A Live Coal in the Sea Part 12

"Yes. They went through the grinder and they came out and put themselves back together."

"They did?" "Yes, Raf" "But I thought they had it pretty easy."

A Live Coal in the Sea105 Luisa looked down at her yellow pad. Smiled. "Love is never easy, Raf"

"Who else?"

"My brother, Frank, and his wife."

"Do you think my mom and dad can make it?"

"From what you've told me, I think your mom is working hard to keep things going."

"Thessaly." Raffi was contemptuous. "My dad made her change her name to Thessaly. Her real name is Esther." "Maybe Thessaly is a better stage name."

"If two people make it, is it just an endurance test?" "Sometimes."

"Is it worth it?"

"If it's no more than an endurance test, probably not." "Is it ever?"

"Oh, yes. It is worth it."

"Why?"

"When two people, lovers, or sometimes friends, have an enduring care for each other, allow each other to be human, faulted, flawed, but real, then being human becomes a glorious thing to be. If the human race ever makes progress, that is how."

"What about you?" "What about me?" "Did you make it?"

Again Luisa laughed. "With husbands, no. With friends, yes. I'll see you next week, Raffi."

"But you still think marriage is worth it?" "Yes. I do."

Camilla and Mac were to be married the following spring. It was a year of separation, with Camilla in New England, Mac in New York, Camilla working on her doctorate, Mac getting a master's degree at the seminary, with occasional trips for Madeleine L'Engle106 interviews. In January he accepted a call to be rector of a small church in Georgia, and they were able to make plans. Camilla was completing her course work for her Ph.D., and her dissertation topic on aspects of non-linear time had been accepted, with Professor Grange enthusiastically behind her. They were not, never could be, quite back to their pre-Rose enjoyment of each other's company, and she was glad that they were both leaving the college at the same time. He had accepted a permanent post at the University of Chicago, and his wife had been offered a position there, too, in the history department. Camilla was beginning to realize that Grange's wife was as respected in the academic world as her husband was.

Chicago. What irony. Rose and Rafferty were not in Chicago, but in Paris, where Rafferty was on some kind of commission that would keep him abroad for at least a year. They came home fairly regularly on brief trips. Rose was having the house redecorated, and needed to check in with the decorators. Still, they were based in Paris, and that was a relief to Camilla, and not only because of Red Grange.

Rose seemed to do best when she and Rafferty were traveling.

In order to get closer to Mac, Camilla audited a couple of courses in the religion department. It was a world of which she knew absolutely nothing. One cla.s.s she dropped after a few sessions, because the professor found a conflict between religion and science. If that was true, she and Mac would be in trouble, but he seemed excited only when she talked to him about the vastness of the outer universe, and the equal enormity of the universe of sub-atomic particles.

She was fascinated by an old, bearded professor emeritus who taught Hebrew Scripture, a retired rabbi who saw Scriptural time as being non-linear, and compared it to some of the astrophysical theories of non-linear time. 'There are constant chronological difficulties in Scripture,' he said, 'if you are look A Live Coal in the Sea-107 ing for time to work out in a tidy, linear way. It doesn't. There are two Creation stories, which are amazing only in their closeness to what the scientists now tell us. Jump to the famous David story, and he enters in two separate ways. In one, David is playing the harp to soothe mad Saul, and inthe other he is still up in the hills, minding his sheep, and no one has ever heard of him. Saul dies two different deaths. It is the story, the myth of the people, that matters.'

He and Camilla went out and drank coffee together and talked, each nurturing the other. If Red Grange had learned that her interest in non-linear time was becoming philosophi cal as well as scientific, he might not have been as pleased as he was with her dissertation topic.

When Grange left for Chicago he arranged for her to transfer to the University of Georgia in Athens, which was about half an hour's drive from the little town of Corinth, where the church was. He had also talked to a colleague there, Dr.

Edith Edison, who would take over as Camilla's dissertation advisor.

She said goodbye to Grange with mixed emotions. She did not know whether or not he would see Rose again when her parents returned to Chicago. It was, she hoped, none of her business. She had her own life to live, and she wanted no part of theirs.

Camilla went to Nashville in early April. Rafferty had to be back in the States for a couple of weeks at that time, and the wedding was timed to accommodate his and Rose's schedule, rather than Camilla and Mac's. It was, as a matter of fact, not at all convenient for Camilla. She would have to go back to college right after her marriage, to finish the semester, give exams, hand in grades, before joining Mac in Corinth.

Corinth! Athens! Mac and Art laughed uproariously at what they considered the appropriateness of the Greek names.

Madeleine L'Engle,108 Nashville was the glory of flowers Olivia had lamented when Camilla was there in June. Camilla was grateful for her few days alone with the Xanthakoses, time to get to know them better, and to reunite with Mac.

They spent hours sipping iced tea out on the screened porch, surrounded by azaleas, camellias, birdsong. Camilla was often with Olivia alone, because Art was in his office at the church, Mac with him.

