“Why,” said Mr. Slatin, a martini held in his big hand, “did you not go to Andover Newton for your seminary training? It’s an excellent school.”
“It is. But my mother needed me nearby.” Tyler had not applied to Andover; he would not have gotten in. His grades were nothing special. He felt the man looking at him, taking this in.
“That was an erudite sermon you gave, however, young man, the first time we clapped eyes on you in that little seacoast church.” Mr. Slatin dipped his head to drink from his martini. “Cheap grace and costly grace. I’m afraid I got left behind. Cheap grace means forgiving yourself? Did I get that point right?”
“Yes, sir.” Tyler felt himself flush. “Essentially.”
“Essentially.”
Tyler studied his fingernails. Never defend your sermon, George Atwood had said. Never, ever get involved in that.
“Well,” Mr. Slatin said, “I’m sure you’ll be very successful. We preferred Lauren go to Simmons.” Tyler looked up and nodded. “An all-girls’ school was best for her,” the man said. He leaned back, stretched his beefy legs before him, stared at the fire. “You’ll have to stay on your toes with her, Tyler. She has a recklessness. You may or may not have noticed.” He looked at Tyler sideways, and there seemed to Tyler to be some element of pride and some vague unsavoriness wrapped around the remark.
“Lauren is wonderful,” Tyler said.
A round table, twinkling with plates and silverware and crystal goblets, sat waiting in the dining room. He had never seen so much silverware, and watched carefully to see which of the three spoons was used for the soup, which fork for the salad, which knife to tackle the lamb chops with. Mr. Slatin used his fingers to eat the lamb chops, but Tyler did not. The napkins were a nylon, gauzy material that could not possibly, he thought, absorb anything.
“It’s a goddamn mess over there in the Middle East,” Mr. Slatin said. He ate with his head bent over his food. “Don’t you think so, son?” He glanced toward Tyler.
“Leave him alone, Daddy.”
Mr. Slatin ignored his daughter. “What’s your feeling about Truman telling the Brits to let in all those Jews to Palestine just so he could capture the vote? And did you see that picture?” Mr. Slatin reached for the plate of lamb chops. “Counterrevolutionaries in China being set for execution while the crowds cheered?”
“No,” Tyler said. “I didn’t see that.”
“It’s a corrupt world,” the man said. “It always has been. Human beings aren’t worth much.” He wiped the gauzy napkin across his lips vigorously. “Don’t you think so, son?”
“I think human beings are worth a great deal,” Tyler said.
The sister smirked and rolled her eyes, but Lauren said, “Stop it, stop it, stop it—why don’t you leave Tyler alone?”
“No one’s bothering me, Lauren.”
“I thought I’d get new curtains for the sitting room,” Mrs. Slatin said, smiling at the maid who came to clear the plates. Tyler was light-headed by the time the peach cobbler had been taken away. Mrs. Slatin said, her brown eyes sparkling, “Why don’t you and Lauren take your coffee into the living room, have a few moments to yourselves?”
Lauren closed the French doors to the room and whispered, “I hate him.”
“He’s your father, Lauren. You can’t hate him.”
“I can so, and I do. And I hate my sister, too. She’s always been jealous of me ’cause I’m prettier.” She took the cup and saucer from Tyler’s hand and kissed him. On the couch beside her, his arm around her, Tyler said quietly, “Lauren, I can’t offer you any of this, you know,” nodding around the room.
“I don’t want any of this. I want you. And I don’t want to be married in the stupid old Anglican church here. I want to be married up at Brockmorton. I want to get out of here.”
“There’s no stopping Lauren when she’s put her mind to something,” Mrs. Slatin said later, when this had been disclosed. “Get married wherever you want to, dear.”
“You’ll save me some money,” her father said. “Our friends aren’t going to want to drive all the way up there.”
“So it will be small,” Lauren said, thrusting her chin up. “And sweet as can be.”
But there was a reception held at the Slatin home a month before the wedding. “This will give our friends a chance to meet you,” Mrs. Slatin explained. Tyler drove down with his mother, and Belle and Tom arrived later. Mrs. Slatin asked Mrs. Caskey to help tie a small ribbon around each napkin that would be placed on the long hallway table when the guests arrived the next day.
