In the Beauty of the Lilies (2 page)

The thought of eating sickened Clarence; his body felt swollen in its entirety, like an ankle after a sprain, and he scarcely dared take a step, lest he topple from an ungainly height. His palms and armpits had broken out into a sweat. Precariously, seeking to suppress the creaking in both the floorboards and his leather shoes, he slithered across the dining room to the kitchen door, and harked there with his lean head tilted, like that of a doctor listening for a heartbeat in a patient who has sustained a trauma. In his sallow temple a blue vein insistently, fearfully pulsed.

“My goodness, Mavie,” he heard, “don’t be so stingy with the brown sugar—we Americans like our ham
sweet
.” Stella’s buoyant and bossy voice was itself sweetened by its Southern accent, which seven years in New Jersey, and six before that at a pair of cold parishes on the plains of Minnesota, had diluted but not expunged. He had met her in Missouri, at a
dismal struggling church in a gaunt wooden town perched on the river bluffs. She had played the piano at services in lieu of an organ, and run the little Sunday school, with its score or so of pupils. She was overweight and swarthy and plain; feminine beauty was confined to her lively black eyes, with their liquid gleam of mischief and need, and her fine head of thick dark hair, loaded with chestnut highlights and with tortoiseshell devices to hold its waving, buckling, spraying mass in place. His gratitude for her lending the church her vitality—for keeping him company in this failing outpost of Presbyterianism in a land of river-fed, whiskey-fuelled license and of shouting, loutish Baptists—had led imperceptibly, with no clear dividing-line where he could have called a halt, to their marriage. They had been swiftly blessed with two children, a boy and a girl, and then, seven years ago, with a second boy, whom they, after some mild dispute, had agreed to name after the young and virile President.

In her full-bosomed sweet voice Stella was saying, “Then we add two level teaspoons of dry mustard—now, pay attention, Mavie, and watch how I scrape it level with the knife—and just a
splash
, half a teacup you could say but I never measure, of the dry breadcrumbs we pounded fine, to give the basting body, and then we add the moistener, you can use most anything but spit, my Aunt Dorothea used to say—she was a character, dear old Aunt Dode, all bent over like a comma. You can use drippings from the ham, or prune juice, or my daddy down home used to favor a shot-glass of elderberry wine”—pronounced
waaahn
—“but Mr. Wilmot with his tender tummy likes his cider vinegar, so here goes three tablespoons: one, two, three, like
that
.”
That
became two syllables,
tha-yit;
he could mentally see Stella’s chins doubling as she looked down lovingly into her task. “Now I’m going to
let you stir a minute while I see how you trimmed the fat. I declare, I think you cut too deep, Mavie. You’re meant just to slice away the
rind
, all but a collar around the shank bone here, and leave all the good fat you can—it has another hour in the oven to go, and we don’t want it all dried out, now do we, little sweetheart?”

Clarence could not hear Mavie’s murmured, chastened reply. Her people came from Cork, and she lived in that jostling mob of unpainted wooden houses below the mills called Dublin; she was saved from the silk mills, where girls spent ten-hour days at the ribbon looms, by domestic service here. She came before seven in the morning and left at six-thirty, when the Wilmots’ dinner was on the table, unless they were having company, in which case she stayed to serve the table. But on non-laundry days they sometimes allowed her to walk back home and help out her mother with her younger siblings. It was the usual Irish situation: a brood of children, and a father who wasted his wages in the taverns. A profligate race, stubbornly professing an antique creed. Mavis had fascinating fine small hands, red-fingered from being much in soapy water, tentative and fumbling as a child’s hands are, and a serious face whose lips were as pale as her fair skin. After a Thursday when she could steal an hour from work and join the idle young people on Garrett Mountain, her face would show a burst of reddish freckles. Then Stella, who had a Southerner’s fear of the darkening touch of the sun, and yet whose own face imperceptibly turned dusky in the summer, would chasten Mavis playfully for “overindulging in the out-of-doors.”

“Then, while you do that—really
stir
, dear, and don’t be afraid to mash with the back of the spoon—I’ll take the big knife and cut the fat in nice long diagonals—see?—and when
I’m done you can take the tin of cloves and stick one each into the
exact
middle of each diamond-shape! Oh,
don’t
we have fun! Little Teddy just loves pulling the cloves out and sucking each one like a tiny chicken-bone!”

