In the Beauty of the Lilies (9 page)

“Well, Mr. Wilmot, I must say,” Stella began when their bedroom door was closed and her heavy white dress had been returned to her cedar wardrobe, and her corset loosened above her thin chemise of sweat-stained nainsook, “I’ve heard no thanks for my part in patching over your strange exhibition this morning. Whatever ailed you, dear?”

He wanly smiled; his mustache—which looked dirty, as fair mustaches do—drooped a little less, exposing his lower teeth. His voice was hoarse and softer than usual but distinct, and unexpectedly sardonic. “My dear, you appeared to enjoy yourself so much I didn’t think you needed thanks. In one bound, you overleaped the whole vexed question of female ordination. You were a veritable Louisa Woosley—splendid, my dear! Would that you had my male prerogatives, or I your dauntless faith.”

“Faith?” she repeated absent-mindedly. Her corset, though less cruel to the waist and unnaturally compressing than the hourglass fashion of her young womanhood, was confining; first she undid the attached garters, and then the hook-and-eye fasteners down the front, at last dividing and parting herself from the semi-elastic carapace, much as one splits the nubbled belly of a Maine lobster to get at the meat. Physical relief evident in her large face, she moved back and forth in the room in her thin chemise as one forgetful of her generous
physical endowment. Stella had had no great height of beauty from which to fall, and seemed little less comely now at forty-three than she had at twenty-six, her age as a bride. Though Clarence and his fellow seminarians had often talked of women, and not always in the most reverent manner, it had been a revelation to him that Stella not only had submitted to sex but in their early years had sought it, when a week or so of abstention had gone by, though he was tired and dragged down by the business of the dour little Missouri parish. It had been years since she, with certain touches of her hands and inflections of those lively lustrous eyes, dark as a gipsy’s, had requested her rights of satisfaction; on winter nights, however, the married partners were still a warmth and comfort to one another on the double-troughed mattress of their old mahogany fourposter, and she accepted him without complaint on those rare evenings when arousal came unbeckoned upon him. Tonight, unrolling her stockings and tucking them back in the corner of her top drawer and unpinning her upswept load of chestnut hair so it fell, only slightly marred by gray, slowly uncoiling down her plump back while she gave herself a stern squint in the oval dresser mirror, she seemed unusually vigorous and able; he decided at last to impart to her the burden he had for a month been carrying alone.

“
My
faith, my dear, seems to have fled. I not only no longer believe with an ideal fervor, I consciously disbelieve. My very voice rebelled, today, against my attempting to put some sort of good face on a doctrine that I intellectually detest. Ingersoll, Hume, Darwin, Renan, Nietzsche—it all rings true, when you’ve read enough to have it sink in; they have not just reason on their side but simple humanity and decency as well. Jehovah and His pet Israelites, that bloody tit-for-tat of the Atonement, the whole business of condemning poor fallible men and
women to eternal Hell for a few mistakes in their little lifetimes, the notion in any case that our spirits can survive without eyes or brains or nerves—Stel, it’s been a fearful struggle, I’ve twisted my mind in loops to hold on to some sense in which these things are true enough to preach, but I’ve got to let go or go crazy. I love you for feeling otherwise, and would never argue a man or child out of whatever they believe, but to me it’s all become relics, things left over from our childish nightmares, when there’s daylight now all around us—this is the twentieth century! I can’t keep selling myself and others the opposite of what jumps out at me from every newspaper and physical fact I see. The universe is a hundred percent matter, with the energy that comes in waves out of matter, and poor old humankind is on its own and always has been.”

She had turned from the mirror to gaze at him. Her mannish, heavy face looked oddly seductive, her lids half-closed. Her low hairline gave it a brutish cast: her head’s gleaming bounty, with its chestnut highlights and buckling waves, sprang from a line straight across her brow, without a hint of widow’s-peak. “Clarence, have you tried praying?” She told him, “Reason isn’t everything. There are things beyond it. Believing isn’t supposed to be easy. What did St. Paul say? ‘We see through a glass darkly.’ ”

Her tone of soft pleading, somehow sexual after these many years of their laying their bodies to one side, drew him closer to her. He lowered his voice, which felt raw, as if tear-scoured. “St. Paul,” he said, “said many excellent things. ‘For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.’ I love the old words, but now they lie dead in me. I don’t quite know what has slain them—the infidel modern times, perhaps, or simply my
years, it may be, and the fatigue with which the years tax my system—but dead the words are, as dead as the bones in the valley of Ezekiel.”

