easy. The Department of Education was, of course, eager to approve a new day care. The feminist cause was mainstream now, and powerful. They were mobilizing voters. A fully enrolled day care would cost the department little, and yet would provide them with newspaper coverage of happy, smiling mothers heading back to work. But a school for those with mental disorders would mean pictures of unsightly children. It would mean special equipment, special teachers, special training. They would have to open it to children in the five boroughs; they would have to pay to bus them in.
Nan countered these arguments with relentless patience and her sweetest southern accent. She made it clear that she was both a minister’s daughter and a minister’s wife, and implied that ignoring her might be seen by some as ignoring God. This got her all the way to the city’s chancellor of education.
“We have schools for these children already,” he told her. “We have spots for everyone who wants them.”
“Do you mean the accredited homes?” Nan asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Have you seen those homes?”
“Not personally.”
“Well, I think you should,” she told him. “I’ll have my husband arrange a tour.”
“Mrs. MacNally,” the chancellor said, “I really haven’t got the time.”
“I do,” Nan answered. “I’m housebound with a new baby. I have all the time in the world to keep making calls.”
The chancellor sighed. “I’ll send my vice chancellor,” he told her.
So James arranged a visit, and the vice chancellor met James in the lobby of Third Presbyterian. He wore a brown suit, tan trench coat, and aviator glasses that obscured half his face. He brought with him two Special Ed teachers in earnest cardigans with simple hair.
They took the subway up on a cold and sleeting afternoon. This time, the director was not so glad to see him.
“Reverend MacNally,” she said, her headband crisp and forbidding. She guided them through the marble hallway without stopping at the nursery, led the
m once again up the marble stairs.
“You asked about the classrooms,” she said to the vice chancellor.
“Yes, please,” he said pleasantly.
“We conduct our instruction in here,” she said, opening the door to the bedroom James had seen before. It was much the same, clean and impersonal. The beds were still lined up along the walls, but now there were two long tables in the middle of the room, and a nurse sat at one of them with three boys. She had laid paper out in front of them and put pencils in their hands. “Write A,” she said, as the door opened, and then she got up, stood behind each boy, and wrote the letter on their pieces of paper with her hand over their own.
“We’re investigating the Lovaas method,” the director said, searching the vice chancellor’s face to see if he knew what that was.
“Very interesting,” he said, nodding. “But do they learn?” James saw that, behind his sunglasses, the vice chancellor was noticing every harsh detail about the entire place.
On the way out, the vice chancellor stopped James on the stairs. “You have the space?” he asked James.
“Absolutely.”
“And you think there is public support?”
James forced himself to breathe twice before he spoke. “I am certain there are parents who do not want their children to live in places like this,” he said.
The vice chancellor nodded. “I can’t promise anything,” he said. “I would bet all my money that getting the state to pay for schools instead of homes like this will take a long legal battle. But if you want to open your own school, with private funding, I will do my best to get it approved. You’ll have to get certified Special Ed teachers. And you’ll be monitored, I can tell you that. But if you see results, good results, you’ll have a leg to stand on. Though you should be realistic. This kind of thing can take years.”
James heard nothing but the absence of No.
Marcus was waiting for him at the church. “We’ve got to tell people,” James told him as he folded up his umbrella.