“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “Can’t you see I’m trying to figure it out? I’ve fed her, burped her—I don’t know.”
In the middle of the night he would walk the floor, holding Katherine, her little head over his shoulder. As soon as she quieted and seemed ready to sleep, he would try placing her back in her crib. She would wake and cry out. Lauren, appearing in her housecoat, would say, “You’re doing it wrong, Tyler. Go to bed.” He was glad he was not a woman; it seemed to him their job was immeasurably more difficult than a man’s. But he wanted his wife happy.
And at times, it seemed she was. As Katherine grew and began to sleep at least five hours straight through, Lauren’s spirits lifted, and she would coo and tickle and nuzzle her nose in the baby’s neck, or kiss her toes one by one. “Who’s the most beautiful baby in the world?” she would sing. “Who’s Mommy’s prettiest baby in the world? Let’s go see Carol today. Tyler, I want the car today.”
CAROL MEADOWS RETAINED the impression that some deep unhappiness nipped at the heels of Lauren. Lauren showed off her new baby, undressing her completely, saying to Carol, “Did you ever see a child more perfect?” And then wrapping her up again. But the woman could barely sit still. She walked back and forth, the infant held against her, poking her head into the other rooms of the house, saying, “Oh, can I just have a look?” Walking into Carol’s bedroom, she said, “What a cute little pot of rouge. I never see you wear makeup.”
“Once in a rare while.” Davis sometimes liked Carol to make herself up in their private times.
Lauren’s voice came through the open bedroom door to where Carol, in the front room, bent over Matt in the playpen. “Tyler said I might want to start a prayer group. Can you imagine?” Lauren stepped back into the living room. “I told him, ‘Tyler, I’d rather die.’ You don’t mind if I smoke again, do you?”
Carol brought out the ashtray. “I’m sure Tyler understands that now is the time for you to be a mother. The prayer group can wait.”
“It can wait,” Lauren said. “Boy, can it wait.”
At night Carol told Davis that the girl had an essentially good heart. Davis said, “And where is your heart? Let me find it.” Later, he said, “Is she too much for you, honey? She seems to come here a lot.”
“It’s all right. She’s lonely.”
But it was a burden, to hear everything that Carol heard. “My parents didn’t want me to marry Tyler,” Lauren said a few days later. Her little baby had just fallen asleep on the nest of pillow and quilt Carol arranged for her. Lauren’s finger was lightly stroking the baby’s head.
“But Tyler’s a lovely man,” Carol said.
“My father called him a rube.” Lauren still stroked her baby, not looking up. “My father said he didn’t send me to Simmons to marry a small-time rube minister, but if I wanted to throw my life away, it was up to me.” Lauren stretched her legs out, then stood up swiftly. “My father said it’s not too late, if I still want to come home.”
“Do you want to?” There was a slightly sick feeling in Carol’s stomach.
Lauren shook her head slowly. “My father gives me the creeps, and my sister hates me. And my mother is a little bit of an idiot, frankly. I guess I’m staying here.”
It was either that night, or close to it, that Carol happened to notice her little pot of rouge was gone. She looked in the bathroom, each bureau drawer, behind the bureau, where it might have fallen. Davis was scared one of the kids had taken it and would eat the stuff, so they asked each child carefully if he or she had seen Mama’s pot of rouge. All shook their heads solemnly. It was gone.
TYLER WAS AWARE those days that alongside his sense of joy—of abundance—was a feeling of being left out. The cozy world he had lived in with Lauren, as though the two of them shared a warm cocoon, was no longer there; or if it was, it was the baby, and not he, who shared it with his wife. “Let’s go out for dinner,” he suggested. “Just the two of us. A date.” Lauren shook her head without looking at him.
“And leave this child with a teenage girl? Never.”
