Abide With Me

  George Atwood’s door was open. Tyler, standing in the doorway, saw George reading by the window. The man’s eyes were hidden for a moment by the light reflecting off his gold-rimmed glasses as he looked over at Tyler, but his voice, as he stood, held a genuine, if restrained, gladness. “Tyler Caskey. What an unexpected pleasure. What brings you up here? Sit down, sit down.”

  “I had some business not far off.” Tyler waved a hand dismissively. “In Edding. I thought I’d stop in to see if you were around.”

  George Atwood nodded, his old eyes peering at Tyler through his glasses. There was a look of dry and absolute cleanliness about him, as if his shirts, or even his undershirts, would be as clean at the end of the day as they had been when he first put them on. He lowered himself into a deacon’s chair that had on its black back the school insignia, and crossed one of his long, thin legs over the other.

  The Brockmorton Seminary had been founded two centuries earlier, and it was different from other seminaries because it had been designed to train men—and sometimes a woman—who had previously held other jobs. A butcher, for example, or an electrician, who decided in midlife to become a minister, received his training here, and went on to one of the small parishes sprinkled throughout northern New England.

  But Tyler had arrived straight from the university, and was the youngest man in his class. And, at first, the loneliest. The affability that had seemed his natural gift since early childhood—and that had only taken one swift, ferocious hit when he was in the navy—had deserted him when first on this campus. The older men tended to be taciturn as they juggled the responsibilities of books, children, and wives, and some were competitive with Tyler, as though they thought he was a show-off. George Atwood, professor of systemic theology, had taken him under his wing. “He’s been like a father to me,” Tyler would say, not realizing that he sometimes even got the men confused, that George Atwood, who had a limp (though not as pronounced as Tyler’s father’s had been) and wore gold-rimmed glasses similar to those that his father had worn, made Tyler’s heart ache with a certain longing when he saw him across the leafy lawn, or watched him limp slowly down the church aisle to a pew. George had married Tyler and Lauren, and presided at Lauren’s funeral.

  “How’s Katherine faring?” the man asked now.

  “She’s all right,” Tyler said, tapping his fingers on the armchair. “Having a little trouble, I think. A little trouble adjusting to school. I happened to speak to her teacher the other day. Katherine cries a bit, apparently.”

  After a moment George said, “I guess some of that’s to be expected.”

  Tyler nodded.

  “You say her prayers with her?”

  “Oh, sure. Every night.”

  “And you include her mother in the prayers?” George Atwood was examining one of the leather-covered buttons on the long cardigan he wore. When Tyler didn’t answer, he looked up.

  “No,” said Tyler.

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know.” The stinging pain below his collarbone began. “I guess we’ve got a little routine that goes way back, and, well—I don’t.”

  “It might be a good idea.”

  “Yes.” Tyler nodded. He squinted out the window and realized he was looking at the corner of the church in which he got married. “I was thinking the other day,” he said, feeling the need to take attention away from the—he saw now—appalling revelation that he had kept Lauren from her daughter’s prayers, “how Saint Thérèse was Katherine’s age exactly when her mother died.”

  “Godfrey, Tyler. You’re not still reading the Catholic saints, are you?”

  Tyler looked at him, smiled. “Now and then.”

  “Oh, I know. You’re drawn to the passions. Be careful. That can get you booted out of a parish in a heck of a hurry. I’ve seen it happen.”

  Tyler smiled again, with half his mouth. “I don’t intend to get booted anywhere.”

  “No. I expect you don’t.” George uncrossed his legs, pressed his knees together in their gray trousers, turned his body sideways in the chair. “So, you’re managing then, Tyler?”

  Tyler nodded, looked out the window again. “I can’t memorize, though, and that irritates me. Cuts down on the joy of delivering. Boy, I loved that. Knowing I had them right there with me, that they’d go home and think over what I’d had to say, that, you know, it wasn’t just abstract stuff I was—” Too late he remembered that George’s homilies were unrelentingly dreary, read as though each word had the same weight, a deadening monotony. Did George know that about himself, he wondered. What did people know about themselves? Tyler leaned forward in the chair, resting his elbows on his knees. (What did people know about their children? When he thought of the quiet, obedient Katherine at home, and then pictured her screaming at school, saying, “I hate God,” in kinderkirk, this discrepancy—his own knowledge of the child, and the way others might see her—frightened him, as though when Katherine left the house she fell through the ice into some dark water where he could barely see her.)

