by Lamar Herrin
Good God, Jim! Walter exclaimed. I thought that swim had cooled you off. Then he couldn’t help himself. Here, he said, have a drink.
I did cool off, I said. I sobered right up. That poor little girl born so late into her parents’ lives. Her unconscionably rich parents. And I took a long slow swallow of the bourbon.
And her little girls? Ellie’s?
You shouldn’t ask.
Is there a safe question left? Walter said.
Now, that’s a good question. The right one, as a matter of fact. Are we into safety?
In that moment, with no warning, no plodding footsteps, no clearing of the throat, no scraping of the stool, from behind the bush and down on his dock, Byron Wainwright began the evening’s recital. Down tempo, no tempo, nothing aggressive, drawing the bow in the lower registers back and forth against the strings. As though trying to catch and keep his breath.
Go inside? Walter said. Go out for supper? Separate him from his cello, bring him over here?
Remember, Walter, after he surveyed the scene he turned his back on us.
Make up? Make peace?
To your question. Her daughters remained with their father, and they kept it out of court. Jennifer, the older, had a head on her shoulders and when the time came managed to save the trust fund Rosalyn had left her. Somehow Leland got his hands on Tracy’s, she’s the younger, maybe he told her he’d turn her million into twenty million, I don’t know. Scott, their father, should have been more protective, but he was overmatched. Or disgusted—blinded by his disgust. He remarried and, I suppose, had his hands full. I really don’t know.
And Walter reminded me, The thing about toads is that food comes to them. They blend into their surroundings. They sit there in their squat. Frogs go jumping, toads don’t. They sit there and grow warts. They snatch flies out of the air and get bigger and bigger.
Here’s how I’d make a case for Leland Oldham …
How you’d defend him?
I’d look at those four boys and I’d ask, Why hadn’t they stayed with their mother? It became available knowledge in town that their mother didn’t live far away, another town, maybe just over the state line. Remarried? That I don’t know, but why did Leland have them all? Four boys, Walter, with whatever strains that causes in any family. The rivalries, the bullying, the sulks, the alpha of the litter and the runt. Short of having a genius for the thing, how do you keep a family like that intact? Leland Oldham took it on himself, which, from an outside perspective, seemed in line with his profession. And if you were doing justice to yours, your profession, you’d have to ask the court to give him a break.
Maybe, but I’d hold my nose while I was doing it.
Well, he wasted no time. A week, two weeks after he married, he had all four of his boys set up with trust funds of their own for considerable amounts.
This is from what’s her name, Harriet, to your sister to you?
With a time lapse. By the time I learned of it, two of his sons were already out in the world. One had bought into some fast food franchise, I believe, and begun to make a fortune of his own, which he would eventually have to share.
When? When would that be?
When his father had pretty much gone through Ellie’s.
Which I believe you called “inexhaustible.”
By any normal standards it was. But we’re in a world of sickness, here. You understand that, don’t you, Walter? Disease, Walter, for which there was no known cure. You could go over the world, as Little Howie had, looking for some way to clean that tumor out of his brain, and it wasn’t going to happen. The drinking allowed you to forget it a while, and the drinking made sure it was going to get worse. What’s left? There’s a boys’ and girls’ camp up in the mountains, within hailing distance of the first house that Big Howie and Rosalyn built up there, where we had our earliest summer reunions, and as you pull into that camp there’s a life-sized bronze statue of a large man holding a fishing rod in one hand and his other arm around the shoulder of a little girl. Leland Oldham had a convenient commemorative streak in him, and he was always appealing to the little girl in his wife that he kept feeding booze. Whoever sculpted the statue caught the chubby-cheeked boy in Big Howie, and the proud father, and the lord of all he surveyed, and the little girl was squarely planted under her father’s arm. Leland commissioned the work. The camp has long since passed into other hands, for as Leland exhausted Ellie’s fortune he exhausted the foundation’s as well, but as far as I know the statue is still there. The day it was unveiled happened to have been the day we buried my mother in the town in which she and her three sisters had been born and brought up, from that camp in the mountains a good two hours away. It was also the first time I saw Ellie after her marriage, and the first time I saw Leland Oldham when he wasn’t a shadowy, toad-shaped figure standing behind a screen door.
