Abide With Me

  He had a great deal to do. It was a small parish, but he needed to acquaint himself with the board and the deacons and the various committees; he went over the membership files, the records of pledges, the church school enrollment, old reports to area ministers. He spent time with the secretary, Matilda Gowen, a pleasant, elderly woman who came to the church two mornings a week to mimeograph the programs and send out letters and make calls to a plumber if something leaked, though the sexton, Bruce Gilgore, did a good job of keeping the building in shape. Tyler wrote sermons, rewrote them, committed them to memory, made sure to be available to anyone who needed his pastoral counseling. And people did. His first month there, a tractor turned over on the Taylor boy, crushing his leg, and Tyler spent hours in the hospital waiting room, praying and talking with the boy’s parents. The woman who ran the small post office came by one day and said when she was in high school she had given birth to a baby boy and put him up for adoption. Did Tyler think she ought to tell her husband?

  He was daunted by these responsibilities. But he found that through careful listening, the answers came to him. A good doctor knows the patient holds the diagnosis, George Atwood had said to him, and the postmistress, as it turned out, wanted to tell her husband, and did. It had a happy ending.

  Another woman came into his office to say that her neighbor, the widow Dorothy, was wandering the back roads at all hours. Tyler paid the widow a call, and found her daughter was there, spending the day with her small children running about the yard. “Oh, upstairs,” he was told casually, when he inquired about Dorothy. He found the old woman tied to a chair in her bedroom. She looked at Tyler with the complacency of a young schoolgirl. “My wrist hurts,” she said simply. And so Tyler telephoned the woman’s other daughter, who lived in Connecticut, and eventually the poor widow was sent to the county farm, which Tyler found to be such a horrible place that he could visit it only infrequently, and even then for a very short stay. This sort of thing troubled him a great deal. Had he done the right thing? Was there really no money from the Connecticut daughter with which to care for her mother?

  The postmistress came back to tell him her husband had taken the news well, and she had one other confession: There had been a second child by a different man a year after the first. Should she tell her husband about that as well?

  Mostly, he listened. And spoke of God’s enduring love.

  He and Lauren were invited for dinner a number of times. At Bertha Babcock’s house, Lauren sat on a stuffed sofa and said, “Oh, I hated English class,” when Bertha spoke of retiring after forty years. “We had this stupid old woman who used to prop her breasts up with the spelling book.” Bertha, who was a heavy-breasted old woman herself, flushed deeply, and for a moment Tyler had a sense of things not being real.

  “You see,” he said to Bertha, “how lucky your students were to have you. Nobody would hate English class with you, I’m sure.”

  “I hope not,” said Bertha, “but apparently you never know.”

  “This blueberry pie is delicious,” Tyler said. “I imagine Lauren would like the recipe.”

  Lauren looked at him, at Bertha. “Okay,” Lauren said.

  But Bertha’s husband helped out. “Lauren, I bet you were a live wire,” he said, and smiled broadly, his teeth crooked and stained from years of tea-drinking.

  “I suppose I was,” Lauren said.

  Tyler said nothing to Lauren afterward; he had made the decision he would not censor her. She was who she was, a bright-faced, beautiful girl, and if she said things that seemed the wrong thing to say, well—he was not going to fight about that.

  What they fought about was money. He drew up a budget to show Lauren how much could be spent weekly on food and other things, and she was aghast. “But what am I supposed to do if I want something?”

  “What do you want? Tell me, and we’ll decide together.”

  “I don’t want a budget! I don’t want to be told, ‘You can only spend this amount.’ “

  “But, Lauren, we only have this amount.”

  “The baby will need things!”

  “Of course the baby will need things. And we’ll get them.” He had a small amount of savings from his summer preaching jobs, and from part-time work he had done in the library as a student. But he learned fairly soon that he couldn’t talk to Lauren about money without it becoming a fight. And he did not want the money problems to scrape against the sweetness they had shared.

  A few times he arrived home from a meeting and found her in tears. “Oh, my dear,” he said. “What is it?”

