For three weeks, Charles tried to forget Lily. He attended class, ate in the dining hall, wrote papers, and went to church on Sundays. He read the newspaper, shined his shoes, took his blazers in to be pressed, all while trying to forget Lily’s brown hair and slight frame.
It did not work. He wanted to know her. He wanted to put depth and shadow and texture to her outline. He wanted to discover the timbre of her voice, to watch her hands move as she talked, to know her stride, her pace, to hear her snap at him in annoyance, to feel her hand on his arm as she made him pause to look at something that had caught her eye. He wanted to know how she sat, how she held her cup, how she brushed her hair. He was surprised by how much he wanted to see her room, to know what color it was painted, what light it got, whether her desk was wide or narrow. He wanted to know how she moved in the world, so that he could recognize her in a crowd just from the way she tucked her hair behind her ear.
But she did not believe in God, and he did. In any intelligent analysis, it was an insurmountable divide. Wars had been started for less, civilizations razed to dust. He supposed he should try to find a girl who understood the deep comfort and broad joy God gave him, who smiled when he talked about becoming a minister, who told her family their plans with pride. He made a point of looking at other girls in the library. Some of them were there to study, lugging stacks of books, wearing tweed skirts, cardigans, and lace-up shoes. Some were there to meet men; he could tell by their tightly curled hair, bright blouses, and open-toed sandals. Any one of them could be the right girl for him; but not one of them was Lily.
It was strange to him that so soon after finding his faith—after believing every need could be fulfilled—a new longing had been awakened in him. A longing for a girl who did not believe in God. But then, his mother did not believe in God, or his father, or Tom Adams—who was, perhaps, the person he most admired in the world—yet he loved them, and they loved him. And also, there was a chance that any girl he dated would reject something inherent about him, wouldn’t like history or Martha’s Vineyard or comic books or baseball. He, in turn, might dislike her brother or her cat or how she spent her money. So why should he give up on Lily before he’d even tried?
He appealed once again to the librarian, Eileen.
“Look,” he said to her. “I’m not crazy. You know me. I study divinity. I think I might be totally in love with that girl, Lily, and I’ve got to know where she lives or her phone number, or something.” He felt like a scrambling puppy.
“She studies English literature,” Eileen said.
So Charles stationed himself in the lobby of Radcliffe’s English building. He did not know Lily’s schedule, so he started his campaign first period on Monday morning, arriving ten minutes before dismissal, hoping to catch her as she came out of a class. He sat on a slatted wooden bench outside the administrative office, his eyes trained on the wide expanse of the marble staircase to the second floor. There were other men there with him, suitors waiting for their own unforgettable girls. Eavesdropping, he realized that most of these boys were English majors, like Lily, and that they could vigorously debate the merits of English literature versus American literature versus literature in translation. These boys seemed to him pale and floppy, and he wondered whether this was the sort of boy Lily admired.
As he waited, Charles worried that Lily would equate him with other divinity students, men who disdained atheists, who worked to debunk disbelief, whose faith called them to save unenlightened souls. He puzzled over how he would explain his own faith to her, how to make her understand that he knew God, but he did not need others to. How to explain that God was like a mentor, a person whom Charles admired, whose company he enjoyed and whom he asked for advice. That analogy left out the feeling of Charles’s faith completely, but Charles thought it would help Lily see him as sensible and levelheaded. He wanted to describe his faith as one part of him, like being tall or needing glasses—intrinsic and essential, but not something others needed to possess as well.
The bell rang. Lily did not emerge from a classroom, so Charles walked back through Cambridge to his own second period class, the class he skipped the next day so that he could pace the long halls of Lily’s school building, still wondering what she would think of him.
His father thought he was crazy. “God,” his father said, rolling his eyes, “the greatest myth ever adopted by humanity.”
Tom Adams agreed. “God,” he said, shaking his head. “Not what I saw coming. I thought you were going to be my competition. I thought you were going to write the books I wanted to write. I thought you were going to write them better.”
Charles had thought that, too. But now he knew his studies had been his preparation for ministering. There was suffering, and he could help. There was loneliness, and he could keep company. There was despair, and he could hope. Charles did not question this calling. It was as certain as the facts of his life that had come before. But now he knew his call was not everything. Now, there was Lily.
