Abide With Me, Page 4

  The wet pajamas were tossed into a corner, the child lifted into the bathtub that was old and deep, and had those lion-clawed feet. It was so deep that when Katherine sat in it, she could barely see over the top. A saucepan for rinsing floated in front of her, rocking from the faucet water. Her father turned the faucet off when the water only covered her legs. When Hatchet Foghorn gave her a bath, the water was so deep it came up to Katherine’s armpits, and she’d get a dizzy feeling. “Katherine?” her father said. “Did you hear me?”

  She nodded, shivering.

  “You just ask in a friendly voice, ‘Hi there—can I play, too?’ “

  She squeezed her eyes shut and nodded again. “All right,” he said. “Two rinses and we’ll be done.” She kept her eyes shut for both rinses, and he lifted her from the tub. Wrapped in a towel, she stood shivering. “Say, Kitty-Kat, do you like Mrs. Ingersoll?” Her father had different faraway voices, but this one she loved—it was so tired it included her in the big people’s world. She shrugged. For a moment he knelt and looked into her eyes.

  “Well,” he said with a sigh. He looked around, picked up her wet pajamas. “I didn’t think she was any prize.”

  THE MORNING LIGHT’S radiance showed in the sharp, clear blue of the sky, in the twinkling of a fender of a car that passed by, in the open-handed beauty of the leaves moving in the tall maples along this section of the town’s Main Street. It seemed impossible that man could, or would, choose to destroy this world. Nuclear arms must be gone within four years, Khrushchev had said, and yet he would not accept inspections of disarmament. What did any of this mean? Tyler, wearing one of his new white shirts and walking toward the church with a folded blanket tucked beneath his arm, might have prayed for the Russian leader, as well as Mrs. Ingersoll—All we like sheep have gone astray. Or he might have simply given thanks for the beauty of the world. But Tyler was thinking of Connie Hatch. He didn’t want to dwell on the glance they’d exchanged, but he’d been surprised by the effect on him; it seemed as though he had not met the eyes of anyone for a very long time. He walked with long strides toward the church, a gusty wind whirling around him, everything crisp as an apple here in West Annett, leaves scattered on the ground.

  The church was set back just slightly from the road, where Main Street veered in to Pottle’s Lane. Built in 1796, it seemed to have settled itself comfortably against the small hillock and sloping lawn; you could even imagine it had its own spread of roots beneath the ground as large and lacily sturdy as those of the pines and cedars nearby. An addition had been built a few years back, off to the side, sinking slightly into the hollow of ground, so that the activities room and Sunday school could be housed in a building that barely showed from the road. The original study for the minister, though, remained in the basement of the church itself, and this was where Tyler was headed.

  But first he stopped in to the sanctuary; the quietness and simplicity of the white painted pews, the slight chill to the air, pleasing him as it always did—that tiny prick of awe. He tucked the blanket beneath a back pew. It used to be that the church was locked at night. This started during the Depression, when a hobo had sometimes been found sleeping in the church. But Tyler, whose tendency was to stay away as much as he could from aspects of church management, had nevertheless said when he first arrived that the church must always be open. “Sanctuary,” he had explained to his congregation. “From the Latin sanctuarium—a sacred place, sanctified, made holy. In fact,” Tyler had said, with his particular brand of enthusiasm, “it used to be that a criminal, pursued, could find safety from arrest in the sanctuary of a church, because of the contagion of holiness.” In any event, the West Annett church stayed open. Any hobo found sleeping in the church was to be fed and cared for, Tyler said, until he chose to move on. “If someone is caught stealing a candlestick, then the other candlestick must be given to him. This is the essence of Christian love.”

  No one fought him on this. And no one bothered to tell him that shortly after this pronouncement, the Ladies’ Aid replaced the silver candlesticks with silver-coated ones, putting the originals in Jane Watson’s care and bringing them quietly back for Christmas and Easter. If Tyler had known about the candlesticks, he wouldn’t have said anything. He was more concerned with the fact that Walter Wilcox, after the death of his wife, had been found sleeping in the church some nights, confused when woken, sometimes crying like a small child. Tyler invited the old man to sleep at the farmhouse on nights when he couldn’t bear his own home. (Tyler’s wife had said, “Is this going to be a boardinghouse, Tyler? Because I don’t think I could stand that.”) As it was, Walter had turned down the invitation, but Tyler thought of it sometimes, and he had thought of it last night, as he lay awake. The nights were cold now. And so he stopped in to the sanctuary this morning and put the folded blanket beneath the back pew. It was to stay in the church, though no one, as far as he knew, had been sleeping in the church since Walter.

