In the Beauty of the Lilies Read online

  In the Beauty of the Lilies is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

  and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used

  fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2012 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1996 by John Updike

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon

  are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States

  by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1996.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42133-3

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photo: JoSon/Getty Images

  v3.1

  In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

  With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:

  As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

  While God is marching on.

  —JULIA WARD HOWE

  “Battle-Hymn of the Republic”

  CHAPTERS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  i. CLARENCE

  ii. TEDDY

  iii. ESSIE/ALMA

  iv. CLARK/ESAU/SLICK

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  i. Clarence

  In those hot last days of the spring of 1910, on the spacious, elevated grounds of Belle Vista Castle in Paterson, New Jersey, a motion picture was being made. The company was Biograph; the director was David W. Griffith; the title was The Call to Arms. The plot took place in medieval times, and centered about a lost jewel beyond price. For the setting of a medieval castle, what better than this Belle Vista, popularly called “Lambert’s Castle” after its builder, the local silk baron Catholina Lambert? The rolling lawn with its groomed, medieval-appearing oaks and beeches commanded a hazy view of New York City, less than fifteen miles eastward of the crowded rooftops of Paterson lying sullenly snared within the lowland loop of the Passaic River. From this height the human eye could discern the strip of brick mills clustering about the Falls and its three millraces designed by Pierre L’Enfant, the dour but majestic brownstone spire of Father William Dean McNulty’s Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, the white wedding-cake tower of City Hall, the fantastical varicolored Flemish façade of the Post Office, and the ribbed dome, not ten years old, of the Passaic County Court House, upon whose columned cupola a giant gesturing woman persistently kept her balance. The distant spires of New York City were a photogenic marvel, their apparently weightless suspension within the mists of summer heat belying the mass of human suffering and striving their enchanted profile rested upon. But the moving-picture camera was aligned to exclude any such modern view. The cameraman waited impatiently in the muggy, coal-gas-poisoned New Jersey sunshine, fearful that a random cloud might suddenly throw his aperture-setting out of adjustment. A faint scent of oil arose from the encased fine gears and sprockets.

  It was two in the afternoon, and the heat was at its peak. In spite of it, the actors Mack Sennett and Dell Henderson had donned metal armor, and the star of the film, little Mary Pickford, sweltered in the tights, velvet cape, and heavy brocaded tunic of a page. She was to mount a horse and gallop with a supposedly momentous message across the wide castle lawn, whose every hard green blade reflected back colorless sunlight. The horse’s great barrel of a body, as several men in overalls helped Miss Pickford up into the saddle, felt hot, and emitted a stench of sweat and wet horsehair. The sunbaked leather of the saddle scorched her buttocks and thighs, and the tousled hair of her steed’s mane seemed to lead her consciousness invitingly down toward the roots of a shady tangle. The petite star was but seventeen. The hotel accommodations in jam-packed, clattering Paterson had not conduced to an easy night of sleep. She felt distinctly less than herself; however, it was not until the close-up—Griffith was mad for this new artistic toy of his, the facial close-up—that she lost consciousness. The page was, for the third take, excitedly delivering the message whose exact words would be spelled out on the screen in white on black, ornately framed: “Sire, the king bids the troops to attack the Saracen infidels!” Two grips in shirtsleeves were holding large foil reflectors to bring further light to play on her fine young features, whose natural pallor was enhanced with powder. In this intensified heat a darkness welled up at the back of her brain and she fainted. The sweet moist scent of June grass and the ammonia of smelling salts seemed to rush simultaneously to her nostrils. When she came to, Mr. Griffith, though ever the correct Kentucky gentleman, was furious, as not only had she wasted a half-hour of daylight—this was Monday, and the schedule committed him to finishing the film by Friday—but she had besmirched with grass stains her expensive tunic of brocaded white silk.

  At the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the parsonage of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct—a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward. He was a tall, narrow-chested man of forty-four, with a drooping sand-colored mustache and a certain afterglow of masculine beauty, despite a vague look of sluggish unhealth. He was standing, at the moment of the ruinous pang, on the first floor of the manse, wondering if in view of the heat he might remove his black serge jacket, since no visitor was scheduled to call until dinnertime, when the Church Building Requirements Committee would arrive to torment him with its ambitions. The image of the chairman’s broad, assertive face—the froglike, nimble, downturned mouth of Harlan Dearholt, a small silk-ribbon millowner, whose short blunt nose supported a pincenez that gave off oval flashes of blind reflection—slipped in Clarence’s mind to the similarly pugnacious and bald-crowned visage of Robert Ingersoll, the famous atheist whose Some Mistakes of Moses the minister had been reading in order to refute it for a perturbed parishioner; from this perceived similarity his thoughts had slipped with quicksilver momentum into the recognition, which he had long withstood, that Ingersoll was quite right: the God of the Pentateuch was an absurd bully, barbarically thundering through a cosmos entirely misconceived. There is no such God, nor should there be.

