“It may seem strange to you,” Jenny said. “I know you didn’t like the Bible study group at my house, but I promise you, you’ll like the Faith at Work people. The Junior League’s not really involved. They’re just the sponsors of the conference—they put up the money for it. I went to one of their conferences in Gatlinburg last fall and loved it. Honestly, you can’t imagine what it’ll mean to you. I promise you.”
Mallie shook her head. No way could she do that. “I don’t think so, Jenny,” she said. “That sort of thing is not for me.”
“This is not just a Bible study group,” Jenny said. “These are real people who talk about real life situations. They’re concerned about the choices we make—how we learn to love and forgive each other—the idea of living a ‘creative life.’ It’s about the quality of our relationships with each other as well as our relationship to God.”
When Mallie was a child, she had believed in God as a kind, loving father—someone she couldn’t see but a person she could trust to always be there and take care of her. She had lost that image of God along the way. Through the years, she had tried unsuccessfully to find it again—not God as a person necessarily, but God as a conviction of ultimate good. The closest she had come to any sort of “trust in God” was when she was with Tom Matthews. Those feelings did not last when she was out of his office for a few hours. How wonderful it would be if she could reignite a deeper sense of belief for herself. But she just couldn’t imagine going to a Junior League–sponsored religious conference, no matter what Jenny said about it.
“Think about it, Mallie. There are four of us going together. You know them all. I’ll make the reservation for you. It costs about three hundred dollars for everything—room, meals, workshops, and events. All you have to do is show up and go with us. It’s been life saving for me. Truly.”
Mallie heard the conviction in Jenny’s voice. Jenny projected a new confidence that Mallie had never seen in her friend before. All through the years of her marriage, Jenny had appeared exhausted, broken down by the demands of her children and the expectations of her husband. Webster was a true scholar who had gone to Andover and Harvard. He had fallen in love with Jenny when he was at Harvard Business School and she was at Pine Manor Junior College in Boston. Early on in their marriage, he had teased her about being one of the pretty Pine Manor girls—“A ring by spring or your money back” was their reputation—but later, after the children were born, his teasing became criticism. He said she never bothered to read any of the books he gave her.
The reality was that she had neither the time nor the energy to read a book when she was driving carpools and cooking and doing laundry for five children. Once at a party within earshot of Mallie, Webster told someone that Jenny looked frumpy. It was true that she’d gained weight and she didn’t wear makeup like most of their Memphis friends. She kept her hair so short that, except for haircuts, she never went to the beauty parlor. When they were in their mid-thirties, Jenny had begun to look years older than she was, and yet she was such a warm, caring person—everyone knew that—it seemed heartless that Webster had left her. But Mallie knew better than to judge what really went on in another person’s marriage. Not even Jenny’s marriage. Certainly no one knew all that had transpired in her marriage to Larry.
Mallie looked at Jenny. The taut sadness that used to dominate her face was gone. She had been devastated by her divorce from Webster—the first one of all their friends’ marriages to break up. But in that moment Jenny looked different—lighter, happier. Something had happened to her that had changed her in the last year. Maybe it had been her experience at Faith at Work, as well as the Bible study group. As weird as it seemed to Mallie, maybe going to the conference with Jenny was something she should consider.
“I’ll think about it,” Mallie said.
“This could be a turning point in your life,” Jenny said. “Let’s talk tomorrow.”
When Jenny was gone, Mallie kept weighing the idea. She liked the prospect of “living a creative life.” Maybe it would mean she would find a way to go back to her painting. She thought about Jenny’s happy demeanor, her positive approach to life. Mallie wanted to believe that she could have that same confidence in her future that Jenny seemed to have. She wondered what Tom Matthews would think about the idea. She imagined he would be pleased. Certainly from what Jenny had told her, the conference would be an opportunity to discover some spiritual connection that she had lost over the years. She was sure that Larry would keep the boys for the weekend. Other than the expense, she decided that she had little to lose.
The next day Mallie called Jenny to say that she would go with her to the Faith At Work conference on “Creative Living.”
Chapter Sixteen
The lobby of Callaway Gardens, the fancy golf and convention resort about an hour outside of Atlanta, was burgeoning with people on the Friday afternoon of the Faith at Work conference. Men and women were greeting each other with bear hugs and squeals like students returning to college. Jenny’s and Mallie’s other traveling companions joined the camaraderie. Each one of them knew people from prior conferences. Mallie felt as out of place as a midwestern public high school girl arriving as a freshman at Sweet Briar College. She remembered the girl from Kansas who told her she felt like such an outsider when she arrived at Sweet Briar that she’d cried herself to sleep every night for a month. Mallie had tried to console the girl without fully understanding what it felt like to be an outsider. In Memphis, Mallie’s identity had been clear. She was a Malcolm, the eldest daughter of Sam and Joan Malcolm. That identity had followed her to Sweet Briar in the company of relatives and friends who’d paved the way before her. As she stood by herself in the lobby of Callaway Gardens at a religious conference in rural Georgia, she knew precisely how the girl from Kansas had felt.