  Lauren shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m bored. You’re away all day, or even when you’re here, you’re in your study working.”

  They would go sometimes to see friends of theirs whom Tyler had gone to college with, or they would go back to Brockmorton for dinner with the Atwoods. But she needed someone in town with whom she could talk. He understood this, and he was sorry that she could not discuss anyone in town. “A minister’s wife can’t gossip,” he told her.

  “But gossip is the only kind of conversation that’s fun,” she wailed.

  “Then gossip with your college friends when you go back to Boston to visit. You just can’t gossip about anybody here.”

  “You mean I can’t find out some woman was tied up in the attic and tell anyone? Or that Lillian Ashworth had two babies when she was just a kid?”

  “Well, no, Lauren. You can’t.”

  She was weeping now. “Tyler, those women in the Ladies’ Aid are gruesome. They never laugh. They have these coffee klatches and talk about how to freeze blueberries, and their houses are dark and cold, and it’s—it’s just horrible.”

  He knelt before her. “We’ll go to a movie in Hollywell this weekend. Would you like that?”

  She smiled through her tears. “You big old lumpy teddy bear,” she said. “Why did I ever marry you?”

  He leaned back on his heels. “Why did you?”

  “Because I love you, you big old idiot.”

  “And I love you. And you can gossip with me all you want.”

  “Okay,” she said, brightening. “Tell me what you learned today. Tell me everything and don’t leave anything out.”

  Tyler sat on the couch beside her. “I learned that Matilda Gowen fell in love with a lobster fisherman when she was a young girl, and her parents were against it, and sent her to England to cool her heels. Then she came back and married Skogie.”

  “Okay,” Lauren said. “That’s good. Where did you get that?”

  “Ora Kendall.”

  “Oh, I love it,” said Lauren, clapping her hands. “Imagine Matilda as a young girl. She must’ve been pretty. She has nice skin.”

  “It seems she taught in a one-room schoolhouse on Pucker-brush Island, and I guess this fisherman was hired to take her across to the island every day, and then pick her up when school was over.”

  “Oh, imagine!” Lauren hugged herself. “Imagine Matilda, young and pretty, and maybe her skirt would have been long, and was whipped around her ankles by the wind as she stepped out of the boat. Teaching a roomful of kids, and then walking back along a path with wild rosebushes, thinking about her fisherman, and there he’d be, with his big rubber boots on, and help her into the boat. I wonder if they did the whole thing.”

  “That I don’t know, but I doubt it.”

  “Yes, but you can never tell, Tyler. They must have, or her parents wouldn’t have sent her off. Maybe she had a baby in England, maybe that’s what she was doing there. When did she meet Skogie?”

  Tyler shook his head. “I’ve told you all I know.”

  “Well, that’s good for one day. Not bad, Ty-the-pie.” The feel of her arms around him was joyous, as natural as blue sky. And then she found a friend.

  CAROL MEADOWS WAS a quiet woman, who had a lambency in her large brown eyes and a creamy luminescence to her skin. She was in her early thirties, though she could have passed for ten years younger, and there
was in the soft gentleness of her motions something otherworldly. This may have been the result of what happened a few years before the Caskeys moved to town: Carol Meadows had put her baby down for a nap, and, looking in on her just a little while later, had found the child unbelievably, inexplicably dead. Carol had three more babies in a row, but she tended to keep to herself, her husband and children being almost exclusively her world.

  The Meadowses lived in a small red-shingled house far out of town on a hill with a wide sweep of sky, and a view that looked out over pastures and trees. The discreet pleasantness of the place was somewhat marred by the four large lightning rods attached to its roof, their thrust and size and vehemence seeming to say, “We are ready for any attack!” At the Academy, where he taught science, Davis Meadows was thought to be strange. He kept on his desk a human bladder inside a jar of formaldehyde, and spoke obsessively of entropic doom, and also the effects of the hydrogen bomb in Hiroshima. If Carol had known of her husband’s reputation, it wouldn’t have mattered. Her heart was an open and loving one, and its ache, which had promised to be immutable after such a loss, eased into a consecration of this man; they were bound by this. She took his fear of disaster quietly in stride, saying nothing about the ugliness of the lightning rods, or the expense of having seat belts installed in their old car, and when he had a bomb shelter built behind the house, she took that in stride, too, and bought the cans of food, the cots, the candles, the board games. And during the summer months she agreed to never have the children play in the little plastic pool unless her husband was home to help watch them.