  Clarence’s mind was like a many-legged, wingless insect that had long and tediously been struggling to climb up the walls of a slick-walled porcelain basin; and now a sudden impatient wash of water swept it down into the drain. There is no God. The irregular open space of the parsonage in which he had paused and been assailed by this realization was defined by the closed door to his study, the doorless archway into the dining room, the inner front door with its large decoratively frosted pane framed in leaded rectangles of stained glass the color of milky candies, and the foot of the dark walnut staircase that, in two turnings punctuated by rectangular newel posts whose points had been truncated, ascended to the second floor. Drafts from the front doors, and the linoleum-floored vestibule between them, lifted dust up the stairs, Mrs. Wilmot often complained; and so it seemed that the invisible vestiges of the faith and the vocation he had struggled for decades to maintain against the grain of the Godless times and his own persistent rationalist suspicions now of their pulverized weightlessness lifted and wafted upstairs too.

  I
t was a ghastly moment, a silent sounding of bottomlessness. Outside, on Broadway, a farmer’s cart was wearily dragging its way uphill, turning up Straight Street to the bridge and the road to Haledon and the rural north of Passaic County after a dawn descent to the Main Street market. The horse’s metal shoes broke their syncopated music slightly as they crossed the double trolley tracks embedded in the cobbles; the hickory axles squealingly protested the moment of uneven stress, of torque. The driver was singing something to himself; Clarence first thought it was a hymn, in German, until a snatch of tune came clear, from the new waltz, “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love … with … you.” The driver had a young voice, or else there were two men mounted in the front of the cart, a man and boy. From the kitchen, behind a door that swung either way, came the voices of Mrs. Wilmot and Mavis, the little Irish servant girl, undertaking, in their armory of ponderous, pitted metal utensils, the daily labor of the evening meal; some members of the Church Building Requirements Committee, including the chairman and his ample wife, had been invited to dinner, along with a few of the parish orphans—a newly created Italian widow with her two daughters, and an aging broad-silk weaver newly unemployed, thanks to his political imprudence.

  Life’s sounds all rang with a curious lightness and flatness, as if a resonating base beneath them had been removed. They told Clarence Wilmot what he had long suspected, that the universe was utterly indifferent to his states of mind and as empty of divine content as a corroded kettle. All its metaphysical content had leaked away, but for cruelty and death, which without the hypothesis of a God became unmetaphysical; they became simply facts, which oblivion would in time obliviously erase. Oblivion became a singular comforter. The clifflike riddle of predestination—how can Man have free will without impinging upon God’s perfect freedom? how can God condemn Man when all actions from alpha to omega are His very own?—simply evaporated; an immense strain of justification was at a blow lifted. The former believer’s habitual mental contortions decisively relaxed. And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal’s fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence’s own life would soon be, in a wink of earth’s tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting. All fleshly acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy—the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem.

  The thought of eating sickened Clarence; his body felt swollen in its entirety, like an ankle after a sprain, and he scarcely dared take a step, lest he topple from an ungainly height. His palms and armpits had broken out into a sweat. Precariously, seeking to suppress the creaking in both the floorboards and his leather shoes, he slithered across the dining room to the kitchen door, and harked there with his lean head tilted, like that of a doctor listening for a heartbeat in a patient who has sustained a trauma. In his sallow temple a blue vein insistently, fearfully pulsed.

  “My goodness, Mavie,” he heard, “don’t be so stingy with the brown sugar—we Americans like our ham sweet.” Stella’s buoyant and bossy voice was itself sweetened by its Southern accent, which seven years in New Jersey, and six before that at a pair of cold parishes on the plains of Minnesota, had diluted but not expunged. He had met her in Missouri, at a dismal struggling church in a gaunt wooden town perched on the river bluffs. She had played the piano at services in lieu of an organ, and run the little Sunday school, with its score or so of pupils. She was overweight and swarthy and plain; feminine beauty was confined to her lively black eyes, with their liquid gleam of mischief and need, and her fine head of thick dark hair, loaded with chestnut highlights and with tortoiseshell devices to hold its waving, buckling, spraying mass in place. His gratitude for her lending the church her vitality—for keeping him company in this failing outpost of Presbyterianism in a land of river-fed, whiskey-fuelled license and of shouting, loutish Baptists—had led imperceptibly, with no clear dividing-line where he could have called a halt, to their marriage. They had been swiftly blessed with two children, a boy and a girl, and then, seven years ago, with a second boy, whom they, after some mild dispute, had agreed to name after the young and virile President.