But his congregation continued to love him. On Sunday mornings he assured them that only what came from a man could defile him, not what happened to him. He told them how the business of man’s life was to seek out and save in his soul that which was perishing. He spoke to his congregation of cheap grace and costly grace. He reminded them of the Doctrine of Justification, of their Covenant with God, and that we must not think that because of these gifts from the Almighty, we could bestow grace upon ourselves. Cheap grace was this—the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance. Costly grace was when you paid with your life, as Jesus had paid with his. Costly grace was the gift that must be asked for. Oh, Tyler loved this stuff—and because of that, because he loved it, and believed it, and spoke of it with a quiet fervor, they seemed to listen to him; and those who hadn’t understood completely might wait and speak to him after coffee hour, or sometimes telephone him in his office. “You’ve helped me,” a parishioner sometimes told him. “You’ve helped me be more patient with my father.” And he would feel enormously glad.
But the gladness did not last. He had an odd relationship with praise. Often it did not seem to do anything but swoop by like a yellow streak of light, bouncing off him. Sometimes, even if he had no reason to, he doubted the person who gave it. And yet he could see, too, that in some cases it was not only sincere but so heartfelt that the person speaking it seemed to experience frustration beneath the taciturn New England countenance, and this caused Tyler unease as well. What was best was when he was safe up on the chancel, speaking to them honestly, letting them take what parts they would, or could.
The child’s first Christmas they spent in Massachusetts, where Tyler was appalled by the massive number of gifts beneath a tree that was loaded with tinsel and twinkling lights and enough balls and decorations that the green boughs could barely be seen. Lauren opened one dress box after another, clapping her hands. For the baby, there was a music box, a jack-in-the-box, rattles, dolls, small dresses. For him there was a wallet of nice leather. They drove up to his mother’s that night. Her tree was small, and had nothing but a few gold balls on it. Beneath the tree was one gift for each of them. The baby was given blocks made of mahogany. The next morning, driving back to West Annett, Lauren said, “Your mother makes me feel like crap on toast.”
“Lauren,” he said. He had never heard her speak that way.
“She does. What’s wrong with a little fun? What baby wants blocks with no color or letters or anything? And a plain black belt for me. I’d just as soon hang myself with it.”
“Lauren, stop. Good Lord.”
“And she hates me.”
“How can you say that? Lauren, that’s not true.”
She didn’t speak for the rest of the drive, the baby asleep between them. “Anyway,” he said, as they pulled up to the farmhouse, “next year we’re not going away. The parish shouldn’t have a visiting pastor on Christmas day.” By night they had made up.
And he marveled at the child. She pulled herself up and held on to the railing of the crib. She let go of the arm of the couch one evening, and took her first step. Soon, he could not even remember her as a baby. “Goggie, goggie!” she would scream happily at the sight of the Carlsons’ dog loping alongside the road. “Dama!” she would announce, smooshing a banana between her small fingers. By the time she was three, Lauren had her in church, sitting in the third-row pew with her sock-doll and her blanket. “You are my best friend,” Lauren would say to her, rubbing noses. “You are my very dearest friend in the world. And you’re such a good girl you can sit in the big people’s church. No kinderkirk for you.”
Frequently Tyler walked into town in order to let Lauren have the car. “I can’t be stuck here all day,” she said. He wished she was more active in church affairs, but it was clear they didn’t interest her, and he knew she was busy with the child. He was glad she went to visit Carol Meadows, but he worried that she
drove the car too much; they seemed always low on gas. And he could not ignore the fact that she bought things more and more. She bought bracelets and barrettes, brassieres and stockings, shoes and blouses. “Lauren,” he said, “we simply can’t afford all this.”
She cried, and then they would have to climb and stumble their way through an argument before they made up. But these scenes left him queasy for days; things were said that stung him bitterly. “You make me live like an animal!” she cried. “No television set, a horrible old washing machine, and I have to look at magazines that show these sweet pink washing machines, and women in pretty dresses, and if Daddy didn’t give me money, I’d never even be able to buy myself some perfume!”
He did not want her father giving her money.
“Why?” she demanded. “It takes away your stupid masculinity?”
Later, when they argued about money, she simply said, “I don’t want to hear it,” and would turn away.
