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“you’re such a coward, you know.”
What a cruel thing to say. Is Tyler a nitwit and a coward or does he inspire bullying?
He was a large man, tall and big-boned, and to shake his hand was kind of like taking the hand of a bear in your own.
What Tyler looks like.
If the men were not especially talkative, their fathers had not been, either. If the women cooked meals that might seem, to someone from other parts, flavorless and straightforward, it is because they cooked what was available to them: chicken, potatoes, canned corn. And if their children were not allowed Novocain when having their cavities drilled, it was not cold-heartedness but a belief that life was a struggle, character honed every step of the way.
Sound familiar?
But what’s a man to do when Love appears before him?
Aw.
the beautiful Lauren has none of her father’s soberness—she is all color, all light, a light shines from her face, from her eyes, as she stares at the young Reverend Caskey—and what a sermon he delivers! He has never felt so powerful, his eyes intense, his cheeks flushed. They are in love by the benediction.
Moving
He understood—as he stared out his kitchen window now—that on both sides of the aisle on the day of their wedding was the unspoken understanding that each was marrying down.
Exactly
Jane Watson, irritated now because no one had complimented her blueberry muffins, said they should decide whether or not to tell Tyler what had happened in Sunday school, because she had to get going.
Love her insight and humor.
And if Tyler believed instead in the power of prayer, it’s because his praying felt strong and right, like a swimmer who has trained for years and feels safe in the water that buoys him up. Tyler loved God very much, and God would naturally know that. Tyler loved Lauren, and God would know that, too.
An emotional aproach to prayer
The idea that there might be an afterlife horrified Connie. She had a hard enough time with this one.
The affability that had seemed his natural gift since early childhood—and that had only taken one swift, ferocious hit when he was in the navy—had deserted him when first on this campus. The older men tended to be taciturn as they juggled the responsibilities of books, children, and wives, and some were competitive with Tyler, as though they thought he was a show-off.
But joy was what Tyler missed. Joy was what he had been full of, it seemed. Even when marriage had brought along its worries. And joy was what C. S. Lewis had used to describe his yearning for God. That’s what The Feeling was, Tyler realized now. But how was joy to be available to him ever again?
Joy = God = love
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide . . . Odd to think that had been his favorite hymn for years, because what had he really known until this year about the sadness and pleading tone of that hymn? The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide. Tyler started the car, drove down the hill, past the church where he’d been married. When other helpers fail and comforts flee . . . O Lord, abide with me.
And I’m sorry, Tyler, about what you’ve gone through, but you are—excuse me—an idiot.
A numbskull, a coward and now an idiot.
the dreary fact was that Lauren’s intemperance had left Tyler in debt.
He thought Mrs. Slatin’s perfume smelled like bug spray mixed with baby powder, but he was not used to perfume.
Wonder what it was. Joy?
He turned to see Mr. Slatin’s eyes following Lauren’s hips as she walked with her mother across the room.
Yikes. Does he fancy his daughter? Is that why she hates him?
And why wouldn’t they? World without end—their happiness. He walked across campus with the sure steps of someone possessed with a sense of rightness. If, at times, the picture of his mother’s worried face floated across his mind, he was able to dismiss it. He was living and loving as God had chosen him to do.
He's an innocent. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike
He had tried, at first, to pray at home in his study with Lauren. She did not pray with him, as he had hoped. She said she prayed on her own, even though when they lived near Brockmorton, she would go with him sometimes into the chapel and sit with him in prayer. But in West Annett, when he tried to pray in his study at home, he was aware of her in the kitchen, wondering why she was making so much noise
Trouble early on. She doesn't share his religious beliefs or practices. Reminds me of Demon Copperhead and Dori.
that Carol happened to notice her little pot of rouge was gone.
But something was gone. When he said to her, “I love you,” she would smile and not answer.
Trouble in paradise
Lauren had turned to him and said easily, “Tyler, do you actually believe that stuff you say?”
Wow.She really doesn't get him at al.
“You know what, Tyler?” said his big-stomached, beautiful wife. “You are aggressively naïve.”
And then the unthinkable, unimaginable thing that he did: He left the bottle of pills by her side while she slept. He went downstairs to sit with his mother, listening for any motion above. In a few hours he walked slowly, slowly up the carpeted stairs. His young wife was dead.
he had no idea, really, what Rhonda was talking about, only that he found it ludicrous, as if she had been brainwashed.
She has been. Freud was a fraud. But Katherine needs therrapy.
When they hung up, Jane called Alison back. “Do you need a doctorate in psychology to know that killing someone is an angry thing to do?” The two women laughed until tears came to their eyes.
He was a man grieving, and she was ashamed at the kind of pleasure she had experienced in excoriating him to her friends and husband.
to your mother, Tyler. I should think now you could take on the world.”
ANYONE WHO HAS EVER GRIEVED knows that grieving carries with it a tremendous wear and tear to the body itself, never mind the soul. Loss is an assault; a certain exhaustion, as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides, needs to be allowed for eventually.
Ain't that the truth?
Over and over he played it out in his mind—the image of Lauren’s suffering those final days—and picturing this, he felt that if he’d had the wherewithal and means, he might have slipped a needle into her so that she need not wake up and learn all over again that she was sick and had to leave her babies. He would have ended her life, if he had dared. She had dared. He thought about this often. It even came to seem to him that it was their last act of intimacy, his leaving the bottle of pills for her. It was wrong, but he would do it again. For this reason he never spoke of it; it was their
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Was it wrong?
“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.”
How has Tyer changed? No longer a coward, in touch with is feelings. But is he less naive about God?
“She’ll get over it,” Belle said. “She’s not going to cut you out of her life. Meanwhile, welcome to 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.
Yes. More grown up.
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.
