Abide With Me Page 5

  “So why did he?” the future Mrs. Caskey asked.

  “He thought he’d have no credibility in Germany after the war if he hadn’t been there at the time of its troubles.”

  “Well, that was noble of him,” the future Mrs. Caskey said, sitting back, and if Tyler had detected any cynicism in this remark, he thought later, he would not have married her. But he had not detected cynicism, and even now, remembering this as he sat in his study, he did not believe there had been any in Lauren’s remark. Well, that was noble of him. She had gazed at the saltshaker she was touching with the fingers of both hands, and lifted her dark, round eyes to look at him.

  She said, in the childlike way she had of speaking sometimes, “I don’t know as I’d have gone back,” and he’d been touched by the honesty.

  “It was his job, though—his calling.” He told her how Bonhoeffer’s fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, had gone to visit him in prison. She was only nineteen, and had visited him in the prison in Tegel; it must have been frightening for her. Bonhoeffer began to write poetry, and sent it to her, and to his closest friend, Eberhard Bethge, too. Life, what have you done to me? Why did you come? Why do you pass away?

  Lauren leaned forward. “Do you write poetry?” she asked.

  Oh, no, no. No. He’d been quick to reassure her, and thought he saw a tiny relaxing that took place around her eyes. It was one thing, he said, for a great martyr, imprisoned by the Nazis, to write poetry, but he, Tyler Caskey, just an ordinary fellow from Shirley Falls, Maine, he did not write poetry. Hopefully strong and meaningful sermons someday, but poetry, no.

  And now Reverend Caskey, sitting in his study, put his fingers to his mouth and thought: What if, just what if he had been able to sit with Bonhoeffer in this very room, a year ago? What if Tyler, clasping the man’s hands in his own, had said, “Please, listen to me. I—”

  But he would not have said it.

  Tyler turned his head slowly, looked out past the birdbath. Briefly he pictured the bedroom he had shared with his wife those last weeks—the sharp beauty to the August light as it had slanted through the room, the cardinal’s call heard through the open window. He thought how Bonhoeffer had written from prison, “There is a wholeness about the fully grown man which enables him to face an existing situation squarely.”

  Tyler turned back to his desk. Bonhoeffer had taken part in a plot to kill Hitler. He had faced prison, his own death, and he had faced it all squarely; no one would argue he wasn’t a fully grown man. “Isn’t it a characteristic of a grown man, in contrast to an immature person, that his center of gravity is always where he actually is?” Bonhoeffer had written from his cell. Tyler tapped his fingers to his mouth; fragments of images jumped through his mind.

  “Girls, leave your father alone!” The sound of tumbles and giggles, and dog’s toenails clicking on the wooden floor, passed by his door.

  For the sake of God, he would do his job. (What else could he do?) He would pray that his center of gravity would be where he was. And he was in West Annett. His job was to stand in church with his shoulders back and his chin up, and make his congregation understand that being a Christian was not a hobby. Being a Christian was serious stuff. Being a Christian meant asking yourself every step of the way: How can love best be served? His job was to be their leader, their teacher, their example. A small parish, perhaps. Not a small job.

  Tyler pulled his chair in closer to his desk, looked through the notes he had. This was World Refugee Year. A million Arabs in the Middle East were close to starving to death, and thousands of people in Eastern Europe were still living in temporary camps. The Church World Service wasn’t receiving any more powdered milk from the United States because the Department of Agriculture decided the stuff was no longer in surplus. This, in particular, bothered Tyler. More than ever now, help was needed for the Share Our Surplus program. S.O.S., Tyler wrote on a piece of paper, hearing his mother in the next room directing Katherine to get the hair out of her face.