  The sky above the church was very gray. Tyler rubbed his face, sat back, and saw George watching him. “You’ll get your sea legs back,” the man said to him. And then added thoughtfully, “You have always needed an audience, Tyler.” George shifted in the black deacon’s chair, raising himself just slightly by his arms before sinking his thin self back down. “Trouble is,” George said, and cleared his throat, “for a man who needs an audience, the audience will never be enough. He’ll even come to dislike the audience. It’s a trap, you see.”

  Tyler nodded slowly, to give the impression of pondering this, but in fact, a pain was blossoming beneath his collarbone. “Well.” Tyler let out a sigh. “Stewardship is coming up, and I’d like to do a good job. The organist wants a new organ, and if there’s any controversy I’d just as soon stay out of it.”

  “Leave that to the board.”

  “Oh, I am.”

  “You’ve done all right with pledges in the past.”

  “Yes. There won’t be any problem with that.”

  The two men were silent; a door closed down the hallway. George said, “Remember the Lamentations: ‘It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.’ “

  “I’m not in my youth,” Tyler said.

  George simply held up a pale, bony hand. After a moment, he asked: “The baby is fine?”

  “With Mother, still. Yes, she’s fine.”

  “ ‘Dark though the night, joy cometh with the morrow,’ Tyler.” George lifted a bony haunch and took a white handkerchief from a back pocket. He blew his nose almost soundlessly. “Bereavement is a sacrament. You’re taking care of yourself? Looks like you’ve lost a little weight.”

  “Plenty in the bank, I guess.” Tyler patted his stomach. It seemed an odd thing for George to mention joy. When, he wondered, was the last time George Atwood had felt joy? But joy was what Tyler missed. Joy was what he had been full of, it seemed. Even when marriage had brought along its worries. And joy was what C. S. Lewis had used to describe his yearning for God. That’s what The Feeling was, Tyler realized now. But how was joy to be available to him ever again? He felt that in one swift, exhausted decision on that final day of Lauren’s life, he had allowed a barn door to fall on him, and in the darkness beneath he saw no way out. “Say, George—” Tyler leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

  But right then George looked over at the doorway, and said, “Philip, come in. Were you looking for me?” A young man stood there, his shoulders slumped deferentially.

  Tyler, after he had shaken hands with Philip, turned and shook hands with George. “Well,” he said, “it’s time I get going.”

  “All right then, Tyler.” The old man did not even walk him to the office door.

  Outside in the chilly air, he tried to find an equilibrium within the enormousness of his disappointment over his visit with George. He sat in his car a few moments, looking at the campus, the massive gray trunks of the elms before him. Ab
ide with me; fast falls the eventide . . . Odd to think that had been his favorite hymn for years, because what had he really known until this year about the sadness and pleading tone of that hymn? The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide. Tyler started the car, drove down the hill, past the church where he’d been married. When other helpers fail and comforts flee . . . O Lord, abide with me.

  The trees along the river appeared caught in a state of half-undress. There were still some leaves, but enough were gone that you could look straight through to the trunks and sky; there was a sense of coming nakedness. Tyler unrolled the car window to have the air wash over him, and the sharp smell of autumn brought to mind a memory of himself as a youth standing on the football field right before the starting whistle. He had thought: I am a large man, and I will do large things.

  KATHERINE, SITTING IN the backseat of Mrs. Carlson’s car, looked out the window with a tiny smile on her face, and Mrs. Carlson, glancing briefly in the rearview mirror, thought perhaps the child had seen the pumpkin stand they passed and had been promised a pumpkin.

