Abide With Me

  “Ah, Mary,” the man said, “you’re one of the best we have. I hate to see you go through this.”

  Mary made no attempt to stop the tears that sprang to her eyes. “But God’s teeth,” she said. “It’s only November! How’m I going to make it to June with this creature in my class?”

  “When I started out years ago,” said Mr. Waterbury, motioning for the young woman to take a seat near his desk, “I had a child who—oh, I know it sounds foolish—but this little fellow scared me to death.” Mr. Waterbury opened his desk drawer, brought out a penknife, and started to clean his nails. “Ah, that kid.” The man shook his head. “He didn’t come from much. You always find that, Mary. When the kid’s in trouble, there’s trouble at home.” He looked at Mary and made an exaggerated grimace with his mouth. “When the kid’s in trouble, there’s trouble at home.”

  “But what do I do?” Mary leaned forward. She let the tears slip from her eyes. The fact is, she felt something quite pleasurable inside.

  “We’ll get Rhonda Skillings in on this,” Mr. Waterbury assured her. “You’re not going to go through this alone.” He dropped the penknife into the drawer, pushed the drawer shut. “Not going through this alone. No sirree. I promise you that.”

  Through the large window of his office, the setting sun had done something marvelous with the sky. The horizon looked as though it had been painted pink and purple with the large brushstrokes of a child. “Look at that,” Mr. Waterbury said, though it had been years since he’d commented on a setting sun.

  “Oh, would you look at that,” Mary said.

  The sky had gone dark completely by the time Mary left his office. Mr. Waterbury had talked and talked, and she’d had to sit there, her pleasurable feeling sinking with the sun. Since 1945, he told her, the class size had been getting bigger. Even all the way up here in West Annett, there wasn’t enough money to pay for an extra teacher like Mary, well qualified, with talent. Did she know that in New York City, a school had painted a picture of the country’s map on the playground? It was true. A fine idea. Time to teach these kids about the country, such a wonderful country, and all sorts of crazy things happening. Russia could blow us up in two shakes, and we couldn’t even beat them at math. Had Mary seen this report? The Pursuit of Excellence. Put out by the finest educators in the country. Said we should separate the gifted and the retarded, and it would be swell to get some funding, if not from the state, then maybe the federal government. Mary nodded and nodded. “I’ll give Rhonda Skillings a call,” the man finally said.

  TYLER PICTURED Connie Hatch returning, how she would simply show up one day, stepping through the back door, and he would hear her from his study and go to the kitchen to find her hanging up her sweater; she’d turn with a smile of apology. “Sorry about that,” she’d say. And he would clap his hands together once. “Oh, Connie, I’ve missed you,” he’d say. “It’s been unbearable in this house without you.”

  She did not come.

  He took Susan Bradford skating one weekday morning, and she laughed girlishly as she took her first hesitant glides. “Haven’t done this in ages,” she called, her brown ski pants hugging her ample rump. When she almost lost her footing over a root that was bumping up through the ice, she fell against him, and he held her arms for a moment. It was, other than shaking hands, their first touch, and between them flashed the possibility of intimacy. Later, as they skated side by side, he held her elbow, pointing with his other hand at a hawk that was gliding high.

  Over hot chocolate at a diner in Hollywell, he watched her gray eyes, and tried to imagine what she would look like were she angry with him.

  “Just about broke my heart,” Susan was saying, placing her splayed fingers against her sweater’s collar. She had been telling him about mittens she had knit for her nieces, how the pom-poms had been cut off by the children’s mother. “But it’s better than one of them chewing on it and choking, I have to agree.”

  “Oh, of course,” he said. “You can’t be too careful.”

  “I love to knit,” she said, dipping her head toward her hot chocolate.

  “It’s a nice thing, isn’t it,” Tyler said. “Mother used to knit.” He wanted to talk about Connie. He wanted to tell her how Connie was misunderstood—a good person who had never had the children she wanted. He wanted to tell her about Walter Wilcox alone in his cat-smelling house. He wanted to say that Carol Meadows had lost a child years ago. That all of it seemed unbearably sad. That he had no idea what to do about Katherine.