I paused in my narration, left it for Walter and, I suppose, for Byron Wainwright, who had found a rhythm and was sawing lugubriously away, and went down to the bottom in my Adirondack chair. My back and shoulders were sore, and the pain branched up into the back of my head, which had nothing to do with the afternoon’s exertions. Or with the bourbon, which could never finally get the best of me.
Walter said, Let’s go up to the cabin. I’ll make a fire. We’ll pretend it’s that cold outside. The temperature is due to drop anyway. We’ll steal a march, Jim, that’s all.
There’s a phrase, I said, you don’t hear every day. Steal a march, get around in your enemy’s rear. I’ll drink to that, and I held my glass out for Walter to clink his against, which he did. I don’t think Byron Wainwright heard that clinking of glasses. If he did, he played right through it as we left the field to him.
A cold fireplace and the first fire of the season, for which some birch wood had been stacked off in one corner of the screen porch. I expected smoke to back up into the small living room, which would have driven us back out onto the porch or onto the terrace and within range of Wainwright’s cello, but we were lucky that over the summer no birds or raccoons had nested in the chimney and it still drew. Once Walter had gotten it started, the crackling of the fire overrode Bryon Wainwright but overheated the room, causing Walter to size down the fire until we could comfortably sit before it and what we could hear of Byron Wainwright was no more distracting than the creaking of the wind in the limbs of trees would have been, had the wind been blowing with any kind of force. We shared the bourbon, and when Walter produced, as though from his sleeve, a deck of cards, we played a little two-handed poker. A wheel of chips had been left on a shelf by the fireplace, and the chips had a weighted, worn vintage, perhaps dating from the time this cabin had been built. We played five-card stud and five-card draw, games quick to conclude, each chip from a stack of ten worth a dollar. After I won Walter’s first stack, I won his second on unremarkable, adequately drawn cards, and I suspected Walter had his mind elsewhere or was suckering me along. At one point I said, We were pretty good paddling up that lake together, but you’re not holding your own now. And Walter asked to be cut some slack, claiming that we all had our lapses, but finally admitting he’d been left on the brink of my first firsthand account of Ellie and the toad as man and wife and supposed that was where he still was. We were sitting in twin easy chairs, too small and too close-fitting to lounge in, and playing cards on a collapsible cane table not much bigger than a dinner tray. When I put my cards down, I must have put them down more emphatically than I’d meant to—I hadn’t meant to put them down emphatically at all—and Walter’s eyes flared. There was an instant’s consternation there, as if he were about to be betrayed or abandoned, and in just that instant I wondered what I had done. It must have seemed that I was laying down my cards in truth, quitting the game.
And I said, but not as though reminiscing to Walter, rather into the fire, which was settling in to a clean, steady burn, My friend Phil Hodge, who almost jumped into Cuba and World War Three, took a look at the Howies, at all four Whalens, and ended up
shaking his head. He couldn’t believe it even though he’d seen it, or he couldn’t see how it was worth working up into anything resembling belief. Of course, we caught all those fish coming north, maybe that was all it took, a real live weight at the other end of your line, a good smallmouth, say, no mistake about it, and all the swagger and hero worship and bluster and the sticky maneuvering around a family web went out of your mind.
Then I turned from the fire to Walter, and Walter said, Phil Hodge is no longer your friend, Jim. You’ve been out of contact with Phil Hodge for forty years. He may be dead. He may have moved south to retire. He may be fishing those very same lakes. Fishing the jumps. Or, via Canada, he may have traveled down to Cuba and been seduced by the place.
All of which I admitted was true, my only point being that Phil Hodge had had a good closeup look at the Whalens, found them preposterous or, perhaps, just touchingly out of date, shaken his head, and as soon as that cop who stopped us had waved us through, had gotten on with his life Whereas you, Walter …
Yes, Jim?
You seem to be taking it all to heart.
Do I?
And if truth be told, it’s a bit—surprising.
If truth be told.