  “Going to make a jack-o’-lantern for Halloween?” Mrs. Carlson asked, but Katherine didn’t answer, just kept smiling out the window. She was picturing her house, the porch, the broken railing, the tilting steps, her climbing each one, and then inside, waiting with her arms wide, would be her mother. “Kitty-Kat, I’ve missed you!” her mother would cry, and then they would go bounce on the bed.

  Katherine frequently pictured this. The fact that it had not happened yet did not discourage her. She thought of it whenever she was in a car that was taking her home. This picture kept her safe, so that when the strange Carlson boy said mockingly, “Thank you, Mrs. Carlson,” as she silently stepped out of the car, and Mrs. Carlson said, “Stop that, Bob—good-bye now, Katherine,” it all had nothing to do with her.

  Up the steps she went, turned the handle of the door that was rattley and loose. And there was Hatchet Foghorn, her big red hands right by Katherine’s head. “Hello, Pumpkin,” she said.

  Katherine dropped her red plastic lunch box on the floor, and ran up the stairs into her room. Pumpkin? It made Katherine feel sick to hear this woman call her that. She looked around frantically, then slid under her bed, where it was dark and private and a dusty sock lay by her face. She heard the woman coming up the stairs, heard her hesitate by the bedroom door. “Come on out now, Katherine,” the woman said. Katherine closed her eyes tight and held her breath.

  THE CLOUDS LOWERED and became the color of galvanized metal, then thickened and lowered some more, so that all the trees were gray and still, and the world along the river seemed compressed and made tense by an umbrageous sky. In her messy kitchen, the kinderkirk teacher, Alison Chase, baked an apple crisp for Tyler, and, after putting on her orange lipstick, she drove over to the farmhouse to drop it off with Connie Hatch.

  “Tyler hates apples,” Ora Kendall told her later on the telephone.

  “Nobody hates apples.”

  “Tyler does. Said they make him sick, ever since Lauren died. She died just as apples were starting to come into season. Can’t eat scrambled eggs, either, he said. After the powdered eggs in the navy.”

  Alison called Jane Watson, who was busy cutting up an onion with a piece of bread stuck in her mouth to keep her eyes from watering. “I tried calling you just a few minutes ago,” Jane said from the side of her mouth. “I already called Rhonda and Marilyn about my awful conversation with Tyler. It was like speaking to a man, just barely polite, who didn’t care if the phone lines were down. Why did you make him the apple crisp?”

  “I felt sorry for him.”

  “Tyler hates apples. He’ll give it to Connie Hatch.”

  “I’m bored to death with my life,” Alison said. “I’m so bored I could just puke.”

  “It will pass,” Jane assured her. “You’ve got the Historical Society meeting next week at Bertha’s house. Bring an apple crisp to that.”

  “Don’t you ever get bored to death?”

  “You have to do things, Alison.”

  “I can’t even clean my house.”

  “Make the beds,” Jane told her, finally taking the bread from her mouth. “Just make the beds and you’ll feel better. And buy a girdle. I’ve ordered a new girdle from Sears. The ad said, ‘Why eat cottage cheese when you can lose five pounds in five seconds?’ “

  “Why make the beds when they just get right back in them? I’ve never understood that. Speaking of, I found a magazine yesterday under Raymond’s bed. A girlie one.”

  “Oh. Well. He’s the age, I guess. Get Fred to have a talk with him. Or talk to Rhonda Skillings. She knows everything these days—have you noticed? Freud this, Freud that. Anything sexual, she’ll talk about it.”

  “The woman in the magazine looked like Lauren Caskey.”

  “Alison. That is a horrible thing to say.”

  “Thank you,” said Alison. “Thank you very much.”

  THAT NIGHT TYLER watched his child run around her bedroom as though stung by a bee. She ran to the door, ran back to her bed, got up on it, jumped. She shook her head vehemently back and forth, then fell in a tiny heap, hiding her face in the pillow.

  “Katherine. Right now. Stop this.”

  The child sat up.

  “Somebody said it,” Tyler told her. “It’s a dreadful thing for anyone to say.”

  The girl shook her head again, starting to hit her head against the wall.

