The more they talked, the more Mallie felt that she had known Alan for years. He was easy to be with. They were sharing stories about many aspects of their lives and found they had much in common.
As the Brown Betty dessert was being passed, the room darkened and a spotlight shone on the center of the platform. Mallie could see that a small group of people seated behind a podium with a round Faith At Work plaque across the front of the lectern. The colorful calligraphic logo reminded her of the cover of the old, elaborately illustrated Bullfinch’s Mythology that she had loved as a child.
“Welcome, everyone!” A tall man in an open shirt and a dark jacket lifted his arms as he spoke. “I’m Bruce Larson,” he said, leaning into the microphone. “I particularly want to welcome each one of you newcomers to Faith at Work. I want you to know how happy we are to have you among us tonight. We hope the experience of this conference will bring you the joy and peace many of us have come to expect from being together.”
Mallie settled back into her chair, a little more relaxed from her dinner conversation with Alan. She liked Bruce Larson right away. She felt no phoniness about him. She decided she would try to be open to hearing whatever the speakers had to say.
“Before I introduce all the good folks up here,” Bruce Larson said, turning to acknowledge the group seated behind him on the platform, “let’s begin by singing together our opening song, ‘Amazing Grace.’”
Alan reached over to the center of the table and picked up the Faith at Work songbook that Mallie had not even noticed was there. He handed it to her, already opened to the correct page. “I know this one by heart,” he said.
Mallie knew it too, at least the words of the first verse. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me …
When the song ended, Bruce Larson began introducing the workshop leaders, including a handsome man named Keith Miller. Mallie thought he looked like Burt Lancaster in the movie From Here to Eternity. His abundant crop of brown wavy hair was appealing to her. Keith Miller stood and gave a brief nod and a wave to the crowd, followed by a burst of applause from the audience.
Bruce Larson then introduced a short, balding man named Dave Stoner. Such a contrast. Dave Stoner looked like an aging cheerleader with his crew cut hair, his shortened pants and white socks. None of the people on the platform looked the way Mallie had expected Christian workshop leaders to look. Except for Louise Mohr, they were all younger men and appeared to be full of athletic energy.
The last person Bruce Larson introduced was Louise Mohr. Mallie felt her heart begin to race and a rigidity take hold of her body when he said the woman’s name. It was the same dread that she had felt as a child about Sister Margaret, the tight-lipped, Catholic nun who ruled her second-grade class by fear of the paddle.
“Hello friends,” Louise Mohr said in a velvety voice, very different from the clipped tone that she had used with Mallie in the lobby. She picked up the microphone from the lectern and walked with it to the edge of the stage.
“I’ve just returned from a week’s vacation in the Caribbean,” she said, holding up a large fluted conch shell in her other hand. “As I collected beautiful shells all along the beach, I began to think of each one as a gift—like Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea. Each one was more beautiful than the last. I thought to myself, ‘If God created a home as lovely as this for tiny little sea creatures, imagine the home he has created for us—his beloved children—in heaven.’”
Mallie shuddered. She sensed the onset of the God-talk that she had been afraid all along was coming.
“You’d never have guessed it, but Louise was once a nightclub singer,” Alan whispered in Mallie’s ear. “Wait till you hear her sing.”
Mallie crossed her arms, trying to protect herself from the dread she felt was overtaking her. She heard her mother’s voice, “Chin up. You can do it.” She would force herself to just sit there and smile. She could tune Louise Mohr out.
“God has given all of us gifts to share with each other on this earth,” Louise said. “I want to share mine with you tonight.” Without a piano or guitar or any instrumental background, she lifted her head and began singing the popular song “People.”
