“I’ll have you at your library in an hour,” he says. And then, to the driver, “St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth, please. The cross street is 53rd.”
Mitchell leans back in the cab and grins at me. “I think you’ll like James. He’s right up your alley. And I was baptized at St. Thomas’s; my parents still go there when they are in town. I think my mother even listens to some of their audio feeds in Paris.”
The cab zips down Central Park West and across the park.
“Mitchell, I think it is terrible that Dennis will be buried in a grave for the homeless,” I say.
“Yeah, it sucks. But if they can’t find his family, then there’s no one to pay for a funeral.”
“You could pay for it,” I say.
He looks incredulous. I suppose he well might. He reaches for my hand and brings it to his lips.
“My precious girl,” he says. “My innocent Esme. I can’t pay for it. For one thing, I’m not Bill Gates, for another, people can’t go paying thousands of dollars for the funerals of people they don’t know, and for another, I am not going to. Are you serious?”
“No,” I say. He looks at me. He knows I was.
“I love that you asked me,” he says.
I am quiet. He says, “Stop worrying about it. You were friendly to him when he was alive; that’s what counts. Okay?”
I nod. But then I say, “But what are we, if we don’t give people a decent burial if they have no money?”
Mitchell looks patient. “You see, I thought this was the case. This is really about self-perception, about you rather than Dennis. Isn’t it a kind of selfishness, dressed up as kindness?”
I feel a shock all through me from that remark. Is he right?
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” I say. “I was just so sad that he just gets—I don’t know—sort of thrown away.”
“Well, never mind about it. We’re here.”
The cab draws up outside what is surely a cathedral on Fifth Avenue. I have never noticed it before, but then this area isn’t really a haunt of mine. And you’re always going to notice the shops before the churches on Fifth Avenue. There is a great flight of steps and huge Gothic arches. I stand still. It is inconceivable that I could get married here. It is the ecclesiastical equivalent of the stores that are around it—Salvatore Ferragamo and Cartier and Fendi and Henri Bendel.
He smiles down at me. “Don’t panic. It’s just a church. It’s not so spectacular inside—you’ll feel better. Come on.”
“I’m not panicking,” I say, although I am. “Look, it’s next to a Baby Gap. The guests could pop in there first and get us something useful.”
We go up the steps and through the great Gothic arch. It is as spectacular inside as you might expect. I do not feel better.
“It’s very English, don’t you think?” he says, looking at a Catholic reredos that could have been pinched straight from Rome. “It always reminds me of England.”
The inside of St. Thomas’s has that look of rightness that makes you sigh with pleasure, the kind of pleasure that might be invoked by a Titian or a Bellini. The massy quality of the stone columns, the mellow glowing warmth of the wood—it is the Gothic softened by New England, as if the Gothic had retired to the new world and relaxed.
“It’s lovely,” I say, staring around me. “But, Mitchell—”
“Mitchell!” says a man who materializes out of the shadows. He is in his priestly dog collar, and his black hair is cut in a way that suggests a tonsure. He is around Mitchell’s age, but is unlike Mitchell in almost every way. He looks rosy with faith. He comes forward to shake hands. “Great to see you. I don’t think I’ve seen you since the game. Hello.” This last word is for me. I say hello back.
“Great to see you, too, James,” Mitchell is saying. “I’d like to introduce my fiancée to you—Esme Garland.”
He shakes hands with me too. “Mitchell’s fiancée? Congratulations! This is excellent news—Mitchell, I thought you were past praying for. I’m very pleased to meet you, Esme—I’m James Curtis.”
“James and I go back a long way,” says Mitchell. “We were even at Yale at the same time.”
“Although I was a graduate and you were a mere whippersnapper,” says James. “And I did a fair amount of teaching, but you were never in any of my classes. How did you weasel your way out of that?”
“Economics clashed with theology, I think.”
James says, “Ah, it was ever thus. Why did you want to be an economist, Mitchell? It never seemed to me that it interested you.”
“To annoy my mother, of course,” replies Mitchell, with a look that suggests this should be evident to anyone who knows him. James smiles in a priestly way.
“And what do you do, Esme?”
“I’m studying for a PhD in art history at Columbia,” I say.
“Ah—art history. So your interest in St. Thomas’s will probably be architectural rather than theological? Not that the one is not an expression of the other. Would you like a tour?”
I say yes, because I am polite, and because I want to carry on looking at that soaring vault.
“The current structure was built in the French Gothic style, and to a large extent with the French Gothic construction methods also—there is no steel reinforcement, it is all stone.”
Mitchell looks towards the altar. “Are you booked up here for years in advance, James? If we wanted something quite small?”
“Oh—for a wedding? For your wedding? It would be wonderful if you got married here, Mitchell. Your mother would be thrilled. But I don’t know—there is always a great deal going on,” replies James as I make furious gestures to stop Mitchell in his tracks, “but we could have a look at the calendar. Would you like to come with me to my office?”
Mitchell nods, and intimates that I should follow behind James to the office. I look back again at that nave. Does he really and truly think that I can walk down that aisle pregnant? It would be farcical. People would be laughing up their Balenciaga sleeves.