  In her full-bosomed sweet voice Stella was saying, “Then we add two level teaspoons of dry mustard—now, pay attention, Mavie, and watch how I scrape it level with the knife—and just a splash, half a teacup you could say but I never measure, of the dry breadcrumbs we pounded fine, to give the basting body, and then we add the moistener, you can use most anything but spit, my Aunt Dorothea used to say—she was a character, dear old Aunt Dode, all bent over like a comma. You can use drippings from the ham, or prune juice, or my daddy down home used to favor a shot-glass of elderberry wine”—pronounced waaahn—“but Mr. Wilmot with his tender tummy likes his cider vinegar, so here goes three tablespoons: one, two, three, like that.” That became two syllables, tha-yit; he could mentally see Stella’s chins doubling as she looked down lovingly into her task. “Now I’m going to let you stir a minute while I see how you trimmed the fat. I declare, I think you cut too deep, Mavie. You’re meant just to slice away the rind, all but a collar around the shank bone here, and leave all the good fat you can—it has another hour in the oven to go, and we don’t want it all dried out, now do we, little sweetheart?”

  Clarence could not hear Mavie’s murmured, chastened reply. Her people came from Cork, and she lived in that jostling mob of unpainted wooden houses below the mills called Dublin; she was saved from the silk mills, where girls spent ten-hour days at the ribbon looms, by domestic service here. She came before seven in the morning and left at six-thirty, when the Wilmots’ dinner was on the table, unless they were having company, in which case she stayed to serve the table. But on non-laundry days they sometimes allowed her to walk back home and help out her mother with her younger siblings. It was the usual Irish situation: a brood of children, and a father who wasted his wages in the taverns. A profligate race, stubbornly professing an antique creed. Mavis had fascinating fine small hands, red-fingered from being much in soapy water, tentative and fumbling as a child’s hands are, and a serious face whose lips were as pale as her fair skin. After a Thursday when she could steal an hour from work and join the idle young people on Garrett Mountain, her face would show a burst of reddish freckles. Then Stella, who had a Southerner’s fear of the darkening touch of the sun, and yet whose own face imperceptibly turned dusky in the summer, would chasten Mavis playfully for “overindulging in the out-of-doors.”

  “Then, while you do that—really stir, dear, and don’t be afraid to mash with the back of the spoon—I’ll take the big knife and cut the fat in nice long diagonals—see?—and when I’m done you can take the tin of cloves and stick one each into the exact middle of each diamond-shape! Oh, don’t we have fun! Little Teddy just loves pulling the cloves out and sucking each one like a tiny chicken-bone!”

  The eavesdropping clergyman, numbed by his sudden atheism, had half-intended to push open the swinging door and enter the fragrant brightness and let his unspeakable wound be soothed by the blameless activity there, but he lost heart and turned away. He stood baffled, looking about the dining room for some exterior sign of the fatal alteration within him. There is no God. With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness. Yet no exterior change of color betrayed the event. The mahogany dining table, with its pedestal legs and much-waxed top of faintly mismatching leaves; the Tiffany-glass chandelier, shaped like an inverted punchbowl with scalloped edges and imitation tassels cleverly fabricated in glass and lead; the bowfront sideboard, with its flaking veneer of curly cherry; the brown wallpaper, unchanged since the manse was built in 1880, its alternating idylls (a couple picnicking in courtship,
a child chasing a hoop) framed in scrolling lines whose silver glints were nearly smothered by three decades of exposure and ingrained dust: none of these mute surfaces reflected the sudden absence of God from the universe—His legions of angels, His sacrificed Son, His ever-watchful and notoriously mysterious Providence, His ultimate mercy, the eternal Heaven so hard to picture yet for which our hearts so unmistakably yearn, the eternal Hell which even calm, gentle, reasonable Calvin could not conceive as other than indispensable to God’s justice. With the mystery of His freedom vanished the passionately debated distinctions of sublapsarianism, supralapsarianism, and infralapsarianism, in regard to the precise moment when God imposes election. The mahogany tabletop in silence reflected with a tinted blur the colorful bowl suspended above it, a bowl emptying itself world without end. At the rim of this vast purge, this volcanic desolation, the house’s furnishings stood unchanged, temporarily enclosing and protecting the clergyman and his family.

  Temporarily, for few of these elegant if well-worn downstairs furnishings were his; they came with the parsonage and would pass to the use of the next minister and his brood. Only upstairs, in children’s beds and bureaus thriftily acquired as needs arose, and a linen-laden cedar chest—Stella’s cumbersome dowry—that had trailed them throughout the upper Midwest, and a scuffed mahogany fourposter they had bought second-hand in Oshkosh when the rope bed the parish had supplied gave them both painful backs, and a somewhat saccharine framed print of the Heinrich Hoffmann painting of Jesus praying in vain in the Garden of Gethsemane for this cup to pass from Him while the disciples slept—a gift of the parish in leaving Granite Falls—and a few crackled family portraits and small items of quality in silver and ivory descended to him from the Wilmots’ wealthier days as Manhattan importers and merchants, before the Civil War bred a rougher set of entrepreneurs and sent the declining family into the farmlands of New Jersey—only upstairs was some of the furniture theirs, to carry with them on their next move, to his next call. But where would they go without his faith to carry them? His faith was what paid their way.