  “My mother used to knit, too,” she said. “My mother was wonderful.”

  “I’m sure she was.”

  “She was so brave during her illness.”

  “You’ll have to come for Sunday dinner again,” he said. But something unpleasant was sprouting inside him, and he looked around for the waitress to get the check.

  LYING IN BED next to his wife, Charlie Austin said quietly, “He married a tart.”

  Doris turned her head. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Your minister. The woman was a tart.”

  Doris struggled to sit up, tugging on her flannel nightgown. “Charlie, you can’t go speaking ill of the dead. Good heavens!”

  “We’re all dead,” he responded.

  She stayed on her elbow, peering at him in the near darkness. The full moon that shone through the gauzy curtain gave a shape to her body, covered in the quilt, rising up like a big sea animal, the flipper of one arm holding her weight. “I’m worried about you,” she finally said.

  “Oh, for christ’s sake.” He turned away, saw the blurry shape of the moon beyond the gauzy curtains. “It’s supposed to snow tomorrow, but the clouds haven’t moved in,” he said.

  “Why did you say that about the poor dead woman?” Doris lay back down, turned away herself.

  “Because she was. And she knew I knew it, too.”

  “I guess I can’t believe you’re saying all this, Charlie. The woman was from out of state; she was shy, I think, and now she’s dead. Do you want people criticizing you when you’re dead?”

  “I don’t give a damn what they do.”

  Her silence chastised him. He’d been planning on telling her Chris Congdon, at a board meeting, had mentioned Tyler didn’t want a new organ—nobody did except Doris, Charlie realized. Nobody gave a hoot.

  But he said instead, “Speaking of out-of-staters. I heard there’s a developer coming up from New York, wants to build a string of summer houses along the far side of China Lake. Near that Jew camp.”

  “Oh, Charlie.” Doris rolled back toward him. “That’s scary.”

  He didn’t like it himself, picturing those goddamn rich people you saw sometimes in the summer, coming into the post office to buy stamps with a hundred-dollar bill. Taking pictures of the grocery store, for christ’s sake. Saying to each other, “Isn’t this town cute?”

  “Phooey,” he said to Doris. “There’s already cabins over there—what’s a few more?”

  “But those cabins, Charlie, belong to people who live in Maine—you know that. They come over from Bangor or up from Shirley Falls. These new places, if the fellow’s from New York, will be huge. They may very well be Jews, too.”

  “Go to sleep, Doris.”

  “What made you say that about Lauren Caskey? That’s a horrible thing to say.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  He’d said it about Lauren Caskey because he’d been thinking about the woman in Boston, how everything was known in just one look, that you could meet a woman, and before a second had passed, that woman—not many, but some—could look right in your eyes and you could see she liked to get laid. Caskey, blind, arrogant idiot, thought he could marry for lust and nobody would know. But the knowledge of the woman dying in that drawn-out way . . . Charlie closed his eyes, felt ludicrously and suddenly close to tears; he thought of all the snow that would be covering the town throughout the coming winter, the woman’s dead body in her grave. Please, he thought. That was the only w
ord he ever used anymore to pray.

  ON STEWARDSHIP SUNDAY, the morning skies were a clear expanse of pale blue, and the world seemed stark, and bare naked. Bare branches made the river visible from the road, its edges frozen over with crusted blankets of blue-shadowed snow, the middle a dark gray where you could sense the cold, cold water moving underneath. Annett Academy, its three white buildings, seemed reduced, its parking lot bare this morning, the maple trees in front bare, behind it the blue sky and the thin strip of bare road passing by, and Tyler, driving to church to ask his parish to open their hearts (meaning, today, their pocketbooks), perceived in the landscape a barrenness, an astringency to the scene spread out before him, that seemed to seep into his soul.