  Down into the basement he went, then, with the Perils of Personal Vanity. Tyler was hoping to write the sermon and commit it to memory, which is what the marvelous Dietrich Bonhoeffer had believed should be done, and what Reverend Caskey, before this year, had always done himself. He settled himself at his desk, tugged on his stiff white cuffs. Vanity impeded spiritual enlargement. A place of worship required no “outward pomp.” Decency, but no magnificence. A place to worship God, not themselves—Tyler Caskey pursed his lips, squinted. He might, or might not, mention the organ business directly.

  He folded his arms, dropped his head down. He imagined, in a deep and sudden drowsiness, a pleased look on Mrs. Ingersoll’s face when she saw the difference their talk had made; there would be no need for any trip to Rhonda Skillings’s office. Personal vanity was not to be confused with personal cleanliness. He might have to point that out in the sermon; always speak to the lowest common denominator in your audience—that would be Irma Rand, nice woman, dull-witted as a doorknob, but the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple, and the Hebrew word for wisdom, he was thinking in the delicious rocking wave of his sleepiness, meant “skill for living.” Those Jews, practical people—

  Tyler raised his head. The outer door upstairs had opened; he heard the squeaking of its hinge, and he got up, stuck his head out into the narrow hallway. Doris Austin was on the stairway, holding her pocketbook with both hands against her long gray coat, her head bent slightly, so that the small basket of her coiled braid seemed tilted forward as she came to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Hello, Doris,” said the minister. “Did you want to see me?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Tyler said, “Please, come in.” But a strange thing happened: He experienced, as he stepped back, a very brief and unexpected image—it really did amaze him—of giving a light smack to her obsequious face.

  She sat down, and while he could have chosen to sit in the chair across from her, he sat instead behind his desk. She said, “I was hoping when I saw you in Hollywell to talk about what’s bothering me.”

  “I’m sorry, Doris,” he said. “My mind was on a number of things.”

  Doris said, “When something’s wrong with your child, of course you’re distracted.”

  “Wrong?” he asked. Was the whole town talking about his child?

  “Those tummy aches,” Doris said. “Almost easier if it had been a belly bug. Least you’d know.”

  Tyler nodded, remembering the Pepto-Bismol. “Tell me what it is that’s bothering you.” He tried to say this kindly, but he was very tired.

  “I’m sad.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Doris.” After a moment he asked, “What is it that makes you sad—do you know?”

  “Everything,” she answered.

  “I see. Oh, boy,” said Tyler, tapping his fingers against his mouth. “I am sorry.”

  “In the whole world,” she added. And without any more warning than a slight reddening of her eyes, she began to weep.

  He looked away. “D
oris. You know . . .” He thought, Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. He could not think what to say. He felt debilitated by weariness, and thought how in the past months he had driven by the car dealership in Hollywell and felt jealous of the salesmen, whose responsibility for the souls of others would not, arguably, be so immediate or direct. (“Where’s the calling there?” he could imagine his mother saying.)

  “Charles makes me sad,” Doris said.

  “Yes, I see,” Tyler said. “Well.” This complicated things. Charlie Austin was head deacon of the church, a man reserved to the point of having, in Tyler’s view, bad manners; and Tyler, as much as he could, had left him alone.

  “He’s irritated with me all the time.”

  Tyler put his hands in his lap and held them tightly. “Doris,” he said, “marriages go through rough patches. Most of them do.”

  She didn’t answer him.

  “You might want to read the autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux,” he said. “I read that at night sometimes, and it may seem at first blush rather hysterical in tone—of course it’s very Catholic—but she writes about a nun who irritates her by clicking her rosary beads—”

  “He hits me.” The woman’s chin was trembling.

  “He hits you?”

  The small puckers of her chin made him suddenly think of mashed potatoes.

  “Oh,” said Tyler. He shifted in his chair. “He does?”

