Abide With Me

  The kids were finally sent off to bed, and now they were watching The Untouchables, and Charlie might have been able to enjoy it—he kind of liked the fellow who played Eliot Ness—if he’d been alone, and, glancing at his wife’s profile, he thought she wasn’t watching, really, just looking at the television set, her face immobile with an expression of anxious waiting. “Go,” he said.

  “I’m all right. I’ll stay up with you.” Still, she looked straight ahead.

  “I’m not tired,” he said. “I’m worked up. Just go to bed.”

  She looked at him. “Let me help you relax,” she said, and she put a hand on his thigh.

  He leaned his head back on the couch, closed his eyes.

  “I’d like to try,” she said. She moved her hand, and his cock, tucked inside his undershorts and trousers, stirred. Capricious thing—it had no shame, only its own foolish hunger. If he kept his eyes closed . . . thought of the woman in Boston, her garter belt, the tops of her stockings, her toes pointed as she lay back on the edge of the hotel bed . . . “Let’s play doctor,” she’d said. Her hands touching his ears.

  He opened his eyes. “Doris,” he said, taking her hand, moving it away, “please go to bed.”

  There were tears on her face as she stood up, folded the crocheted afghan, put it carefully over the edge of the couch. She plumped the pillows, tears dripping over her nose.

  “Goddamn it,” he said quietly. “Blow your nose and go to bed.”

  His cruelty caused her to burst into noisy sobs, and he said, “Shut up, for God’s sake—you’ll wake the kids,” and something in his stomach curdled.

  Exhibitionism, the woman in Boston had said, wanting to open a curtain in their hotel room, I’ve certainly been accused of that, turning to him, laughing.

  He thought his wife was an exhibitionist of a different sort. He thought her tears said: Witness my unhappiness. And he wanted to shout: Why should I witness your unhappiness? Your unhappiness makes me sick!

  She had walked partway up the stairs when he heard her turn and walk back down. She came and stood in front of where he sat on the couch. “You should know,” she said, and her voice trembled, “that I went to Tyler Caskey and told him you hit me.”

  He gazed up at her. Quietly, he said, “Are you out of your mind?”

  “You’re asking if I’m out of my mind? That’s a laugh, Charlie. You asking me.”

  He looked down, shook his head. “Well,” he said, “I don’t believe you. I know you’re making it up.”

  “I’m not. He said we should go see some other minister to help us out. He didn’t want to be bothered.”

  “Now I know you’re making it up,” Charlie said, waving a hand dismissively. “Tyler never would say he didn’t want to be bothered. Although I’m sure if you had told him, he would feel that way.”

  “I did tell him, and he did feel that way, and he didn’t use those words. He said we could go to him if you were comfortable with that. But he didn’t think you would be.”

  He saw now she was telling the truth, and his windpipe felt tight, his voice breathy, as he said, “Doris. For God’s sake. You hit me first! Did you tell him you hit me first? Of course not. Did you tell him about the faces you make? He’d want to hit you himself, if he could see you sticking your lower lip out, wagging your face in front of me.” He stood up. “Go to bed.” Adding, as she went up the stairs, “Perhaps your compassionate minister will deliver you a glorious new pipe organ as a prize for your suffering.” Charlie turned the television off and sat in the dark. But he was afraid of the dark, and his heart pounded. He went to the window, but beyond just a few inches he could see only the dark night, and it frightened him. He turned the television back on.

  FIVE

  It was still October when the first snow fell. It came in the afternoon, light as white dandelion thistles being dropped from high in the sky. They took their time reaching ground, so light and sparse they floated. But there was a quiet steadiness to the snow, and by late afternoon, a soft covering lay over places where the ground swelled. Right before it got dark, the skies cleared and the temperatures dropped, and a cold wind swept through the towns by the river, so the new snow swirled like it was being swept by a fast broom. In the morning it lay where the wind had taken it, curled in long, arcing sweeps across a field, or mingled with dried leaves against the base of a tree. There was not much, but the ground was frozen and the branches bare. The sky was a luminous gray; it was to warm up, and then more snow was expected.