The eavesdropping clergyman, numbed by his sudden atheism, had half-intended to push open the swinging door and enter the fragrant brightness and let his unspeakable wound be soothed by the blameless activity there, but he lost heart and turned away. He stood baffled, looking about the dining room for some exterior sign of the fatal alteration within him.
There is no God
. With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness. Yet no exterior change of color betrayed the event. The mahogany dining table, with its pedestal legs and much-waxed top of faintly mismatching leaves; the Tiffany-glass chandelier, shaped like an inverted punchbowl with scalloped edges and imitation tassels cleverly fabricated in glass and lead; the bowfront sideboard, with its flaking veneer of curly cherry; the brown wallpaper, unchanged since the manse was built in 1880, its alternating idylls (a couple picnicking in courtship, a child chasing a hoop) framed in scrolling lines whose silver glints were nearly smothered by three decades of exposure and ingrained dust: none of these mute surfaces reflected the sudden absence of God from the universe—His legions of angels, His sacrificed Son, His ever-watchful and notoriously mysterious Providence, His ultimate mercy, the eternal Heaven so hard to picture yet for which our hearts so unmistakably yearn, the eternal Hell which even calm, gentle, reasonable Calvin could not conceive as other than indispensable to God’s justice. With the mystery of His freedom vanished the passionately debated distinctions of sublapsarianism, supralapsarianism, and infralapsarianism,
in regard to the precise moment when God imposes election. The mahogany tabletop in silence reflected with a tinted blur the colorful bowl suspended above it, a bowl emptying itself world without end. At the rim of this vast purge, this volcanic desolation, the house’s furnishings stood unchanged, temporarily enclosing and protecting the clergyman and his family.

Temporarily, for few of these elegant if well-worn downstairs furnishings were his; they came with the parsonage and would pass to the use of the next minister and his brood. Only upstairs, in children’s beds and bureaus thriftily acquired as needs arose, and a linen-laden cedar chest—Stella’s cumbersome dowry—that had trailed them throughout the upper Midwest, and a scuffed mahogany fourposter they had bought second-hand in Oshkosh when the rope bed the parish had supplied gave them both painful backs, and a somewhat saccharine framed print of the Heinrich Hoffmann painting of Jesus praying in vain in the Garden of Gethsemane for this cup to pass from Him while the disciples slept—a gift of the parish in leaving Granite Falls—and a few crackled family portraits and small items of quality in silver and ivory descended to him from the Wilmots’ wealthier days as Manhattan importers and merchants, before the Civil War bred a rougher set of entrepreneurs and sent the declining family into the farmlands of New Jersey—only upstairs was some of the furniture theirs, to carry with them on their next move, to his next call. But where would they go without his faith to carry them? His faith was what paid their way.

Yet would he call it back, his shaky half-faith, with its burden of falsity and equivocation, even if he could? In his present state he was a husk, depleted but at last distinct in shape, as if, after a long, enfeebling captivity, a secret anger and resentment
at his captors could be felt moving tinglingly through his veins. The cowardice of men and women in the face of the natural facts had forced upon him the discreditable role of magician. Ingersoll, among his other thunders, had promised the clergy liberation, unchaining them from mouldy books and musty creeds. He must look up the passage. He was shaking, a look at his hands discovered. A slight lumpy soreness, as if after a mismanaged swallow, had intruded itself into his throat. Anxious now not to deflect the women’s attention from the ham to himself, he walked with Indian stealth, suppressing the scrape of his leather soles, back through the spot on the dark wood floor where his theocentric universe had collapsed. The milled and carved configurations of the spiky staircase and the inner vestibule door with its big frosted-glass pane rimmed in milky translucent colors were as they had been ten minutes ago. The cap of the walnut newel post nearest him was an elongated four-sided pyramid upon a brief neck of several turnings of half-round molding; the detail presented itself to him as having a glowering Oriental aspect, as if the Gothic and Chinese styles were carved by the same barbaric hand, guided by the benighted, hopeless mentality which seeks ornament as a distraction from the intolerable severity of the universe. Bare, pure, devoid: even the Bible contained the information, in its less exegized verses.
All is vanity and vexation of spirit. How dieth the wise man? as the fool. If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me
?