  “I’m not making it up,” Doris said, umbrage in her voice.

  “Of course not.” He had so recently felt the startling impulse himself, he supposed he couldn’t doubt her. You never knew what went on inside people’s houses. His professor George Atwood had told him this in seminary: You never, ever knew.

  “Often?” Tyler asked.

  The tip of Doris’s nose had become red. “Does it matter?”

  “But are you in danger? Or the children?”

  “Do you think I’m a mother who would let her children be in danger?”

  Tyler reached for a tissue from the box on his desk and leaned forward with it. “Not for a second, Doris. But I think it’s a serious situation. Would Charlie agree to counseling?”

  “Charlie would kill me if he knew I’d come in here.”

  Tyler looked over at his sagging bookshelf, at the mess of papers on his desk, back at Doris. Two spots of pink had spread on her cheeks.

  “Oh, not literally.” She said this with such disgust that Tyler sat back. “He gets so angry. Out of nowhere. Yesterday the wind made the door slam shut, and he began to yell.”

  Tyler tapped his mouth with his fingers. He thought of Bonhoeffer writing that it was not love that sustained a marriage but the marriage that would sustain the love. Tyler wanted to mention this, but Doris’s weeping had become very noisy. Tyler could not recall any parishioner making the noise Doris was making, sobs climbing on top of one another. He moved farther back in his chair.

  “It’s horrible,” Doris cried, “living the way I do.”

  “Yes, of course it would be,” Tyler said. “Listen, now.” He held up a hand, and gradually her weeping slowed, but there was still a gasp or two. “I know a pastor from Brockmorton,” Tyler said, “who works with married couples, and I’ll give him a call if you think Charlie would agree to counseling. I’d be glad to provide counseling myself,” he added, which was not true, “but it might be better to use someone outside. You’ll need to ask Charlie,” Tyler said. “You’ll need to find that out.”

  “Well, I think it’s hopeless.”

  “Doris,” he said, “let’s think. Let’s think about what Reinhold Niebuhr has said: ‘The intimacy of marriage can be endlessly transfigured by grace.’ “

  “Intimacy.” Doris leaned forward. Her coat had fallen open and her white blouse was straining at the buttons down its front. “In our intimate life, he makes me feel very bad. In our private life. He makes me feel very inadequate.”

  Tyler looked at her seriously, so she wouldn’t guess how much he didn’t want to hear this.

  “He gave me these pamphlets to read. Directions, sort of. When he went off to that conference in Boston.”

  Tyler waited. She blew her nose.

  And then the black telephone began to ring. They both looked at it. Tyler let it ring twice before he said, “Excuse me for just one moment.” He held up a finger, and saw Doris’s mouth tighten as she yanked on her gloves. “No, no, Doris, don’t go. Tyler Caskey speaking.”

  Doris would have to leave, though. And he would have to leave. Katherine had thrown up at school.

  BUT THE LITTLE Jeannie Caskey was a love. There she was on Saturday morning, a blond, curly-haired little love, who toddled around with a hand in her mouth, making happy noises, and then reaching with her small wet hand for whatever leg or dog or person’s face happened to be nearby. If her grandmother was forever pulling out a hanky to wipe the little hand dry, the child seemed not to care; she would wait, smiling, looking around, and as soon as the hand was released, back it would go, either into her mouth or to touch whatever suited her fancy. She was standing on the couch now, next to her father, patting his head with increasing vigor, until Tyler, in the midst of a conversation with his mother about the lack of cleanliness of his house, had to say to his younger child, “Easy. Easy, now.”

  “Be nice, Jeanne,” said the grandmother, with tired but affectionate authority. Margaret Caskey’s speech was apt to be slow, drawled out with a New England deliberateness. “Tyler,” she said, “does she wash the windows? What is it she gets paid to do?”

  It was all this bright sun. Tyler Caskey felt exposed, sitting on his couch in his living room while his mother criticized the work of the woman from whom he had received a moment’s comfort. He nodded toward the window his mother had just pointed to. Earlier, she had taken a tissue from her bag, stood on one of the dining-room chairs, and swiped at a cobweb she found up there. “Mother,” he had said, “be careful.” She was not young. Her ankle could snap like kindling.