“But those bones lived,” she said quickly. “That is the point of the story. With God all things are possible. Perhaps your fatigue will pass, and these doubts with it.”

“They are not doubts, alas—they are certainties. I cannot continue in the Christian pulpit, and be a Benedict Arnold in the camp. I fear if I continue to speak I will take hope and reassurance away from those that can still believe.” And, as if proving that bones can live, he felt his eyes water and a convulsion of grief long held within himself overtook his face and shoulders; he sat on the edge of the bed, and she with him, setting a hand on his thigh.

“Poor heart,” she said. “For how long have you been thinking these hopeless thoughts?”

“Since before the solstice, and it’s been building God knows how many years before that.” He laughed, snuffling, through the tears, at his unthinking invocation of the empty name. “I felt the leaving like a physical event,” he said. “The afternoon before the Dearholts came to dinner.”

“Dearholt weighs on a man of your temperament,” she said. “He rouses your spirit of contrarity. Clarence: we all have moments, when life seems empty and not worthwhile. But they pass; we push through them, for the sake of the children we have brought into the world and all those others who depend upon us.”

“Would I could push through, Stel. For, if I cannot, the burden of failure will fall not just on me but on you, dear, you and the children, as you say.”

Her back stiffened so that the old bed swayed and once or twice creaked. “What are you thinking of? Not—”

“Yes. Resigning the ministry.”

“Oh, my dear. How would we live?”

“There must be jobs. It would be a rare job indeed that pays less, in hard cash, than this. Even our horse and buggy are parish property.”

“But”—her gesture took in the room, the house, the respectability and distinction that hedged them round. “Many a minister and priest, I’m sure, has doubts.”

He thought of objecting again to the word, but this seemed pedantic and petty amid the gaping abyss of social consequence that had opened up with this sharing of his impotence.

Stella went on, “But the Word goes on, out through them.”

“So I should go through the motions? Perhaps I could, if people did not sense the truth—the lack. They sensed it this morning. It dried me right up. The words stuck in my throat.”

“You don’t know what those people sensed—they were thinking of a hundred different things, would be my guess. As to the frog in your throat, you’ve run yourself down and are getting a summer cold, like I said right out,” she told him. “Clarence”—with her extended Southern “a,” one long syllable—“couldn’t you think of it, keeping on, as walking a bridge, from one solid shore to another? The Lord doesn’t leave us hanging, if we truly turn to Him. Remember the time when little Jared had the diphtheria, and you and I stayed up together all night watching and praying, and—”

He gently laid his hand on hers and lifted it from his black-clad thigh. “You believe, I know, and it is lovely in you. I envy you, I suppose. But I no longer
can
—if simply willing it or praying for it would do it, don’t you think I would have? And the bitter fact is that my respect for the church is still enough that I don’t intend to pollute its pulpit with hypocrisy.”

She had pulled back, offended by his dismissal of her helping hand. The bed creaked with her shift of weight. “That’s all very grand of you, dear, and of course don’t bother about me—my life, my position with all the people who know me around here, how everything will look—but what about the children? How will they eat?”

He sighed, exasperated by the smallness of her concerns, when he had lost the entire contents of his universe. “I can’t yet think clearly on that. But this parish includes a number of well-placed men with whom I have worked successfully.… Surely … Or it may be our future does not lie in Paterson. We could go back out west.”

“West?” she said sharply. “We escaped the West, and glad of it. Your spirit was too fine for the West; it ground it down, all those ignorant penny-pinching farmers.”

“Yes, well …” The effort of confessing to her, the faint disappointment he felt now, as if expecting her, against all reason, to rescue him, suddenly left him very weary. To stretch out upon this bed, to merge his head with the down of the pillow … He said, “I needed to talk to you first. Now, Stel, do I have your permission to go to Harlan Dearholt? He is head elder; a consultation with him would be the first step in my resignation.”

“Permission?” She was angry; it had not occurred to him, swallowed up in his own spiritual misfortune, that she could become angry. “You don’t need my permission. You didn’t ask it when you decided to abandon your Lord, why ask it now?”

Struck by her characterization, he turned it over in his mind before saying mildly, “I didn’t decide, dear. The decision was beyond my control. My Lord decided, if you would rather, to cast me out.”

