Abide With Me Read online

  Nobody wanted to tell him.

  But Katherine had shown no remorse—coffee spoons clinking against saucers—and when children didn’t show remorse, it could indicate a social pathology. There was an article in a recent Newsweek and that’s what it said. Wasn’t it just insane, by the way, how people were spending fortunes to lie on a couch five days a week and talk about anything that came to mind? In New York, especially, where the Jewish psychoanalysts were having a heyday.

  “I would love it,” Alison Chase said. “Put my feet up every day and talk about my problems.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Jane said. “They don’t care about your real problems, just any old thing you can think up from your childhood. Eventually the psychoanalyst tries to convince you that you wanted to sleep with your mother when you were a child.”

  “My mother?”

  “Father, in a woman’s case. I suppose. But it’s all about sex, sex, sex.”

  Say, wasn’t it rude, Irma Rand suggested—her cheeks having colored at Jane’s remarks—of Mrs. Khrushchev to say no when she was offered hotel soaps to take home? But then, they did write awful things about her in the newspaper out there in California, saying her suit looked like a slipcover for an old couch. “True, though,” someone said. And, it was agreed, both those Khrushchevs were homely as hedgehogs. She’d been just a peasant, you know. Working in the fields before the Bolshevik revolution, before she wandered out and married him. Maybe a matter of principle that she’s supposed to look plain.

  Jane Watson, irritated now because no one had complimented her blueberry muffins, said they should decide whether or not to tell Tyler what had happened in Sunday school, because she had to get going. “Have Ora tell him,” someone suggested, since it was known that Ora would say anything. No, Ora wasn’t here—she didn’t know the details; Alison should tell him, since it happened in her kinderkirk class.

  “Someone ought to tell him,” said Doris, eating a second blueberry muffin. “I’d want to know if my child said such a thing, but I’m not telling him. I’m a little tired of Tyler, frankly. I went to speak to him about the new organ and he told me to read the works of some Catholic, Saint Thérèse from Lisieux.”

  Jane Watson touched her red button earring, and looked at Alison Chase.

  But why, exactly, had Mary Ingersoll been in tears? This was gone over once again, and it was agreed: Rhonda Skillings, who had been the one to report this to Jane, was not a woman who lied (insufferable as she might be—you’d think she was the first person to ever get a doctorate). And Rhonda had said that Mary Ingersoll said Tyler had been awfully rude.

  Tyler was never rude.

  Well, something had happened. And the little girl was certainly rude. Sad. Saying something like that in Sunday school. Alison Chase tugged her sweater close. “Hold on, hold on.” She pointed to each woman sitting around the table. “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe,” she said. “Catch a nigger by the toe. If he hollers let him go. Out goes Y-O-U.”

  Jane would make the call.

  FOUR

  The fact is: What had happened to the minister’s beautiful wife was the kind of tragedy that holds a small town in a certain thrall. No sooner had the Caskeys’ new baby been born—and she was an adorable thing, pink-cheeked and chubby; she could have fallen off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, said Marilyn Dunlop, who taught art at the Academy, and had taken a trip to Italy, becoming tiresome about things Italian—no sooner had the sweet Jeanne Caskey been born than rumors began that Lauren Caskey was having a nervous breakdown. Something very odd occurred: Lauren Caskey, with both children in the car, had driven to Hollywell one day and suddenly not known where she was. From a pay phone in the bus station, she called her husband, who was in his office in the basement of the church, and because Skogie Gowen, who was retired from his law practice and used to go talk to the minister about fishing, was in Tyler’s office at the time, word made its way around town that the panicked minister had to ask his wife to read the names of the signs nearby, the name on any bus she saw, to determine that she was, in fact, in the bus station in Hollywell. And then, after begging her to stay exactly where she was, he drove with Skogie to get her.

  She was standing out on the sidewalk looking pale and baffled, but, more than that, she looked “gone.” This was the only way Skogie could think to describe it to people. Skogie said the minister was beside himself, getting the woman into the car, making sure the kids were all right. When Skogie called later that night, the minister thanked him, sounding subdued, and said Lauren was overtired.

  “I think we forget how hard it can be,” Skogie assured him. “Chemical changes and things when you have a baby.” He was embarrassed, and he thought Tyler Caskey, who only said, “Yes, it’s true, and thanks again,” was, too.

  Stories were recalled of postpartum breakdowns. Sharon Merrimen, after her fourth child, got into bed in November and didn’t climb out until March. Betsy Bumpus had tears streaming down her cheeks the entire first year of her twins’ lives; she’d actually become dehydrated. This sort of thing was hard on the husbands, but what could you do? At least no one had drowned their kids in the bathtub, like you heard about once in a while.

  Lauren Caskey wasn’t drowning her kids, or bathing them, either. What was happening didn’t have anything to do with her kids. She was in Boston having surgery. The words “gone to Hanover for treatments” were repeated quietly that spring, on the telephone, in the grocery store, in backyards as women shook their heads over hyacinth blooms. “Wig” was sometimes heard.