Mitchell puts a determined hand on the small of my back and guides me in James’s wake. He says, “This is very much a casual inquiry—we haven’t even decided on whether it is to be Sag Harbor or New York yet.”
“Or England,” I say quickly. “I mean—Mitchell—we should discuss this together before we take up James’s time.”
Mitchell makes a face at me, and propels me forward.
We go through to a paneled office that smells of lavender polish. James fetches a carved seat for me with a flat silk cushion, and a little pew-chair for Mitchell.
“We call this the bishop’s chair, Miss Garland,” he says, “although the bishop doesn’t use it very often.” He sits down before a state-of-the-art Mac, clicks open a file, and opens an enormous desk calendar.
“What month were you thinking of? And does it have to be a Saturday?”
“Any day, don’t you think, Esme?” says Mitchell.
“I . . . I can’t . . . ,” I say, sitting down a little too heavily on the ornate chair that has probably housed bishops’ bottoms for a couple of hundred years. “Mitchell, I can’t—surely you can see—the situation? People will notice.”
“I don’t see why you can’t. Don’t be overwhelmed. It is just a parish church. And it’s my family’s church,” says Mitchell.
“I can’t. I can’t. Father—I am sorry we have wasted your time—”
“Reverend,” says Mitchell. “Not father.”
“Oh, neither, just James, please. Is there any particular problem?” he asks. He asks it with a benign mildness they must practice when they are in the seminary. His eyes stay courteously on my face, though I must have just given him a big clue. I can feel the flush rise up.
I stare meaningfully at Mitchell, but he doesn’t see what I mean. I turn back to the priest and shrug and say, “I’m pregnant. I can’t go up the aisle in this church pregnant.”
James smiles. “At the risk of sounding indelicate, I don’t think y
ou would be the first.”
“Well, maybe they didn’t mind. But I would mind; I couldn’t get married here anyway—whether I was pregnant or not. I was thinking of a registry office, or city hall, or a church at home in England after the baby is born. This is—I don’t know—like Westminster Abbey. The idea that my father would have to walk up the aisle with me here—just think what the dress would have to be like, and all the rest of the hoopla that would go with it.”
“Esme—” says Mitchell, but Reverend James holds up a hand.
“No, no, Mitchell, this is very much my field. Let me see if I can help here, Miss Garland. You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that this is an elitist institution. It isn’t; it is just a church, the house of God, where everyone is welcome. In the end, despite appearances, there is no difference between St. Thomas’s and the very simplest structure built for Christian worship.”
I nod, mute. If I threw, oh, I don’t know, a diamond ring from the steps of this place, it would probably hit Harry Winston’s.
Reverend James is looking with disturbingly insightful eyes into my own.
“Congratulations, on your pregnancy,” he says gently.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “I’m—we’re very happy.”
“This is all a little impromptu, I know,” he says, glancing at Mitchell, “but would you both like to talk about this? I understand if you don’t . . .”
“It isn’t some old-fashioned notion of doing the right thing, if that’s what you’re thinking, James,” says Mitchell. “I—well, Esme and I were in a relationship, and then we found out she was pregnant. And I’m afraid I was a little—surprised, and didn’t handle the news all that well at first. We split up, for a time.”
He stands up, and goes over to the mullioned window. That isn’t the way I remember the story.
He turns back to me. His chin is lifted, as if he is filled with a fine sense of his own nobility. “It was then that I realized I had to be with you.”
Both of them look at me with a certain degree of eagerness, ready for me to smile through sparkling tears and say something Brief Encounter–ish, like Oh my daahling, do you relly think we could be heppy? But I don’t want to play a part any more than I want to play a game.
My eyes, therefore, are not misty with affection; I am not moved by his moving words. I can feel tears prick, but it is because I am feeling turbulent—that word must come because of the proximity of the priest—and because James is again inspecting the big calendar. One minute we are eating pizza, the next a priest at a Fifth Avenue church is writing down our wedding day. Mitchell and his family work in this way, so you get swept along. It would be wonderful, were it not for the dry-throated dread that, for Mitchell, marriage is one more performance. I want to believe him.
“There is a Saturday afternoon in June—the seventeenth,” James says, tracing a finger down a page in the calendar. He looks up. “We could always put it in there in pencil.”
“In pencil?” says Mitchell. “I’m an ink kind of guy.”
“But, Mitchell—getting married—having to get married—we don’t really have to. You don’t have to rescue me—we’re not living in Victorian England, or the Dark Ages—look around you, you’re in New York—gay men adopt babies and lesbian couples adopt babies and—and turkey basters are regularly involved, and nobody bats an eyelid. I want the baby to have both its parents, Mitchell, I do, and I want to be with you. But let’s see how we are without this; we shouldn’t feel that we have to do this. It is horrible to make it all legalistic and public—it isn’t really a romantic thing at all, is it?”