'So Mac told you about Cissie.' Olivia was stretched out on a white wicker chaise longue, her tall gla.s.s on a table beside her.

'How could anybody do something like that? Accuse Mac, when she knew it wasn't even possible?V 'You're still very innocent, my dear.! 'I don't feel innocent.'

Olivia smiled. 'People wanted to believe the worst of Mac. That was what hurt so, people wanting him to be guilty. And he was young, incredibly young for his age. I don't know what Art and I could have done that we didn't, but surely something. And we had not discouraged a tendency in him to run away whenever things got rough.!

'Kenya,' Camilla said. Olivia nodded, pushed her fingers through her silver hair. Camilla continued, 'When my friend Luisa-Frank's sister-blundered into the room in the Church House where Mac and I were, and said that he and Frank had met in Korea, the next day Mac told me he was leaving for Kenya.!

'Yes. That is Mac. I'm sorry. He still had not come to terms with his experience in Korea. He was still overwhelmed with guilt, far beyond reason, and he was terrified of losing you. So he fled.'

'That doesn't make sense,' Camilla said.

'No. Fear seldom does.' Olivia picked up a paper knife from the table and drew her finger along the blade. 'When Mac finally told you about Korea it was a beginning of his accep tance that he was deeply ashamed, but also that what he had A Live Coal in the Sea-109 done was not beyond the realm of comprehension and forgiveness, and that he was going to be able to live a good and honorable life. I think he needed the year in Kenya to come to terms with himself before he could offer himself to you.'

She put the paper knife back down on the table. 'Parents have a tendency to want to fix everything. To rationalize. To excuse. But we can't fix it. We have to let be. I think Mac will make you happy. And Art and I will try not to interfere.'

'Oh!' Camilla exclaimed. 'I love you and Art so much. I look forward to seeing lots of you, to getting to know you better.'

'Thank you, my dear.'

'My parents-my parents are coming next week and you'll meet them. My father's tall and strong and doesn't talk much. My mother's beautiful and talks all the time. When they sent me to boarding school I left them. Not just physically.'

'That is understandable,' Olivia murmured.

'I know this doesn't need to happen. Some of my friends have stayed close to their parents, I didn't. I feel closer to you than I do to my mother.'

'Oh, my dear-I will love your mother, because she gave you to us.'

The love between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is not as unusual as it may seem. Camilla had deeply loved her mother-in-law. She loved her daughter-in-law.

She and Thessaly had a warm, rich friendship.

She looked at Raffi, seeing a glimpse of Thessaly in Raffi's high cheekbones.

Not in the red hair. That had not come from Thessaly's family.

"My mom says the best thing about marrying my dad was getting you and Grandfather for parents-in-law," Raffi said. She sat again on the stool in front of the fireplace in the long living room of Camilla's white clapboard house.

"Your mom's a great blessing in our lives."

Madeleine L'Engle110 "I guess Mom's own parents were pretty stuffy."

"They were good people," Camilla said. "You never really got to know them, did you?"

"They were kind of old when they had Mom, and they didn't like to travel. And Dad thinks Iowa's somewhere in the Middle Ages. Mom took me there a couple of times when I was little, to visit my grandparents, but I don't remember much.

They died in some kind of flu epidemic. Mom had a much older brother and sister, and they thought dancing was remember at the funeral they were stiff and funny."

"Do you remember the house?"

"It was a yellow house with a porch across the front. And I remember inside there was a stone fireplace and on the mantelpiece was a picture of Mom and Dad, a wedding picture.

Even then I realized that they were totally glamorous, and the picture was out of place in that house. I think I remember, after the funeral, that the brother took it down."

Yes, that wedding picture had indeed been glamorous. It had been in most of the New York papers, both Taxi and Thessaly having made names for themselves in the world of theatre and dance. They were married at the Little Church Around the Corner, as the Church of the Transfiguration was affectionately known, the church willing to marry actors and dancers and other marginal characters at a time when the more fashionable and traditional churches turned them away. By the time Taxi and Thessaly were married this had changed, although the fact that this was Taxi's third wedding raised questions, so they did not look elsewhere. It was Taxi's choice. The question of the seminary chapel, with Mac officiating, was not brought up, and Camilla and Mac held their peace.

Thessaly's parents flew in from Iowa, calling their daughter by her baptismal name of Esther, looking baffled when Taxi called her Thessaly. She was still Esther in the ballet program, Esther Jennings, but she was to become _ Thessaly Xanthakos.

The Jenningses had been ambitious for their late-born, a sin. I A Live Coal in the Sea letting her come to New York to study ballet when she was still a teenager, settling her in a small box of a room in a brownstone house which accepted only young Christian girls of good moral character.

'She's a good girl,' Mrs. Jennings said to Camilla. 'I know she lives in a world of sin and temptation, but she's held on to what she believes.' They were in a guest apartment in the seminary which had been made available to the Jenningses.

'She danced before she walked, and the minister's wife had a little dance studio. I know it was our fault '

Camilla smiled. 'Was it a fault?'

