by Rick Moody
April ended with Maggie Estep’s memorial service in New York, organized by the sterling poet and singer and human John S. Hall (of King Missile fame), and featuring just about everyone I knew from my misbegotten youth in early sobriety, and then a whole bunch of Nuyorican Poets Café types. It was a spectacle. Maggie took so many people to the racetrack for the first time, myself among them. It’s possible she had taken every friend we had in common there, one day after another. She made me feel like it was our conspiracy, back then. At the memorial service, all these young addicts and alcoholics who had all tried to clean up together, going for endless cups of coffee (and nicotine gum in Maggie’s case) and mulling over the gossip of our various sober dances, all revealed to be well into middle age, all lurching to and from the various explosions of poignancy, the stuff of daily living that Maggie would miss from here on out. We stood out on the sidewalk after, with one last story to tell, and then wandered around the East Village. Somehow I ended up with my friend Randy, the best man at our wedding, the witness, talking to Ann Magnuson, the actress and singer, in Tompkins Square Park. The scene was just as colorful as when I had woken up there thirty years before.
May
I had contracted to celebrate Laurel’s brother’s marriage in Houston in May, and this had resulted in my getting officially ordained by a certain permissive ordination outfit, the Universal Life Church. It’s not that I didn’t want a more formal ordination, I should say. I did. I really thought about trying to go to divinity school in 1992, until my first novel Garden State was accepted for publication by a small press. I had failed out of book publishing pretty well, I thought. And I couldn’t seem to get my work published anywhere except, once or twice a year, in a quarterly magazine that inevitably paid in contributor’s copies, and so I thought first about graduate school in literature, which seemed uptight, and then about divinity school. I went to a meet and greet at Union Theological Seminary.
Once I learned about the Universal Life Church, I ordered up the complete package of materials, which languished in the mailbox upstate just long enough to become completely overrun by spiders. The mailbox also houses mice in autumn. So my ordination pamphlet, with the offer that I could go to the Universal Life Church physical address and get some priestly training, was so full of spiders that they were spilling out the side when I got the thing into my car.
I wasn’t sure, and am not now sure, about why I was selected for this particular duty, the duty of being marital celebrant. Nate Nakadate, Laurel’s older brother (of the two siblings she grew up with), is a good-looking, funny, honest, heartfelt, guitar-playing surfer and fly fisherman, who has hair well below his shoulders, and who writes a frequent column on his far-flung angling exploits for a glossy magazine on the subject, and who also writes about guitars and music for a similarly glossy publication. He is a great and poignant writer. He is also, by trade, a public school teacher of English to high-school age kids. I like Nate a lot, though I do not fish anymore because of the hook-in-the-mouth problem, and am such a mediocre guitarist by comparison to Nate that I try, when in his company, not to bring guitars up too often. Nate seemed to want me to officiate, and I was touched and honored.
They’d had a whirlwind romance, he and his bride, a year or so, theirs was a paroxysmal love, a powerful thing, a surfeit of desire and love that swept into it anyone within orbit. It was hard not to admire how passionately engaged they were, even if it sometimes made me feel like Laurel and I were more about arduous collaboration on life-and-death matters. Anyway, I was happy to serve, and I went looking around for ideas about what kind of service Nate and the woman I’m calling Natalie were going to have, and what, after all, I was going to wear. Laurel was worried about how her mother was going to get there, to Houston, Texas, where the marriage was taking place. When Laurel’s mother came east for our wedding, there were enough friends and family making the trip that there was someone on the same plane with her, but in the case of Nate’s wedding, it was more complicated. You could almost drive to Texas from Iowa, if you could hack the long empty hours. In the end, Laurel’s mom made it back to her Texas homeland without too much difficulty, on commercial jets, and then we made sure that we were across the hall from her hotel room, so that we could help when necessary.