“We cast ourselves out, or deal ourselves in,” she said, surprising
him with this Missouri touch of riverboat parlance. “You have cold-bloodedly decided to inflict on your family an entirely needless sacrifice. This parish has suited us. Paterson is thriving, it’s letting the children make their way, and now, just because—I don’t know why I should be surprised. Your own sister Esther warned me, before we married, ‘The Wilmots are a cold clan.’ ”

“But if the requisite faith—”

“Oh, stop this tedious mooning about faith! Faith is something we
build;
it’s a
habit
. I always thought—back in Jackson Bluffs I thought—you were a weak reed, Clarence Wilmot, but, but you know the conceit of women”—it had become her turn to laugh snufflingly through the slippery obstruction of tears—“I thought I could make a man of you. Well, all I’ve done is make a pretty mess for myself and the three harmless souls I brought into the world.”

“Dear, no, don’t speak so harshly—so unworthily. You’ll find me solid through all this, I vow.”

Her eyes contemplating him seemed dark as small plums; liverish patches beneath her eyes in the wan electric light seemed to betray some streak of ancient, pagan blood. “As solid as you can be, I don’t doubt.” She turned her back, the white flesh broad across her shoulders marred by a few raised moles between the straps of her frilled chemise. “Oh, my,” she sighed, not so much to him as to a set of ghostly ancestors and descendants that had clustered sympathetically around her. “The trouble a life sees. No wonder they say there’s another, to make this one right.”

This was her way of conceding him all he sought.

Mr. Dearholt’s house on Pennington Street had round, heavy-stoned arches and a round side tower whose conical roof was covered with progressively sized slates and tipped
with a glass-balled lightning rod. It projected the gloomy savor and amplitude of a church, and yet the living room had a certain Oriental sensuality, with its ottomans and fringes and patterned Persian carpets. Having heard his unhappy visitor out, Dearholt lifted his head so his oval eyeglasses flashed and, with a friendly grimace of his flawless teeth, said, “Fight on, my friend. Never give up the good fight. You will win through in the end to renewed certainty—of that
I
am certain—if you stay the course. These are passing shadows, a crisis of direction, common to a man at your time of life. When I was just past forty, I had half a mind to throw everything over and head to Alaska and prospect for gold. From boyhood on, I’ve been drawn to the open spaces—the cowboys in Montana seemed to me to be the most splendid people in the world, and I would have gladly become an Indian if a tribe had ever been so kind as to kidnap me. But the better half of my mind prevailed, and my better half—my blessed Obelia—in her wisdom rode out the storm, and I’ve stuck the route here in Paterson, as you can see. The city’s been good to me. The silk industry’s been good to me, for all its ups and downs. Here’s where the future’s being made, in industrial cities, not in some Wild West that only exists any more in travelling shows where a few shabby survivors sit to be stared at. Once I took my twin boys up to Madison Square Garden, Reverend, to see Buffalo Bill and his gang, and Geronimo was too drunk to move a muscle!”

Clarence felt he was being tugged rather far from the point of his visit. “Mr. Dearholt,” he said, “every Christian has doubts; it is our challenge and privilege to wrestle with them. Since student days at Princeton, I have been exposed to thinkers and poets from outside the Christian fold, and indeed at seminary some of the professors themselves gave alarmingly
earnest voice to agnostic reasoning—but always, at the end of the day, I could return home, to the burning candle so to speak and the Sacred Book and the childish trust with which I lay me down. My father—a skinflint, some said, but a steadfast churchman, and a double-tither no matter how high or low that year’s income—presented for my emulation a stern rectitude. He was Old School through and through; when the local possibility of merging with the Hopewell Congregationalists came up, as sharing the Calvinist heritage, he said he would as soon merge with the Unitarians and Emersonian pipe-dreamers, as he called them. For many years I assumed I had inherited his inflexible faith. So I know what it is to have faith, and now know what it is to have none. If I attempt any of the old formulations, to make myself the target of my own apologetics, or offer my inner voice up in helpless prayer, some irresistible denying force within me knocks the words away. I fear I have read too many atheist thinkers, in an attempt to understand and refute them. Meaning to undermine them, I was undermined instead! Darwin, Nietzsche, Ingersoll—the sons of clergymen have slain the Father above!”