A Good American

by Alex George

  Mr. and Mrs. Weldfarben were out of town for the weekend, and Darla had been hoping to lose her virginity while they were gone. But it was humiliating, having to beg a boy to do that stuff. Teddy had told her again and again that he wanted to sleep with her, of course he did, but that he was just trying to be good. It had been sweet at first, but as time had gone on Darla had begun to lose patience. Either you want to, or you don’t, she’d say bitterly. Well, it’s difficult, Teddy would reply, avoiding her gaze.

  Darla had decided not to go to Jette’s memorial service, as fond as she’d been of the old lady. She wanted Teddy to understand how serious things had become. She took another swig and looked out her bedroom window. The sky had been bruised into darkness by the approaching evening. She frowned. Where was Teddy? He should have come looking for her hours ago. She sat on her bed and waited for a knock on the door.

  By the time she’d finished the bottle of vermouth, Darla was steaming drunk and indignant. Teddy was supposed to have come crawling to her, contrite and ready to do her bidding, but he hadn’t appeared. She stared miserably up at the ceiling as her stomach heaved and the room spun. She got unsteadily to her feet and pulled on her coat. If Teddy wouldn’t come to her, then she would go to him. She let herself out of the house and stood for a moment on the doorstep, momentarily stilled by the cool night air on her face. Then she bent forward and vomited on the flower bed. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and set off through the town toward our house.

  As Darla turned the final corner, she saw my brother standing by the front gate, smoking a cigarette and staring up at the sky.

  “There you are!” she cried.

  Teddy looked up at her and gave her a small smile. “Here I am,” he said.

  “Has everyone left the party?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t have called it a party, exactly,” answered Teddy. “But yes, the guests have all gone. There’s just family left.” He waved his cigarette at her. “From whose tender affections I’m taking a much-needed break.”

  Darla cocked her head to one side. “Did you wonder where I was this afternoon?”

  “Of course I did.” He looked at her appraisingly. “So where were you?”

  “I was at home.”

  “Home, huh. What were you doing there?”

  “I’ve been drinking vermouth and waiting for you.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t you remember? My folks are away for the weekend. I’ve got the place to myself.”

  Teddy looked at her, his face unreadable. “I’d forgotten,” he admitted.

  Darla felt the booze sloshing about inside her. She took his hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go back.”

  “Really?”

  She hiccuped. “It’s now or never,” she said.

  My brother paused for a moment, caught in two minds. Darla held her breath and concentrated on remaining upright. Finally he squeezed her hand and smiled at her.

  “All right, then,” he said.

  As I sit here and write these words, fifty years later, I cannot help but speculate how things might have turned out differently if I had stepped outside at that moment and seen the two young lovers as they turned and began to walk silently back to the Weldfarbens’ empty house. I would have called out; they would have turned toward me; and the half century that has passed since that night would have looked entirely different.

  But I didn’t. I stayed inside, oblivious to the little drama unfolding by the front gate, and off they went. It was the calamitous finale in a carnival of missed connections. We have all been paying the price, to a greater or lesser degree, ever since.

  Because it wasn’t Teddy that Darla drunkenly took home on the night of my grandmother’s funeral. It was Frank—angry, horny Frank.

  FORTY-TWO

  For all of Frank’s predatory instincts, his time at Duke had been a disappointment, sexually speaking. Student life was not the cornucopia of amatory delights that he had imagined. Yes, there were legions of desirable coeds who floated like angels across the campus, but they had remained tantalizingly out of his reach. My brother watched those beauties parade by, his whole body thrumming a hymn of unbridled longing. But the girls’ dorms were fortresses, barricaded by lock and key. Strictly enforced curfews limited the opportunities for illicit trysts, especially since Frank didn’t have a car. Back then, the consequence of getting caught having sex was certain expulsion, and nobody (except Frank, apparently) was willing to take that risk. When Darla Weldfarben threw herself at him, then, Frank had been in a state of frustrated arousal for a year and a half.