Houston does not yield up its treasures easily. It requires a car, for example, which makes it more of a western city than I am used to. And it is divided into neighborhoods, separated by bayous and waterways, that are only connectable with psychic effort. It’s hot, incredibly hot by northeastern standards, and humid, and while it’s not quite as resolutely Texan as Dallas, it’s still a big city in a red state.
That said, it is easy to forget that Laurel is from Texas, was born in Texas, and that great numbers of her mother’s extended family still live in Texas. Nate Nakadate landed there primarily because he has an ex-wife in town there, who has family and connections in Texas, and he needs to be close enough to her for their teenage son to travel back and forth easily between the two of them. Nate left real seniority in the Florida public school systems to travel to Texas with his ex-wife (she was his wife then), and now he is duty bound to spend a few more years teaching in the greater Houston area, though with every free afternoon he is off with his canoe, which fits perfectly in the back of his pickup truck, to fish (the canoe was out on his front porch during Hurricane Harvey, in case it was needed), and to be in the rehabilitative solitude of a natural setting.
The fishing part of the Nakadate family story comes from Laurel and Nate’s grandfather, a figure of striking importance to all the Nakadates, who served as a medic in the American military during WWII, while his family was incarcerated in Minidoka, and while his brother, who had returned to Japan for school and who was still there during the conflict, fought on the Japanese side. Later in life, while he practiced medicine in the Northwest, still carrying shrapnel from injuries he suffered for this country, Laurel’s grandfather often fished, and found peace and reward in the same kinds of rivers and lakes that Nate haunts. The angling skipped a generation in that Neil Nakadate was not interested in the same way, but he now fishes with Nate periodically, honoring the prior generation and indicating the way the stories of family are honored by inclination and reiteration.
Let me digress just long enough, then, to note how much I too love and respect my father-in-law. It is not always easy being with one’s in-laws, and in my first marriage I could feel everyone trying to bridge the significant differences by sheer will. Everyone tried, but there were times that the chasm was too wide. They lived in Florida, and, in fact, you had to cross a lot of bridges to get to their condo, in their gated community. I was all but obligated to watch televised college football on Thanksgiving, and this became a symbol of the difficulty with the in-laws, that there was great effort, and despite that effort, feelings of isolation and difference.
But that hasn’t been my experience with Laurel’s family at all. Neil, Laurel’s dad, is interested in a lot of stuff that is easy to share with him, like major league baseball, and, more accurately, minor league baseball (because the Chicago Cubs’ Triple-A affiliate is in Des Moines, Iowa, the I-Cubs), and also American literature, which was his specialty while teaching at Iowa State. Neil has taught all the books that my father read as an American literature major, for example, and what he hasn’t taught, he knows plenty about anyway. He will send you a Virginia Woolf story in the mail, now and again, alongside clippings from the local paper of Ames, Iowa. Also, while he has written a lot as an academic, he has also written a memoir about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, which was and is his story; he has gathered this story into a tremendously powerful and important book. There is, as it turns out, a lot to talk about with Neil, who has also, naturally, spent a few decades around Laurel, and is full of good advice, and support, on that subject, as on so many others.
That all three of Neil’s kids were married in an eighteen-month period was self-evidently moving to Neil, e
ven though he is occasionally reserved. He tucks the emotional part of the conversation into it at the corners, and doesn’t go on at length. There’s a bit of subtlety and disinclination to showboat there that feels culturally Japanese American to me. He has the dignity and reserve that you associate with a Japanese American family that lived through the Second World War in this country, and who lost a great deal, but he’s also funny and warm and down to earth. He wanted all the kids to land well, and he is not shy about saying so.
The first thing we did in Houston, when we landed, was a rehearsal of the service. We all went down to the chapel in Houston, the one that Nate and Natalie had rented at great expense, and the wedding specialist lady waited while we tried to go through the ritual at top speed. I had tried to keep the bride and groom focused on the vows, despite my own troubled relationship to this language, because in spite of everything I felt that sometimes language does confer change on they who utter it.