  “It depresses me, Tyler. The way you live.” Her lowered voice, the particular tilt of her head, the way her long fingers picked at her navy-blue dress with its big white dots—all this caused some flicker of ancient anxiety in Tyler. Perhaps Mrs. Caskey’s old black Lab, Minnie, felt it as well; she had been sleeping next to Tyler on the couch, but now opened her eyes, moaned, stepped down. Her nails clicked across the hardwood floor, as Tyler said, “Don’t worry about me, Mother.”

  Jeannie patted the dog’s rump and plopped down on her father’s lap. Tyler felt a wet diaper seeping through his trousers. “Katherine,” he called, “come help me change your sister,” and Katherine came over and didn’t yell or pull away when Jeannie tugged on her bangs hard.

  “I’ll do it, Tyler,” said his mother, reaching for the child. “You have a sermon to prepare.”

  Tyler nodded, and stood up, although in fact the sermon was “prepared” already. It was Tyler’s habit to get his sermon title to the church secretary on Friday so she could get the programs mimeographed; he didn’t like to have her work on a Saturday morning. The title was not, after all, On the Perils of Personal Vanity. Katherine’s upset stomach, Doris’s visit to his office, the conference with Mrs. Ingersoll—all this had taken a toll on Tyler’s ability to concentrate; the sermon on vanity was left undone. Instead, Tyler would preach an old sermon on the Prophecies of Isaiah, left over from his seminary days, even though, he acknowledged to himself, patting Minnie on her head as he stepped by, nothing he’d written then seemed related to anything now.

  Tyler sat at his desk, looking around the room. His eye fell upon Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison on the table nearby. He could recite whole portions from memory—he had looked at it that often. He gazed out the window at the birdbath, the ivy, and imagined a house in Berlin where people talked excitedly about theological issues that Tyler knew reached beyond his own capacity to understand; he imagined the sound of a German radio broadcast, Bonhoeffer
’s clear voice declaring that man’s responsibility against evil lay in action, and then the radio cut off in midsentence by the government authorities; oh, the intensity of the discussions that would have followed! He pictured Bonhoeffer, the young blond-haired pastor, walking through the narrow streets of Chichester, England, speaking earnestly with his friend Bishop Bell; the trip to New York, then boarding one of the last ships back to Germany; he imagined the green lawns of Finkenwalde (Tyler had no idea if there were lawns in Finkenwalde), where a community of Christians listened to Bonhoeffer say that man’s sin was flight from responsibility. Tyler imagined the military prison, Tegel; the clanking of gated doors, the echo of booted steps . . . The vastness of such activity, the innumerable scenes of that man’s courage and suffering, gave Tyler a heightened sense of how twisted—as a nail would be, banged through a plank of knotty pine—was his own despair. Whatever anguish Dietrich Bonhoeffer had endured seemed to glow with purity.

  Tyler’s love for this martyred man felt so personal that it sometimes surprised him to think they’d never met, that Bonhoeffer had never even known of Tyler’s existence. We would have been friends, Tyler thought. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been born in Breslau, Germany, in 1906, twenty-one years before Tyler Caskey had come prematurely, scrunched-up and red, into the world of Shirley Falls, Maine. And while Tyler, whose digestion from the very beginning had caused Margaret Caskey sleepless nights, was being fed from the tip of a basting wand, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had already completed his first Ph.D. from Berlin University, producing a thesis entitled The Communion of Saints.

  “Oooh, a smarty pants,” the future Lauren Caskey said laughingly, on her second date with Tyler, having to listen to these intensely relayed facts.

  Yes, Bonhoeffer was smart. And from a prominent family. Tyler, who had an American abhorrence of that term, had nevertheless used it as evidence—explaining this to Lauren—that the man had much to lose. And he dared to lose it. Not only did Bonhoeffer rise up against his church’s implicit acceptance of Nazism and help found a seminary for the opposing Confessing Church—a place ultimately closed by the Nazis—the man chose (this was the part of the story that caused Tyler Caskey’s voice to drop, so heavy was it with feeling, as he leaned across the table to deliver it), he chose, after spending a year in the United States in 1939, to return to Germany, and he must have known he would die. Others knew. Karl Barth, Paul Tillich. They did not return to the hands of Hitler’s murderers, and they had begged him not to, either.