She wished she could pick up a phone and call Tom. She wanted to hear his comforting voice. She had, of course, told him that she was going to a Faith at Work conference; actually she had asked his advice about going. He had been supportive but told her that, as an Episcopal clergyman, he had never been to any sort of nondenominational Christian conference. He had known other ministers, Methodists and Presbyterians, who had been to religious conferences. Mostly he had heard good things about the experience. It couldn’t hurt her, he had said.
“Mallie,” Jenny called to her from the front desk where she was signing them both in. “Come over here. I want you to meet someone.”
Mallie could see a small, stylishly dressed, older lady looking over at her and smiling. She could tell from Jenny’s expression that the woman was someone important. The tiny woman wore high-heeled navy blue pumps and a navy blue short jacket with a frilly white blouse. Her silver hair was stiff with spray—a hairdo that she likely had set in place once a week at the hairdresser and protected with a hair net at night—just like her mother’s, Joan Malcolm’s, hair.
“This is Louise Mohr,” Jenny said, as Mallie walked over to them. Jenny lifted her chin and announced the woman’s name with admiration, really more with reverence, as if she were introducing a saint.
“Welcome, my dear,” Louise Mohr said, putting both her hands on Mallie’s shoulders, her eyes burning into Mallie’s eyes like branding irons. “Now tell me, dear girl, are you a Junior Leaguer or a Christian?”
Mallie instantly felt short-circuited. She tried not to show her recoiling, horrified reaction. Louise Mohr’s question implied everything that she had feared about coming to a Faith at Work conference. The woman was obviously one of those closed-minded, Bible study people. Mallie was furious with Jenny for convincing her that the people at the conference would be different. Louise Mohr had the same sanctimonious, smug attitude as the Bible study women Mallie had met at Jenny’s house. Her question about whether Mallie was a Junior Leaguer or a Christian proved it. Oh, dear God, Mallie pleaded to herself. What could she say? She pulled herself up and took a step back. In a noncommittal voice she said, “Well, I recently resigned from on
e, and I’m working on the other.” She felt a momentary satisfaction. Surely her response was clever enough to stand her ground without directly insulting the woman.
“My dear girl,” Louise Mohr was quick to respond. “I do hope it was the Junior League you resigned from.” She gave Mallie a pat on her shoulder and turned away to greet a long line of people waiting for her attention.
Mallie shot a look of despair at Jenny, then walked as fast as she could through the busy lobby and out the front door. She headed for a dormant rose garden that she had seen on the way in. She was not sure whether she would burst into tears or, perhaps, be violently sick to her stomach. In either case, she had to get out of there fast. Her body was heaving with regret for having come—and with fear of what would happen to her if she stayed. At the same time she knew there was no easy way out. She had no car. There was no public transportation. And she had already paid her money. The worst part was that Jenny and her other friends were counting on her staying with them. But Mallie couldn’t bear the thought of ever seeing Louise Mohr again, or of meeting other people like her. In that moment, she wasn’t even sure she was a Christian.
“Mallie, Mallie,” Jenny called as she walked briskly toward her. “What is it? What happened?” Her voice was pleading and kind. She put her arms around her friend.
Mallie pushed Jenny away. “I can’t do this,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not a Christian. I don’t know what I am, Jenny—but I’m not like that woman. I don’t want to be like her.”
“Oh Mallie, Louise didn’t mean anything to hurt you. Truly, she didn’t.”
“I don’t care what she meant. I know what I feel. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I shouldn’t have come.”
“Wait a little while, Mallie. You’ll meet other people. You’ll like them. I promise. Louise is a wonderful woman when you know her. She didn’t mean anything by what she said—and besides, she’s only one person here. There are so many others.” Jenny patted Mallie’s arm as she spoke. “Let’s go to our room and have a glass of wine before dinner. Okay?”
Mallie felt like a four-year-old being coaxed into a noisy birthday party for some child she had never met. It wasn’t that she was shy. She liked meeting new people. In most social situations, she made friends easily—in Memphis, at Sweet Briar, in Watch Hill in the summer. The problem was Faith at Work. The problem was religion. She felt so out of place—maybe even an imposter. But she knew she was trapped. She had committed herself. From childhood, the idea of commitment had been deeply embedded in Mallie’s psyche. “Your word is your integrity,” her father had instructed her. When she married Larry, she gave her word in front of God, her parents, and some three hundred people. If Larry had not released her from that commitment, she would never have separated from him. She knew she couldn’t leave the Faith at Work conference. No matter how miserable she might be, she would have to go through with her commitment and stay at Callaway Gardens.
As Mallie walked back to her room with Jenny, she thought of her mother’s parting words before putting her on the train for camp. At the time Mallie was eleven years old and fearful of going to a place away from home where she had never been and did not know anyone. Joan Malcolm had hugged her goodbye and said, “Chin up and smile. You can do it.”
Mallie lifted her chin and reminded herself that the weekend would be over in two days. Maybe not with a smile on her face, but she could do it.