Generally, I think I’m a reasonably good reader. And therefore I naturally felt like reading the service of matrimony would come easily to me, because I think I know what reading is all about. But the irony at the rehearsal was that Nate really didn’t like how I read it! He sort of stopped the proceedings and gave me some line reading alternatives, which had the effect of banishing any confidence I had about serving as the officiant, and suddenly we were all standing there uncertain if the thing was going to go off without a hitch. I should have asked first what Nate wanted! And not assumed that my professional capabilities were so admirable! Nate and Natalie’s whirlwind romance, the kind you hear about in songs, that you associate with films by American directors of the sixties and seventies, was built on the language of desire. They knew what language they wanted, and how it should sound. But I think Nate was nervous anyhow. Who wouldn’t be? Nobody sensible wants for nerves at the nuptial ceremony; if they are without nerves they’re just not thinking ahead. Nate was sort of holding the whole ceremony on his back, Atlas-like, and a big posse of Ivie relatives were coming in, Laurel’s mom’s family—for example, all of Laurel’s still-living uncles, who all lived in Texas, and of course Mary Ivie, who had managed to get on that plane.
If I say that I once wanted to be a minister, or a theologian, when younger, and that I take to heart the implications of, for example, a Christian model of pastoral responsibility, what does it mean for a moment like this when it seems I was not doing a perfect job? On the one hand, I have a long list of performances as a reader to my name, which would suggest that, at least, I have an idea why I might read a particular passage of nuptial language in a particular way. But why do this job, the job of celebrant, if in doing this job I was not there to serve? If the task was intercessory, if I was there to serve as the intermediary voice between the ideal of marital language and the couple before me, there was no room for self, for ego, for expectation, for a resting-on-the-laurels, for a discussion of conventions of reading. I stood before the intended couple as the gatekeeper of the institution of marriage, I stood for the language of marriage, and what I could offer, and what I should have offered, was exactly what the marrying couple wanted and nothing more. And the one thing they wanted was peace of mind in the context of the ceremony. The ideal of pure service, in this setting, is powerful and instructive. I was fortunate to be in receipt of that lesson, as I always am fortunate to be the recipient of opportunities for growth. And therefore I asked Nate for notes, and I made adjustments. Maybe I did a better job as a reader the second time, or maybe I simply got better at being the celebrant who modeled the celebration, the give and take and the joyous union of it all, but suddenly we seemed to be having a marriage.
It was pretty hard to figure out what Natalie’s family made of it all. They were from the land of hunting and fracking, where the winters were long, the farthest north, and were perhaps unused to some of the features of the Nakadate and Ivie clans. Not many of them came over to chat.
And Laurel’s mom definitely could not find a way to easily weather the bits of decorum that were integral to the wedding, and all weekend Laurel kept going across the hall in the hotel to make sure Mary had a bit of a grip on when and where we were going, and what she was supposed to wear. I was well into writing Hotels of North America, by then, and Laurel took a photo of me wearing the suit and hat I wore to the wedding in the hall of the hotel, and there’s a somberness to the photo that I associate with worrying about Mary Ivie. It became the author photo for the book.
The next day we conducted the wedding, though Nate was still abundantly nervous. Maybe I was too. I thought he was great, honest, and true, his posture all vulnerability on display, a person truly in love, feeling the terror and confusion and desperation of being truly in love, feeling what being in love really means.
Mary sat at a table with her brothers Walter and Danny, and I don’t think the three of them had been together at a table in a long spell, maybe ten or even twenty years. And I could see that Mary wasn’t much talking to them at all, and that they didn’t quite know how to talk to Mary, and it was no one’s fault, it was the pain of all the time, the eons, the decades of hardship, and the gravity of Mary’s decline. Maybe the silence, then, was something generous, and giving, and what Danny and Walter were doing was letting Mary be there, and in their company, but not needing her to be other than she was. Frail, wearing the same dress she’d worn at our wedding, quiet, burdened, but full of support for her children, even in her own time of hardship. There was nowhere else on earth she wanted to be on that day, even if she could do no better than she was already doing. For me the camera of these recollections wheels around in the reception hall, but always goes back to record Mary and her brothers.
