In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  Mr. Dreaver, one of those fair-lashed men whose eyelids always look pink, spoke all this with a virtually hypnotic smoothness, as if memorized, or at least urged upon troubled pastors several times before. For the sake of the children and Stella, Clarence wanted to believe him. “What about personal immortality?” he asked.

  The moderator shrugged, and began to speak confidentially, in a kind of shorthand. Clarence felt the pressure of the next appointment already bearing upon them. “Very little of it in classic Judaism. The New Testament references, ambiguous and various. The Roman Catholic emphasis definitely post-patristic. Purgatory, Limbo, the anatomy of Hell and Paradise—entirely invented post–first millennium. Consider this approach: Modern physics proves that nothing is newly created or destroyed, not the merest atom or particle of energy; in exactly what form our own energy persists nobody knows or pretends to know. Prying into the afterlife, with Spiritualism and the like, breeds goblins and absurdities. State the hope firmly, of endless continuance, and anxiety is eased. Life can go on. This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say—‘One world at a time’?”

  His pink lids opened wider, the intelligent blue eyes under their white lashes asking how much more Clarence demanded of him. Dreaver’s eyes’ blue was not milky but a steelier echo of the northern seas that, from Orkney to Jutland, had narrowed their seafaring ancestors’ gazes with briny winds and a low-angled sun. He spoke with a gliding, quick-tongued New York accent that was consistently light, fluid, easy, even nonchalant, dropping some “g”s, passing over some “r”s. Clarence asked, “The Resurrection?” He felt as a circus trainer must, tossing a ball to a seal who effortlessly, shimmeringly balances it on his nose.

  The little shrug again, impatient and alert, with a gaze above Clarence’s shoulder as if someone might walk into the room from the outer office. “The Gospels give garbled accounts. The risen Christ was seen here, there, sometimes by crowds. He ate of the honeycomb, showed His wound to doubting Thomas, and wandered off out of history again. Mark’s and Luke’s accounts of the ascension seem pretty tacked-on; the description at the beginning of Acts’ account feels rather theatrical, with the cloud that takes Him out of sight and the two men in white who pop up. Paul testifies to an appearance, to ‘one born out of time,’ but gives no details, and in the next letter to the Corinthians has developed the formula ‘Whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth.’ Talk about building a house on sand! What can’t be disputed, though, is that the Jesus movement resurrected itself in the months and years after the Crucifixion. Think of the devastation, the humiliation the disciples must have felt—and we all still celebrate the living Christ among us. Do we not? If there was no Resurrection, something happened just as inspiring and transformative. Here’s a crux, actually, where history helps the believer, and puts the burden of explanation on the skeptics.” Seeing Clarence about to speak, he lifted a shapely small hand whose palm had a lily’s waxen pallor. “And if the Resurrection is only a manner of speaking, a metaphor for the Christian community’s revival and growth, why should we scorn words?—words which bring us the only reality the mind grasps.” He tapped his glossy, lightly furrowed brow. “Bishop Berkeley, et cetera. Try some William James, if you care. Not just The Will to Believe and Varieties but the recent books, like The Meaning of Truth. Pragmatism—it turns the tables. It’s the American contribution to the great debate; you might say it’s the healthy Calvinist answer to all those pedantic Lutherans who burnt the ship beneath them and then couldn’t walk on water. And actually there are some interesting new developments in German—a man called Husserl, picking up on some old hints of Hegel in Phänomenologie des Geistes, and using some of Kant’s terminology. I mean, ‘the real’ isn’t quite as self-defining as we intuitively think. Human consciousness is part of it—shapes it. The Resurrection can be thought of as something we have made happen, if you follow me, instead of something that happened once and for all, and debatably at that. Welcome to the twentieth century, Mr. Wilmot; we all have some catching up to do. Amazing things are coming out of European physics. Time is the fourth dimension, it turns out, and slows down when the observer speeds up. The other three dimensions don’t form a rigid grid; space is more like a net that sags when you put something in it, and that sagging is what we call gravity. Also, light isn’t an indivisible, static presence; it has a speed, and it comes in packets—irreducible amounts called quanta. Quanta aren’t merely the limit of our measurements; they appear to be the fact. Energy is grainy! All these strainings of our common sense are facts. We don’t any more merely investigate reality—Lilliputians crawling over some huge dark Gulliver sleeping there. We make it, make it with our minds, our minds and wills. We make God, you could say.”