Charles returned to look for her again the next day. His in-class essay had taken longer than he’d thought it would, even with his rushing it, and he arrived later than he’d wanted to, dropping onto the bench hot and slightly out of breath. Carrying his books had made his palms sticky; he wiped them on his pants then raked them through his hair. He looked up. The bell rang across the marble floors, a door opened at the top of the staircase, and Lily emerged. She was wearing a grey dress with a full skirt, no stockings, flat shoes. She was pushing a notebook into her green Radcliffe book bag, and she did not see Charles at first. He was glad, because if she had looked at him, she would have seen his face awash in incredulity as he realized that it was not their difference of faith that was absurd—it was the depth and certainty of feeling that he had for a girl he did not know.
His attraction was as unavoidable as a baseball spinning toward him, as his raising his arm to catch it, feeling it land hard in his mitt, the force of it reverberating through his shoulder, simple and solid and obvious. He was relieved when Lily looked back into the classroom to say goodbye to her professor. He needed a moment to take her in, a moment to compose himself, to realize that he felt in that moment exactly as he’d felt in front of Father Martin: that when given the possibility that God—and now love—might be real, he couldn’t possibly turn away.
When Lily came down the stairs of the English building to find Charles waiting on a bench in the hallway, she thought, How ridiculous, and averted her eyes. She recognized him by his height; even sitting, he was a full head taller than the other boys on the bench. He wore a perfectly normal tweed blazer, white shirt, and khakis. It did not occur to her that Charles might be waiting for another girl; she turned away from him because she had absolutely no idea what to do with a boy with such a look of determination in his eyes.
She had just left a discussion about Leaves of Grass, during which she had been reminded how different she was from other people. Her classmates needed to discuss what Whitman was trying to do with his fragmented language, to ask what does it mean? Their sincerity made Lily feel as if she was watching them from the distance of the moon. How could she be the only one who knew that some experiences could not be translated into language, could only be measured or explained by the gaps left between the words? She left class with a silence inside of her, a memorial to what was missing.
And now there was a boy who wanted to talk to her. A boy in a striped tie and penny loafers who jumped up to follow her as she strode quickly past him down the hall. He caught up to her before she reached the door, the rough sleeve of his jacket just grazing her bare arm; he smelled like cedar.
She stopped with an audible sigh and looked up at him, wary. He really was absurdly tall; she had to step back to see him properly. His eyes were grey, which surprised her. She had expected them to be as brown as his shoes, and for them to be insistent. Instead, he was looking down at her with an expression that Lily, even in her annoyance, could only describe as nervously kind.
“I’m Charles Barrett,” he said. “I’d like to take you to dinner.” His voice was round; he spoke loudly, and two boys in bow ties standing by the bulletin board turned to stare. Another jostled past him so forcefully that he had to take a step closer to her to avoid being shoved aside. Lily took a step back. She wanted him to go away. She wanted to ignore him, to push past him without saying a word. But she did not want to make a scene.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“I asked the librarian,” Charles said. “Don’t be angry. She knows me. I’d like to take you to dinner.”
Lily scowled. “Why?”
Charles looked startled. “To get to know you,” he said.
“Absolutely not,” she answered.
Charles took a step back. “Pardon?”
“I don’t think you would like to get to know me. I’ve told you what you need to know. You’re studying to be a minister and I don’t believe in God.”
To her surprise, Charles smiled and looked up at the ceiling. “That’s true,” he said, looking back down at her. His skin was pale; his hair fell over the left side of his forehead. “I’d like to take you to dinner, anyway. Please?”
Lily glared at him, stiffly aware of the passing crowd and the raised-eyebrow looks her classmates were giving her. She could see them lifting their notebooks to cover their mouths as they whispered to one another. Rumors would sprout and twine around the two of them as long as they stood there, as long as they gave everyone something to see. She could not stand it.
“One dinner,” Lily said. “And then you have to leave me alone.”
Charles left the English building draped in a golden relief so heavy it made him want to lie down. He had expected Lily to reject him, had prepared to make his case. Still, in the moment after she had said absolutely not, when her eyes were hard and dismissive, he had felt utterly undone, as if someone had opened a window and taken away the whole living room.