  My brother had never met Darla before. He realized at once that she had mistaken him for Teddy, but when he smelled the alcohol on her breath he decided not to correct her, curious to see what would happen next. When she took his hand and told him that her parents weren’t home, he had hesitated, but only for a moment. Frank silently followed her home, hoping that Darla was drunk enough not to notice that he wasn’t who she thought he was.

  As it turned out, she only realized her mistake the following morning. Even through the fog of a raging hangover, she could see that the boy asleep next to her was not Teddy, even though he looked an awful lot like him. With a furious cry she launched herself across the bed and delivered a stunning left-right combination punch, one ferocious wallop to each eye. Frank tried to pull on his trousers while dodging her fists. This angry pursuit around Darla’s bedroom was conducted in mournful silence. Both knew that there was nothing to be said. Finally Frank fled down the stairs and stumbled out of the Weldfarbens’ house. As he made his way home, Darla sat on her bed and wept.

  Frank didn’t tell any of us what he had done. He refused to explain where he had spent the night, but told us that he would be leaving later that day, two days earlier than planned. By lunchtime his eyes were ringed with two dark bruises. That afternoon I drove him back to Jefferson City. He sat next to me, tight-lipped and thoughtful. We drove the whole way in silence. At the train station I handed him his bag. “Whatever it was you got up to,” I said, “I hope it was worth it.”

  He gave me a small, crooked grin. “Bye, James,” he said. Without another word, he walked away.

  And so my brother escaped back to North Carolina, leaving the rest of us to deal with the mess he had made. The following morning Darla appeared at our front door and confessed everything to Teddy.

  My brother listened, aware that he should have been consumed with fury, his heart darkened by thoughts of fraternal revenge, but what he actually felt was relief. Frank had presented him with the perfect opportunity to end things with Darla for good. When she finished her story, Teddy played it perfectly. He patted her hand and said that he forgave her, but that he couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t happened. This, he told her sadly, changed everything. He couldn’t see her anymore, not after this. She gasped and wilted pathetically into his arms. He listened to her pleas and her promises, but remained resolute. It was over, he told her, scarcely able to believe his luck.

  Darla, though, was not going to give up without a fight. Teddy spent the next two days hiding in our bedroom while she loitered outside our house, hoping for another chance to plead her case. When he returned to Columbia, there was already a tear-stained letter waiting for him. She began to write him every day, begging for forgiveness. Teddy read the letters quickly and then guiltily dropped them into the trash. He decided to skip a few weeks of church, hoping that God would understand the gravity of the situation and grant him a pass.

  I suspect that Darla’s campaign to win Teddy back might have worn him down in the end, had Mother Nature not intervened. A month or so after Jette’s funeral, Darla began complaining of nausea and exhaustion in the mornings. Teddy was off the hook for good, but things were about to get a whole lot more complicated for everyone else.

  Hershel Weldfarben worked ninety acres of
arable land out to the west of town with his three sons. Darla was his youngest child, and his only daughter. She’d come along six years after Hershel and his wife had thought they were through with babies—a blessed, if unexpected, gift from God. The Weldfarben boys had been unceremoniously hauled through their childhoods. Hershel put his sons to work in the fields as soon as they were able to drive a tractor—which, in Caitlin County, was around the age of ten. He was a gruff, undemonstrative man, whose love for his boys, if love was the right word, was proportional to their contribution to the family business. Darla, however, was different. Hershel did not possess similar tools to calibrate his affection for his little girl, and consequently his adoration for her went off the charts. The very first time that he held that squalling little bundle of flesh in his arms, he promised her that he would protect her from all the horny little toads who would one day try to have their wicked way with her.

  When he learned that Darla was pregnant, Hershel Weldfarben grimly got ready for the drive to Columbia to confront Teddy. When Darla tearfully confessed who the real father was, he changed his travel plans and went to Raleigh instead. This time he took two of his sons with him.