  PEOPLE IN WEST ANNETT had been intrigued by Tyler Caskey right from the start. They had grown so used to the old Reverend Smith, whose watery eyes had looked out at his congregation with such indifference, whose wrinkled face had not, for years, broken into a smile, that Tyler Caskey’s arrival was as surprising as it would have been if a big, vigorous bear had swum up the river and climbed onto the banks. He was a large man, tall and big-boned, and to shake his hand was kind of like taking the hand of a bear in your own. His voice, in keeping with the rest of him, was deep and resonant, and what saved him from being “too much” was a gentleness of expression that passed frequently over his features, and the way his pale Puritan eyes would twinkle as he thrust his head forward and down slightly, to look the person he was talking to straight in the eye. In other words, for someone who could, with that build and presence, walk into a room and throw his weight around, that he did just the opposite, that he tried to be accommodating, tried, as he moved through the activities room at coffee hour, greeting people and shaking hands, or as he stood in a hospital waiting room with a family whose child had fallen from a tractor, to speak quietly, gently, to otherwise harness the depths of power he displayed from the pulpit: There was something touching about this.

  Although not everybody liked the man. Charlie Austin, without saying so, thought he was “too familiar”—that the soft eagerness beneath his bulk was not altogether genuine. A few others might have felt this, too, but the women of the church, and most of the men, had found him to be uniquely watchable, compelling in a way quite different from his wife, although she was a woman of some pulchritude. Lauren Caskey, it’s true, had ended up becoming a town legend, but she’d certainly been talked about from the very beginning, when she had first shown up to have dinner with the deacons and their wives.

  People not familiar with towns like West Annett may not realize as they drive through the gully of trees leading to the sparseness of its Main Street that a social hierarchy exists there, exactly as it does in prisons, sixth grades, and Beacon Hill apartment buildings. In West Annett, a great deal of weight was given to ancestry, and it was not ancestry of the tired, the hungry, the downtrodden masses—those people ostensibly welcomed in the vast doorway of New York. No, in West Annett it would not do to align oneself with the tired masses. You arrived on this shore for many reasons, but weariness would not be one of them. You may have arrived with the Puritans, or been an English tea merchant wanting land and a different life. You may have been a poor Scotsman, indentured for seven years of labor. Or you may have arrived on the Mayflower, as was the case with the forefathers of Bertha Babcock, who had in her living room a model of this marvelous ship measuring two feet in length.

  When it was decided by the Pulpit Committee that Tyler Caskey should be asked to come preach—to audition, so to speak, although that was not the term used—he and his young wife were invited to be guests of the board, the deacons, and all of their wives at a potluck dinner the evening before. Seldom in West Annett did this many people gather in one home, and the house of Auggie and Sylvia Dean had been chosen for the event.

  Auggie Dean “had money,” which simply meant he had, through his family, more money than most people in West Annett, but then most people didn’t have much, nor was money, by any means, a requirement for respectability. Not long before the Caskeys arrived in town, the Deans’ kitchen had been ripped out and redone, the first dishwasher in town placed next to a lovely Frigidaire with the swing-out shelves that were, that spring evening, getting swung out and back with some steadiness, as the women tucked away the food they had brought, commenting to Sylvia on how authentic-looking her fake marble countertop was.

  “Oh, it’s sweet,” Lauren Caskey had been saying, as she peered through the window of their car. It was late April, and a fresh spring snow had fallen the night before, so by late afternoon, as Tyler and his wife drove into town, there was still the white covering on the dark branches, and on some rooftops, and some snow left around the steps of th
e little white church. “It’s sweet,” Lauren said again, turning her head to look as they passed through the center of town. “Your first church, Tyler.”

  “If they want me.” He pulled the car to the side of the road in order to glance at the directions he’d been given.

  “They’ll want you. I’m the one who has to pass.” Lauren turned the rearview mirror toward her, spread lipstick around her full mouth. “Honey,” she said, snapping her blue pocketbook shut, “let’s just get there. I need to pee.”

  The Main Street of West Annett had along it a small grocery store, a doctor’s office, the Congregational church, the parsonage, a tiny white post office, and an old grange hall across from the cemetery. Farther along, the road split in two, and along Upper Main Street were the three white buildings of Annett Academy, which served the town and received students as well from nearby towns too small for high schools of their own. Upper Main Street continued on, winding its way through a gully, following along beside a stone wall, until you came to Ringrose Pond, and there, not far from the road, was the big white house of Auggie and Sylvia Dean, white curtains caught back from every window.