Mallie was prepared to cringe, or at the very least, to unfavorably compare her to Barbra Streisand. To her surprise Louise Mohr soared through the notes as if she had taught Barbra to sing. The words, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” took on a different meaning for Mallie. She had always thought the song was corny, overly sentimental, and that needy people were weak people. As much as she loved her sisters and her friends, she had never thought of herself as someone who “needed” anyone—although, as a child, she had certainly needed her wonderful, loving nurse Bernice. But since her separation from Larry, her perspective on so many things had changed. Over the past few months she had discovered that she definitely needed people. Certainly, she needed Tom Matthews. Whatever fear or pain she was experiencing in the chaos of her life was always dispelled in Tom’s presence. She felt lucky when she was with him, just as the words of the song suggested. She knew she needed her friend Jenny—and she had no doubt that Jenny had set her up for a positive dinner experience with Alan Fremont. There was something about Alan that night that made her feel lucky to be with him, even though she had just met him. Her pleasure at being with Alan was not based in an attraction to him. She felt safe with him. In spite of all her fears about going to a religious conference, where she had nothing in common with anyone, she had discovered a real person who had much of her same background and faced the same life questions.
Chapter Eighteen
When Louise Mohr finished singing, she took a deep bow. The applause nearly brought the walls down. Even Mallie had to admit that the song had touched her.
“Thank you,” Louise said, rising and placing her hands over her heart. “Thank you all so much. Now it’s time for us to choose a partner and begin our evening’s work together.”
Mallie panicked. Choose a partner? The evening’s work? Before she could sort out the possibilities, Alan turned to her and said, “Would you be my partner for tonight? I think we have a lot to talk about. That okay with you?”
“I’d like that,” Mallie said, relieved.
As the lights went on, many people around the room were standing up and stretching, some hugging their dinner partners. Alan smiled and gave Mallie a quick, easy hug. “This should be fun,” he said. “Let’s find a quiet spot.”
He led her to an uncrowded corner of the room where he pulled up two chairs across from each other with a small table in between. Slowly the overhead lights dimmed and the noise level in room lowered to hushed, conversational tones.
Alan pulled out a notebook and glanced at the first page. “The one specific question we’re supposed to discuss tonight is, ‘What would you most like to leave behind when you leave this conference?’”
“I have no idea,” Mallie said, taken by surprise. “I hadn’t thought about leaving anything behind.”
“Would you like to know what I want to leave behind?” Alan asked. He put his notebook on the table.
“Yes,” she said. Listening to him would give her time to think about the possibilities for herself.
“I want to leave my job behind.”
“What do you do?” Mallie asked. She instantly thought of Larry. Leaving his job would certainly have been something Larry would have said. “Why do you want to leave your job?”
“I’ve been a mortgage banker ever since I got out of the University of Virginia,” he said. “I’m a vice president of the Barnett Bank in Jacksonville. I’m bored to death with it.”
“What would you want to do instead?” Mallie asked.
“I’ve been offered a job as assistant publisher of the Florida Times Union,” he said. “It’s what I’ve always wanted. I’ve been a writer at heart—first as a child, then all through college. Writing has been the way I feel free and at the same time connect
ed to myself, to what’s really important to me. I love the idea of being in publishing—but it’s a major salary cut, and it’s a role I’m not familiar with.”
Mallie thought of her own life. She was a wife and a mother, a daughter, a sister and a friend. She was a board member of MIFA and the Art Academy. It wasn’t that she was bored—she wasn’t—but it was always as if something were missing in her life. She thought back to her joyful moments as a child. That joy mostly occurred when she was alone drawing pictures. She could create a world that was completely hers, where no one told her what to do or how it should be done. Ideas popped into her head like stars in the night sky. She could draw a pink horse if she wanted, or purple apples. She loved the smell of crayons and the feeling in her hand when she was drawing—a clear line between her mind and her body and the paper. All through school she felt most alive in her art classes. She understood what Alan said about the freedom he felt from his writing. Drawing and painting gave her that sense of freedom. He had also said that his writing connected him to himself. She had never thought about her art as a connection to herself. Her connection to herself had been tied to her marriage and her family. Now it looked as if all that were about to change. There would be no Larry. Her boys were growing up. As if she were about to walk into a dark room, she could not see where to take the next step.