  “A personal God?” Clarence asked, mesmerized and feeling betrayed, as Lazarus might have when brought back to life. “The Biblical God?”

  “Again, ‘existence’? In what sense? ‘Personal’ is tautological, of course. Why bother to have an impersonal God?—you’re back then with Spinoza and calling ‘God’ everything and therefore nothing. The Unitarians tried that and within three generations they’re a spent force. The soul needs something extra, a place outside matter where it can stand. The Bible—think of it as the primer of a language whereby we can talk to one another about what matters to us most. It is our starting point, not the end point.”

  Clarence liked this light-tongued, pink-lidded, preoccupied man, and was considerately conscious of the inroads his troubled case was making upon Dreaver’s crowded schedule. He felt like a deficient schoolboy having a privileged hour with a busy tutor. Beyond the brick buildings of Jersey City, with their flat roofs and lettered advertisements for pills and tailors and dance halls, the green patch of cattailed marsh rippled and twinkled in the summer breeze like those vistas of freedom seen from a classroom window, rectangles of a world sublimely free of effortful thought and the problems that exist in books. From beneath the accumulated weight of two months of atheistic dreariness and dread he glimpsed this blithe creation bathing naked in the sun, and felt the eclipse in his heart as some kind of sin which the other man, with his rapid, stabbing equivocations, might lift from him. “You’re saying,” Clarence said hesitantly, “that within the general indeterminacy—”

  “There is room for belief,” Thomas Dreaver finished, sinking back in his wooden swivel chair so emphatically that the spring hinge beneath the seat squeaked in surprise.

  “Enough space to go through the motions.”

  “Going through the motions, not at all. Walking toward the light. None of us lives in the light; we can only walk toward it, with the eyes and legs God has given us.”

  How easy it is, Clarence thought, to use the word “God” when the reality has been construed out of existence. The God Who confronted Moses was a terrible burning presence, unspeakable. “But my parishioners expect me to be halfway along the path at least.”

  “Your parishioners know you are human—don’t underestimate them. Mr. Dearholt has supplied me with a sheaf of fond testimonials. You are loved, Mr. Wilmot.”

  “I don’t underestimate them. That’s why I wish to quit. To demit,” he corrected, smiling. This man made him happy, even as he resisted his counsel. The church was not utterly dead, if bright young men like Dreaver continued to staff it.

  “The people see,” Dreaver offered, gazing up at the ceiling fan that lackadaisically paddled the torpid air, “the difficulties. They know that out of our common unease and terrors the majestic apparitions of faith are born. What drives them to church, those that come? They need very little from you to complete their quest, but that little they do need, and will forgive you much if you provide it. We have spoken of the Bible as the point of departure; think of yourself—your standing there in vestments, the visible pillar of the institution—as the point of arrival. You have pledged yourself to walk with them toward the light.”

&n
bsp; “But I can’t—”

  “Never say can’t, Mr. Wilmot. The movements of our innermost selves are various, and unpredictable. They need but a tendency to be suddenly fulfilled, when we least expect it. To yourself you seem unworthy. To me you seem an eminently well-qualified pastor—dignified, conscientious, and admirably earnest that the things of faith not be taken lightly.”

  “Lightly! Mr. Dreaver, you are putting a positive aspect on what in truth is quite negative. The things of faith for me have totally evaporated.”