He understood that he would eventually have to move on to a larger parish, where there would be more money and more people for Lauren to be with. But he loved the town of West Annett. He loved being far out in the country, walking to town with his boots squeaking on the packed snow. He loved the faces of his congregation as they looked at him each Sunday. He loved the smell of coffee in the activities room later, moving among the people, asking about their children, their work, their car troubles, for someone was always having trouble with their car.
In the summer he loved swimming in the lake, bicycling for miles on a Sunday afternoon to unwind after his sermon. As he pedaled past farmhouses, large fields of young corn, seeing the winding stone walls that went off into the distance, he would feel The Feeling, and give thanks for God’s beautiful, beautiful world. On Sunday evenings they had pancakes for supper, and he would take Lauren in his arms.
But something was gone. When he said to her, “I love you,” she would smile and not answer. When he asked if there was something wrong, she would shrug and move away. Uneasiness sat at the table with them, got into bed with them (she no longer wanted him to touch her breasts during lovemaking), uneasiness was there in the morning, when he stood in the bathroom and shaved. But then Lauren became pregnant once more, and he thought he felt happiness sweep through the farmhouse again.
CAROL MEADOWS HEARD a great deal about Margaret Caskey. “She’s mean,” Lauren said, while Katherine and Matt played on the floor with pots and pans, stacking them high until they crashed down, then stacking them again. “Just as cold as a witch’s tit.”
“That’s sad for Tyler,” Carol said.
“He doesn’t notice. He doesn’t notice anything, except how much gas I’ve used in the car.”
Carol did not want to hear this. What Carol wanted to say was that marital happiness, in her opinion, was not so hard to achieve. It was a matter of giving yourself over. One reason that Carol did not involve herself more with the women in town was that she didn’t like how they complained about their husbands. “Why, they wipe the floor with them,” she had told Davis. Arguments over replacing a toilet-paper roll—this sort of thing did not make sense to Carol. She thought if Lauren was using too much gas, she ought to try to use less. This petty kind of tug-of-war could chip away at married life; could certainly affect how they felt toward each other in bed, and for Carol, all levels of her intimacy with Davis felt to be a gift that she would not think of harming.
After returning from a visit to Massachusetts, Lauren said to Carol, with tears suddenly coming into her large brown eyes, “Tyler got my father very angry.” A streak of black mascara very slowly made its way down Lauren’s cheek before she rubbed it off with a tissue Carol handed her.
“Oh, dear.” Carol sank back into her chair.
“Tyler said . . .” Lauren opened her compact, touching the skin near her eye with the tip of her fourth finger; it was a natural and elegant gesture. “Tyler said he preferred not talking politics, but went ahead anyway.” A tiny shiver of pain moved across Lauren’s features as she snapped the compact shut.
“Did they have a serious argument, or just one of those blustering times men sometimes have?”
“I don’t know. Blustering, I guess. I was trying not to pay attention because it’s boring, but Tyler, you know, it’s embarrassing sometimes, but he talks about religion.”
Carol nodded kindly. “Men like to talk about their work.”
“But religion, Carol. I’m sure it’s much more interesting to hear Davis talk about science.”
“Religion is interesting. It seems to me it’s very interesting.”
Lauren ran her hand through her abundant hair, pink nail polish showing through. “And my sister went to bed with Jim Bearce.”
Carol waited. “Is Jim her fiancé?” she finally asked.
“No. Jim was supposed to be my fiancé.”
Carol reached over to hand the children each a graham cracker. “Jim is someone you loved, then.”
“I guess so. Yeah, I did.”
“And what happened?”
“My sister—oh, she’s such a cretin, Carol—my sister told him I’d had all these other boyfriends.”
Carol did not know what to say.
“And it’s true. I had a lot of boyfriends. Tyler doesn’t know that. Do you think he should know?”
Carol’s face grew very warm. “I think what matters is what you and Tyler feel together now.”
“So my sister told Jim, this was a few years ago, and Jim said, well, he couldn’t marry someone like that, you know. And now she’s gone to bed with him.”