But he had won a dinner. One dinner in which to persuade her to have another. How would he do that without discussing God? It was all he had, really, all that he was: a man who wanted to become a minister. He spent his days in church-adjacent rooms parsing men’s callings and their hopes of sharing them with others. He spent his evenings absorbed in Hebrew translations, authenticating primary sources, reading testaments—reading everything—with an eye to how he might use them in a sermon, or in counseling, to illustrate or shore up his own words of wisdom and advice.
Lily wanted to hear none of this. He would only be able to tell her that school was easy for him and dancing was not, that his mother made him anxious and his father made him sad, that he loved the Vineyard and sailing and eating lobster on the deck before the sunset, in the clear, bright days of summer. As he showered and shaved and put on a clean shirt, he wondered: Would it be enough?
Lily dressed for dinner with as little effort as possible in a straight navy skirt and navy blouse, red lipstick, and four quick brushes of her hair. She locked the door to her room, put her keys in her purse, and went downstairs to wait for Charles on the bench outside the dorm, so that the other girls would not see him pick her up.
He was exactly on time. He smiled at her as he walked up the path, studiously casual in a grey wool blazer over a navy sweater and white shirt. His hair was neatly combed and still damp from the shower. He smelled like shaving cream.
“Hello,” he said.
Lily raised her eyebrows as she picked up her scarf from the arm of the bench where she had laid it and put on her gloves.
They walked to a tavern nearby, where they sat across from each other in a dark wooden booth. The table between them was sloped and scarred with initials. Instead of looking at Charles, Lily let her eyes fall on the tables around them. Other booths were full of people, their tables crowded with glasses and pitchers of beer. She was surprised, as she often was, that her classmates lived noisy, companionable lives. When she finally looked at Charles, who had not taken his eyes off of her, she saw that he was approachable and earnest; there was no grief in his eyes, no sign of a fare hard-paid.
“Let’s not talk about divinity,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
She said, “It’s just that I think God is wishful thinking.”
“What’s wrong with wishful thinking?” he asked.
“It’s wishful,” Lily said.
“You must have wished for something that didn’t come true.”
“Yes,” she told him.
“What?” he asked.
She shifted in her seat, tried to lean back, but the wall of the booth was too far away.
“Let’s not talk about divinity,” she said again.
So they talked about school, and Lily found herself admiring the way Charles’s eyes lit up when he talked about history. They talked about the library, and she had to appreciate his reverence for it, the gratitude with which he described its solemn rooms. After they’d finished their first drinks, he told her about Martha’s Vineyard, and she could easily recognize the pictures he painted of his cousins—they were as lively and attached to one another as her own. While they were eating, he told her about his stern father, his accommodating mother, the thin, silent house in which he’d been raised, and she was glad to see some sadness in him, a close familiarity with solitude.
She told him about the paper she was writing on Leaves of Grass and how much her professor hated the thesis, but would have to give her an A anyway, because it was so well researched. She told him that she had her senior suite all to herself because her roommate, Rosemary, had gone back to homecoming at her old high school and never returned.
Her overwhelming sense, as she spoke, was that Charles was listening. When her eyes landed on him, he was considering her words, every one of them. His attention was alarming. She could not meet his eyes directly. She looked down or over or away and her hands moved across the surface of the table, adjusting the silverware, fiddling with her straw.
Dessert came—two ice cream sundaes in tall cups with long silver spoons. She had not suggested they share, and he had not seemed to mind. They ate in silence. The waitress took their plates away. The seat beneath Lily was hard. The only way to sit comfortably was to lean forward, legs crossed, elbows on the table. Charles was looking at her, waiting for her to say something. His silence pulled at her like a tide.
“Fine,” she said abruptly. “Why on earth do you believe in God?”
Her face was flushed and her expression reconciled. It was the first time Charles had seen her look anything but pale, and he thought she looked beautiful. He wanted to tell her they could talk about God another time, but he wasn’t sure there would be another time.
He took a deep breath. “I don’t exactly know,” he began. “From the moment I was presented with the idea, I believed it. I can’t imagine not believing.”
Lily narrowed her eyes, seemingly unmoved. “Do you think you have some sort of call?” she asked.
Charles looked at the straight angle of her shoulders and the long line of her neck. She was weighing him now; he could not lighten the scale.