“Tyler, old boy,” said Mr. Slatin. “How about you and I go into town and buy a new suit?”
Margaret Caskey’s mouth, as she arranged the napkins, stayed closed, but Tyler saw her jaw drop, making her thin face elongated. “Oh,” Tyler said, “I guess I’m fine with this one, thanks.”
“Do this as a favor to your new mother-in-law and me,” the man said. “A wedding present from us. A new suit.”
“Is there anything wrong with Tyler’s suit?” Margaret Caskey asked quietly.
“No, no. I just never had a son, you see,” the man said to her. “It will be an experience for me.”
“Let Daddy buy you a new suit,” Lauren said. “Even though your mother and I know you don’t need one. You are the handsomest man in the world.”
“I have a little present for you, Lauren,” his mother said. And she gave Lauren a book, The Pastor’s Wife.
“Oh, what fun!” Lauren said. “Tyler, look!”
The next afternoon Tyler stood in his new suit next to Lauren, outside on the combed-looking lawn. Lauren’s sister held a camera to her face, aimed it at them. There was a picture of just the two of them, a picture with just his mother, then a picture with Belle and Tom, then a picture with all of them. Tyler smiled and smiled, his arm around Lauren. Lauren’s sister, squinting through the camera, said, “Everyone say, ‘Shit’!”
Mr. Slatin laughed, and yelled, “Shit!” Tyler, shocked with the horror of having his mother hear the use of such language, kept smiling, but after the picture was taken, he could not look at her. As the guests arrived, Tyler shook hands again and again, finding what he had always found to be generally true: If you are friendly to people, they are friendly to you. He said to his mother afterward, as they sat in the big living room, “That was nice, don’t you think?” He glanced at her, but she did not look up from the tissue she held clenched on her lap.
“Very nice,” she said.
Belle and Tom said their good-byes and drove home, and Margaret Caskey went off to bed. As Tyler sat with his arm around Lauren, his future in-laws resting across the room with drinks in their hands, Mrs. Slatin said, “Oh, that was so rude of the Tibbetses.”
“What, Mommy?” said Lauren, yawning.
“I’ve always hated the Tibbetses,” Mrs. Slatin explained to Tyler. “Well, not always. We used to be good friends. But they went on to a different crowd, joined a different country club. I only invited them out of respect for old times.”
“What did they do?” Lauren asked.
“Oh, they were rude.”
“They stood in line at the buffet table,” said her father, “watching your new sister-in-law, what’s her name, there? Belle. Looking at Belle and Tom, looking them up and down, and then they said to each other, not softly, ‘What rubes.’ “
“You just ignore them,” Mrs. Slatin said to Tyler. “Goodness, I am one hundred and twenty percent wrung out. I’m going to turn in.” She stood up, and Tyler stood.
“Thank you,” he said. “And good night.” He turned to see Mr. Slatin’s eyes following Lauren’s hips as she walked with her mother across the room.
THEY LIVED, THAT FIRST YEAR, in an apartment on the top floor of an old wooden house near Brockmorton while Tyler finished his studies. Lauren, who said she had never cooked a meal, bought a cookbook and made lists, bought groceries, and fussed in the kitchen at night, presenting Tyler with plates of fish and beef,
and showing the delight of a child when Tyler praised the food. The next day, when Tyler came home for lunch, they would sit on the couch and eat leftovers. “Tell me everything,” Lauren said. “And don’t leave anything out.”
He told her of the recent excavations that proved King Solomon had been as rich as the Bible said. They had discovered stables for four hundred and fifty horses, and sheds for a hundred and fifty chariots. “They say that horses were treated better than humans.”
Lauren tucked her feet under her. “Even better than his seven hundred wives? Tyler, what would you do with seven hundred wives?”
“Be busy, I expect.”
“You would do nothing, because I would kill you.”
“Then perhaps you should be the Queen of Sheba.”
“Yes, yes, yes, I am a queen.” Lauren took their plates back to the kitchen, twirling around.