  “What do you do with Katherine in the case of a snow day?” asked Tyler’s sister over the phone.

  “Oh, she can stay here with me,” Tyler answered. “Or Connie can watch her. Connie’s a great help.”

  “I spoke to Mother,” said Belle, “and she thinks your house is depressing. The second year after a death, you know, is always worse than the first. You’ve got to get yourself a wife. Mother is driving me bughouse. I swear to God, Tyler. If you don’t call this Susan Bradford, I will.”

  “Well,” said Tyler, shifting his legs, “I’ve been busy.” Then, cautiously: “Belle, I’ve been thinking. I’d like to work out a way to have the girls together. If I hired a sitter full-time, Jeannie could live here.”

  “Tyler,” said Belle, “have you forgotten? You have no money. And, frankly, neither do I. Besides, if you take that child away from Mother right now, you’ll take away her whole reason for living.”

  “Oh, Belle, I don’t think that’s true.”

  “No? You’re lucky she finds that farmhouse depressing, or she’d move right in with you. Call Susan Bradford. Get yourself to Hollywell and meet her for supper. That would make Mother happy, if such a thing is possible. Try marrying a woman she likes, who is nice to her, who will help care for her in her old age. I’m not going to be up for the task—I can tell you that right now.”

  “Now, Belle. Let’s be considerate. Let’s think of the other person first.”

  Silence. He thought she might have walked away from the phone. “Belle?”

  “I heard you. Do you know why Dad said that crap about thinking of the other one first? Always be considerate?”

  “Because he was kind and—”

  “Because he was scared. He was scared to have an opinion. The only opinion that ever mattered in that house was Mother’s. What he meant was, Always think of Margaret Caskey first, because if you don’t, God help you.”

  “Belle, for—”

  “It’s true. And I’m sorry, Tyler, about what you’ve gone through, but you are—excuse me—an idiot. If you’re always thinking of the other person first, you don’t have to bother with what you’re feeling. Or thinking.”

  Tyler turned in his chair and watched as a chickadee, landing on the birdbath, give one tiny shake of his wing. “What do you mean, the second year is worse?”

  “Because the first one goes by in a blur. And then you start remembering things. Call this Susan Bradford creature, Tyler, before Mother drives us all nuts.”

  “Yes,” said Tyler. “Regards to Tom and the kids.”

  He hung up and leaned back in his chair. The truth is, Tyler had less money than Belle—or anyone—knew. Tyler was in debt. The man’s aversion to matters of money may have been a bit stronger than most, but it was not—if you understood his background—especially unusual. Many people, particularly Protestants whose ancestors had come from Puritan stock and had been living up in New England for many, many years, held an attitude toward money that had wrapped around it some cloak of unsavory secrecy. The less spent, the better. The less talked about—better still. It was a bit like food: there to sustain you but not, past a certain point, to be fully enjoyed. That was gluttony.

  In any event, the dreary fact was that Lauren’s intemperance had left Tyler in debt. Her shopping sprees had depleted their small savings at an alarming rate, and there were still doctors’ bills not covered by insurance. But it was the dress shops outside of Hollywell that had allowed her to buy clothes on cr
edit, apparently because she was the minister’s wife, which had really racked up the bills. Her father had sent her money occasionally, and she had sometimes paid with that. But when she died, Tyler had discovered dresses hidden in the attic, shoes and bracelets and pocketbooks, many with the price tags still on. He would not have dreamed of trying to take them back—he could not even bear to think of them. But the bills still came in from the shops. He had taken out a bank loan, but it would be a year, at least, on his current small salary, before he was even returned to square one. He had hoped, with the new budget being planned, that the board would give him a raise, but he’d heard no talk of this, and he was certainly not a man to ask for one. At the same time, he did think he might inquire about more money for Connie, so he could have his kids together.

  My heart is unquiet ’til it rests with you. Tyler stood up and rubbed the stinging pain beneath his collarbone. “Are you having a pity party?” his mother used to say to him when he was small and distressed over something. “Where’s your dignity?” his mother would say. “Nobody likes a weak person.”