I remember after conducting the ceremony chasing a bunch of kids around the yard out front of the reception hall, just taking off the top layers, the priestly garb as it were, and chasing kids, like it was exactly what an officiant should be called upon to do, getting behind a water fountain and waiting for a kid to run by and then springing up with some immemorial huzzah. Of such moments is the worthy life made. But worrying about Mary and at what point Mary was going to be unable to look after herself, that was more on my mind than anything else, as I’m sure was true for Laurel too.
We went off to shoot photos on Laurel’s project after the wedding.
We drove farther west, in fact, to visit Laurel’s great-uncle, Mutt Ivie, who lives out near Cisco, Texas. As far as I can tell, this is true bootlegging country, and some of the Ivies, or further-out in-laws of the family, really did do some bootlegging back in the day. But Mutt, like everyone else in the family in West Texas, is involved in the oil business now. In particular, he was until recently a foreman and technical expert on oil drilling rigs, and was known for his professional expertise. He couldn’t retire, even in his eighties, because no one else was as good as Mutt was. Mutt has an honest forthrightness, and a warmth that is incredibly life-affirming, and his devotion to his wife, Bertie, now his wife of seventy years, is a thing that serves as a beacon for the notion of how decent people can be. Mutt and Bertie live in a tiny ranch house in the middle of the prairie in West Texas, and it took us many hours to drive there, and they were all incredibly beautiful hours of travel. We were sort of terrified by the majestic emptiness of West Texas, the severity of it. We drove back and forth past their house a couple of times, trying to will ourselves to find it easy to stop. And then we did.
It was so hard not to feel like the city slickers coming in and gumming up the smoothly operating country traditions of West Texas. But Mutt and Bertie, who knew lots of stories about Mary and her sister Katherine (who had died not long before our trip), welcomed us, no matter how unlikely it was that we were there, that we had come all the way from New York City to see them. Mutt has, it’s honest to say, lost a few digits on either hand in the line of his work, on the drilling rigs, but he reaches out and grabs you and reels you in and there is no problem, there is only warmth, while you’re there. I was just the college pr
ofessor who married Laurel, and of no other significant interest, but they welcomed me just the same.
After we visited with Laurel’s great-uncle, had some chicken soup, looked at yellowed black and whites, we drove toward the Oklahoma line, where we met some even more distant cousins on Laurel’s mother’s side. And then we went to photograph a further passel of extremely distant cousins, on a thousand acres in the dark of the Great Plains. A galaxy of stars above. It was a strange scene. Laurel has always thrived in these completely awkward and sometimes ominous situations. I will often find her marching off for a long conversation with a stranger, and even prolonging these conversations, really giving of herself to people she doesn’t know at all. And so the Oklahoma scene, which involved, in my recollection of it, rather sweet and good-natured relatives of the southern variety, and the presence of guns in the house. My family had guns around when I was growing up, too, so I should not have been surprised, though having renounced firearms in my twenties and never having shot one since, I am often surprised by the fact that the guns are still happening, and even that they are flourishing throughout the nation. As a result, we were the strangers in that Texas landscape. And yet Laurel’s persistence, and her friendly banter, wore everyone down, until we weren’t just the couple from the dreaded New York City (it’s so violent, isn’t it?). At the end of the night, we were hanging out with one of the cousins, a long-haul trucker, and I think his wife and daughter, and I can remember some pretty strange, and sort of punch-drunk conversation, but also the sense that this was it, this was family, this field of utterly inexplicable outcomes, people whom you didn’t know at all, who don’t think like you or dress like you (all those things seemed to be decided regionally), but to whom you could apply the loyalties of family just the same, and by doing so earn something like an honorary place in family, just by risking some affection.