'To be honest, Mrs. Xanthakos-though you're also called Dr. d.i.c.kinson, Esther says?'

'It's easier, professionally. Do call me Camilla.!

'To be honest, it is not the life we would have chosen for her. Her teachers all told us how talented she was, but we still thought the dancing was something she would outgrow.'

'She's a lovely dancer,' Camilla said. 'Do you remember that Moses' sister, Miriam, danced after the crossing of the Red Sea?' This was something that had pleased her when the old professor had talked about it, his face radiant with delight. Mrs. Jennings clasped her hands tightly. 'We're Presbyterians, Jim and I. We don't know much about the Episcopal Church, but it does make us feel better that your husband is a minister. And he teaches?'

'Spirituality,' Camilla said. 'Prayer, and so forth.!

'I see,' said Mrs. Jennings, who did not see. 'Did it ever 'worry you, your son being an actor?'

Camilla replied carefully, 'Our children always worry us, one way or another, don't they? But acting seems to be Taxi's metier, and we're grateful he's found it.'

'Esther is not his first wife-'

'No. He was very young when he-' She wondered if Mrs. Jennings knew that there had been two wives before Thessaly-Esther.

'Let me tell you one thing, Mrs., uh, Camilla. Esther is not Madeleine L Engle112 a quitter. She takes marriage seriously. When she makes her vows she will keep them. Divorce is not an option. I don't mean to imply-I know your son is a good boy. He loves my Esther.' 'Yes. She's a very lovable young woman.'

'Esther left us long ago. We recognize that. She's gone beyond us into another world. My other two resent that. They don't approve. But all her father and I want is for her to be happy.'

-We all want that for our children, Camilla thought, -even though it may not be the best thing we can want for them.

Mrs. Jennings continued, 'Your son is handsome. Almost beautiful, in a masculine way. Girls must fall all over him.' 'Sometimes.'

'I hope he will be good for our Esther.' Camilla nodded. -I hope so, too.

'She will be a good wife. She will not put her career before her marriage. I know her. But she's far from home, Mrs., uh, Camilla. I'm glad she will have you and Reverend Xanthakos nearby. I worry about her. But I suppose we all do that.'

'Yes, we all do that,' Camilla agreed.

Perhaps the greatest blessing of this wedding for Camilla was that Frankie flew in from Seattle to be there, quiet, sketchbook always in hand, calmly loving with her parents.

'I like Thessaly-Esther, whatever her name is,' she told them. 'She has stability. I think this one will take.'

'I_ hope so,' Camilla said. 'Your father and I like her, too.'

"Mom really loves you, Grandmother," Raffi said. "She says you're a stabilizing influence."

Camilla said, "Your mom is a stable person."

"Most of the time," Raffi said. "She's really missed you since you moved up here."

A Live Coal in the Sea113 "I've missed her, too," Camilla saict. "Our unplanned 'Let's go out to dinner and the movies,' or just sitting together over a cup of tea and talking."

"It hurt Mom that her brother and sister didn't come to the wedding. She said you made all the difference."

For the few days before Camilla and Mac's wedding, Rose and Rafferty stayed ina nearby family hotel largely inhabited by widows and widowers who lived there permanently, who wanted their beds made and their rooms cleaned and an available dining room if they did not want to cook. There were always a few rooms for transient guests, and it was only a few minutes from the church and the rectory.

Their room contained a large bed, a comfortable sofa and chairs, a tiny kitchenette, and a sizable bath-dressing room. Although Rose protested that it was shabby and not what she was used to, it was comfortable and much more convenient than one of the modern downtown hotels where transportation would have been more of a problem.

Rose quickly got over her miff and plunged into wedding preparations. When she was not following her uncontrolled desires, Rose knew how to behave, and was at her most charm ing, delightedly appreciative of all the Xanthakoses were doing.

She wore pastel-colored dresses and matching cardigans and sandals and went into an orgy of shopping.

Camilla had bought her wedding dress at a shop near the college, knowing that if she did not choose it ahead of time her mother would want something far more elaborate.

'Shoes,' Rose said. 'We have to do something to make up for that dress. I know it's what you want, darling, but it's so plain.' 'Mother,' Camilla protested, 'this is a small and simple wedding. Just you and Father, and Mac's parents, and Frank and Luisa. A ten-foot, veil would be completely out of place.' Rose laughed. 'Don't exaggerate, darling. This is your Madeleine L'Engle-114 wedding, your wedding!' And she was off on a waterfall of reminiscences.

Camilla followed Rose from shop to shop. She would have preferred much less fuss. So, she was certain, would Art and Olivia.

Olivia said, 'Your mother is gracious indeed to allow the wedding to be here.'

'We could hardly go to Paris!'

'Nevertheless, it's generous. Let her have her fun.'

Mac rea.s.sured, 'My mother's used to this kind of wedding. It doesn't bother her, and it gives your mother so much pleasure.

'Mac, it's supposed to be our wedding.'

'It is. I agree with you. I don't like frills, either. But it's the only thing we can give your mother.'