  Perhaps others felt this, too, for the congregation put away the maroon hymnals and sat down, having sung without enthusiasm “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.” There was a stifled yawn behind a church program, women adjusting their coats, someone bending to pick up a dropped glove, a feeling that they were settling in for the long haul now. Reverend Caskey said, “Let . . . us . . . think,” and remembered a man in seminary who had fainted in front of his first congregation. “We must not allow religion to become a mockery of God.” He could not remember if the man had finished his sermon or not, only that a nurse in the front row had come to administer to him. “The religious man,” Tyler continued, “is the man who dares to lose himself in loving others, who dares to sympathize with the suffering of others the way God sympathizes with us.” He had not cared for the fellow who fainted, but he could not now remember why.

  “People ask these days, How can the world continue to arm itself for war after the destruction of the past fifty years? But the Bible itself tells us the cause of war.” Tyler paused and ran his finger lightly over his upper lip. The only time he had ever fainted was in fourth grade, during his only piano lesson, when he threw up all over the keys. He had seen spots before his eyes. He was not seeing spots now; it was just that everyone seemed very far away. “ ‘From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence—’ “

  A hymnal dropped with a loud thump up in the choir loft.

  “God’s capacity for love is endless,” Tyler said, his face becoming so warm it seemed lit from behind with candles. “He has shown us directly how it is better to give than to receive. To give is the way we praise God and stand by Him.” Perhaps the man who fainted that day became a librarian at the seminary. Tyler did not want to be a librarian. A drop of sweat rolled down his face and landed on the Bible. With his handkerchief he patted his forehead. “Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, as a young girl, was able to write the truth when she said, ‘He comes to find another heaven which is infinitely dearer to Him—the heaven of our souls, created in His image.’ “

  Two wide strips of sunlight fell through the windows and folded across the maroon carpet, the white backs of the pews; an earring twinkled as Rhonda Skillings turned to pick a piece of lint from her husband’s sleeve. Tyler, glancing up, believed he saw her whispering, and heat washed through him once more. “Let us pray,” he said. Bonhoeffer confessed in prison that he became tired of praying. Perhaps he should say this to his congregation, but he did not want to look up again. “Let us pray,” he said again.

  By the end of the service, he felt he had been through a month at boot camp. Not the physical stress of running back and forth with a rifle and knapsack, but the dark pinch of being in the company of those with whom he had not one thing in common. In the car, his mother said quietly, “What ails you?”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, and it was snack time in the classroom. The children sat at little tables, bringing out crackers with peanut butter, little bags of potato chips, cookies, apples. Mrs. Ingersoll opened a large can of pineapple juice and poured it into tiny Dixie cups. Katherine saw Martha Watson watching her, and so she opened her red plastic lunch box, pretending to look for her snack, but she knew there was nothing in there except a peanut-butter sandwich.

  “How come you never have a snack?” Martha asked her.

  Katherine closed her lunch box and looked away. In the doorway stood Mrs. Skillings. Mrs. Ingersoll put down the can of juice and went to speak to her quietly. And then Katherine heard—they all heard—Mrs. Ingersoll say, “Katie, could you come here, please?”

  The children stopped talking and watched as Katherine, so frightened she felt like her arms were melting, walked to the doorway of the classroom. “You go along with Mrs. Skillings,” Mrs. Ingersoll said. “We’ll all be here when you get back.”

  No one else was in the long corridor. Mrs. Skillings seemed so tall as to be walking on stilts. “We think you’re a very special girl,” said Mrs. Skillings. “And we thought it would be fun if you and I played some games in my office.”

  When Mrs. Skillings sat down, her dress rustled. She put on a pair of glasses that had sparkly things on the flipped-up edges of them. She looked so different in her glasses that it seemed like she’d become someone else.

  “Now, what’s the difference between beer and Coke?”

  Katherine looked at the woman’s big white earrings, which seemed like the tops of small cupcakes. She sat with her tiny shoulders slumped forward, her hands in her lap. Mrs. Skillings had put a big wooden block under Katherine’s feet. “So they won’t fall asleep,” she said.

  Katherine looked away and didn’t speak.

  “Let’s try a different question,” Mrs. Skillings said. She moved a sheet of paper, and her bracelets made a delicate clinking sound that caused Katherine’s whole body to give a quick shiver.

