by Lamar Herrin
Which Rosalyn did or didn’t know about?
Hard to say. Probably did but didn’t want to admit …
A man old enough to be her daughter’s father …
If she’d been fathered at a normal age.
Which, of course, brings us to the question of why Ellie was put on this earth to start with, not that Reverend Crawly would want to speculate on that. Not if it meant accounting for the toad and his brood, as if they too were part of God’s plan.
I’m not sure how much the good reverend knew of the Oldhams. At first they kept a low profile.
Meaning they didn’t go roaring around town in black Cadillacs.
No, that only came later. Or something to that effect.
It did, did it? Walter expressed real surprise. I believe he’d grown accustomed to imagining Big Howie, and only Big Howie, with his girth, and his small shrewd eyes, and his plump manicured hands on the wheel.
Much later, I said. Ellie, too.
Ellie? Driving around town in one of her father’s Cadillacs?
If not a Cadillac, something equally grand. It became a sort of sport, like a sighting around town. You had to be in the right place at the right time.
And we’re not. Not in the right place at the right time.
We left her sitting in that wing chair, Walter. Her mother’s favorite. Shielded both to the right and left, and in front of her—
Sits the toad.
Except when he’s getting up to refill her glass. Hers first, although he doesn’t forget his own.
And other Oldhams are spreading through the house, down to the youngest, that sullen teenage kid probably stretched out where you once were, in Little Howie’s bed, when Rosalyn—
And the Pritchards. My sister and her family, the good-humored Mr. O’Higgins and their two well-behaved children. My aunt Ruth and her three, grown themselves and a daughter with children of her own. But not Ruth’s sailor husband. He’d been the first to pass away, as if he’d gone off to fight yet another war and left the faithful Ruth behind. And my mother along with her sister Lily, who it turns out in her own scandalous, good-humored fashion couldn’t live without a war and was stockpiling materiel in every room in her house as though to withstand a final assault, one item of which was to be that desk. And so many more, Walter, up and down the generations, the Whalen house never so full, and food, of course, you’d think you were at one of those Sunday southern buffets, an assembly-hall-sized affair, table after table—
You’re sure? Remember, you weren’t there.
I don’t have to have been. I don’t have to take my eyes off my cousin and the man there to refill her drink to know what’s going on in that house. All I have to do is imagine the worse possible outcome to a life spent trying to give all the excess away to know how it was piling up—
And how quickly it would disappear?
My sister said Ellie looked both overwhelmed and, seated there as she was, as if she’d come to take control. Everybody passed by her chair before they left, and every time Ellie’s spirits began to sink, Leland put a drink into her hand. He got her drunk and got her through it, my sister said. He drank himself, as if to show her the path. It was his modus operandi. Before it was over, he might have been showing her how to breathe. You had to look past his toadness, Walter. There was some deep, centered, zealous principle operating in the man that made him commanding and that, while you were sitting there observing him, made it impossible for you to sneer or laugh. He wasn’t a Rasputin. This wasn’t the world’s high stage. This was small-town chicanery, and my sister knew small towns, but on that stage Leland Oldham was formidable, a real formidable, steady-eyed, little son of a bitch. My sister said it didn’t take two minutes to see how things stood between Leland Oldham and Ellie. He got her drunk, held her up (in her mother’s favorite chair), and got her through the afternoon. He got drunk, too, drunk on her drunkenness, you could say, except there was no doubt he was putting away as much scotch as she was. He’d been recruited to run a charity out of the church and, by all accounts, was making things happen. But no one there in the Whalen house that afternoon, maybe not even in the toad’s own family, actually cared anything for the man or didn’t see how things stood. Rosalyn had been right, and it needed to have been proclaimed. Engraved on her marker: I left my daughter in the arms of a scheming, unscrupulous, father-aged scoundrel. Someone should have been there to prevent it, but both my husband and my son were dead. Someone else, a survivor, say, who had a debt to pay.
A low blow, Walter said.
I know, I said.
We need to stop this for a while.
Step free of the undertow?
Jesus, Jim. A helluva way to start off the day.
