“Oh, so am I.” George looked up at him, raising his white eyebrows.
“I think she stopped being happy with me.”
George took a deep breath, and for a while the men sat silently. Finally, George said, “No one, to my knowledge, has figured out the secret to love. We love imperfectly, Tyler. We all do. Even Jesus wrestled with that. But I think—I think the ability to receive love is as important as the ability to give it. It’s one and the same, really. Consider, for example, the physical act of love between a man and his wife. If one holds back, withholds the ability to receive that pleasure, isn’t it a withholding of love?”
Tyler, to his great embarrassment, felt his face flush.
“It’s just an example, Tyler.”
“Yes.”
“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it’s no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
Tyler nodded, gazing at the rug.
“Your congregation, it seems to me, has given you love. And it’s your job to receive it. Perhaps before now they gave you an admiring, childlike kind of love, but what happened to you that Sunday—and their response to it—is a mature and compassionate love.”
“Yes,” said Tyler. “My word.”
In the morning he telephoned Charlie Austin and arranged for a meeting the next evening with the deacons and the board. He telephoned his mother, as he had every day, to check on her. “How do you think I am?” she said. He wondered if his mother lacked the ability to receive love. He telephoned Belle. “She’ll get over it,” Belle said. “She’s not going to cut you out of her life. Meanwhile, welcome to grown-up land.”
Tyler took a long walk across the campus of the seminary. Grown-up land. He thought how Bonhoeffer had believed mankind was on the threshold of adulthood. That the world was now coming of age and needed a new understanding of God—God not as a problem solver, not a God to be relied upon exclusively to do what man himself could do. Tyler stopped beneath a huge elm tree, and looked down the hill at the river seen in the distance. If the world’s relationship to God was changing, well, Tyler’s own relationship to God was changing, too. He thought of the words of the hymn he had always loved: Help of the helpless, O abide with me. He knew one could say—perhaps Rhonda Skillings might say—that this was merely the plea of a frightened child reaching up in the dark to hold the hand of Parent God.
But Tyler, softly humming the tune as he stood beneath the elm—fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide—thought God existed in the hymn itself, in the yearning and sorrowful acknowledgment of the loneliness and fears that arrived in life. The expression of it, the truthfulness of it, was what was beautiful. He thought of William James writing that a solemn state of mind is never crude or simple, that it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. And it was, to Tyler, this mysterious combination of hope and sorrow that was itself a gift from God. Still—it was hard for Tyler to understand what he felt. It was as though in his long, heavy sleeps, many ideas he had previously had were shifting slowly and getting buried beneath new and shapeless ones.
“I have so many thoughts,” Tyler told George that night, as they sat in George’s study talking. “And I can’t articulate them, or get any of them together.”
“Good,” said George. “Confusion will prevent you from being dogmatic. A dogmatic pastor is useless.”
After a moment, Tyler said, “Bonhoeffer thought the world was growing up. But I wonder what he would think of the world today, all grown-up with its nuclear weapons.”
George raised an eyebrow. He said quietly, “He’d probably say that it was up to man, not God, to solve this mess.” The old man sat back, sighed deeply. “Get back in the pulpit, Tyler, where you belong. And Tyler—putting nuclear weapons aside for the moment—one of these days you’re going to have to call the Slatins. They are the grandparents to these girls, no matter how much you may not be able to stand them.”
“Yes,” said Tyler, tapping his mouth. “A lot to do.”
THE NEXT EVENING, in the living room of the Deans’ house, where he had eaten the potluck dinner years before with Lauren, he sat with the board members and the deacons and listened while they said they wanted him back. “What is it you need, Tyler?” Fred Chase asked. “Tell us what you need.”
Tyler’s heart was beating fast. “Well, I guess to speak honestly,” he said, “I need to be out of that farmhouse. Away from those pink walls.”
“We thought of that.” Fred Chase nodded toward Skogie.
Skogie cleared his throat. “We’re going south for the winter, you know, Tyler, and we’d like you to take our house. It’s big and warm, and closer to town. And we’ve been thinking that we might, when we get back, summer in one of the new cottages they’re building out by China Lake. The house is really too big for us.”
“There’s money, you know,” said Chris Congdon. “We’ll work it out, one way or another. You won’t be stuck out in that farmhouse.”
“I’ll need help with the kids,” Tyler said.
They had thought of that, too. Carol Meadows and Marilyn Dunlop had already spoken about setting up a schedule where they would take turns with the children.
“And—I’m in debt.” Tyler smiled as he said this, for he did not expect any more than what they had already offered, but when they nodded and said they would give him a raise “long overdue,” he was amazed, and might have said, “No, no, don’t do that.” But he thought of George telling him that the ability to receive was as great as the ability to give, and so he simply said thank you.
THAT NIGHT CHARLIE AUSTIN watched Doris get ready for bed. She turned her back before slipping the flannel nightgown over her head; it had been years since she’d stood before him naked and freely, and perhaps she never would again. He understood now that this was not so much a sexual inhibition—for he felt the same shyness—as an accumulation of shame that had come between them over the years, not only from their spoken altercations, but from the secret of their private disappointments and resentments, as well. There hung between them some fabric of dishonesty, and he was pained deeply to know the fault—or so it seemed tonight—was almost fully his. He felt he had soiled himself, and therefore his family, and they would always have to drag some filthy diaper behind them into their advancing years.