Well, I’m trying, I said. After so many years, it’s not that you pick and choose so much as your memory picks and chooses, and what court would hold a man my age accountable for each of his memories? Some things stand out, others fade back, any of which might be true. The things that stand out might make a better story, that’s all—
And Walter interrupted me. What makes you think that that isn’t what a court of law is all about, who, which side, can tell the more convincing story? Juries get tired and distracted. Just like judges. They all want to hear a good story. Of course, they’d all like to hear it firsthand, not what a cousin of the sister of the accused happened to observe.
The accused?
To draw the parallel, Jim.
Phil Hodge got it firsthand, shook his head, pulled in the fish, and walked away.
That’s because it wasn’t his story. His story was almost—three times on and three times off the plane, wasn’t that was what you said?—jumping into Cuba, and almost, almost helping to start World War Three.
That would have been some story, I said, if anybody had been left alive to hear it—or tell it.
Whereas your story, Walter said, is you. Oh, you have a cast of characters, some more familiar than others and some out in left field, but you are my friend, I’d go so far as to call us teammates—
Teammates?
Canoeing teammates, card-playing teammates, guys getting away for a weekend in the woods teammates, bourbon-drinking teammates, we could be right there on the label with the Beam brothers—
Those are fathers and sons, Walter, I said. And one nephew.
But we’re brothers, and to emphasize the point Walter freshened my glass and took a long drink from his own. I began to suspect the bourbon had loosened his tongue, Walter not having been born to it. And we have a sister, a sister-in-law, he went on, but we could keep the law out of it. We have Elaine. And we could bring Molly back in by the back door. You should have seen your friend Molly—
Also known as your wife, I said.
And your friend, you should have seen her when we left you and Elaine out on our patio that evening so the chemistry could begin. Being more discreet, I wanted to go sit in the living room and let nature take its course, but your friend Molly—
And your wife, I remind you again.
—wanted to peek out from behind the patio curtains the whole time at what became, I guess, your courtship. And Molly won. I kept her from cheering, but it was sweet to see, Jim, we couldn’t hear a lot, nothing, actually, you were keeping your voices low, but we could see, and when you touched Elaine’s hand that first time, or she touched yours, that was a moment to remember.
I challenged him. What do you remember? Tell me about it.
We’d taken away the plates when we went inside, but drink glasses were still there. And a couple of hors d’oeuvre dishes we’d missed. The citronella candle was producing a flickering effect. Your hands, your right hands, were on the table. You were talking—but relax, I told you we couldn’t hear what you said, I wouldn’t have let Molly get away with that—and smiling and looking in each other’s faces, then one of you—and Molly and I differ on this, too—reached out, and when I say “reach” I mean twelve, fifteen inches, and covered the other’s hand. You never took your eyes off each other’s faces, and you clearly continued talking, but your hands had a life of their own, and before long—if you ask how long, I’d guess a minute, but time has a way of going slowly in moments like that, both for the principals and the observers, maybe for the observers most of all—your hands turned over onto their sides so that one wasn’t covering the other, and there was no gripping and no strain, and what I really remember was that you never took your eyes off each other, off each other’s eyes, but your hands from that moment on were—I guess the right word is “bound.” Molly wanted to cheer, because, well, you can imagine, Molly was the one who had it all worked out, but I put my hand over her mouth and pulled her back into the house and from that moment you and Elaine were alone.
My memory was that Elaine and I had found our hands like that as we’d gone on talking about the key points in our lives that had brought us to that table, and neither of us registered surprise, which did come as a surprise, although the evening had begun to cool and a little act of intimacy of that sort felt more instinctive than anything else, the giving and taking of a little animal warmth.
In that moment I confessed to Walter, You know I talked to Elaine last night briefly …
And Walter smiled.
You were making supper, I said.
Jim, Jim, Walter half sighed, half sang, the bourbon now clearly having its way with him, I don’t care what you and Elaine have done in the eyes of the law. Believe it or not, there are times when I don’t care about the eyes of the law.
We’re fine, Walter. Better than ever. I know it seems strange.