I will say this, Walter. When my sister said there were two people held in ill repute by the time that funeral reception was over, I didn’t doubt her. One of those two people was sitting before her, working his will on her cousin, whose mother had just died and who looked as forsaken as an orphan on the streets. The other was a thousand miles away.
All right, Jim. Enough.
That was how my sister, speaking for the family at large and for selected townspeople, had paired us off. Leland Oldham because he was there, behaving as he did, and I, my aunt’s favorite nephew, because I wasn’t. Because I’d chosen to stay away. Bedfellows, in Little Howie’s boyhood beds.
Jesus, Jim, enough!
I didn’t disagree. I let Walter talk me into the car, and I let him drive us around. It was a perfect day. A breeze, a mild late-summer sun, late enough in the season to take the glare out of the light and lay it mildly over the land. We proceeded down valley roads with streams running alongside, and when a vista opened before us, we saw how the trees had begun to turn until you lifted your gaze to the higher reaches where the pines and spruce and hemlocks remained a yearlong stony green. There was really no reason not to continue driving like this, with the windows down and something gently bracing in the cool warmth of the breeze. I had the luxury, not Walter, of closing my eyes. With something like a blessing in the breeze. We stopped for lunch somewhere, sat out on a terrace with a valley view and, down below, a stream providing a quiet current of white noise. Up on the hillsides stood what once had been rustic summer resorts, perhaps still were, you’d have to get closer and look more closely, and we chose to stay down in the valley’s fold. But gradually the hillsides sloped down to meet us, our particular valley began to level out, and we were at the mercy of a geological event and looking out on what seemed to be an inland sea that a glacier in its grinding retreat north had dug out and the streams had filled with a water so blue you wanted to breathe it down, let it ride through your body on your blood and clean out the residue. Pleasure boats crossed it, then in the clear blue light were lost to view. Lake George, named not for our first president but for his nemesis, the English king. The Sagamore was down there, too, which clearly had an Indian ring. Bygone luxury time-captured for the present day, not just a faithful replica but the thing itself, and before it rose before us I asked Walter if he’d mind very much returning to where we’d come from, along a different route if he preferred, which would end up being the same, one route as good as another, the shallow valleys steepening again, the streams freshening, the sky darkening only a bit, the winding then straightening then doubling back of the stream as it braided its way up the valley floor, and we were gradually lifted back into it, not the real Adirondacks, only the foothills, once again. We crossed a modest bridge the WPA had built, whose iron girders were a rusted red but stout enough to hold us up, the bridge bridging the stream that flowed out of the lake that Walter’s vintage cabin stood on.
We took out the canoe but left the fishing rods behind. We tried paddling as a team—Walter in the back, I in front—straight up the center of the lake to see how well we would do. Lakeside neighbors might have thought we were training to compete, but against whom and for what prize? It took a while to get it right. I alternated strokes on the left wit
h strokes on the right, but with such back-and-forth energy that invariably I pulled us in opposing directions, as though we were tacking up the lake and not striving for a straight course. Walter was the real canoer. He advised me to paddle on either the left or the right, whichever suited me and for as long as my strength held out, and let him take care of the steering. Or did I want to steer? Coming back, of course, I could. So I tested my shoulders and arms and back on the right, reversed hands on the paddle and tested them on the left. The jerks to the right and the left the canoe made as we proceeded up the lake were the equivalent of the dodging feints a boxer made as he advanced through the rounds. The farther we went, the narrower in their range those jerks became, until Walter was almost able to steer us in a perfectly straight line while I, ten years his elder, alternatingly discovered a fund of strength in my right and left shoulders that gave us sufficient forward force.
We were out perhaps an hour before the normal canoeing hour and had the lake to ourselves. There came a moment in our performance when our rhythm seemed so clean, almost so effortless, that I found myself expecting to hear applause from spectators stationed along the shore. If not applause, because there were no spectators, of course, then a click, which current cameras didn’t make or made so quietly the picture takers themselves could hardly hear it, something from the old days, then, befitting a canoes-only lake, a young man and a young woman out for a chaste afternoon of picture taking, with the camera itself as a sort of party favor in exchange for the young woman’s consent, if you could believe such a thing. A Kodak party. Black boxes. A preacher with eyes as dark and swift and unsparing as a shutter’s lens. A Reverend Pritchard and a quartet of Pritchard girls. A succeeding generation, a firstborn and a last, roles someone had to play. Click.
