In the Beauty of the Lilies (13 page)

He had not fully grasped how far his resignation from the church would drop him in the social scale; he had somehow imagined proceeding by inertia along the same paths of respectability, only without the encumbrance of hypocritical pretense. Robert Ingersoll had written stirringly of freeing the clergy; well, now he was free—free to sink. He had vaguely thought that, with his languages and love of print’s silent song, he might find an appropriate niche as an instructor, in a genteel, private boys’ school. It was what he should have become in the first place, had not his father’s rock-hard faith insisted that his son go seek an otherworldly profit. As Clarence imagined his new future, he would be, liberated from the dead black shroud of the Geneva gown but otherwise
ministerial, deferred to by a lively pack of secular choir boys as he evangelized for the Latin classics or the English poets, or individualized the vague parade of the grim-lipped American presidents as they evolved from Washington to Wilson. But his locally notorious apostasy, he soon realized, put a shudder into headmasters and boards of trustees. It was not so much, they or their representatives assured him, his beliefs or lack of them—this was a free country, after all. There would be no difficulty had he never made a public profession or accepted a call to preach and serve; but since he had, and had demitted, a whiff of betrayal clung to him. He had deserted his post. The world can accommodate many sincere opinions but has no lasting use for turncoats. Having made such a point of renunciation, with a pious wife at his side and a disheartened congregation spread before him, why would he, in his fury of faithlessness, not seek to propagandize credulous children? The climate of the times was against him. The immigrant hordes had brought to America German radicalism and Italian anarchism and Semitic materialism; this was no time for native-born Protestants to grow lax and abandon the sublime values and articles of faith that had induced God to shower down upon them the blessings due a chosen people. It was Harlan Dearholt who with genial frankness explained the nuances of feeling behind the sometimes curt rejections that set the limits to Clarence’s professional prospects. He alone of Clarence’s former parishioners continued to engage him in intercourse; besides helping him arrange the home loan, he headed Clarence, in the more prosperous atmosphere of 1911, to Goldman’s Clothiers, where the former parson’s natural courtesy and dignity of bearing enhanced the store but did not lift his wages as high as the twelve weekly dollars the strikers would demand. Dollars
had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God’s specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.

Setting out in late winter, when the soot-speckled triangles of old snow were easily mistaken for the bedraggled pieces of newspaper and strike propaganda that blew everywhere, he had first essayed the more fashionable blocks on the East Side, and had met there mostly doors quickly shut by frightened-looking maids, on orders he could hear shouted within rooms curtained from view. In some houses where affluent boredom welcomed a visitor, he met a disposition to make of him the morning’s entertainment. The encyclopedia company, which was located not in one of the capitals of the East but in forward-looking St. Louis, supplied to its apostles, along with a smart briefcase holding order forms and sample pages, a glossy handbook that listed for memorization the merits of its product—the more than thirty million words, the twenty-five thousand separate alphabetical entries from Aachen to Zwickau, the close to ten thousand illustrative steel engravings, diagrams, and maps, the over a thousand individual contributors, eighty-five percent of them American citizens, in sharp contrast with an unnamed competitor, whose contributors and emphasis were preponderantly British. The enterprise even had a brute industrial dimension, measured in the hundreds of compositors needed to set the text, the tons of metal involved in the type, the miles and miles of thread to sew the sheets together, the tons of ink and glue—twice as many tons, it turned out, of glue as of ink. Heads of learned
societies, members of the United States Congress, learned professors eminent the world over—even these were not spared quantification. Some prospective customers listened respectfully to his tumble of information; some cut him short; most didn’t let him in the door. He thought he would grow inured to rejection and scorn, as in his former profession he had grown inured to tales of misery and discontent from his parishioners, but something unhealing and unduly proud in him continually winced at the angrily shut door, the sardonic dismissal. More than one smug householder from the eastern parts of Paterson walked him to the study and unkindly showed him the haughty leather spines—so impeccably ordered on their tall shelf as to suggest that the treasury of knowledge was merely worshipped, never consulted—of the eleventh edition of
The Encyclopœdia Britannica
. Then it was his to protest, in a gambit foreseen by his salesman’s handbook, “Oh, but the
Popular
is edited entirely by Americans, and is much superior on American subjects. It has an American slant throughout, as well as being written in a more accessible language, and over a dollar a volume less expensive. If you have any young persons in the household—”