Charlie said, “Tyler looked rested. He looks ready to come back.”
“I’m glad” was all Doris said. She got into bed beside him, putting lotion on her hands.
“It was nice of you,” he said, “to play that hymn for him that day. He appreciated it, Doris, mentioned it in his study after. It wasn’t lost on him.”
“I’m glad,” Doris said again. She added, “It just came to me.”
A natural goodness existed in her, he thought. One that had become hidden beneath the dust of domestic worries. She switched out the light beside the bed, and cautiously, he reached for her hand. She allowed him to hold it, moist from the cream, both of them on their backs in the dark. He remembered how Caskey had once, years ago, said in a sermon that the Hebrew word for Satan was “The Accuser,” and he felt like Satan lying there, having accused his wife of much over the years—of spending too much money, of being fretful so often that joy seemed impossible, even of serving him food that was not hot enough. He saw no way to recover from the calumny he had brought into the household: Satan now accusing himself. He still thought every day of the woman in Boston, still missed her with a nauseating longing, although there were times the memory of her would suddenly, briefly, repulse him. The memory of himself repulsed him.
“I don’t care about a new organ anymore,” Doris said calmly.
“Are you sure?” He turned his face toward her in the dark. “There’s still money, even with Caskey’s expenses.”
“Nope,” said Doris. “I hope nobody even talks about it. I just lost my appetite for it—that’s all.”
; He didn’t know what to say.
“Don’t be sad about it,” she added. “Maybe sometime in the future. But I just don’t care about it now.”
“All right, then.”
“Charlie?” She was speaking to the ceiling. “Maybe someday you could tell me what you saw in the war. How it was you survived.”
“I survived because I was ordered by the Japs to drive a Jeep. They couldn’t figure out how to drive it.” It surprised him to realize he had never told her that.
“Well, thank God,” Doris said, still looking at the ceiling, her hand tightening just slightly on his. “But if you could someday, just one day, tell me what you saw, and then we’d never mention it again.”
She had asked him this before and always he answered harshly that she was never to ask again.
“I wouldn’t tell anyone,” she added, turning her face toward him.
He said nothing, and in a minute she squeezed his hand and rolled away from him. “Maybe I’ll try,” he finally said hoarsely. “Someday, maybe.” After a long while, he heard her breathing slow as she fell asleep.
AND SO IT was that during the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Reverend Caskey met with all the members of his congregation, one house at a time, much as he had done when he first moved to town. He came in the evenings and spoke quietly, and people could not help remembering when he had made those visits years before, a younger man, broad-shouldered and gregarious, his pretty, distracted wife not appearing the way they had expected her to. Now he sat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, still a keen listener, but with a visage revealing the fatigue of the years. He still laughed in a way that made his blue eyes light up, he still tilted his head as he watched someone speak, but he was older, and when he rose to leave, there was not the quick buoyancy of his earlier step.
He paid a visit to Mary Ingersoll and her husband, asking about their families and their college years. He seemed a man very different from the one Mary had encountered in the school, and she felt intimidated in a different way. But he struck the right note, both she and her husband later agreed; he was not deferential and eager to please, just polite and tired and apparently interested in what their needs might be. “Perhaps we could move the service from ten o’clock to eleven, so those of you who work hard during the week could sleep in. But you come whenever you like—that’s the point of the church, to be there when you need it.”
And so in this way, it was decided by the town, and by Tyler, that he would stay on—at least for the time being. (The woman from the pharmacy did not show up in church anymore, and there were those who still wondered where Tyler would find a wife.) Tyler himself wondered this, but mostly he felt a sense of enormous relief to have the girls together, and a sense of puzzlement that his parish had in fact loved him this way.
He went every week to visit Connie. He took her books and a sweater and some socks, as the sheriff had told him he could do. Sometimes Adrian went with him and other times he went alone. One time she whispered to him—although they were alone in the visiting room—that she had thought of “ending it all,” and he had taken her hands and begged her not to. “If you keep visiting me,” she said, “I can keep going. And Adrian, too. If he keeps visiting me, too. But it’ll be a longer drive when I get moved to Skowhegan.”
“Did Adrian say he was going to stop?”
“No.”
“Well, then. And neither will I.”
The next time he went, Connie said that the woman guard who had been hired to watch her had become friendly, and for the first time, Connie’s eyes looked more like they used to. “You see,” Tyler said. “Where there are people, there is always the hope of love.”
Connie sat back. “Do you think she’s a lesbian?” she asked.
“Oh, my goodness, no. I meant love as in friendship, Connie.”
“Like us?”
“Like us.”