  Now the young man did look tired; the reputed graininess of energy had gone to his voice, which had hoarsened. His intent blue eyes seemed to itch, behind a chronic flutter of his pink lids and pale lashes. Clarence inconsiderately had dumped the full load of his own incapacity upon this upholder of that by which they both lived. Yet the moderator offered a smile, and a dismissive flicker of his hands above the papers that awaited his attention. “What evaporates can re-condense,” Dreaver said. He picked up the black-bound Book of Discipline but did not open it, since both remembered what he had read. “I cannot permit your demission on the evidence you present, of alterations in your understanding of doctrine. Doctrine is the living, changing expression of a living God, and is properly the subject of ongoing, at times radical, reconsideration. You heard it: at least a year’s probation. The General Assembly of 1889 made this rule in response to a situation in the Presbytery of Butler. In 1901 the Presbytery of Chicago and in 1906 that of Puget Sound, with similar cases in their venue, placed on record overtures assenting to the wisdom of the probationary period. In that period of a year this Presbytery of Jersey City asks that you carry on your duties as before, with good faith and a genuine will, and that you submit to searching introspection the motives and reasons that would lead you to consider relinquishment of those duties.”

  Clarence said, touching his black chest with all his spread fingertips in a gesture of disclaimer and, almost, martyrdom: “I did not wish to lose my faith; the reasons came upon me, irresistibly, from outside. They came from above.”

  “Much of what we blame on the above comes from within,” Dreaver said, still soft-voiced but growing impatient. “Quench not the spirit, Mr. Wilmot. The elect are not spared passing through the valley of the shadow of death. The possibility of rebirth lies within you, if you but nurture it. Though both science and our own divines have sought to reason it away, I firmly believe in free will. We make our salvations, as well as our earthly fortunes. However, as moderator I truly have no choice in my disposition of your request. Is the necessity of at least one more year in the clergy so repugnant to you?”

  “No—it is pleasant. I know the tasks; they are the only tasks I do know. My poor distressed family will be very pleased. I myself am relieved. But it seems to me you are directing me to behave with blatant hypocrisy.”

  Dreaver became ever more official; his pallid eyes flashed. “I am asking you to carry for twelve more mere months responsibilities you solemnly vowed to undertake for a lifetime. Please, Mr. Wilmot—renounce your intellectual pride and give God’s grace a chance to do its work. This is not hypocrisy, but the meekness that every man in his work offers up to the order of things, whether divinely ordained or not.” Dreaver lowered his pained pale gaze, cleared his throat, and set the Book of Discipline aside. The stacked papers on his desktop were all smartly typed, as in the most modern offices. He concluded, “The presbytery will be apprised of this conversation, and all its members shall pray that at the end of the year you will no longer wish to seek demission.”

  Clarence boarded the train back to Newark with a light head beneath his straw boater. He had no choice; he had been commanded to take the easiest course left him. Swinging his arms, grasping lightly in alternating hands the curved brass handles fitted into the corners of the plush seats as he moved down the swaying aisle in search of a seat, he shed upon his fellow passengers the blessing that his reversed collar proclaimed had descended upon the world. Outside the grated, open windows, the Meadows and the two rivers and the trusses of their iron bridges skimmed past; gulls and ducks shared the waters and islands of the marsh, and red-winged blackbirds flickered from reed to bending reed. Miniature suns bobbled in the water beneath their wings. Then city buildings and dirty backyards crowded around the elevated tracks; weathered white letters on a brick wall welcomed the passengers to NEWARK—HOME OF BALLANTINE ALE. In his light-headed, celebratory mood, he impulsively disembarked at the Erie Railroad station and, walking a few blocks, found a saloon where in spite of his collar he enjoyed a cold draft ale and a hot sausage and sauerkraut on a roll. He strolled back to catch the 2:26 for Paterson, already basking in Stella’s relief and the children’s joy that for at least another year they were assured of the shelter of the parsonage and the respectability his position extended to them all.

  Three years later, during the spring and much of the summer of 1913, a strike of the silk-workers paralyzed and galvanized Paterson, pitting twenty-five thousand workers against three hundred silk manufacturers. Local 152 of the Industrial Workers of the World was the organizer. The strike had begun at the end of February and instantly widened when the police chief arrested three out-of-town IWW agitators at Turn Hall, on Ellison Street. Fifteen hundred assembled strikers had gone wild at seeing Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in the clutches of the law; a steady hail of clubbing from mounted police did not disperse the mob that accompanied her to the station.