“I think we’re in the same situation—sort of,” she said. “Although I don’t really know what I want—how I’d go about changing my life.” She stopped and sighed. “I think what I’d most like to leave behind is my fear of the unknown.”
“Then we’re definitely on the same wavelength, Mallie. We’ll keep that goal in mind for both of us throughout the weekend.”
Alan put his coffee cup down on the little table beside them. “Let’s talk about your Catholic childhood, So much of our faith as an adult is founded in our childhood experiences. Were both of your parents Catholic?”
“No, no,” Mallie said. “My mother’s an agnostic, influenced by her intellectual father who never set foot in a church. Her mother, my Montell grandmother, never went to church either. My grandmother was sort of an heiress who apparently lost most of her money in the Crash of 1929. According to my mother’s stories, my grandmother tried to bury the resentment of losing her money by going to parties and running committees. Nothing churchy at all. It was my father’s family who were the devout Catholics. My Malcolm grandparents were the ones who took me to church.”
Mallie recalled the consistent, happy experience of being with her grandparents on Sunday mornings. She loved the service, even though she never understood a word of the Latin Mass. She could still hear the priest’s melodic voice: Dominus vobiscum. And the response: Et cum spiritu tuo. She loved the statue of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. Sometimes Mallie felt as if she were the baby in Mary’s arms. At the end of the Mass, she could hardly wait to put her nickel in the metal slot and light one of the little red glass candles. She always knelt and made a wish. Nannie Malcolm told her she was really sending a prayer to God but she could call it a wish if she liked. There was something magical about the service that made Mallie feel loved and protected.
“My grandparents were the ones who took me to church, too,” Alan said. “And did you go to Catholic school? I seem to remember you did—at least, you told me about your First Communion.”
“Only in the second grade,” Mallie said, “the year my father went away to the war. We lived with my grandparents and I walked to Immaculate Conception Catholic School. It was not a happy experience.”
Mallie told Alan that her homeroom teacher had terrified her. Sister Margaret looked like a gigantic black duck with her big chest and her beaky face peering out from under her black hood. She had small eyes, a wide nose, a protruding upper lip and a hairy chin. It gave Mallie a chill to remember seeing her waddling up and down the aisles in her flat black lace-up men’s shoes. The worst part was Sister Margaret’s lectures about sin. She said sin was something evil that got into your body like a worm and had to be beaten out. Every day at two o’clock she chose a boy or girl who had committed the worst sin that day. In front of the whole class, Sister Margaret paddled the child until he or she cried. Mallie had been so filled with the fear of committing a sin that she hardly spoke the entire year.
“That would explain a lot about doubting the love of God, don’t you think?” Alan said, shaking his head. “What a difference in the nuns today. They don’t even wear habits and some of them wear makeup. They’ve become human.”
Mallie found that hard to believe. “Do you know any?” she asked.
“I do,” Alan said. “I went to a Cenacle retreat last year run by nuns. They were a far cry from the stern ‘black ducks’ that you and I knew as children. Talking to one of the Cenacle nuns was when I first got the idea of quitting my job. She said God would want me to do what I was created to do.”
The conversation continued for about an hour. Mallie was startled—and disappointed—when the bell rang for the small group sessions to end. The experience of being with Alan had given her a new perspective on the idea of “Creative Living.”
Chapter Nineteen
The following morning, sitting in the back of the lecture hall in a long row of metal chairs, Mallie began to fantasize about the speaker, Keith Miller. Right away she recognized something about him that reminded her of Tom Matthews. Maybe it was as simple as being an attractive, masculine man in a clerical collar. It was certainly not his hair—Tom’s hair was polar-bear white and neatly combed. Besides Keith Miller’s almost teenage mop of unruly brown hair, which she had noticed the night before, he had bushy sideburns. It was certainly not his voice—Tom spoke in a highly educated, unaccented, carefully modulated tone. Keith Miller was assuredly a Texan—an effusive, expansive, southern-talking Texan. It wasn’t their religious disciplines. Church of Christ or Baptist, or whatever denomination Keith Miller was, his loose, self-referencing style could not have been more different from the Episcopal formality of Tom Matthews.