  Whatever instinct it was that drew Lauren Caskey to her, it was a good one, for Carol’s sense of discretion was natural and deep, and except for her husband, Carol repeated to no one the things she learned.

  “Good God, I had no idea you were so far away,” said Lauren Caskey that first day, sitting down and pulling off a red high heel, giving it a shake. “I don’t want to run my stocking.” She had picked her way across the gravel to get to the front door, and Carol, watching through the window, had felt a pang for this young woman so wrongly dressed in a linen maternity suit with red piping, wearing red, shiny high heels, a red pocketbook on her wrist. “I got lost,” Lauren said, accepting the coffee poured. “My God. You make one wrong turn out here and you could be lost for days. None of the roads have names. Why in the world don’t these roads have names?”

  “Everyone’s lived here so long, they know where the roads go.”

  Lauren opened her red pocketbook, brought out a compact. “It doesn’t seem friendly not to name the roads. Can I use your bathroom? Does it flush right?”

  Carol pointed with her coffee spoon. “As far as I know, it should be all right.”

  “Some of these old houses up here, the toilets scare me to death. Did you know Bertha Babcock has one that’s meant to look like an outhouse?”

  “Well, Bertha loves history,” Carol said.

  “What a cute place,” Lauren said, when she emerged. “Tyler hates it when I pee with the door open. Does your husband mind? Truthfully? Tyler can make me feel terrible.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t mean to.”

  “I don’t know. But I hate that smelly old farmhouse they stuck us in.”

  The next time Lauren showed up, the sky outside the window had an opalescent quality to it, and because, to Carol, the sky was like a friend, she pointed it out to Lauren. “Oh, lovely,” Lauren said, without looking. “I’m so fat I feel like a cow. I could be lying out there in your pasture.”

  “But you’re going to have this baby soon. Really soon,” Carol added. Lauren wore a soft-blue maternity dress, and her bulging front had lowered.

  “Gosh, he fills that right up,” Lauren said, nodding toward the playpen between them. Matt, Carol’s youngest, lay sleeping on its floor.

  Carol nodded. She didn’t say that when he had his nap she could not have him out of her sight.

  “Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?” Lauren was opening her pocketbook, a blue one today. “I don’t see any ashtrays.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  “Tyler hates it, so you’re not to tell. He says it looks very bad for a minister’s wife to be smoking.”

  Carol set an ashtray in front of her. “Tyler’s sermon on Sunday was marvelous. People are really impressed, Lauren. And his prayers—”

  “He writes those himself,” Lauren said, exhaling like a woman who knew how to smoke. “People might not know this, but a lot of ministers aren’t original. They have books and magazines filled with published sermons and prayers, but Tyler writes his own.”

  “He’s gifted,” Carol said. “And speaking without notes.”

  Lauren nodded, the hand with the cigarette placed over her huge stomach. “Yeah, people like him. They’re coming to him with their problems, you know.” She held up a hand. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to repeat a thing.”

  “Oh, no, you mustn’t,” Carol said.

  “Can I say one thing, though?”

  “Lauren, someone in your position must be careful.”

  “I’m only going to say Bertha Babcock’s pie crust could break your toes.” Lauren flicked an ash into the ashtray. “When you eat it you feel like someone’s being mean to you. How come you don’t belong to the Historical Society, or any group?”

  “I like to be here in the evenings with Davis. And during the day he has the car.”

  Lauren rubbed her large, tight stomach. “You’re lucky, then. Those church women—oh, I’m not going to gossip. But Carol”—and Lauren’s eyes seemed to squint in some confusion—“they don’t like me.”