  The word “cancer” was not. This was a time, remember, when you immediately and shudderingly would equate that word with doom. Even though Life magazine—right around the time that Lauren got sick—had its lead article on this disease, claiming new hope for unfortunate victims, the full-page pictures of a woman ready to be rolled beneath a radiation machine had caused some to turn the pages quickly; for the woman in the photographs appeared to be in the prime of her life, and it was compelling and horrible, more frightening for some than a nuclear war, because its source was nature, and its victims chosen at random.

  Soon, women in West Annett who had not wept in years stood in their kitchens weeping. That Lauren Caskey was a person who had held herself apart was forgotten or forgiven. Her fate seemed to provide a luxury of emotion that had been held in check for some time. Poor, poor thing, people said—how terrible. Was there family arriving to help out? Nobody knew. Jane Watson, being a member of the Sunshine Committee, had driven out to the farmhouse one day and offered, in the long and sure-to-be-difficult days that lay ahead, to read to the woman when she needed distraction. Reverend Caskey seemed surprised by this, and said it wouldn’t be necessary—Lauren was going to be fine.

  Connie Hatch, who had been working at that point two mornings a week for the Caskeys, began receiving phone calls at her home. But she was not forthcoming, saying only that Mrs. Caskey’s family and the minister’s mother and sister had all arrived to help. The biggest piece of news slipped through the cracks when Jane Watson called the Hatch place one night and an inebriated Adrian answered the phone, and said, “Oh, yeah, the lady’s real sick. She’s dying, for sure—pissed as hell about it, too.”

  There was other stuff as well. Even Connie—because the minister had said she could take time off, now that the family was here—did not know that Lauren’s parents and sister wanted to take the young woman back to Massachusetts, where they could give her proper care. “Where at least there’s running water!” the sister had hissed out in the hall one night, causing Belle to turn on the faucet in the kitchen and say loudly, “Oh, look! Water coming through the spout! Soon we can get rid of the outhouse!”

  But the minister said no, Lauren would stay right there; this farmhouse was her home. He delivered this with infinite politeness, but it spelled the end, essentially, to the minister’s relationship with his in-laws. He had taken this stand because he could not bear—or even understand—their certainty that she would
die (“Only a miracle will save her now,” his father-in-law said), and because there was as well a bitterness between him and them that had silently escalated over the years regarding matters of money.

  Every night and every morning Tyler prayed. Always he ended, “Thy will be done.” He did not think a miracle was needed, nor did he believe in them—he saw all of life as a miracle. And if Tyler believed instead in the power of prayer, it’s because his praying felt strong and right, like a swimmer who has trained for years and feels safe in the water that buoys him up. Tyler loved God very much, and God would naturally know that. Tyler loved Lauren, and God would know that, too.

  But when the Massachusetts contingent had departed, offering to take Katherine with them for the summer—even that he refused—and it was left to him, and to his mother and Belle to handle things, his wife began to lash out at him. Terrible things were said.

  “It’s the disease talking,” Tyler had murmured to his mother in the kitchen one morning, knowing she had overheard.

  Margaret Caskey said nothing. She worked steadily, drying the dishes, changing the baby, going back upstairs to change the pillowcase beneath Lauren’s head.

  Jane Watson, appearing that day on the minister’s porch, standing in her summer dress, holding a straw handbag, white-framed sunglasses pushed up on her head, had struck him as obscene in her healthiness. He had not invited her in. “I would invite you in,” he said, “but Lauren is resting.”

  “Of course,” said Jane. “I’m simply here to offer my help.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “We’ve all just been sick about this,” the woman said. She was wearing a dress with big red flowers on it.

  “Yes.” The minister looked past her. It was a magnificent day. He thought he had never seen such a beautiful world. The birch trees lining the driveway were like newly whitewashed lampposts, only instead of lights they offered lovely green arms of leaves.

  “Tyler, I wanted to say, when my sister’s husband was dying, we found it helpful to read to him. It helped pass the time.”

  “Lauren isn’t dying.” He said this with a slight lilt, as though genuinely surprised to hear assumptions to the contrary.

  “I thought—”

  “She’s ill,” said Tyler. “But with the power of God’s love, she’ll recover.”

  “Well, say, then. The doctors indicate a chance?”

  “Oh, sure. They’ve seen recovery in a case like this.”

  “That’s marvelous, then,” Jane said. “Hold on, Tyler. I have a casserole in the car.”

  He moved out onto the porch, closing the screen door behind him, and waited while she walked across the gravel in her pumps. The fullness of her haunches as she bent to reach into the backseat offended him with their display of vigor. She walked up the tilting steps holding a casserole dish covered with shiny aluminum foil, and he thought how she seemed to come here from a far-off country, that this farmhouse was now a ship in the middle of nowhere; he had been summoned to the deck, and the sunlight hurt his eyes. She would get back in her boat, the shiny blue Oldsmobile, and return to the continent of free, healthy people, reporting on this visit, perhaps disappointed there had been no “sighting.”

  He thanked her and went back inside. Noodles and creamy stuff were there when he removed the foil, and, scraping the mess into the garbage, he heard his mother say behind him, “You mustn’t become bitter, Tyler.”