Can he hear what I am saying beneath this tumble of words? I want to say, Love me, love me, love me, love me in sickness and in health, love me whether I’ve said the right thing or the wrong thing, love me when other men bring me watermelon, love me when they don’t, love me no matter what anyone else thinks or believes about it, and I will love you, I will love you no matter how often you lay about my soul with knives, no matter how hurt you feel inside, because you are a man unendingly worth loving, and because it is that, the submission to one another, not to a God or a law, that is what matters, and unless you have that, it is pointless to talk of standing before God and promising it.
Mitchell does not speak. Reverend James picks up a phone and dials one number. “Meredith,” he says, “could you call Mrs. St. John-Parker with my apologies and tell her I’ve been unavoidably detained? I won’t be there until after four o’clock. Thank you.” He replaces the receiver and turns to us.
I am sitting bolt-upright in the bishop’s uncomfortable chair. I look once at Mitchell’s face. He is pale.
James goes over to a cabinet and comes back with three glasses. I think for a second that he’s going to pour us some communion wine, but he pours out some dry sherry. I accept my glass and take a sip without thinking, before I remember the baby that is the root cause of all of this. One sip won’t hurt it, but for two pins I could down the rest.
He says, “Oh, I am sorry—the sherry—I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s all right,” I say. “Strictly speaking I am not allowed anything at all that is enjoyable. I still drink tea in the speakeasies for pregnant women that are dotted around Manhattan.”
“Esme,” says Mitchell.
As he hands a glass to Mitchell, James says to him, “This nervousness about marriage is a very common thing. Believe me, it is better for it to come now than later. I have seen it minutes before the vows. It is normal, natural—and very human.”
Mitchell’s answering smile is thin.
The priest takes a sip of his drink and considers me. “Will you listen to an Anglican defense of marriage?”
I say that I will.
“I don’t think our intimate relationships are at their best if they are merely private,” he says. “Marriage is not a private contract between two individuals, it is a public declaration of an intent to be a social unit. If you have a child within the institution of marriage, it is better for society as a whole, because society is held together by such units. It is also better for the individuals who undertake it, because it frees them from the tyranny of their own wishes and whims. You smile at that, and I understand why, but I would like you to think about it. How much of your life is dictated by a belief that you must submit to your own desire?
“Your unease about marriage is a basic fear of commitment. Why do we think, in our romantic way, that mutual affection without a legal framework is purer, fresher, more spontaneous? Why do we sneer at the idea of the bit of paper? Do you have any idea?”
I shake my head.
“It’s because we’re all emotion junkies,” he says. He does not look like an emotion junkie. “We’re high on the adrenaline of feeling, even though we know it is fleeting and evanescent. And we’re getting worse—checking texts and e-mails and Facebook every five minutes, always searching for that next hit of feeling, that next morsel of approval. Esme, if you don’t marry Mitchell, if you have the baby and stay in a relationship with him, you might never be free of the constant demand of your own psyche to evaluate how much you love him. Do I love him more than I loved him at breakfast, will I love him less by supper? Do I owe it to myself to look for someone else, do I owe it to myself to stay with him . . . you see? There is that tyranny too. But marriage obviates a lot of that. Marriage allows the individuals involved to free themselves of those anxieties, because they are held together by something greater than their own emotions—by society’s recognition and approval. In marrying the father of your child, Esme, you are freeing yourself. Your freely given submission to that social framework would be the finest expression of your freedom.” He stops.
“You’re good,” I say.
“I know,” he says.
“You didn’t mention God.”
“God suffuses the whole.” He pushes himself back from the desk and says, “I’m just going to have a word with Meredith in the other office. I’ll only be a moment.”
>
Once he has left, Mitchell moves his eyes in my direction without moving his head. “Well?”
“It was a very impressive speech.”
“Yes.”
I pause. “But I didn’t need convincing that the institution is a good idea. It isn’t about any of that, or about this church; it is more that I think you might be doing something against your nature, that you won’t be happy, that it won’t suit you.”
Mitchell is staring at me with an arrested look. “Oh,” he says softly, “why didn’t I see before? What you need is for me to go down on bended knee and declare my undying love.”
“No,” I say quickly, “no, you’re not listening.”
“I am listening, and I was listening. I’m the east and the west, the sun and the moon. And I was supposed to say it back, when you told me you loved me. Wasn’t I?”
“I only love you north-northwest.”
His eyes crinkle, he relaxes. “Is that so? Then I am going to make you love me at every compass point there is.”
When James comes back in, Mitchell says, “Write us in your book, my man, write us in.”
“Really?”
“Really. Esme? Can he write us in?”
“If my parents can—”
“If your parents can. Of course. And mine, for that matter. Let’s call them today, and in the meantime, James, keep our booking.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The next day I have my first shift at the bookshop since the bed rest. When I get there, the sun is shining. There is a homeless person whom I’ve never seen before, stacking up books for George to inspect. The multicolored roses that were tight buds the last time I was here have now exploded into flower, crammed cheek to cheek in the pot. There is a customer up a ladder and another one plowing deep into the fiction section.
George is peeling a couple of dollars from a big roll.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You’re all better?”
“All better. Ready to work.”
“Glad to hear it. We’ve missed you around here. Although your flowers seem to be thriving. I’m glad also—you know—” He waves a slightly embarrassed hand in the direction of my belly.
The Bookstore Page 27