I laid my paddle across the gunwales and we floated, never to a complete stop but just perceptibly toward that exit stream. I felt it in the shoulders and the back, and I felt caught in a current so modest it was unworthy of the name. There were houses on the shores, and people were quietly about, people, excepting their grandchildren, roughly our age, in keeping with a secluded lake eons old and still holding on, and I told Walter that it was a shame we hadn’t brought swimming trunks, because after the pull that had gotten us this far, all I really wanted to do was slip over the side. Walter, who’d steered and not paddled, but would paddle us back, volunteered to turn us around and with his own body shield me in my nudity from the closest cluster of houses if I really wanted to get into the water, and he said it in such a way he seemed to be wondering if I could be taken at my word. So I stripped and slipped over the side, as ghostly pale, I suppose, as I had been in my life, what I could see of myself in the artic embrace of these northern waters. I swam some strokes, modestly keeping the canoe between myself and that closest cluster of houses, but as one stroke led to the next and the iciness of the water relented, I thought I could swim for it, that it was something a body like mine could still do, and I did strike out for the opposite shore with eight, nine, ten powerful strokes, timing my kicks, probably splashing more than I needed to, perhaps even getting Walter wet although he didn’t protest, just began to quietly follow along behind me in the canoe. I swam until I’d gotten absolutely all I could from this water, when to ask for more would have been to beg, then I signaled for Walter to pull alongside and tried my best not to capsize us as I climbed up into the canoe. Walter asked how the water was, and when I told him he didn’t know what he’d missed, he assured me he did and for that reason had remained high and dry. Accepting the pain in the upper back and right down the spine, I half lay in the bottom of the canoe, as though I’d been thrown there by a fisherman eager to add to his catch, and allowed the sinking sun to dry me while Walter, who neither insisted nor resisted, both paddled and steered us back to his end of the lake. If Bryon Wainwright had been out on his dock, I suppose I would have made the effort to dress myself, but he wasn’t, so I was able to get up to the cabin carrying my clothes, dry off, dress, and be back in the chairs looking out over the lake by the time Walter had appeared. He brought the bottle and the ice and he, perhaps more than I, had Leland Oldham on his mind.
As Hamlet said, yes, “the funeral baked meats did furnish forth the marriage table,” and no, they did not marry in the Whalen house, and not in the church, but in an old home squarely in the center of town where weddings and receptions of all sorts were held, and no, neither my sister nor my mother was there, in fact the only member of our side of the family present was a cousin, a daughter of Aunt Ruth and her sailor husband, after me the next oldest in the Pritchard line and a close friend of my sister’s. Close? How close? Walter asked. A confidante, I said. To be trusted? I’m getting it thirdhand now, you understand. That I can’t tell you, Walter. I believe so. Her name was Harriet. Her mother, Ruth, and Rosalyn always had a special bond, even though they were six, seven years apart in age. Lily came in between them, but when it pleased her, Lily was a maverick, who had her good and bad days, and my mother had been the disciplinarian when her mother failed to be and her father was away—
Except, Walter reminded me with a wink, when a thin Howard Whalen had come for a wooing walk in the woods.