Chapter Seventeen
Dinner was held in one of the ballrooms of the vast Callaway Gardens Resort complex. Approximately thirty-five large round tables, each seating ten, were placed in a semicircle around a central platform with a podium and a microphone. Bright lights in the ceiling shone down on the colorful fresh flowers in the center of a sea of white tablecloths. Lines formed at each end of a long buffet table, laden with hot chafing dishes of barbequed chicken breasts, mixed vegetables and rice. A large ice sculpture of a fish surrounded by a mass of fruits and flowers rose from the center. It occurred to Mallie that the fish carried some sort of Christian symbolism, but she wasn’t sure what it was. The only reference to fish that she remembered from her childhood was the baked fish that the family were required to serve on Friday nights. After they finished filling their plates, Jenny led her to a nearby table and introduced her to several couples who were already seated there.
A man whom Jenny had obviously chosen ahead of time as Mallie’s dinner companion pulled out a chair and reached for her hand. “Hi Mallie,” he said, “I’m Alan Fremont. Welcome to our table.”
He had a wonderful smile that seemed to span his whole face, dark curly hair, a few wisps covering his collar in the back, and long dark eyelashes. Handsome, Mallie thought—nice.
“That’s my wife, Paige, across the table,” Alan said, pointing to a shorter, blonde, vivacious woman who was in animated conversation with the person next to her. Paige Fremont looked up and waved to Mallie, as if she could hear Alan’s voice, even when she was in the midst of another conversation. “Hi Mallie,” she said. “Don’t let my husband talk your ear off.” She winked at Alan.
“Look who’s talking whose ear off,” he said, smiling.
His wife laughed, the way one does at a spouse’s familiar teasing remark.
Mallie put her plate down on the table and settled into the chair. The routine was familiar. Since young adulthood, and particularly since her marriage, she had been seated at formal dinner tables after a cocktail hour, often meeting her dinner partner as they sat down. The accepted social protocol for married couples in her world was to separate husband and wife and introduce each one to someone new, preferably of the opposite sex. The idea was to stimulate provocative conversation throughout dinner. She had been carefully taught by her mother that it was her responsibility to make the effort to lead the conversation, bring the other person out. Mallie had watched Joan Malcolm hold her dinner partners in rapt attention. “What you want is for someone to fall a little bit in love with you,” her mother said.
Mallie wondered if Alan Fremont would fall a little bit in love with her—or if she would have to talk to him about religion, and he would discover right away that she was not a true Christian and that would be the end of the conversation.
“So, you’re from Memphis?” he said. “An old friend of Jenny’s?”
“Yes,” Mallie said, “we’ve been friends for years.”
“I first met Jenny when I was in college,” Alan said. He grinned, a sign of remembering happy times. “She was dating my roommate at the University of Virginia. Did you know her then?”
“I didn’t know her until after she married Webster—I mean Stuart—and moved to Memphis. We took family skiing trips together when our children were little. Actually, his family was close to mine when I was growing up. His mother was a sort of grandmother to me after my grandmother died.”
Alan smiled. “How nice for you to have had a surrogate grandmother. It’s such a special relationship for a child. My grandmother died when I was ten. I miss her to this day.”
Mallie pictured Aunt Lolly, Webster’s mother—not her real aunt, much less her grandmother. Old family friends in the South were often referred to as Aunts and Uncles. Aunt Lolly took her to buy the white shoe skates that she wanted so desperately when she was twelve. Most of the other girls in her class had them, but Joan Malcolm said that shoe skates were too expensive and Mallie’s feet were growing too fast to warrant buying them. Aunt Lolly let her pick out exactly the skates she wanted and gave them to her for an early Christmas present.
She also took Mallie and her sister Anne to see the movie The Song of Bernadette. For a time after she saw the movie, Mallie dreamed of being chosen by the Virgin Mary—like Bernadette in Lourdes. She talked Anne into helping her dig a hole in the back yard that they filled daily with water, hoping that the Blessed Mother would come to visit. When six months went by and there was no sign of the Holy Mother, Mallie gave up the idea. She wondered what Alan would think of her folly.
“Did you ever see the movie, The Song of Bernadette?” she asked, totally out of context in the conversation about their grandmothers.
Alan’s eyes lit up. “I remember it well,” he said. “I fell in love with Jennifer Jones in that movie.” He leaned closer to Mallie. “I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, and after I saw that movie, I was convinced that the Virgin Mary would come to tell me I was meant to be a priest. Thank God, she didn’t come, but it took years before I got over it.”
“I was a Catholic child, too,” Malle said. In her head, she heard the faint, tinkling sound of communion bells and her body tightened, as if she were being watched. “I know exactly what you mean. The day before our first communion, Sister Margaret—our home room teacher—told us if we were meant to be a priest or a nun, God would tell us while we were kneeling at the altar.”
She realized that she was excitedly telling Alan a story that she had never repeated to anyone. It had been one of her childhood secrets with God. “I remember closing my eyes under that stiff white veil in my white organdy dress—feeling slightly faint from no breakfast—and praying so hard: ‘Please, God, please don’t tell me I’m supposed to be a nun. I want to be married and have children. I don’t want to be like Sister Margaret.’”
Alan laughed. “You being a nun in those days would have been a terrible waste,” he said. “Thank God neither of us was called to the church.”
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