“Yes,” he said.
“To what religion?”
“Presbyterian.” It was the church he had gone to with his parents, and the most democratic and practical religion he could find.
“What do you have to do?”
“Preach. Counsel. I talk with people about their deeper beliefs. Not what they do for a living, but why they do it. I get to know people. I see what’s underneath—what gives them comfort, what brings them joy.”
He knew this sounded hackneyed, but it was true.
“Do you pray?”
“Yes.” Before prayer, his life had unfolded in a place of hard study and debate, where men believed in the power of their minds. Prayer gave him a respite from that skepticism, a way to ask for comfort.
“About what?”
“Mostly, I sit quietly. I ask for help in thought, clarity of understanding. I try to see beyond whatever obstacle I’m experiencing. I ask to see the possibility of its resolution. I know I can’t find all the answers, but I think they’re out there.” Through prayer he had seen, immediately, how much easier life was when he had faith.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lily said.
Charles frowned at her, taken aback. She was angry now, her eyes fierce. She looked like his father, outraged at the absurdity of an unproven thesis.
“It’s not ridiculous,” he said, keeping his voice serious. “It’s what I believe.” He leaned forward, ready to say more.
“Shush.” Lily glared at him. “I’m thinking.”
Charles sat back and watched her still, delicate face as she thought.
At one time, Lily had believed in God. She had gone to church and Sunday school, which was taught by her grandmother or her great-aunt, depending on the year. Mostly, they played with the faded animals that made up Noah’s ark and cooked pretend chocolate cakes in the yellow plastic oven. If they managed not to act like hooligans, they were given a root beer Dum Dum before they went home.
“Jesus likes well-dressed children,” her great-aunt reminded them, “and little boys who don’t pick their nose.”
Her parents’ funeral was in a church. Their caskets were grey, with white roses on top; her aunt Cassandra had asked the florist not to use lilies. Richard sat in the front row with her and held her hand. It was very bright inside, so she closed her eyes for most of the service. She didn’t cry. Everyone else did; Miriam kept passing tissues down the rows. Lily just waited for it to be over.
The minister had preached that God had a reason for her parents’ deaths, a purpose only God knew. So, for weeks, Lily racked her mind to discover that purpose. Was it to spare her parents from aging, to let them exist for their loved ones as ever young, ever handsome, ever charming and at ease? Or, Lily wondered, was their death meant, in fact, for her—did she need to wake up, to grow up, to suffer, to learn? And if so, why? Was she so judgmental, so impatient, so spoiled? Were her parents so casually expendable? She began to panic because she could not discern the logic of it, which meant she was stupid, which meant she was losing her mind.
Then a thought came to her, a simple thought, clear and unbidden. There is no God. The idea was followed by a velvet abyss of silence so deep that it stopped time for a moment, as one stops for a fear-frozen deer in the middle of a road. She stared at it, unblinking.
Could it be? Was God not real? Had God not punished her or her parents? Had they not been watched and found lacking? Was it possible that there was no magical being, no loving benevolence, no outraged tyrant, not even a mirror reflecting her back to herself? Was it possible there was just nothing? Did life run out as commonly as a ball of yarn, knitting needles waving in suddenly empty air?
The idea was so electric that Lily held it at bay for a few days. When it had stopped hissing and cracking at her, when its sparks fell impotently to the ground, she allowed it to be real. And then she understood.
There was no God.
There was no master plan, no prewritten destiny, no plot, no judge, no sentencing. There was no God. There was only circumstance and coincidence. Life was random, neutral, full of accidents. There was no redeeming value in her parents’ deaths, just debris to be cleared, trees in the driveway after a storm. Her relief was as liberating as a lemon ice on the hottest day of the year.
And now, here, was a boy who was telling her, with his whole being, that he believed in the loving benevolence, the hidden meaning, the plot and purpose. He had described his faith clearly; she could not mistake its outline. It sat between them as fresh and essential as the pale frame of a new house. Her heart was racing. She was afraid. And yet, she did not stand and walk out. Charles had given her a plain truth, and somehow it calmed Lily, opened a still space inside of her, smooth as a lake at dawn.
Without warning, Lily looked Charles in the eye. “My parents died,” she said.