I told Walter that, like anybody else, my mother could relent, but Ruth, who’d sung those love songs on the radio as a prewar girl, and must have believed every word, was constancy and sweetness itself, and Rosalyn had need of her as the Whalen fortunes waxed and waned—
But mainly waxed, Walter said, correcting our course again as if we were still back in the canoe, and I saw no reason to disagree. But I added, The thing about Ruth was that because of her husband’s job with that oil company, she always lived some distance away, and Rosalyn had to either go to her or wait till the summer when Ruth brought her family for those two weeks on the lake, which could sometimes be extended to three, if it was pure abiding sweetness Rosalyn wanted, and, believe me, there were times when she did. But there’s no reason to go back into that. We’ve reached the wedding now, which my cousin Harriet attended, and she told my sister that Ellie, who was taller than Leland Oldham and half of his girth, pronounced her vows as though from a pulpit, summoning a strength into her voice, really a note of defiance, except no one was present that day she needed to defy. Harriet was there because she was fond of Ellie, fondness and sweetness running in her blood. Reverend Crawly did not marry them. Harriet was not quite sure of the authority of who did. If the word “God” was spoken, it was by rote or mumbled or employed as a figure of speech, the way you might invoke the forces of nature to shine down on this day. It was a civil compact, with no escape clauses. Oldhams were present guarding all the doors. Ellie’s daughters were not. And it was done in an old house at the center of town, with a wraparound veranda and rockers rocking a little, as though just vacated, in the ghost of a breeze.
Then what happened?
He took it all. He ruined her.
No! No! Walter protested, covering his ears. I mean what happened right then. After the wedding.
Then? The sun shone down, I suppose. Ellie had a cream-colored suit on, her light brown hair was done with a part, she had taken her time with her makeup, her lipstick was a coral red, either she’d had a good night’s sleep or somebody had worked some magic, for the honey-gold in her eyes shone out of the green with a steady low luster. She was slender, svelte if you imagined her stepping out of a forties fashion magazine along with the likes of, say, Lauren Bacall. If her father had been there, he might have fallen in love with her in place of her mother, or in addition to her mother. She did not look as if she had held a shotgun or a fishing rod in her hands in her life.
All this for the toad?
Harriet told my sister and my sister told me that Ellie hadn’t had a drink all day, not until the wedding supper, which Harriet also attended, so she was reluctantly forced to conclude that her younger cousin was riding a wave of happiness throughout the day, and it wasn’t until after the supper that that wave came crashing down. Then a hagg
ardness took hold of her as if she’d spent a cold night out in a storm. She couldn’t keep it up. Leland Oldham seemed solicitous of her then. He kept feeding her the wrong medicine, of course, or the medicine that suited him, the best scotch Whalen money could buy, from the start no less than Lagavulin 16, Walter, but he also seemed aware of what had blossomed and then wilted before his eyes, and he had to shore up his conviction and go to work on her again. Harriet, who’d had her own rocky marriage, not hills and valleys but craggy peaks and ravines, told Jean she could see how this was going to go. Did Leland Oldham love Ellie Whalen? Enough to want to restore her before she came apart again and he picked up—and banked—the pieces? Without him, he must have reasoned, she’d have no one to put her back together, and without her he’d have no pieces to pick up and bank. So he made good on his vows and went to work.
It sounds like you’re saying they made a team.
If they did, it’s a goddamn shame!
He got her drunk until her only recourse was to turn to him.
She came from a drinking family, Walter. Her father had been a heavy drinker, at least during the cocktail hour when I was a boy. But when Rosalyn announced she was pregnant with Ellie, notice that Big Howie sobered up. He must have heard that as the voice of God thundering in his ear—I’m giving you one more chance! Rosalyn, of course, stopped drinking too. Ellie’s father dies and Ellie turns to the drink her father gave up when she came into their lives. The only difference, scotch whiskey instead of bourbon. When Leland Oldham appears to take over as director of her father’s endowment, the Howard Whalen Youth Crusade—after Ellie’s appointed him, that is—and it turns out he’s a bigger drinker than Big Howie ever was and can portion out to this daughter-aged benefactress/boss of his her daily allowance of liquor, which as a sort of sympathetic overseer he will join her in consuming, and they become so like-minded in their drunkenness that they actually marry and, putting their drunken heads together, dream up ways to spend Ellie’s seemingly inexhaustible fortune while everyone else, I’m talking about us, the family at large, is forced to stand off on the sidelines and watch the debacle unfold because there’s only one game in town and only two players left—well, yes, Walter, I guess that’s what you can call teamwork.