  Bonhoeffer, Tyler thought, beginning to walk back and forth, would have agreed with that. Bonhoeffer had been disgusted by those men in prison who messed their trousers when the bomb alert was heard, men who moaned and collapsed “under the slightest test of endurance. There are seventeen year olds here in much more dangerous places during the raids who behave splendidly, while these others go around whimpering,” Bonhoeffer had written to his friend Bethge. “It really makes me sick.”

  Tyler rubbed his shoulder. If Bonhoeffer could spend a year in a prison cell, only to find himself taken naked out into the woods to be hanged, then he, Tyler Caskey, could pay his debts, care for his children, and do his job. He turned back to his desk and saw the words he had written for a new sermon: “God is on your side if”—he picked up a pencil and leaned over to finish—“you live your life as honestly as you can each day that goes by.” Tyler looked at the words for a long time, then stood and walked out into the hallway.

  It may not have been a German prison cell, but the quietness unnerved him, and he thought there might not be anything as empty as an empty house in autumn. Outside, branches of oaks moved, bits of snow stuck in their crevices. He could see across to patches of brown field, he heard a car go past on the road. He thought: One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The rooms of the old farmhouse seemed scarred, as though a sword had been whipped through them, in spite of the fact that the furniture sat complacent and intact, the dining table and ladder-back chairs, the couch in the living room, the lamp in the corner. In this room he had once said to his wife that he liked that Kierkegaard’s name meant “churchyard.” Lauren had rolled her large eyes and said, “That’s so like you, Tyler. The name means ‘graveyard.’ “ Remembering this, he frowned. They’d had a real squabble about it. What was a churchyard, after all, he had argued. A graveyard, yes, but what was wrong with preferring the sound of the word “churchyard”? Why did she have to insist on “graveyard”? And what had she meant? “That’s so like you, Tyler.” It was like being pinched, he thought now. Little pinches unexpectedly in his marriage. “Reverend Don’t Make Waves,” she had called him once. He could not remember why.

  The kitchen door slammed.

  “Oh, my goodness,” said Connie, when Tyler stepped into the hallway. “The wind just did that, just as I came in here. The wind’s picked up out there.”

  “Well, Connie Hatch,” said Tyler, “how awfully nice to see you.”

  IN THE CLASSROOM on the top floor of the Academy, Charlie Austin faced his senior Latin class. Toby Dunlop had not done his homework, and he bent his head over his desk after the confession had been forced by Charlie. The other students sat sprawled in their seats, only a few glancing at Charlie. But his silence, as it continued, made them uneasy, and they stopped rustling their papers, their notebooks, the girls stopped pulling at their kneesocks. They had been translating one of Horace’s odes. “What shame or limit should there be to grief for a person so dear? Teach the songs of mourning—” and the fact that these students showed so little interest made Charlie want to go to the window and smash the glass with his fist. He had often felt sympathetically toward these kids, their youthful unknowingness, their polite, deferential desire to please. He had wanted—at times as much as he wanted anything—to give them the beauty of this language, the poetry from centuries before that could speak to their own nascent needs.

  The fact that on this wintry autumn day they had not been able to attend to what he said, that in fact they had not (for it was not just Toby Dunlop) bothered to finish their assignment, filled Charlie with images of violence—a munitions dump exploding, glass flying through the air. “Class is dismissed,” he said, and he was gratified in a tiny way by the quiet sense of amazement that followed this. “I mean it,” he said, waving an arm. “Get out of here. I can’t teach you if you don’t do your part. So go away. Go home, go sit in your cars, go wherever you want. But this class is over.” He picked up his books and left.

  In the library, he went to the dictionary and looked up the words “nervous breakdown”: “Any disabling mental disorder requiring treatment.” Charlie looked at this for a long time, taking the dictionary with him to the window seat of the library. Mrs. White, behind the desk, smiled at him.