Every part of her was dear to him. The sight of her full hips as she walked back and forth in the kitchen stirred him with longing. The wet footprints left on the floor after she bathed gave him a sense of sweet fortune. She giggled at his astonishment the first time she danced for him unclothed. “You’re a wonder,” he said. “The inhibitory section of your brain is missing.”
“No.” She stopped her dancing and looked at him with serious innocence. “No, Tyler. It’s just that I love you so much.”
“Well, then,” he said as seriously, “I praise God.”
She laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh, let’s praise Him!” she cried, and came and sat on his lap.
On Saturday mornings, Lauren slept late and Tyler would go to the bakery at the bottom of the hill and buy doughnuts and the newspaper. Lauren would just be stirring when he arrived back, the blankets piled over her head. He would undress and get back into bed. “Let’s do this when we’re eighty,” he said one morning, smoothing back her hair from her moistened face. “Yes, oh, yes,” she said. And why wouldn’t they? World without end—their happiness.
He walked across campus with the sure steps of someone possessed with a sense of rightness. If, at times, the picture of his mother’s worried face floated across his mind, he was able to dismiss it. He was living and loving as God had chosen him to do. And there were times, as he walked down the steps of a classroom building, and felt the sharp, cold winter air stab into his nostrils, that The Feeling would come to him. Life, he would think. How mysterious and magnificent! Such abundance! With all his heart he praised God. His own specific history was unfolding.
“Oh, I missed you!” Lauren would say, even if he had been gone only for the afternoon.
“Are you restless?” he asked. “Because I’m sure you could work in one of the offices.”
“I’m not restless. I missed you because I love you so much. No, I don’t want to work in any office. Tell me everything.”
He told of a discussion in Calvinism class regarding the notion of sin and depravity in man, the Atonement of Christ, the notion of predestination. “Get to the good part,” Lauren said, eating a cookie. He told how a man’s stomach had growled so loudly during a lecture on Christian ethics that the professor had stopped and demanded the poor red-faced fellow go get something to eat.
“But I thought you were all supposed to be nice,” Lauren said, eating another cookie.
“I know. But they’re not. Some professors are dried up and stingy. That fellow whose stomach growled is very sharp in systemic theology, by the way.”
“And you are good at homilies!” she said. “You are the best speaker on this campus. Even Daddy knows that.”
She left the bathroom door open, talking even as she urinated. She called him a prude when he closed the door when using the bathroom himself. “I may be,” he admitted.
At night they lay in bed while she read to him from The Pastor’s Wife, the book that his mother had given her. “ ‘Chapter One,’ “ Lauren said. “Oh, I love this, Tyler. ‘As a Worthy Woman. The girl who marries a minister must expect to be a marked woman.’ Marked with what, Tyler?”
“Beauty.” He leaned over to kiss her.
“ ‘Chapter Five. As a Financier. She looketh well to the ways of her household, And eateth not the bread of idleness.’ “ Lauren was silent for a moment, reading. “Wait, Tyler,” she said with some alarm. “ ‘First set aside a tenth for the Lord.’ Do we have to do that?”
“Don’t worry,” he said.
“It says we should always have a can of fruit cocktail in the pantry in case someone stops by.”
“That’s easy enough.”
“I get scared.”
“Oh, no,” Tyler said. “Lauren, you’ll make a beautiful minister’s wife.”
“Look at the picture on the back of the book. She looks like a horrible lesbian. Am I going to end up looking that grim?”
“Never.” Tyler reached over and turned out the light.
“Daddy said Mrs. Tibbets is a lesbian.”
“Why?”
“Because she was the first one to complain about him.”
“Complain about what, Lauren?”
“That our house wasn’t a nice one for girls to come to. Because Daddy would give us baths.”
“How old were you?”
“Oh, I really don’t remember.”
“Honey, what are you saying?”
In the dark she snuggled close to him. “I’m saying this: I hate everyone but you.”