  “They just have to get used to you. You’re fashionable and pretty—”

  “Well, they could be, too, if they tried.”

  “It’s different,” Carol said, but she knew these women did not think of themselves as unfashionable, and Carol didn’t think of them that way, either.

  “You don’t find them a little . . . grim?”

  “Oh, well. They are who they are, that’s all. They’re nice women, really.”

  “You think that Jane Watson woman is nice?” Lauren opened her eyes wide. “Carol, she’d just as soon sell me to the Russians!”

  Carol burst into a laugh. “And what does she think the Russians would do with you?”

  “I don’t know. Make me into a satellite.”

  “Oh, Lauren,” the woman said kindly, “you really are funny. Tyler’s very lucky to have you.”

  “I’m glad you think that,” Lauren said. “I really am.” She pushed aside her blue pocketbook, gazed down at the sleeping Matt. Then she looked around, out the window, back to Carol. “But can I just ask you?” she said, with seriousness. “What do you do all day?”

  WITHOUT REALIZING IT, he had expected to have a son, and when the doctor came out to the waiting room to announce he had a daughter, there was a strange moment of confusion in Tyler’s mind. But when he was allowed to see the baby through the glass, her perfect, calm, sleeping face filled him with such awe that tears rolled from his eyes. “You’re the baby,” Lauren said, when she saw his wet face. “For crying out loud. Please don’t do that again,” she said, reaching for the water by the bed stand. “I have never seen a grown man cry, and I don’t care to see it again.”

  Her mother arrived for two weeks, assuring Lauren there was no reason to nurse—it had gone out of fashion, thank God, since it made your breasts so droopy—and Tyler was shooed to the side as the women moved about, heating bottles in a pan of hot water on the stove, running the washing machine all day, diapers chugging away. “You’re really roughing it up here in the woods, aren’t you?” Mrs. Slatin said to Tyler one day, smiling her smile that he had come to dislike, seeing behind the brown eyes something hard and intractable. He went to the church to stay out of her way.

  Once, arriving home, he found Lauren and her mother making fun of a pair of pink knit booties given by a member of the church. “Can you imagine putting such
a scratchy thing on a sweet baby’s foot?” Mrs. Slatin said.

  And Lauren said, “Oh, Mommy, if you could have seen the awful baby shower they gave me. Such grim politeness—no fun at all!”

  Mrs. Slatin went home. But then his own mother arrived, and, after two days, Lauren whispered to him fiercely, “I want her out of here. She thinks the baby is hers.”

  “Oh, she’ll be gone soon,” he said. “I can’t just kick her out.”

  “You certainly can,” Lauren said. And then: “Or maybe you can’t. God, you are such a scaredy-cat sometimes.”

  The next morning at breakfast, while Lauren stayed upstairs, he said, “Mother, you’re a big help, you really are. But Lauren is anxious now to do the job alone.”

  His mother said nothing. She put her coffee cup down, rose from the table, and went to pack her things. He followed her out to her car. “Mother, really—please come back quite soon. You know how it is—she needs to get a schedule going on her own.”

  Without a word, his mother drove away.

  He telephoned Belle from the church. Belle said, “Tyler, she did this to us all the time growing up.”

  “Did what?”

  “The silent treatment.”

  “She did?”

  “She sure did. Welcome to the club. Tom’d just as soon take a baseball bat to her head.”

  “Belle, good Lord.”

  “Tyler, good-bye.”

  At the baptism, performed by George Atwood, both families seemed congenial, and Tyler gave great thanks. He thought, watching the child held in Lauren’s arms, standing next to the chapel window that said WORSHIP THE LORD IN THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS, while George Atwood was bringing his daughter into the community of Christian life, that it might have been the happiest moment of his life.

  Still, the baby’s crying frightened him. Sometimes she cried for more than an hour, her tiny face wrinkled in a rage that astonished him. “What does she want?” he asked.