In the Beauty of the Lilies (6 page)

“It wearies me,” he confessed, “the thought of so much effort and expense directed to a merely material end. Nineteen thousand dollars: such a sum would support a score of families for a year, or would enable a foreign mission to relieve only Heaven knows how much misery in one of the Asian famines. I think of the interest, the running expenses, that will be with us far into the future, a burden upon our children’s children. The Psalmist admonishes, ‘Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.’ Is a church effective in direct proportion to its physical size? Please ask yourselves, gentlemen, how much of your sudden passion for building is rooted in motives of competition and envy. Just because Trinity Methodist, our good neighbor further up Broadway, has expanded, and reconstructed its entire chancel the better to display the voices of its paid choir, does not oblige us to match them, dollar for dollar. Surely our Presbyterianism is not so crassly worldly as that.” He permitted himself a dry theological jest. “The Methodists are, after all, followers of Arminius, who argued against thrifty Calvin and said men were free to spend. Seriously, a church is a community
whose strength lies in purity and zeal, not in its buildings. The present edifice sits harmoniously on its lot, and the leftover green park is a kind of gift we make to the neighborhood in general, to the weary passersby.” Weary himself, he sighed.

The eyes of the committee fastened on him with an oppressive brightness and curiosity, detecting in his very cadence something already defeated. Not one voice sprang up to argue against him. Mr. McDermott at last said quietly, kindly, “Ah, but how will purity and zeal be known, unless we make of them an outward and visible sign? Our buildings are the means by which we announce ourselves in Paterson. Visible prosperity is not a virtue, of course not, but Calvin’s creed allows that it may be a sign of God’s grace.” His tone was not accusatory but softly probing, like a doctor’s.

And Clarence did feel sick, not just in his stomach but in his chest, always his frailest part, since a boyhood fever and a spell of what they called consumption. He took breath with a little difficulty, and could not shake the touch of hoarseness. “My friends,” he said, “the church belongs to you, and not to me. That’s the meaning of Presbyterianism. I am a teaching elder, but you are the ruling elders. I am with you only for the length of my call, whereas many of you have been baptized here and will be buried here; this is the church of your lifetimes. I just wonder”—he scraped away an obstruction in his throat—“if going forward in a very practical way is not sometimes”—again, he struggled to clear his voice—“a path of avoidance, avoidance of the deeper issues.…” He trailed off.

The committee, their voices coming to the rescue, briskly agreed to establish a subcommittee to look, in view of the minister’s lack of enthusiasm, more closely into the likely costs, both immediate and continuing. A friendly conference
with the Trinity Methodists, as to the drawbacks and results of their own expansion, might not be out of the question. Of course, you can bet that—and they named several industrial aristocrats who sat prominently among the Methodists—contributed heavily. Some said as much as half of the needed total came from two or three pledges. Mr. Dearholt, his oval glasses flashing, in his clarion voice ventured to hope that no lesser generosity might be met with in their own ranks. Their parish was not impoverished, though the three older Presbyterian churches in the city of course offered stiff competition and contained many of the oldest and most distinguished families. He would take the liberty of informally inquiring, here and there, among sound and discreet men whose acquaintance he happened to enjoy. Might he make an approach—non-binding, of course—to an architect experienced in ecclesiastical additions? Nothing less than full Gothic, in matching rough-faced brownstone, was his own personal vision—an imposing addition that would blend seamlessly with the existent structure, whose beauty and integrity our pastor quite rightly cherished.

Clarence felt that he was mentioned with a touch of orotund gravity, as if he had, in some sense, passed on. With Dearholt on the subcommittee, the thrust of its report was in no doubt, only the details. Still, he was relieved, as the meeting concluded in a jocular mood, to have put off to a future meeting any real decision. Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. He marvelled at himself, how the diction of belief had still risen to his lips. Perhaps this afternoon’s revelation would sink harmlessly down within him, to join in unspoken, half-forgotten depths the grotesque sexual dreams and nocturnal emissions of his youth.

Stella was waiting for him in their bedroom, awake. Shadows
hung in the corners, away from the feeble electric bulb whereby she was darning a black sock; she was sitting upright in the mahogany fourposter, in a white cotton nightie and a frilled cap bulged by the containment of her hair. She explained that Mrs. McDermott and Mrs. Dearholt had taken the streetcar home, after a nice chat over the rest of the strawberries and cream. “How was the meeting?” she asked.