“The young persons are grown and flown. There’s only me and my missus, and when we want accessible language we’ll go down to the Question Mark Bar and hear it spoken by the disgruntled workingmen and their anarchist friends.” He laughed, this bespectacled, sallow retired accountant or clerk, his life spent in inky cuffs and green eyeshade in some secluded upper cell of a mill whose battalions of machinery throbbed and shrieked below him. “I don’t envy you your task,” the man genially conceded, showing Clarence the door without the offer of coffee and cake which his initial hospitality had suggested might be coming, “trying to sell books of
knowledge in a city where ignorance is up on a high horse, and two in three can’t even speak the king’s English let alone read it. I don’t know what the country’s coming to, Mr—?”

“Wilmot.”

“Wilmot. Somehow that name rings a bell. Your face was familiar, too, when I came to the door. I don’t as a rule entertain drummers, understand. Ada, that’s my missus, is terrified of letting a stranger in, the way burglaries are rising these days, with the strikers feeling the pinch—and they’ll feel it worse, mind you me, when the industry gives the reds a shaking out!”

“You can never be too careful, sir. I appreciate your allowing me admittance. Permit me to give you my card, in case you think of anyone who might be interested in subscribing to a down-to-earth encyclopedia, written and edited to patriotic native tastes and yet containing all the world’s essential knowledge.”

“Wilmot,” the man repeated.

“My father was a farmer, like his father before him, in the middle of the state, around Hopewell. His people before the Civil War had been New Yorkers, old-fashioned merchants.”

“You’ve come a good way from them,” said the little withered accountant, more registering a deficit than seeking to be unpleasant. Clarence was out the door gratefully, into a raw spring day, under chill rolls of cloud spitting shreds of snow that might be flecks of chimney ash.

Contrary to what he had expected, it was in the working-class districts, neighborhoods close to the river and the Erie Railroad tracks, amid the little clapboard houses with sagging stoops and drawn shades, that he achieved now and then a sale. “My English, not good. Never can read. But my children, maybe. Already they speak good.”

“Whatever they want to know, they’ll find in here,” Clarence said, tapping his tinted photograph of the complete set. “For the twentieth century, these books are what the Bible was for”—he rejected “bygone times” as perhaps too idiomatic—“times long ago.”

“I know nothing,” said his possible customer, a wiry Polish Jew with expressive gnarled hands, “just knitting. In old country, since boy”—a hand held at belt level—“know to knit. Father told me, Come to silk mill. He knew knitting, I learned knitting. I come here. Now knitting business bad. Too many mills, making same silk. My boy—no. Go to school, learn from books. I tell him. In America, people learn from books. Not like old country, everybody held in place”—a yellow, veiny fist, held rigidly in mid-air, and the other hand laid on top of it, captive and captor—“never change. Here, change.” He removed the left hand, the fist floated upward, its fingers relaxing. “Each man make new self.”

Clarence was too eager; a tremor shook the promotional papers he fanned before the man. “
Popular
,” he said. “The word comes from
populus
, the word for ‘people.’ For just three dollars and fifteen cents each month, you receive one volume, and at the end of two years have the complete set, in a handsome box that is
free
. Your children can look up everything they need for their schoolwork. They will get high marks.” He restrained himself from shouting; he was straining his throat.

The man’s stained, muscular hands, warped to be the guiding parts of a machine, limply waved away the prospectus, the contract. “Not good time now, mister. Strike. No money anywhere, no money for food. Come back when strike won. Then, lots of money. You a good man. I like your ideas. America the best country.”

In another modest house, entered through a tiny screened porch not six feet back from the pavement—a patch of front yard at this time of year brightened by a few crocuses and early dandelions—a tiny well-spoken woman in a buttoned housedress asked him, “Isn’t it anti-Catholic? We wouldn’t want to have that in the house.”