But every time he drove away, he felt he was driving away from death. He felt greedy for every piece of sunlight that twinkled off his dashboard; every branch of a tree seemed to him so sweet he imagined himself running his hands over the rough bark as though it were the flesh of a dear and loving woman. With all his heart he hated that ride up the hill to the county jail and nursing home; it baffled him to think of the sorrow within its walls, and made him guilty to think he was free—each visit reminded him of the bottle of pills left by the side of Lauren’s bed. But he could not stop the huge wave of relief as he drove back down into the everyday world, and out on the main roads he sometimes stopped to do an errand just to bump into people. Doris Austin was sometimes in the grocery store, and he would go to her quickly, her quotidian presence seeming splendid, a gift. “Doris,” he would say, “how are you? How awfully nice to see you.”
“Hello, Tyler.” She was shyer now. When he had visited them in their home, thanking them for their help on his day of distress, he had suddenly bent forward and hugged both Doris and Charlie before he went out the door. He was not sure he had ever hugged a man before—when he left for the navy, he and his father had shaken hands. When he pressed Charlie’s shoulder, he’d felt beneath his hand both a surprising thinness and a sudden stiffness, as though the gesture had somehow horrified the man. But they had stood together on their front steps in the cold night air, as he walked to his car, as he waved to them as he backed out the driveway, Doris’s braided bun shining under their outdoor light, Charlie’s shirtsleeve showing white as he raised his arm and left it there.
HE NO LONGER worked in his study at home—for soon he would be moving to the Gowens’ house—but, once again, went every morning to the church after Katherine had been picked up by Mrs. Carlson and he had dropped Jeannie at the Meadowses’. He prayed in the sanctuary, and sometimes he didn’t pray, but just sat there for many, many minutes, thinking of Lauren and his children and Connie. He thought of Kierkegaard writing that “No one is born devoid of spirit, and no matter how many may go to their death with this spiritlessness, it is not the fault of Life.”
One morning, he realized that what he had experienced the day he stood weeping before his congregation, seeing Charlie Austin come to help him, hearing the hymn burst forth from the old organ, was The Feeling. This surprised him: It was very different from the times before, but that’s what it had been, The Feeling. O Lord, truly I am thy servant . . . and the son of thine handmaid; Thou hast loosed my bonds. He looked through the long window. The sky was the pale, sweet blue of a baby’s blanket. He understood again that his relationship to God was changing, as it would have to do. I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving . . .
On a snowy day in December, a truck came to move the minister’s things from the farmhouse to the Gowens’. Tyler had told Katherine she could stay home from school, because he did not want her leaving one home and coming back to another. He thought it best for her to see the change take place, but Jeannie stayed with Carol Meadows. After the men left with the truck, after Tyler had gone through the house one more time, he took the child’s hand and closed the rattly doorknob behind them, walked down the tilting porch steps.
Icicles the size of a man’s upper arm hung from the edge of the porch roof. The light snow that had begun at dawn was already making the world whiter, already renewing the surface of things so that the icicles and snow seemed a faint bluish-gray. “Pumpkin,” the minister said, and he picked the child up. She put both arms around his neck but turned to look with him back at the house.
“All gone,” she said. He kissed her cheek, and she put her head against his neck. And everything seemed remarkable, the familiar scent of his child, the snarl in the back of her hair, the quiet house, the bare birch trunks, the snow on his face. Remarkable.
To the memory of my father, R. G. Strout
ALSO BY ELIZABETH STROUT
Amy and Isabelle
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIZABETH STROUT’s first novel, Amy and Isabelle, won the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and the Chica
go Tribune Heartland Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker. Currently she is on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. She lives in New York City.
Read on for an excerpt from
The Burgess Boys
A Novel
by ELIZABETH STROUT
Published by Random House
Prologue
My mother and I talked a lot about the Burgess family. “The Burgess kids,” she called them. We talked about them mostly on the telephone, because I lived in New York and she lived in Maine. But we talked about them also when I visited her and stayed in the hotel nearby. My mother had not been in many hotels, and it became one of our favorite things: to sit in a room—the green walls stenciled with a strip of pink roses—and speak of the past, those who had left Shirley Falls, those who had stayed. “Been thinking about those Burgess kids,” she’d say, pulling back the curtain and looking toward the birch trees.
The Burgess kids had a hold on her, I think, as a result of the fact that all three had suffered publicly, and also my mother had taught them years before in her fourth-grade Sunday-school class. She favored the Burgess boys. Jim, because he was angry even back then and trying to control it, she felt, and Bob because his heart was big. She didn’t care much for Susan. “Nobody did, far as I know,” she said.
“Susan was pretty when she was little,” I remembered. “She had those curls and big eyes.”
“And then she had that nutty son.”
“Sad,” I said.
“Lots of things are sad,” my mother said. My mother and I were both widowed by then, and there would be a silence after she said this. Then one of us would add how glad we were that Bob Burgess had found a good wife in the end. The wife, Bob’s second and we hoped his last, was a Unitarian minister. My mother did not like Unitarians; she thought they were atheists who didn’t want to be left out of the fun of Christmas, but Margaret Estaver was from Maine, and that was good enough. “Bob could have married someone from New York after living there all those years. Look what happened to Jim, marrying that snob from Connecticut,” my mother said.