  “No one wants to eat this.” But he had flinched—to be caught throwing food away.

  For three days, then, Lauren lay with what appeared to be a peacefulness. Her brown eyes seemed lit from behind so they shone like dark cedar chips with sun on them. And there was sun, a sharp, beautiful August sunlight filling the room in the afternoons. Tyler bathed Lauren with a facecloth, starting at her hairline, back over her ears. Gently, he bathed his wife, gently he pushed the cloth between her toes. Once she said softly, “Oh, look at the balloons,” and then fell into a nap.

  A cardinal called from the fir tree by the window, swooping past in a flash of red. Tyler tucked the pillow behind his wife’s head, then sat in a chair beside her, his big hands in his lap. Deep inside himself, he felt what might have been incipient sobs; he raised his chin and ignored them with deliberateness. God was in the room. The air was not merely air, it was the presence of God—you could feel it as distinctly as you would feel the water around you if you were swimming in a lake. It seemed to Tyler that each time during his life when he had experienced The Feeling, it had been leading to this. The Feeling was large and quiet and magnificent. Tyler, while his wife lay sleeping, and he sat inwardly denying his tears, gave silent prayers of thanksgiving and praise.

  The next day Lauren sat up and spoke. “Goddamn your God!” Belle said it was time she took the children away.

  Katherine’s clothes were packed in a small suitcase belonging to Lauren. It had brown leather edging at its corners and a brass clasp beneath the leather handle. It was the sight of this suitcase, which in the past had held the delicate and dear clothes of his betrothed when she came to visit him, now standing in the kitchen with little Katherine next to it, the child holding tight to her sock-doll—it was the sight of this suitcase and child that Tyler suddenly thought would do him in.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Katherine said.

  “Go on, then,” said Belle. “We’ll wait.”

  But Tyler followed the child into the bathroom off the kitchen, and he helped Katherine arrange herself, get the little corduroy pants pulled down, get her seated on the toilet.

  “I already went a little.” Katherine pointed to a wet spot on her red underpants stretched between her little knees.

  “It will dry,” Tyler said.

  “Daddy,” the child whispered, “Aunt Belle’s house smells funny. I don’t want to go there.”

  “It won’t be for long. Help take care of the baby.”

  “Aunt Belle says don’t touch the baby.”

  “Belle has a lot on her mind right now. Help sing the baby to sleep when she gets fussy. You can do that.”

  In the driveway he knelt beside her. “Daddy loves you.”

  “I want to see Mommy,” Katherine said. Oh, she was trying not to cry, but her chin wobbled.

  “Mommy’s sick right now.”

  “But she’ll wonder where I am,” the child pleaded, crying now.

  He took out his handkerchief. “Blow.” She blew. “Katherine,” he whispered, “you have to stop.”

  “I want to see Mommy.”

  “Katherine,” he whispered.

  The child pulled her head back to stare at him. Fear moved in little flickers across her face.

  “Mommy wants you to go to Belle’s now, and be a good girl.”

  “Tyler,” said Belle, in a warning kind of voice, and Tyler stood up and looked at her hard.

  “Belle,” he said firmly.

  He had to peel Katherine from his leg, had to pick her up—she would not on her own get into the car.

  THERE HAD BEEN some fear, after his wife’s death, that the minister would leave town. But he did not leave town. He took time off, then returned with Katherine, saying his mother would be caring for Jeannie for the time being, and she would bring the child up on weekends. He did become very busy, throwing himself into activities that took him around the state: the New England Chapter of Christian Young People, the Seacoast Charter of Ministries, the governor’s task force on poverty. With all the running around, it was difficult for anyone to find time to talk with him. But people understood. And they understood, as well, that his sermons were now read, as he preached with his deep voice, standing tall and broad-shouldered, on the power of God’s eternal love, the grace of Jesus Christ. He moved through the activities room during coffee hour, smiling and nodding and shaking hands, much as he had done in the past. The only sign that he had held the hand of tragedy was the slightly subdued level of his affability, and also the swift, deep look of bafflement that might su
ddenly pass over his face.

  When November arrived that first year, people remembered: How that man could skate! He moved as though in the arms of God. Really, you would not know he had anything strapped onto his feet, you would not know he had feet at all. All you could see was the large shape of him moving about that frozen lake in his long coat. As he moved between children playing, or couples holding hands, his body leaned one way, then the other, his ankles effortlessly close, one foot crossing over the other so he looked as though he were merely out for a stroll, and yet he was fast as the wind; oh, he was a marvelous thing to see on ice.

  The minister could often be seen skating late in the afternoon, or walking home near dusk with his skates hung over his shoulders. Sometimes he could be seen standing and gazing at the sky, as though overcome by the barren trees back-lit by the day’s final yellow light. Old Bertha Babcock, who stopped her car one day to offer him a ride, was surprised when the minister said, “It seems as if right beyond the horizon, Bertha, right there, out of reach, past the gray rooftops and dark, leafless trees, is some richly viable presence of activity.” And then, putting his hands to his face: “I wonder if we are all condemned forever to live outside the grace of God.”