Strange? He pulled up in his chair, then settled back down. Strange? he repeated. He began to laugh, but the laugh caught in his throat, and I thought about taking possession of the bottle, preemptive possession. A brief abrasive passage from Wainwright’s cello got through then, and as if in protest, the fire popped, which seemed to put Walter on alert.
Strange, he said, is whatever’s going on between Ellie and the toad, that’s strange, that’s downright incomprehensible, not you and Elaine. He looked at me sharply then, angry if what I had put him into was a position to beg. He said, I want it firsthand now. Not your sister and not her cousin. No branch on the Pritchard family tree. No little dead-end twig. You were there. Firsthand. He paused, grimaced, then gained traction again. Your mother’s funeral, is that what you said? Damn, Jim, I’m sorry. What did that goddamned toad do?
Once again I felt like laying my cards on the table, and once again wondered what I was doing, what I had done. Walter, I said, it’s not worth your attention, it’s not worth going on. It’s a sordid, sad affair, that’s all. Forget it. Textile empires rise and fall every day. New England first, then down south, and now in every offshore haven where the workers barely earn enough to stay alive. One day it may come back, I suppose, the way those pendulums swing, but forget it for now. The story’s here, it remains right here, FDR, the New Deal, and the ever-enduring WPA. A slide, Walter, that will be there till Judgment Day! Go to Cincinnati! You owe it to the boy in you to go sliding down that slide!
Merely invoking the WPA was apparently enough to sober my friend up, to deliver him back to familiar ground. But remember, he said, you didn’t have FDR and the New Deal and the WPA down south. Not so they counted. You had right-to-work laws, the old plantation plutocracy turned to textile mills and apparel plants, and the Big Howies. And maybe you had favorite aunts uncomfortable with all that excess, who wanted to give it away, but what you really had we
re toads. I’m sorry it’s over your mother’s grave, Jesus, I am, but that’s what I’m waiting to hear. Tell me about the toad.
But it wasn’t over my mother’s grave. Leland Oldham never got closer than a hundred feet of my mother’s grave. And my mother had been within days of reaching her ninety-second birthday when she died. Lily had preceded her and, of course, Rosalyn years before that. Of the Pritchard girls, only Ruth was left, and the last few months before my mother died, she had almost become a match for Ruth in her tolerance and equanimity and her songbird’s sunny disposition. During those last months, when you walked into her room, my mother greeted you with a kind of floating sparkle in her eyes, as if she were stargazing. My sister and I looked at each other and wondered why she couldn’t have been like that always, that sergeant-at-arms of a preacher’s daughter. No one seemed more at ease with her impending end, which would overtake her in her sleep and leave a smile on her lips. What in the world—or well beyond it—was going on? My mother’s death was almost a cause for celebration, and it was in that spirit that we made the trip down to her native town and were standing around the gravesite when Ellie Whalen now Oldham came hurrying up, accompanied by her two daughters, hurrying in such a way that my sister and I both looked back to where she’d started from, and there beside his car, not a black Cadillac is all I can tell you, Walter, stood Leland Oldham, I had to believe. A short, narrow-shouldered man, with a paunch and a loose-fitting sport coat, dark glasses—no goatee that I could make out—and an unsteady stance in the sun beating down, tracking his wife as she approached the gravesite shaded by the awning we’d all gathered under, as if, although I doubt he’d ever fished a day in his life, Leland Oldham had given the fish he’d hooked too much line to play with and now feared she was about to get away. He was a trifling figure, hard to take seriously. Nonetheless, he came close to ruining my mother’s funeral. If he’d accompanied his wife to the gravesite and sat with us under the awning while the current minister from the town’s First Christian Church made a few farewell remarks, he wouldn’t have. It was the way he remained back there beside the car as though he had a stopwatch running that threatened to erase from my mind that aura of sweetness and sublimity my mother had achieved at the end. My sister was not so affected. And my cousin Harriet, who was also there, had seen Leland Oldham in action too many times to be taken by surprise now. As far as Harriet was concerned, he had our cousin Ellie not on a fishing line but on a good reliable leash, and what else was new?