Charles held her gaze without answering. There it was, he realized, the barest bone of her, bright as the moon on an autumn night that was full of the smell of woodsmoke.
Lily did not want to be dating. One of the girls on her hall was dating, and it involved flowers, phone calls, hair curlers, and laughing in ways the girl had never laughed before. Lily did not ever want to act that way.
And yet she found herself thinking about Charles all weekend. She was acutely aware that he had not said I’m sorry. He had not said, How terrible for you. He had not said, God works in mysterious ways. He had sat across from her, sturdy and kind, and absorbed her grief without comment or pity.
She did not remember the route they had taken home. The waitress had put the check on the table and Lily had excused herself to the ladies’ room. When she came back, Charles had held her coat for her to slip into and followed her out the door. It was cold, but they had decided to walk; she had watched her shoes fall into step next to his. They did not say a word to each other until they reached her dormitory, when she had turned to him, nodded her head, and gone inside.
So, when she found Charles waiting outside her class on Monday, she wondered how he could have possibly thought their date went well. She walked quickly down the stairs and stood squarely in front of him, confrontational.
“You were supposed to leave me alone,” she said.
“I didn’t want to,” he answered. Lily glared at him.
“You didn’t call me,” she said.
Charles nodded. “I didn’t know what to say.” He spoke with easy honesty.
“About my parents?”
“Yes.”
Lily was tempted to tell him there was no way he could be a minister without having a pretty good plan in place when he was called on to comfort and console. But then she realized he meant that he didn’t know what to say to her, because his pretty good plan involved talking about God.
“Do you have a class near here?” she asked finally.
“No,” he said. “I came to walk you to your next one. What is it?”
“American Lit,” she said, turning on her heel to leave. Charles fell into step beside her.
“Is it good?” he asked.
Lily shrugged without looking at him. “Passable. But I don’t like Thoreau.”
“What do you like?”
They had reached the glass door that led out of the building. Lily stopped and looked at him, annoyed. She did not want to tell him what she liked. She did not want to find out what he liked. She did not want to talk at all. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes, sighed heavily, and handed Charles her books.
“Come on, then. Even though we’re only going right next door.” She pulled on her coat as he slid her books on top of his own, tucked the whole pile to his chest, opened the door, and waited for her to walk out in front of him. They walked down one set of icy steps and up the set directly next to them, where Lily took her books, said thank you, and went inside.
On Tuesday, Lily found Charles waiting once again. “Do you not have a class of your own?” she asked.
“Yes, but I don’t mind being late.” Charles shrugged, the tweed of his blazer rasping against the collar of his blue shirt.
“Every day?” Lily raised her eyebrows, handing him her books. They walked outside, down stairs, then up stairs. Bells rang inside the buildings, and Lily said thank you.
“For the carrying or the company?” Charles asked before she had gotten inside.
“The carrying,” she said, without looking back.
On Wednesday it was raining, and Charles arrived with a large black umbrella.
“Do you want to carry this or my book?” he asked. It was a pointless question; there was no way Lily could hold the umbrella as high as the top of his head.
“Do you just have the one?”
“Yes,” he said, handing it to her. “Don’t worry, it’s not a Bible.” He was grinning. He was teasing her. It had been years since anyone had told her even the smallest joke. But here was Charles, straightforward and charming and preposterously pleased.
On Thursday, Charles was waiting for her again, looking thoughtful. He took her books, as usual, and held the door open for her without saying a word. Then, at the bottom of the steps, he stopped, faced her directly, and said, “Look, Lily. You must know I come all this way just to see you.”
She turned to face him and met his thoughtful tone. “Of course,” she answered.
“If you want me to stop, you should say so.”
Lily said nothing. On the one hand, she still did not want to be dating. On the other hand, Charles was not totally objectionable. From what she could tell, his mind was clear and his ideas were organized. Plus, he was handsome. That, she could not avoid. Mostly because the girls on her hall had whispered it to one another all week. “Lily’s got a boyfriend,” they said. “And he’s a looker.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Lily shouted into the hall.
But they persisted. “Well, he should be,” they said. “His father’s a dean and he has family money.” “He’s a shoo-in for faculty, if he decides to teach.” “My brother says he’s brilliant.” They wouldn’t leave Lily alone about it, and slowly she began to see that it was not terrible to be a little bit more like the other girls, to not be so different, to be defined by something she had rather than something she’d lost.