  Tension had been building as the women uncovered their casserole dishes, laid out the paper napkins, fanned out the forks and spoons on the Samsonite portable table that had been covered with a white cloth and placed next to the table in the dining room, everything set up beneath the bowed window. “They’re here, they’re here” was heard throughout the house as Tyler and Lauren were spotted heading up the walkway, their car parked, presumably, back on the edge of the road, the driveway being already full of cars.

  Lauren Caskey was different from what had been expected. Whatever people expected—she wasn’t it. Shorter than her husband (just about everybody was), there was still something “big” about her, as she stood there in the doorway; her eyes were big, her mouth was big, her cheeks were big and round. And while her shoes—perfectly lovely things, but with a strap over the heel, and still snow on the ground!—were not as big as the rest of her seemed to require, her calves were magnificent and shapely, seen in their nylon stockings as she stepped through the door, holding a potted plant in both hands, a blue leather pocketbook hanging off one wrist. The expression on her face was hard to read, people agreed later. Those staring brown eyes, and her full face framed by the strawberry-red hair.

  The plant was taken by Sylvia Dean—she would put it right by the living-room window; it was unnecessary, but very nice. Mrs. Caskey was helped out of her coat by Auggie, and then the fact that she was in the early stages of pregnancy became obvious. When she leaned forward and said, “Gosh, could I run straight to the bathroom? It’s been a long drive,” a number of women’s voices assured her, Of course, right there off the kitchen, no, no, let her go upstairs, yes, here, I’ll show you, we remember, don’t we, how it is . . .

  The attention, for those minutes of her absence, was turned to Tyler, who was remarkably at ease. His open face and big-pawed handshake (not too firm, but certainly not flabby—as prescribed in The Pastor’s Wife, a book given to Lauren by his mother) was pleasing. “Hello, Charles,” he said, nodding. “Hello there, Auggie. Nice to see you all again. Nice to meet you.” And on he went, bending his head down to look people in the eye with his blue-eyed twinkling gaze. “Say, what a spread you’ve got here. This is swell.” His smile took in the cluster of women still moving about from the kitchen to the living room.

  “Ginger ale, if you’ve got it,” he answered Irma Rand. “Hey, that’s great. Oh, I think she’d probably like some, but what do you say we wait and ask her.”

  This was discussed as well, that the minister let his wife speak for herself—and she did, asking for cranberry juice, wearing enough lipstick so as to immediately leave an imprint on the glass. But by the end of the evening, Mrs. Caskey’s lipstick had worn off and her face appeared pale over there, where she had been seated by Sylvia Dean in the big easy chair. “Oh, no—you rest,” the woman directed, as Lauren tried to hoist herself up from the chair.

  “But I can’t have you all waiting on me and not help with the dishes,” the young woman cried, and it was Alison Chase who said, “Here, you come stand by the sink and dry.” So Lauren Caskey stood in the kitchen drying forks, asking women about their children, or in certain cases, about their jobs, for Marilyn Dunlop taught art at the Academy and Doris Austin played the church organ and, with one hand and a nodding head, directed the choir.

  “I can’t sing,” said Lauren.

  “Wouldn’t make you the only one in town,” said Ora Kendall, pausing to gaze at Lauren through her huge black-framed glasses—her dark curly hair shooting in all directions—before she moved past, having found in a closet a dustpan and broom. A glass had been broken in the living room. Old Mr. Wilcox had backed up to the table and knocked it to the floor, and not even known it at first.

  “A lot of people think they can’t sing,” said Doris, “but they can learn.”

  Droplets of sweat had appeared on the edge of Lauren’s hairline.

  “We have our own historical society,” said Bertha Babcock. “You might want to join. We have people here going back twelve generations. The early settlers were a hardy lot.”