“Madame, not at all. The editors have taken pains to make the articles on religion uniformly respectful and studiously neutral. No child’s faith, of whatever denomination, would be disturbed by studying these pages. Facts—
The Popular Encyclopedia
contains nothing but facts, the facts of the world, clearly and straightforwardly presented.” Saying this, he seemed to be sunk deep in a well of facts, all of which spelled the walled-in dismal hopelessness of human life. The world’s books were boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow.

A few blocks away, and sounding closer, a booing rose to a roaring sound; the police were trying to break up a picket line, or perhaps some poor scab, shaming himself to keep his family in bread, had dared a gesture of defiance at the mob of his former co-workers. It was the mindless bloodthirsty roar of a crowd at a football game, a boxing match, a coliseum where Christians were being tortured and dismembered; it seemed at its distance to rise and keep rising, a wave of terrible mass, with all the weight of the human ocean driving it to tower and topple.

“But does it tell how His Holy Father is infallible? Does it give due reverence to the saints, or pass them off as less than forever blessed? Does it make out Luther and those others to be heretics?”

“It gives balanced accounts, I am certain, of all the religious controversies that have existed since Arius argued with
Athanasius. Remember, madame, that the orthodox Christian creeds were hammered out point by point, and on every point both sides of the debate should be presented.”

“Ah, only if it comes out right,” said this small defender of the faith, with her curiously precise diction, as if each word were consciously held back from contamination. “On the right side. If a book isn’t Catholic, it’s anti-Catholic. Father McNulty gave us a homily once, on how the encyclopedia attacked the Jesuits. He forbade us to read it, or anything like it. Jesus said, and it’s right in Scripture, that he that isn’t with the church is against her.”

“That was not
The Popular Encyclopedia
the good father preached against,” Clarence assured her. “Most likely it was the
Britannica
, which is composed mostly by British scholars, with no understanding of American subjects and attitudes.” But he had lost all faith in this sale; this doughty would-be nun was using him merely as a whetstone to sharpen her prejudices on. His mind was blocks distant as he listened to the hullabaloo whose roar rose and then fell, shattered into a multitude of shrieks and shrill whistles, as the frightened police perhaps began to lay about with their black billyclubs, and the fragile pale girls from the ribbon mills melted and writhed beneath the blows, and the twin tides of desperation swept one against the other.

At times, as he solicited wooden tenements packed in rows near the mills, on Van Houten and McBride and River Streets, on Ryle Road and Broadway, the roar of falling water would penetrate his mind as a constant tumult underlying those of riot and catcall, rally and parade. Since the young Alexander Hamilton had thrilled to the sight of the Totowa Falls and saw in this heedless power the center of American industry, the Falls had plunged and thrashed and thrown up mists, and,
though the unharnessed flow had been diminished by the three millraces, the Falls remained an essentially wild thing at Paterson’s heart, a distillation of all that is furious and accidental and overwhelming in nature, a gem of pure ruinous uncaring around which the aching generations came and went. The Falls had been here when only the Leni-Lenapes had stood rapt before such careless grandeur, and would be here when Paterson had sunk back into a crooked valley of brick rubble and rusted iron.

One gray forenoon early in April, when the blank sky wore a blinding glare without being blue, Clarence knocked at a narrow house in need of paint along Fulton Street. Clarence was startled by a familiar, delicate face at the door.

“Mavis! Is this where you live?”

“Myself and some others, Reverend Wilmot. Come in, please do. What a start you gave me, there’s no telling what a knock on the door will bring these days. Is it Mrs. Wilmot that has sent you?”

He was tempted to back down the two wooden steps that had brought him to this door; the girl had left their service while they were still in the manse, that last, provisional year, during which he was courting his disgrace but had not yet been married to it. Mavie’s figure had filled in since then, and her green-eyed gaze no longer quite so shyly flitted away from his face. She was wearing an apron around a thickened waist, but her hands still had red-tipped little fingers and a childlike look of not yet being shaped by the things she touched. Her hair was bundled more loosely, with more of a wiry wildness, than he remembered. “No, not Stella, though she is well, and misses you, I have heard her say more than once. I am knocking on doors, Mavis, one after another, on a commercial quest, and won’t trouble you with it. It has made
my day less dreary, to have seen you for this moment. You look well. You were a girl when we had to let you go, and now you are a woman.”