  “Stop it.” The sudden rise in his voice caused the child to stare at him, and then, fast as a squirrel, she curled herself against her pillow.

  “Get under the covers, and let’s say your prayers.”

  Tyler had driven back from Brockmorton that afternoon understanding that the seminary’s campus belonged to other men, and yet it had seemed, when he was a student there, to be constructed wholly and utterly for him. “I am not in my youth,” he had said to George, and it was true that when he walked back through the hallway of Blake Hall, the building seemed diminished, as though it had shriveled imperceptibly, taking with it the stateliness Tyler’s younger self had imbued it with. On the way to his car, he thought the campus seemed no more than old gray buildings set on a hill. As he drove along the narrow road, the clouds lowering so it seemed he was driving into a hallway, he remembered the perfect smack of a football catch on that field out behind his old high school, and he felt he had been catapulted straight from his childhood to driving this car as a widower and father—and he was absolutely stunned.

  When he arrived home, it was Connie Hatch once again (the knowing, quiet glow of her green eyes) who steadied him. She pointed out the apple crisp on the counter, dropped off by Alison Chase. “Take it with you,” Tyler said. “I loathe the smell of apples.”

  “Smells can get you, can’t they?” Connie nodded easily, as she slipped it into a brown grocery bag. “When I worked at the county farm, I had to take my clothes off right away when I got home, put them in another room. Even then, seemed like little pieces of that place got stuck right on my nose hairs.”

  “I should think so,” Tyler said, remembering an old woman, the widow Dorothy, who had been packed off by her daughter to the county nursing home—called the county farm—a few months after Tyler had first come to town. “I don’t know how you stood working there.”

  “I didn’t stand it,” Connie said. “Katherine’s upstairs coloring.”

  “Thank you,” Tyler said. Then: “Can you stay for a quick cup of tea?”

  And so she had stayed, her strong, red-tipped fingers circling a steaming cup, tilting her head to the side as she listened as he spoke of Brockmorton, how it seemed a hundred years ago he had been a student there.

  “Time,” Connie said. “It’s a funny thing. Haven’t got that one figured out yet.”

  She left, taking with her the apple crisp and the barrier her presence provided between the voices of Jane Watson and Mary Ingersoll and him; for these voices returned to him with the sense of a rolled-up barbed wi
re inside him, as he sat now on Katherine’s bed. The child spoke the Lord’s Prayer with enunciated obedience.

  For Katherine—if she shook her head enough times, it would be true: She had not said, “I hate God.” Alongside the skinny fact she had said, “I hate God,” sat the bigger fact that she had not said it. And the only thing that mattered was that her father look at her right now as though he saw her, that he rub his big paw of a hand over her head, that the frown marks between his eyebrows disappear. But they did not disappear—they stayed throughout the prayer, and there was no extra word after, as there sometimes was, when he would say to her conversationally, “Walter Wilcox fell asleep in church today and his own snoring woke him up.”

  No, tonight her father stood up, the lines still in that thick skin above his nose, and when he turned out the light, he hesitated in the doorway, saying, as he sometimes had before, “Remember, Katherine. Always be considerate. Always think of the other man first.”

  She lay wondering who the other man was. It must be Jesus. She was glad it wasn’t Connie Hatch, who wasn’t a man, and so didn’t have to be thought of first. Katherine shut her eyes tight, to see if that would bring sleep. She didn’t like Connie. Didn’t like to even look at her.

  “DORIS, GO TO BED,” Charlie Austin said. He felt like they’d been sitting there forever, watching television. He’d had to watch that new show Twilight Zone, which he hated, about a “fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.” He’d sat there with his kids, his older son hunched beside him on the arm of the couch, eating potato chips, every munching mouthful making Charlie nuts.

  “Isn’t this great, Dad?” the kid said, poking his father’s leg.

  “Why don’t you sit in a chair?” Charlie said.

  “I like it here. It’s a great show, huh, Dad? Look at that, Dad!” On the television a hand came up out of the ground; it gave Charlie the absolute willies.