“How do you know?”
Lauren looked up at Carol, her big eyes glistening. “She told me last week, when I went home. As if this horrid scene with Tyler and my father wasn’t enough, she told me in the bedroom when I was packing up the baby’s things that, oh, by the way, she’d gone to bed with Jim Bearce. And that Jim said now he’d had both Slatin girls he could see what everyone meant.”
“Lauren, this is disgusting. Who is this man?”
“A Harvard law graduate.” Lauren looked exhausted now, and waved a hand. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Don’t tell anyone what I said.”
“Of course not.”
“And then I had to listen to all that crap—Tyler saying how Karl Marx said all sin was committed in the name of religion, or something, I mean, Carol, who cares, and my father said, ‘Tyler, it’s not religion that controls the world, it’s oil.’ “
“Oil?”
“Oil.” Lauren was watching Katherine, who was banging Matt on the arm with a stuffed toy. “Petty-pie, stop that, now.”
“Oh, they’re just playing, they’re fine.”
“And Tyler said that’s talking apples and oranges and my father said no, it was talking oil and vomit.”
“Vomit? He was equating religion with vomit?”
“I really don’t think so. But he said when we drove back up here, to take a look at the cars on the road, because they all required gasoline, and where did Tyler think that came from? Mostly from Persia. Iran. And Daddy said it’s a good thing the Shah replaced that awful fellow over there, or in a few years we wouldn’t even be able to drive to visit them, there’d be no oil for gasoline, and Tyler said, ‘I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying,’ but he was. He got Daddy worked up somehow. Daddy said people had no idea how much work went into running this country and keeping it safe.”
“I can’t imagine Tyler would disagree with that.”
“No, Tyler wasn’t disagreeing. But Tyler doesn’t know as much as Daddy does.”
Carol said, “Goodness. Tyler appears pretty intelligent to me.”
“Tyler knows stuff, sure,” Lauren said. “All that religious stuff, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the real world, and that’s Daddy’s point—we live in the real world.”
“Oh, well. Men. They get talking. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Lauren’s eyes teared up once more as she stood. “I should get going,” sh
e said. “Back to my monk’s cell.”
“Oh, Lauren. You’ll feel better. Your sister’s made you feel bad. But you have a family here. And Tyler won’t stay here forever, much as we wish he would. He’s a talented man. He’ll find a bigger church someday, and you’ll find more to do.”
Lauren nodded, and wiped her eyes carefully with a tissue before she left.
LATER THAT EVENING, as she got ready for bed, Carol noticed that a rayon scarf she usually had draped over a hook on the back of the bedroom door was not there. “Davis,” she said, “have you seen that pretty scarf Mother gave me?” Her husband was lying naked on the bed with a Playboy magazine. He shook his head. “I can’t think where it would be,” Carol said, a real uneasiness coming over her.
“You’ll find it.” Her husband patted the bed. “Come.”
She was glad to go lie with him. Carol did not mind the Playboy magazines as long as no one knew about them. “Never as beautiful as you,” he always said—he was kind that way.
CAROL DID NOT THINK it possible that Lauren would take things from her house. But the woman’s unhappiness bothered Carol, and she thought if Lauren was taking things secretly, it represented neediness. And so Carol, having thought this through carefully, remembered how Jesus said that if you are asked to walk a mile, offer to walk two, and she thought if Lauren needed things, then she, Carol, in the truest spirit of Christianity, would give her things. And so one day she gave Lauren a small gold ring with a tiny red stone in it that had been intended for her little girl who had died. The ring, a gift from Carol’s mother to the little baby girl, should have, by rights, gone later to one of Carol’s other children. But she gave it to Lauren that day. “Katherine might want this,” she said.
Lauren, enormously pregnant with the second baby, looked both eager and stricken. “It’s so sweet,” she said. And then handed it back. “I can’t take it,” she said.
“But why not? It would please me if you had it.”
“Tyler wouldn’t let me.”
“Why is that?”