He removed his black coat, hung it tidily over the back of a ladderback chair, and with an upward strain of his jaw and grimace of difficulty undid his detachable celluloid collar. “Dearholt steamrollered for the addition, but I asked them if they weren’t wanting this just to keep up with the Methodists. It gave them a little pause, though I expect they’ll end up going ahead. I should just get out of their way, I suppose, but the Sabbath school is struggling to fill its classes now, with so many of our better families moving out to Clifton and Totowa.” He sat down on the cane-bottomed rocker to remove his black shoes and socks. “Oh, my, Stel dearest, what a weariness I feel! I wonder if I have energy for all this.”

“All what, Clarence?” From her voice she was still concentrating on the darning threads.

“All this church—all these good people, wanting something from me no mortal man can provide. All this simulation of zeal.” He could not tell her how even pronouncing words had become a heaviness, now that the true nature of reality was revealed.
There is no God
. Perhaps everybody, back to his professors at Princeton, had known it already.

“You’ll feel better after a good night’s rest. Little Teddy thought you looked tired.”

“I heard him, all the way to my end of the table. Poor child, he’s sensitive.”

“More so than Jared and Esther?” she asked, still squinting
at the sock stretched on its wooden egg, picking her way among the black threads. “They’re the ones that get the marks at school.”

Even attempting to discriminate between his children was in his brain-weariness almost beyond him. “Maybe not. But they’re getting on in life. Both have jobs after school, and Esther has a beau. Teddy’s being left behind.”

“Not by us.”

“Ah, I hope not.”

She glanced up, and decided to ignore the enigma of that remark. “Dinner was spirited, I thought,” she said.

He had to laugh, even in his stupefaction. The world distracts us from its own ruin. “Spirited is one way to describe it; some might say it was a quarrelsome disaster. You never should have invited Kleist; he’s gone fanatic since they laid him off. He even had our demure Italian guests rallying to the red flag.”

“It’s healthy for people to exchange frank views,” she said. “It’s good to have the different sorts mix. If you let Paterson’s class factions divide the Christian church, there’s nowhere left where the sides can hear one another. Our Lord was never afraid of a good discussion.” As if fearful of seeming to know his business better than he, she subdued her tone. “That McDermott seems a sweet soul, and Mr. Dearholt means well—he just rubs you the wrong way.”

“He wants to take over Fourth Presbyterian as his own little business on the side, and the way I’m feeling tonight he can have it.”

“Why, Clarence, you’re sounding almost sinful! There’s nobody like you around, for learning and compassion.”

“Compassion! Isn’t that a sickly thing, when as Kleist said the millowners have all the swords? Aren’t these so-called
Christian virtues just as Ingersoll and the radicals claim, an excuse for doing nothing, a way to keep the poor quiet while the rich get richer?”

Stella put aside her completed sock and told him, “I’ve never read a word of Ingersoll and don’t intend to. He mocked God yet went on living off the fat of a land made prosperous by God-fearing men and women. And you shouldn’t be reading him either—something’s troubling you, everybody noticed it tonight.”

“Really? I tried to hold my tongue and let the others talk.”

“You always do, dearest. It wouldn’t hurt for them to hear their minister speak his mind now and then.”