  “We have square dances in the grange hall,” Rhonda Skillings said. “Alvin’s a wonderful caller. The Couples Club’s lucky to have him.”

  “What sorts of things do you like to do, Lauren?” asked Alison Chase.

  “I like to shop,” said Lauren. “I love the way department stores smell.”

  Alison glanced at Sylvia Dean, and handed Lauren a plate to dry. She nodded at Lauren’s middle. “Well, I guess you’ll have your hands full pretty soon. Do you have any hobbies? Irma and I have gotten very interested in painting birds.”

  “Gosh, I think I’m going to have to sit down,” Lauren said.

  “Come on,” said Ora Kendall, and she led the woman back to the easy chair in the living room until it was time to say good-bye.

  The Caskeys had declined an offer to spend the night at the house of Auggie and Sylvia Dean, saying they had plans to stay with friends in Bangor before returning in the morning for Tyler to preach. In fact, the Caskeys were staying in a roadside motel, and as they drove in the old Packard, given to them by Lauren’s father, they left behind plenty of talk in the Deans’ household. “A hail-fellow-well-met,” someone said of Tyler, and others agreed, while Charlie Austin remained silent. About Lauren, the talk was guardedly positive. There was something the women had not liked about her, but no one wanted to be the person to say so. It was more than her remark about shopping and department stores. It had to do with her looks. (Ora Kendall murmured to Alison, “What happens when the sex wears off?”) Lauren Caskey had seemed too aware of her looks, in a manner unbecoming to a minister’s wife, and it could be that, had Tyler not delivered such a magnificent sermon the next morning, he would not have been offered the job. In any case, a great deal was made of Lauren Caskey’s shoes that night. The strapped back was simply out of season. They were nice-looking, with the tiny braids across the toe, but wasn’t it strange for a woman in her condition to be wearing heels? She could easily fall down and—well, that was her business, hers and Tyler’s, and he did seem like an awfully nice man.

  “THAT WASN’T SO BAD,” said Tyler, as they drove the back roads. “Nice people.” It had only recently got dark. They had been asked to arrive at four-thirty, as people in West Annett tended to eat their evening meal early, even on a Saturday night. Dinner had started at five-thirty, and by eight o’clock the Caskeys were on their way.

  “It was strange,” Lauren said.

  Tyler wanted to make sure he didn’t get lost on these back roads, and was looking to see if there was a turn he missed. “Weren’t they friendly to you?” He reached for her hand.

  Lauren yawned loudly. “Who was the one with that awful orange lipstick? She likes to paint birds. What does that mean she likes to paint birds?”

  “I didn’t notice the
lipstick,” Tyler said.

  “The men were nice,” Lauren said. “Quiet, though. But they’ll love your sermon. And the women like you. They’ll tell their husbands to vote for you.”

  “The whole congregation votes.”

  “Who was that redheaded fellow with the pink face? His wife is the organist, I think.”

  “Charles Austin.”

  “I feel sorry for him, Tyler. Deep down, he’s a wolf.”

  “A wolf.” He supposed she was using the term the way it was in the service, a man who went after women. He didn’t think Charles Austin appeared to be a man who went after women.

  “He’s a wolf in pink skin. Trust me, Tyler. I’ll tell you something else,” Lauren had said in the car that night. “That Jane Watson woman. Watch out for her.” Lauren snuggled close to him, put her head on his shoulder. “I’m going to take a nap.”

  But in the motel room, she sat on the edge of the bed and cried. Tyler sat next to her and put his big arms around her. “Gosh, Lauren,” he said, “that was jumping off the high dive, and you did it beautifully.” Streaks of what seemed like black paint were streaming down her round cheeks. He pulled out his handkerchief and blotted her face.

  “You were good at talking to everyone,” Lauren said. “You’re good at that kind of thing.”

  “What I want to be good at is being your husband.”

  Oh, they were happy that night. Waking early, they were happy again, their breath mingling, the slipperiness beneath his arms as they loved each other.