Charles had their books pressed between his arm and his rib cage, both hands in his pockets. “All right,” he said. “If you don’t want me to stop, I’d like to take you to dinner again.”
“Tonight?”
“No,” Charles answered. “On Saturday.”
Lily’s heart sank. She knew what Saturday night meant. Friday was for girls who were fun but nothing serious. Saturday was for courtship.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow.” She scowled.
That night, Lily talked to her uncle Richard on the telephone. “He wants to take me to dinner,” she complained.
“I’m sure lots of boys want to take you to dinner,” Richard said. “They just don’t have the nerve to ask.”
“What would you call it?”
“Stubbornness.”
Richard sighed. “Lily, that boy likes you. And you’re being mean.”
“I know he likes me,” she said. “I don’t know if I like him.”
“Of course you like him,” Richard said. “If you didn’t, you would have told him to mind his own business.”
Lily thought for a moment about how much she should tell Richard, how much of what she said would get back to the whole family, how much she could bear others knowing about her life. “He believes in God,” she said finally. “And I don’t.”
“I believe in God,” Richard said.
“True, but so does Miriam. Wouldn’t it bother you if she didn’t?” There was a pause in which she could almost hear Richard thinking.
“Maybe. But Miriam doesn’t like to read.”
He had her there. Miriam didn’t read, and Richard did, constantly. Lily wondered what it would be like to marry someone who didn’t have the same need for plot and character and story, for words and words and words. Unbearably lonely.
“Does this boy read?” Richard asked her.
“I have to assume yes,” Lily conceded.
“Then try not to make him work so hard.”
Charles was, indeed, late for his third period every day. That was how every one of his classmates in Intermediate Greek knew he had found the woman he wanted to marry. True, Lily was not encouraging in the slightest. But he had spent nearly a week watching her face as she talked, and her expressions revealed what an effort it was for her to keep up her indifferent facade. She had ten thoughts before she said a word, and ten more after she’d said it; he could see them in her eyebrows and the way she bit her lip. She seemed aggressively Spartan, but she cared about her appearance: her skirts and blouses and cardigans were finely made. He guessed she would never admit to being sentimental, but she wore her Radcliffe ring on her pinky and a leather-banded Cartier watch that was too big and not new.
She reminded him of the rosary beads he had once seen at the Cloisters. No larger than walnuts, each one had opened like a locket to reveal entire scenes from the gospels in miniature: crosses the size of peppercorns and saints as slender as toothpicks, with eyelashes and fingernails almost too small to be seen. They must have taken years to carve, the monks hunched carefully over every movement, still and precise and attentive. Lily seemed to Charles like both the beads and the carvers: intricate and patient, closed and waiting to be seen.
He spent Thursday night in the library, wondering what he would do if Lily turned him down. If she said no, he would have to give up completely; having asked her to make up her mind, there would be no point in trying to make her change it. He wondered if he should just not show up the next morning, surrender before she could reject him.But he couldn’t stand the thought of whom she might walk with if he weren’t there, and he could not stand the idea of her walking to third period alone.
So, on Friday, before he even took Lily’s books, he said, “Well?”
“Tomorrow?” she asked, as if she had forgotten to check her calendar.
“Yes, tomorrow,” he said, holding his breath. It took her so long to answer that he knew she was calculating something in her mind.
She was, in fact, calculating whether she could love him. Not that he expected her to, after just one dinner and four walks to class, but she could tell he was hoping, and the truth was that she did not think she could love anyone. She could love things, like linen sheets, peonies, and strong tea. She could love Richard and Miriam, because she was grateful to them for all they had done for her. She could remember loving her parents and could still recognize that feeling in the characters and plots of the books she read. But the prerequisite for love was trust; and Lily did not trust anything.
Her silence became uncomfortably long, but she didn’t rush herself. She stared at Charles’s shoes, then his white shirt, then the bare trees and redbrick buildings behind him, blocking out the opinions of the other girls, trying to decide if she, herself, liked seeing Charles at the foot of the English Department staircase more than she liked not seeing him, if she liked walking to class with him more than she liked walking alone.
The answer was yes. Unfortunately.