Mallie recalled the times she had listened to Tom’s sermons at St. Michael’s on Sunday mornings. Rarely did he mention anything personal. Sermons are for preaching the Gospel, he told her. Also she knew how much he revered the poetry and the tradition in the King James Bible. And there was Keith Miller speaking about his personal life, rejecting the King James Bible and quoting passages from his own book: “We do not realize how unreal our language and ‘in’ expressions are . . . and to the uninitiated they seem pious or phony. Very few couples I know fight or make love in King James English. The men and women with whom I counsel have problems, anxieties, and doubts, which don’t have a religious sound. And in my own life—when I scream silently at night in my aloneness and frustration—I do not do it in the language of the liturgy, or systematic theology.”
Those words rang so true to Mallie. She believed him. She had never met Keith Miller, but as she watched him on the stage and listened to him talk about himself and his beliefs and his relationships, she felt oddly attracted to him. There was something powerful in her mind about a handsome, compelling man who spoke about God and the Bible in real life language. She thought of Tom Matthews. For months she had been living in the aura of her attraction to Tom. Now she found herself drawn to Keith Miller. How was it possible that she—still a married woman—could sit there in a lecture about what it means to be a Christian in the world today, and think about the sexual appeal of two married ministers?
When the lecture was over she ran back to her room for her rain jacket and was late for lunch. In the large crowd of people, all arriving at the same time, she couldn’t spot any of her Memphis friends. Where was Jenny? They had agreed to meet at noon in the dining room, but Jenny was not there. Panic set in. She couldn’t find anyone she knew. Where were Alan and Paige Fremont? She felt abandoned by everyone. It occurred to her to return to her room and order room service for lunch. No, she couldn’t do that. She had not come all the way to the conference to be al
one. She tried to push away the fear. The comfort of her time with Alan Fremont the night before seemed lost in the sea of strangers.
Mallie made herself walk over to the buffet table and begin filling a plate: tuna salad, a cup of vegetable soup, two small pieces of French bread. She looked around for an empty place at a table. Like a deer seeking safety through a hole in the woods, she dove through a group of people into the first empty chair she saw between a pleasant-looking man and a woman.
“Hi there,” the man said to her without rising from his seat. He introduced himself, as did the woman on the other side. “Where’re you from?” He peered down at her nametag. “Mallie? That’s your name? That’s really an unusual name.”
She hadn’t been asked about her name since Terry questioned her the first time she went to Tom’s office. “My real name is Valeria,” she said. “Mallie comes from Malcolm, my maiden name. My married name is Mallie Vose.”
She took a bite of her tuna salad hoping he wouldn’t ask where her husband was. She tried to envision Larry at a Faith at Work conference. A silly exercise. She knew he would never have agreed to come. He actually had very little interest in religion and never went to church with her. He would no doubt be shocked if he knew she was there. She had not told him where she was going for the weekend, even though he was keeping the boys while she was away. She had given him her sister Anne’s number in case of emergency.
“I’m from Memphis, Tennessee,” she said, answering his first question. “Where are you from?”
“Knoxville,” he said. “The other end of the state.”
She didn’t know anyone in Knoxville to play the do-you-know game. “Oh,” she said. “It’s beautiful and mountainous there, I’m told.”
She was feeling disoriented; some of the old apprehension that she felt on arrival was creeping back. Where were all her friends? She kept looking around the room. Finally she spotted Jenny at a table on the far side, but it was too late to pick up her plate and walk over there. She knew it would be rude to the people at the table where she was seated. Still, right away, she felt more comfortable just knowing that Jenny was in the room.
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