  Frank has never told me exactly how that confrontation on campus went down. I don’t know, for example, whether or not an actual shotgun was involved. But within a week, my brother was back in Missouri, and a married man.

  Frank moved into Darla’s childhood bedroom, and began work on the Weldfarben farm under the hawkeyed surveillance of his new family. When Claudine Meisenheimer was born the following August, Frank was no longer considered a flight risk, and he was allowed to stop work on the farm. He applied for a teller’s position at the bank that Grandfather Martin used to run. Every day he put on a coat and tie and stood behind the counter, doing his best to smile at the never-ending line of customers.

  Franklin, who had only ever wanted to escape, found himself more trapped than any of us.

  Claudine was as perfect and beautiful as a baby can be. Darla had half-expected the child born of her carnal sin to have tiny horns sticking out of its head, but whenever she held her daughter in her arms, she couldn’t help wondering, just for a moment, if what she had done could really have been that bad, if this was the end result.

  After Claudine came Andrew, Frederick, Nancy, Donny, Clyde, Todd, and Beatrice, each arriving within a year of the one before. Darla, it transpired, was chronically fertile; Frank couldn’t look at his wife without getting her pregnant. Every egg that came careening down her fallopian tubes seemed fated for instant fertilization. For the first seven or eight years of their marriage, she was pretty much always pregnant. I think the only reason she finally stopped having more children was that she and Frank were simply too exhausted to have any more sex.

  As their family grew, Hershel built Frank and Darla a house on his farm. They invited me round for supper every so often, but I never enjoyed those visits much. The amount of noise generated by all those children chilled my soul. Neither parent seemed to notice the incessant symphony of bawling, bickering, and screaming, but every indignant yowl put my nerves on edge. Frank and Darla had shut down all but the most acute of their sensory faculties, and reacted only when a child’s cry achieved a degree of shrillness that I associated with physical torture. Wherever I turned, children sprawled across furniture and left a trail of infant detritus in their wakes. Their parents traipsed numbly through the house, picking stuff up, too tired to speak.

  Still, they seemed happy enough. Given everything that had happened, Darla and Frank muddled through their marriage just fine—better, in fact, than many couples who had chosen each other by more orthodox means. When they had exchanged their vows beneath Hershel Weldfarben’s watchful eye, they were strangers, with no hope or expectations of the other, and this had equipped them well for married life. They were immune to the quiet creep of disappointment that can sour more optimistic unions; there was no heady first blush of romance to be mourned as the years passed. From that joyless ceremony in the empty church, there was nowhere for them to go but up.

  It helped that neither blamed the other for the mess they had gotten themselves into. There was nothing to be done but to forge a way out of the thicket of their abandoned dreams. A lack of viable alternatives helped, but it was the adoration they shared for their expanding family that really drew Frank and Darla together. In the chaotic crucible of their little home, filled with all that love and noise, with each passing year they crept closer toward some sort of contentment, and each other.

  FORTY-THREE

  Teddy did not come home for Frank and Darla’s hurried nuptials. Nobody was surprised when he didn’t appear at the service, although his absence was noticed by Reverend Gresham. The clergyman knew that Teddy and Darla had been dating, and he was appalled when Hershel Weldfarben asked him to officiate at his daughter’s wedding—to the wrong twin. He had performed the ceremony, ashen-faced with fear. His gaze kept drifting out across the empty pews as he wondered where the risen Son of God was. The words of Exodus 20:5 rattled through his head: I am a jealous God, and will visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me. After the service Reverend Gresham had gone home and prayed for forgiveness, petrified that a terrible, retributive hell would soon be unleashed on the town.

  There was no apocalyptic visitation, however. Life in Beatrice went on as before. And when, a few weeks after the wedding, Teddy began to appear at church again on Sunday mornings, Reverend Gresham was hugely relieved. So the Messiah had not abandoned them in fury, after all. If anything, Teddy seemed more cheerful than ever. He sat in his usual pew and smiled at his new sister-in-law as she played the piano. The minister marveled at the Lord’s capacity for forgiveness.