EARLIER THAN PLANNED, she became pregnant. Lauren went to Boston to shop for maternity clothes with her mother, and came back with so many boxes that the bus driver raised his eyebrows at Tyler as he pulled one after another from the storage compartment in the bottom of the bus. An uneasiness rolled through Tyler that he ignored, and when she tried on all the new clothes for him that night, he told her again and again that she looked beautiful.
He was ordained in a service that made his mother’s eyes glisten. His in-laws did not attend. Offered the job at West Annett, he and Lauren prepared their move, and drove one morning to see the farmhouse on Stepping Stone Road. They stopped at a diner, where Lauren ate two fried eggs and a piece of pie. “I’m hungry as a bear,” she said to the waitress, who didn’t seem to care.
Back in the car Lauren sang. “Two little honey bears, happy as can be. Two little honey bears about to be three.” She fell silent, though, as Tyler drove slowly along Upper Main Street, past the Academy, the road becoming narrow, up the hill past the lake, back down around Ringrose Pond, and then along the stretch of road where the trees grew close enough to block the sun on the road before them. But back out into the sun, and there was the old Locke place.
“Gosh,” said Lauren. “It’s kind of far from anyone.”
“Don’t worry,” Tyler said, turning in to the driveway, the tires crunching.
“I guess it’s better,” said Lauren. “I guess I don’t want to be plunk in the middle of the ladies in town.”
The house sat. It was not welcoming or unwelcoming, just old and silent, with its broken front railing and tilting porch steps. The Caskeys got out of the car slowly. Lauren hung back as Tyler fiddled with the keys, and then he realized the kitchen door was unlocked, and he pushed it open. “You have to carry me,” Lauren cried, holding out her arms.
“Then I wish you hadn’t had pie for breakfast.” Tyler picked his bride up in his arms and stepped or, rather, stumbled, over the threshold into the little mudroom.
“It smells,” Lauren said softly, as he set her down.
“Let’s open the windows,” Tyler said, and he moved into the kitchen and opened the window that looked out onto the driveway. The window was old and rattled in its casing.
“It smells like death,” Lauren said. “Tyler, I don’t like it.” She began to cry.
BUT MRS. SLATIN arrived for a visit, and took Lauren shopping for curtains, a bathroom rug, a crib, dishes with apples painted on them. And when Mrs. Slatin left, saying, “Well, you won’t be here for long, dear. This is just temporary,” Lauren said she wanted the horrid o
ld place painted pink, she couldn’t stand it, and so Tyler asked the church, and then painted the walls of the living room and the dining room pink. “Perfect!” Lauren said. “I love you!”
Joy filled him, and trepidation, for the job of being pastor of this church was, for Tyler, an assignment of great seriousness. He was moved by the kindness of his parish, how they sometimes left notes for him by his office in the church, saying how his sermon had touched them. He was moved by the Ladies’ Aid inviting him to one of their meetings; he stood, the only man among them that day in the activities room, singing with them “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” then eating sugar cookies from a paper napkin on his knee. When he suggested to Lauren that it would be good if she started a prayer group, her eyes grew very round, and she said, “Oh, dear God, no.” And so he let it go. She would be a mother soon. Life had moved up upon him in a wave of seriousness and wondrousness, and he felt he had indeed left childhood behind.
Prayer—his own morning prayer—took place in the church sanctuary, where he sat alone each morning. He loved the slightly musty smell, the simple lines of the tall windows, the rows of white painted pews, the air seeming to hold within its quietude all the prayers and hopes and fears of those who for the last century and a half had sat humbled on these benches before God. If someone happened to enter, Tyler would look up and nod, and if they wanted, he would pray with them. He felt immensely blessed to have this job.
He had tried, at first, to pray at home in his study with Lauren. She did not pray with him, as he had hoped. She said she prayed on her own, even though when they lived near Brockmorton, she would go with him sometimes into the chapel and sit with him in prayer. But in West Annett, when he tried to pray in his study at home, he was aware of her in the kitchen, wondering why she was making so much noise with the pots and pans, and when he stepped into the kitchen to say, “Lauren, is everything all right?” she said, “Yes, go away. Go back in there and pray. Or whatever it is you do.”