  “Requiring treatment.” That simplified things, since he would have no treatment. He knew a fellow veteran in Togas hospital who’d been shocked; they stuck a piece of rubber in his mouth, turned on the switch, the guy crapped all over the place, and now he just sat in a chair all day. Charlie long ago had stopped visiting him. No, there would be no treatment.

  Charlie pondered the other words. “Mental disorder.” The whole world had a mental disorder. It was the word “disabling” that was dangerous. He pictured a wheelchair, his head drooping down to his chest as he sat in it. Pretty goddamn spooky. Disabling. He flipped through the pages of the dictionary, looked “disable” up: “to make unable; cripple, incapacitate,” or “2) to make legally incapable, disqualify.” So a mental disorder that incapacitated him. Which meant, Charlie thought, closing the dictionary, taking it back to the book stand, that one just kept on going. He nodded toward Mrs. White.

  The sun set quickly this time of year: it rested on the horizon a minute, then sank like a huge stone. Charlie got into his car and drove home. Seeing the lighted windows made him want to weep; he understood that were he ever to leave, this image before him, the small gray house with its white shutters, the juniper bushes to the side, the blue spruce by the porch—this image would haunt him forever.

  “Doris,” he called, walking through the door. “Doris?”

  His older son was watching television. Charlie walked past, up the stairs. Doris was standing in the bedroom. “Do you think I don’t know?” she said. Her lips had no color, and he had the sense that someone had suddenly poured water on him; he could barely stand up. Doris yanked back the quilt, the sheet, and pointed. “Do you think I don’t hear you, awake at night? Do you think I don’t know what you’re lying there doing right next to me? At first I thought, Well it happened in his sleep, no one can help what they dream. But then I checked every morning, and a new stain, every morning, and I started lying awake pretending I was asleep, and I could hear you. Last night I heard you, Charlie, and then even this morning early! Are you a pervert, for God’s sake? Are you, Charlie?”

  “Doris, keep your voice down.”

  “I know perfectly well you’re not thinking of me when you do that. Who are you thinking of?”

  “Doris.” He stood there, his coat still on, still holding his briefcase.

  She stepped toward him. “I can’t slap you,” she said fiercely, “because the kids are downstairs, but I would like to slap you until you fall over.” She followed him as he tried to move away from her, and pushed him hard.

  “Jesus,” he murmured, hunching over. “Jesus, Doris. Please stop.”


  TYLER WAS NOT in the business of converting people, and the fact that Connie had not been to church for many years was not something he would have thought to ask her about. He was surprised when she said one morning, “Why did Jesus say to love our enemies?” She had just cut two squares from a pan of coffee cake that sat on the kitchen table between them. She licked the knife and looked at him.

  A pattern of frost, like tiny snowflakes, spread above the corners of the kitchen window, and a wind blew, so that even with the storm window, a cold draft leaked through. Connie put the knife down and tugged on the cuffs of her woolen sweater.

  “Because it’s easy to love our friends.”

  Connie took a big bite of coffee cake, pressed the tip of her finger into the brown sugar left on the plate. “Not for me,” she said. “It was hard for me to love my friends. And now I don’t have too many anymore.”

  He watched her.

  “I got jealous of them,” she said, eating the brown sugar from her finger. “They have kids, they have houses. Some even have mother-in-laws they can stand.”

  Tyler nodded.

  “When I was a kid,” Connie continued, “I knew a really fat woman. One day she said to me, ‘Inside me is a slim, beautiful girl.’ “ Connie took another bite of coffee cake. “And then she died,” she added, wiping crumbs off her fingers.

  Tyler set his coffee mug down quietly. “And inside you is a mother?”

  “That’s right,” said Connie. “Just like the fat woman. And then I’ll die.” She shook her head. “I’ve dreamed about those kids so much, Mr. Caskey, I’ve practically thought they were real. Jane and Jerry are their names. Nice kids. Well behaved.”

  “I’ve always liked the name Jane,” Tyler said.

  “Yuh.” Connie wiped at her nose with a tissue. “Well, I’ve lived in a dream world.”

  The minister looked out the window. “I think people often do.”