  Of course, Teddy’s behavior toward Darla had nothing to do with limitless reserves of clemency. In the circumstances, he could afford to be magnanimous. It was only when he learned about Darla’s pregnancy that he realized what a narrow escape he’d had. Every day he gave thanks to God for giving him the strength to resist Darla’s charms. That could have been me, he thought as he watched Frank amble about the church in cowed defeat. Teddy realized then that God really was looking out for him. We probably shouldn’t have been surprised when, after he’d graduated from the University of Missouri, Teddy announced that he had applied to seminary school in Kansas City. He was going to be a minister.

  The prospect of his son’s ordination seemed to knock the fight out of Joseph. He no longer ranted and raved about Teddy’s faith; a bemused silence settled on him instead. He knew when he was beaten.

  Teddy stopped coming home every weekend; he was busy helping to officiate Sunday services at the seminary. But he never forgot First Christian Church in Beatrice.

  When his training was finished, Teddy returned home, bringing several cardboard boxes full of religious textbooks with him. It was early summer; the brutal humidity that held us hostage every year had not yet descended. One night Teddy and I were sitting on the back porch, drinking beer.

  “So,” I said, “what’s next for you?”

  Teddy grinned. “Now the fun starts,” he said.

  “Your first posting.”

  Teddy nodded, and took a long drink of his beer.

  “How do you decide where to go?”

  “Oh, I don’t decide. I go where I’m sent.”

  “Which will be . . . ?”

  Teddy shrugged. “Could be anywhere. New pastors often get sent to inner-city parishes. Not a lot of fun, so I’ve heard. Much of the work is done on the street, rather than in church. We minister to prostitutes, drug addicts, and criminals.”

  “Sounds delightful,” I said.

  “They’re God’s children, too, James. Everyone deserves a shot at redemption, wouldn’t you say?” Teddy looked at me, his eyes steady. He spoke softly, but his words held a new, quiet confiden
ce.

  “If you say so.”

  “Anyway, that’s not for me.” He paused. “I want to come back here.”

  “Back here? Why? You could go anywhere.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere,” he said. “I want to come home.”

  I sat there, momentarily unable to speak. Five years of study and Teddy wanted to come back to Beatrice. I thought of what Rosa had told me years ago. You’ll leave. And then one day you’ll come back. Finally I managed to say something. “What about Reverend Gresham?” I asked.

  “Look, James.” Teddy spoke calmly. “Like I said, it’s not up to me. All I can do is pray and see what happens. Although,” he added thoughtfully, “it might not hurt to talk to Reverend Gresham, and let him know what I’m thinking. See if he can help.”

  There was a certain inevitability about the subsequent chain of events. The more spiritually inclined might deem the whole thing divinely ordained.

  The following morning Teddy visited Reverend Gresham, and told him quite frankly that he wanted his job one day, and would he mind putting in a good word for him when the time came? Reverend Gresham realized at once what was happening—finally, his sinful thoughts about Margaret Fitch were coming home to roost. He had fretted about Teddy’s lingering presence for years, unsure what it meant for him and his parish. Now everything became clear. He was being ousted. He meekly accepted his fate. The news almost felt like relief. The poor man’s nerves had been frayed to breaking point. That afternoon the minister wrote a letter tendering his resignation and strongly urging that Teddy be appointed in his place. His testimony about my brother’s virtues would have made a saint blush.

  Reverend Gresham decided that he’d had enough of the ecclesiastical life. He went to live with his sister on the southern California coast—about as far away from Teddy as he could get without actually leaving the country—and began studying for his real estate license. Every morning the ex-minister gazed out toward the white-crested waves of the Pacific. He watched the surfers as they shot back and forth across the water, and remembered the sight of my brother levitating above the Missouri River. He never did discover that all he had seen that summer afternoon was Frank, sunbathing on a pole. But that vision had revealed truths that were far greater than the mundane facts of the matter—truths that would guide him through the rest of his long, if rather anxious, life.