  Katherine whispered to her lap. “I know a secret.”

  Mrs. Skillings was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Do you, dear?”

  THAT EVENING TYLER sat on the couch in his study while moonlight fell through the window. Katherine was next to him, turning the pages of a magazine that she held upside down in her lap. “Do you want to color a picture?” Tyler asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Tummy feel funny?”

  She shrugged.

  “Looking forward to seeing Jeannie again in just a few days?”

  She nodded.

  “Me, too.” He pictured Jeannie’s eyes laughing, as Lauren’s once had. He pictured Susan Bradford’s eyes, and thought they revealed nothing—what would it be like to live a lifetime with someone whose eyes revealed nothing? He thought how poor Connie’s eyes would light up with a laugh, and wherever she was now, her eyes must be filled with anxiety.

  Tyler rubbed the spot beneath his collarbone, and imagined Bonhoeffer in a freezing prison cell writing, “I know only this: you go away—and all is gone.” Bonhoeffer was comforted by writing his poems. People were comforted by writing things down. Lauren’s letters, now in the attic, letters she had written to herself. Why do I feel such loss, when I have Tyler and the baby? The minister tapped Katherine’s knee. “Let’s go, kid. What do you say?” He got his skates from the mudroom, tucked her in the car beside him, and drove over the hill to China Lake.

  They were the only people there. His skates made wonderful scraping sounds against the ice. Katherine sat on a log, wrapped in a blanket and shivering. Back and forth he went, Bonhoeffer’s poem repeating through his head: “I will think and think again, until I find what I have lost.” Tyler’s skates dug into the ice, moving him faster and faster, until he slowed down and went back and picked up the child, and she clung to him, her little legs spread against his torso, and together they moved around the moonlit lake; scrape-scrape-scrape went the skates. Scape-grace.

  He saw the splash of moonlight that fell upon the earth, and while he knew that through the love of Jesus Christ his life could come back to him, he felt then a shudder of despair so cavernous that his legs might have given out from under him, if not for holding Katherine. One thought, shaky and barely formed, seemed like a dark pile of stones placed along the edge of a crevice, and his mind would creep toward it, then run back: Could it be he had no self?

  Never before had
such a thought seemed possible to Tyler. But he wondered if madness lay beyond that pile of stones, and while faith should be able to save him, it seemed that faith was a road that stretched confidently past that pile of stones, wound past the edge of that deep crevice that he seemed compelled to approach and peek over. No, Tyler was not losing his faith—it seemed to have lost him. And it did not help to know that in another poem Bonhoeffer himself had wondered, “Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?”

  It didn’t help, because Bonhoeffer was a man of greatness, and he was just Tyler Caskey. He skated over the lake, the small ridges of ice bumping gently under his feet, the shadows of spruce trees pointed and dark in the moonlight. He did not want to go back to his empty house. Walter Wilcox had said he lay in his bed every night thinking of the things he did and did not do.

  Tyler stopped skating abruptly, turning a small, quick circle.

  If Walter Wilcox was lying in his bed every night, then he wasn’t sleeping in the church. The blanket under the pew had been used by someone else. Tyler skated back to the river’s edge. He set Katherine down, unlaced his skates.

  “Of course,” Carol Meadows said on the telephone. “I’ll make up the little cot for her right now.”

  AS THOUGH HE were a fugitive himself, he opened the church door only partway, slipping through. He passed through the vestibule, where old programs lay fanned on a shelf by the door, their whiteness showing in the near dark, and then entered the back of the darkened sanctuary. The moon shone a stream of pale light through the far window. In a loud whisper he said, “Connie?” And waited; there was no sound. Slowly, he walked down the aisle, past the shaft of moonlight. Up near the front, he could see nothing. “Connie? You must be cold. I’m alone,” he added.

  He stepped up the two steps to the chancel, and sat in his chair. A car drove by on Main Street, the lights coming through the windows briefly, going away again. He closed his eyes, thinking, Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, each word seeming a dark, warm space he was too big to crawl into.