Clarence had preached on these texts, sought with his striving, affecting, rather fragile tenor voice to find the way around them, but there was, it now clearly appeared, no way. He went back into his study, his book-lined cave that smelled
of himself, scented with the odor of his tobacco and of paper piled on paper, undusted books and yellowing magazines, pamphlets, manuscripts from his own hand, never to be again consulted. Miss Brubeck, the church secretary, kept a superior semblance of order at his office in the adjoining church building, where his sermons and blurred carbons of his letters, struck off on that frenetic modern device the typewriter, filled green metal filing cabinets with the tidy hopefulness of bodies awaiting Resurrection; here in his home study the disarray of death reigned, its musty surrender to chaos. The door was a somewhat ecclesiastical yellow oak construction with a rounded top that in the humid heat of summer tended to stick, unless one pressed with some force down on the knob; the embossed knob had been worn to a crescent of polished brass on its top side by years of such pressure from his and predecessor palms. His hand was unnerved and enfeebled by the physical shock that a motion of his mind had imparted. The latch clicked and he took a consciously deep breath, stepping in and closing the sticky door behind him.

He was safe among books, books which had so much danger in them. He wanted to look up that quotation from Ingersoll.
Some Mistakes of Moses
rested in its rusty-red covers sideways on his much-consulted row of the Kegan Paul
Pulpit
commentaries, next to those of
The Expositor’s Bible;
the passage came early, in the first chapter, ministers leading the parade of those—teachers, politicians—that Ingersoll wished to free from the tyranny of the Bible. Here it was:

Well, not exactly scorn. In pity, more. The doctrine had for these years past felt to Clarence like an invalid, a tenuous ghost scattered invisibly among the faces that from sickbeds and Sunday pews and the oilcloth-covered kitchen tables of disrupted, impoverished households beseeched him for hope and courage, for that thing which Calvin in his Gallic lucidity called
la grâce
. Grace Clarence had pictured when his faith was healthy as an interplay between men and God, achieved within the mystery—imagined as a glass globe, transparent only in decorative spots and bands where the frosting had been buffed away—of Christ and His placation of that otherwise ineradicable sin inherited from Adam, leaving men with, in a phrasing Clarence had once found delightful, “a lively tendency to disobey God.” This faith that he offered to represent lay not in them, the aggrieved and wounded and disappointed, and not in Clarence, housed and paid that he might serve them with this elusive commodity, but between them, in their agreeing thus to meet in faint hope of daily miracles. Not an invalid, perhaps, so much as an infant that he must tenderly nurture and indulge and take great care not to harm. Ingersoll went on with his own, lively evangelical vigor:

Clarence stopped reading. This sentence, like hundreds of others mocking and scourging the Christian faith, which he had turned aside at the time of initial reading with a hardened skepticism of his own, a thick skin bred of his education in apologetics, must have sunk in—each bit of scoffery a drip carrying away his vocation’s modest mountain. He looked at his pallid hands resting on his green desk blotter, hands as fumbling and blind as Mavie’s, though twenty years older, coarser with masculinity and weathered with age. A nerve in the flesh connecting his thumb and forefinger jumped. He lifted his eyes to the wall of books opposite his desk, rows of books in subtly ridged cloth the careful dull colors of moss and clay, the dour greens and browns of putrescence, their titles in fading, sinking gold:
Apostolic History and Literature
and
Systematic Theology
and
What Is Darwinism
? by Charles Hodge,
The Atonement
and
Popular Lectures on Theological Themes
by his son Archibald Alexander Hodge, both professors at the Princeton Seminary before Clarence Wilmot arrived there in 1888. He did take a course with Benjamin Warfield—as erect at the lectern as a Prussian general, with snowy burnsides—whose
Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament
, lost in this wall of accumulated titles, should have fortified him forever against Ingersoll’s easy sneers, and with William Henry Green, whose
Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch
and
Grammar of the Hebrew Language
had given the slender young seminarian many a headachy midnight back in Alexander Hall. In those student days, hungry for knowledge and fearless in his youthful sense of God’s protection close at hand, he had plunged into the chilly Baltic sea of Higher Criticism—all those Germans, Semler and Eichhorn, Baur and Wellhausen, who dared to pick up the Sacred Book without reverence, as one more human volume,
more curious and conglomerate than most, but the work of men—of Jews in dirty sheepskins, rotten-toothed desert tribesmen with eyes rolled heavenward, men like flies on flypaper caught fast in a historic time, among myths and conceptions belonging to the childhood of mankind. They called themselves theologians, these Teutonic ravagers of the text that Luther had unchained from the altar and translated out of Latin, and accepted their bread from the devout sponsors of theological chairs, yet were the opposite of theologians, as in the dank basement of Greek and Aramaic researches they undermined Christianity’s ancient supporting walls and beams.