  In March, the police installed cots at their headquarters and hired a cook and barber to accommodate the platoons of new around-the-clock officers, and the strikers, feeling the pinch and anticipating worse, established a General Relief Committee. The Purity Cooperative Company, a bakery founded eight years before by immigrant Jews, distributed thirty thousand loaves of bread free for each week of the strike. The Order of the Sons of Italy voted to levy its members enough to provide a thousand dollars a week. Picket lines were established to harass and shame scabs seeking to enter the shut-down mills. Big Bill Haywood, head of the IWW, came and went; Flynn was almost constantly in Paterson, throwing her voice over crowds of thousands, emboldening the women who emerged as leading spirits of the strike. Hannah Silverman, seventeen years of age, became the captain of the pickets at the Westerhoff mill on Van Houten Street. Twenty-three-year-old Mary Gasperano slapped a woman strikebreaker in the face and was arrested for the fifth time. A fourth of the more than two thousand persons arrested were women, women and girls like those of the Bamford ribbon mill, who ate lunch on the outdoor factory steps rain or shine, were locked out and docked a day’s pay if a minute late, were fined for such offenses as laughing and opening a window, and half of whose pay was withheld to the end of the year by Joseph Bamford; if they left within that year, he kept it. Hoping to appeal to the workers’ patriotism, the manufacturers declared a Flag Day, flying American flags on their mills to welcome back employees. The employees did not return. The IWW distributed lapel cards reading We wove the flag. We dyed the flag. We won’t scab under the flag. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn told a crowd at Turn Hall that the IWW had brought all nationalities of this city together and represented the ideal spirit of America. As she tried to explain a red flag, a dyers’ helper leaped to his feet and held up his hand, dyed indelibly red by years of work, and cried that here was the red flag. The thousands in the hall cheered.

  The local police, who had neighbors and friends among the strikers, were relatively gentle, and broke bones but never took a striker’s life. In April, however, one of the hated special detectives hired from the O’Brien Detective Agency of Newark by the Weidmann Silk Dyeing Company, while putting a group of strikebreakers on a trolley car outside the mill in the Riverside section, fired shots to intimidate an angry crowd of dyers’ helpers and killed an employed file-worker, Valentino Modestino, as he stood on the stoop of his own house. The detective was never indicted. The manufacturers owned the police, and the courts. Thousands marched to the Laurel Grove Cemetery and dropped red carnations on Modestino’s g
rave. Red ribbons were worn by the workers, red flags were waved.

  Five weeks after the abortive Flag Day, the American Federation of Labor, a relatively conservative trade union that had already enlisted the well-paid, anti-strike loom-fixers, twisters, and warpers, sent John Golden to seduce the strikers away from the socialist IWW, but his scheduled meeting at the Fifth Regiment Armory was swamped by heckling Wobblies waving their red handkerchiefs and their little red books of membership. The strikers’ days were filled with meetings—every weekday morning the ribbon weavers met at Helvetia Hall and the dyers’ helpers and broad-silk weavers at Turn Hall, being addressed by the out-of-town “jawsmiths”—and speaking themselves, at first shyly, then vociferously, in Italian, German, Polish, English, Dutch, Yiddish, even Arabic. Afternoons, there were shop meetings of smaller groups at Probst Hall, the Union Athletic Club, Degalman’s Hall, the Workingmen’s Institute. Sunday afternoons, there were giant gatherings across the river in the streetcar suburb of Haledon, which had a socialist mayor and one policeman, who weighed ninety pounds. Spring burgeoned as the strike aged. There were brass bands, mass singing, romance. Flynn, who was blue-eyed and dark-haired and twenty-two and separated from her husband, conducted an affair with the Italian-born anarchist Carlo Tresca, with whom she had fallen in love during the 1912 woolworkers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. On one occasion a meeting in Helvetia Hall was interrupted by the complaint, “Mr. Chairman, there is love going on here,” and a vote was taken to expel a young couple who had been kissing.