“Ah, Stella, I don’t half know what my mind is any more.” He went in his suspenders and black trousers into the bathroom, to spare her the sight of him naked as he changed into his nightshirt. He did not want to come any closer to confessing his secret, the still-raw sore of Godlessness within him. He brushed his teeth with baking soda and took a swig of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup to ease his throat and help him sleep. When he came out, Stella was already unconscious, in the sudden way of a healthy animal. The brown-shaded light burned directly into her sagging face. She had never been beautiful but there had been a square-jawed compactness that was loosening and bloating with age. She was looking more and more like an overfed man. He thought of slender little Mavis asleep in her corner of an airless room down in Dublin, her hard-working small hands curled against her chin, her fresh crop of freckles fading into the milk-soft skin. He pulled the chain on the lamp so gently his wife would not waken and slithered into a dark space beside her that might as well have been his tomb, except that the heat of this June day followed him in, and the whine of mosquitoes, and
the desolate stir of his mind, and the muttering noise of the city putting itself to rest. The clatter of horseshoes and iron-tired wheels on cobblestones was mixed with the receding friction of a Broadway trolley car and the occasional snuffling crescendo, punctuated by sharp coughs of frustrated combustion, of the horseless carriages, or motorrigs—Ford Model Ts and Oldsmobiles in the main—which the more advanced citizens of Paterson were inflicting in ever greater numbers upon the old uneven, dung-strewn streets. The young century was thronged with a parade of inventions that amused Clarence when little else did, and the presumptuous, ragged, hopeful sound of a doughty little motorrig brought a ray of innocent energy, such as messenger angels would ride to earth, into his invalid mood. The hoarse receding note drew his consciousness to a fine point, and while that point hung in his skull starlike he fell asleep upon the adamant bosom of the depleted universe.

His next day’s duties, thick-headedly enacted while an underlying fever of confusion sought to repel the virus of atheism, included calls upon the sick of his parish. Clarence walked the two blocks to the mews behind Hamilton Street and took out the parson’s buggy. Betsy, a compact old gray Morgan, had a blood spot in her left eye and greeted him by rotating her little white-fringed ears. He flicked the reins listlessly, settling his eyes on her heavy croup and agitated tail as she tugged the lightweight box, with its spinning slender wheels, along the polished cobbles of Parks Boulevard. Mrs. Van Scoyk was at home recuperating from her fifth difficult accouchement. The baby could be heard squalling in the next room, as a nurse vainly cooed and crooned. “As soon as I hold the cunning little angels in my arms,” Mrs. Van Scoyk told her visitor, “the agony flies right out of my mind, as if it never
happened!” Miss Harriet Bartle, active in his altar league, was for an indeterminate stay abed on a floor in Paterson General, originally “Ladies Hospital,” in Wayne, suffering from a siege of nervous indisposition whose exact symptoms and deeper causes could be comfortably left veiled with other female mysteries while he delivered a little gossip and offered up a brief prayer at her compliant, wistful bedside. Barnert Memorial, opened a mere two years ago far out on Broadway, to serve the immigrant masses in all their flourishing ills, was—like St. Joseph’s, Paterson’s oldest hospital, founded by a priest and five Sisters of Charity—rarely on Clarence’s rounds. Mr. Orr, however, lay near death in Barnert. He had been a manual laborer—a hod carrier to brickmasons, a crate-handler for grocers, a paid helping hand to those with heads enough to be tradesmen or entrepreneurs—and never able, somehow, to achieve the ease of a wife, home, and family. Yet he had been a tenaciously faithful attendant at church, always seated on the lefthand side of the nave, midway down the set of side pews underneath the painted-glass memorial windows presenting a sextet of Protestant martyrs and heroes—Wyclif, Huss, Calvin, Knox, Cromwell, Bunyan, all seen, save for the armored Protector, at pulpit or desk with expressions of dire resolve. Beneath their sternly rapt visages Clarence had missed, these last months, Orr’s small, dingy, beadily staring face, hanging on the sermon with an intensity that shamed the sermonizer, whose habit of dramatic hesitation frequently tempted his mind to wander even as his tongue proceeded. Today Mr. Orr, who bore as testament to his parents’ piety the Christian name of Elias, was poorly; Clarence found him asleep, his head on the starched pillowcase looking little bigger than a withered gray apple. Disease had thinned his russet hair unevenly, so it seemed patchy like a newborn
baby’s, and chronic pain had cut deep lines along his nose and between his brows. Clarence would have tiptoed away, but within Orr’s sunken sockets two wet dark gleams forced apart the crusty melding of his wrinkled lids; the man grunted in lieu of welcome and made a gesture at elbowing himself higher in the bed, before lapsing back into supinity.

“Don’t bestir yourself, Mr. Orr. I didn’t come but for the briefest moment. How is your cure progressing?”

“To say I’m fair would be saying too much, Reverend. I’m very weary of the pain. It won’t be long, I can feel it in my marrow. With all how hot it’s been these past days, the cold has not let go its grip on my feet, and trust my words it’s climbing higher.”