When in 1958 she met Wesley, in a Stags Harbor luncheonette, Sally—nineteen, about to turn twenty—was all but engaged. An “understanding” had been arrived at. Her all-but-fiancé, Jacob Slopsema, was likewise planning to become a schoolteacher, in pursuit of which he’d journeyed all the way to the holy city of Mecca—or what stood for such in the minds of the congregation of the Restoration Christian Reformed Church. For Jacob had enrolled at Calvin College (“My heart I offer to you, Lord, Promptly and Sincerely”), in Grand Rapids, on the western, the even more Dutch, end of the state. Jacob’s father was a deacon of the Restoration Christian Reformed Church.
Sally naturally assumed that the announcement that she was “spoken for” would put an end to the attentions (rather flirtatious attentions, to be sure, but honorably so) focused upon her by this odd gentleman with the odd name, Wesley Sultan, who trained upon her the bluest, most potent gaze she’d ever encountered. And yet her announcement seemed only to enhance, to quicken, his interest.
“Of course it must be duly noted that he was extremely good-looking, ” she would later explain, in her roundabout and quaintly literary way, “but that was only the half of it. The smaller half, you might say. First and foremost, there was the urgency of his pursuit. In my nineteen years on the planet, I’d never seen anything like it, except perhaps on one of my rare trips to the movies. Could we meet at ten tomorrow morning? Ten tomorrow?—I’d reply—That’s out of the question. I have a class then. All right, how about eleven? Eleven? Well goodness gracious, I wouldn’t even have time to set down my books. All right then, what about eleven-fifteen?
“Pressing—that’s what he did to you. Wes was always pressing, pressing, pressing.”
In time, Wesley Sultan called on Sally at home, pulled right up with a squeal of brakes in front of the Admiraal house in his tomato-red Bel Air convertible. So charmed was he to meet Sally’s parents, and to view the Admiraal homestead, that he apparently failed to perceive just how chilly a reception he’d been accorded. Five minutes after his departure, Henry Admiraal made it clear to his daughter, in no ambiguous terms, that this wasn’t the sort of single gentleman she ought to be entertaining: a convertible-driving salesman who, to make things worse, didn’t even belong to the CRC—the Christian Reformed Church. There was, in addition, the issue of whether it was proper for her to be receiving any gentlemen callers, now that she was virtually spoken for.
Sally’s mother, while professing to like Wesley (and indeed Kathy did like Wesley—what woman didn’t?), reminded her daughter of the deep ties of friendship and faith uniting the Admiraal and Slopsema families . . .
And Sally saw their point. Far better to sever all such relations at the outset. Only, it wasn’t quite so near the outset as she’d led her good, trusting parents to believe: On the Bayview campus, Wesley had already contrived to meet her a few more times than she’d let on to Henry and Kathy. She’d spent enough time with Wes to owe him, anyway, some brief explanation about why future meetings were impossible. Which is how it happened that the two of them wound up side by side, one warm June afternoon, on a bench in Restoration’s Toledo Heights Park (the very park in which Wes’s late father, Chester, had once taken a proprietary interest). It was an afternoon Sally would recall vividly for the rest of her life. She was wearing a pink-and-white seersucker shirtwaist, white pumps, and—an extravagance—nylons purchased in Saginaw. Wesley was wearing a white shirt and a narrow red-and-blue tie. The blue of his necktie was in fact azure—precisely the color of his eyes.
The sun was fading behind them. Far away, to the north, Lake Huron could be glimpsed, a patch of crystalline blue, moment by moment turning the pink of a Dutch tulip. Wesley listened somberly as she laid out her careful reasoning. When she concluded, nothing could be clearer: They must stop seeing each other. Although no date had been fixed, she was going to marry Jacob Slopsema.
And then in Wes’s hands the conversation veered off. (It was just the way he drove his Bel Air convertible: one abrupt, unexpected turning after another.) Their talk shot off in an unbelievable direction. Sally probably would have jumped up and walked away in indignation, had she not been so astounded. Wes wanted to know: Was she a virgin?
Truly, that was the juncture the two of them had arrived at. Sally was sitting in a public park with a blue-eyed businessman who wanted to know whether—whether she was a virgin!
And Sally (blushing less than you might suppose, for she had righteousness on her side, the impregnable knowledge that—in this matter anyway—she’d always been a spotless girl) explained that, yes, of course she was a virgin. Good heavens . . . Jacob was an utterly honorable man, you see. Otherwise, she would never have considered marrying him.
And once more Wesley’s talk angled off unexpectedly. Some of the icy-fiery intensity drained from his gaze, replaced by an ample ease and sweetness. His voice, too, altered. It lifted, until he sounded just like a boy as he told her, as he chanted at her, “It’s all right, then, everything’s all right, then, everything’s all right.” He took her hands in his—which, too, felt less odd than you might suppose: to be holding hands on a public bench, in Toledo Heights Park, with an older man who wasn’t your fiancé . . . And he made her a solemn avowal: “I promise you, dearest Sally, one thing: Everything between us is going to be all right, forever and ever.”
And Sally, recalling his pledge thirty-nine-plus years later (recalling it while slicing into a plate of poulet de Bresse à la crème, in a sunny restaurant in Domat, a little ruddy-walled town in Burgundy), cries out, “What fools, fools, fools we were!” And yet her protest rings with more amusement than despair. She’s on the verge of uttering that phrase which crystallizes so much of her life: Back then, we didn’t know any better. For these days—a widow one year short of sixty, her fair, undyed Dutch girl’s blond hair beginning to turn the wan straw color of a cobwebby broom—she carries everywhere a sense that what little clarity she has achieved on her existence has arrived late in her life, just as this gentle, generous French sun came late in life. It sounds like such a trivial accomplishment, but in truth it is the most thrilling state imaginable: At fifty-nine, Sally has begun to make sense of things. From some unimaginably distant corner of the cosmos a light has come down to illuminate her personally.
But if Wes’s vow, recalled thirty-nine years later, brings tears of vexed amusement to her eyes, it brought tears of a different sort to the nineteen-year-old girl sitting on a bench in Toledo Heights Park. She’d never met anybody so romantic, so devoted, so good-looking, so greedy for her time. (Not even when, some three years later, she became a mother, would she feel so unreasonably needed. Her child—a boy—would prove to be a “good baby” who slept well and ate well and solemnly enjoyed watching the world go by. The baby seemingly recognized that she needed a little space—a life of her own. Wesley, however, clutching her hand in Toledo Heights Park, recognizes no such need: He wants to swallow her up, to absorb her, or to be absorbed in her. He wants to merge with her and, his hips only inches away from hers on the bench, she wonders, with a little shiver, whether this is what love must be, whether this is what—her virginity having somehow become fodder for public discussion—sexual intercourse will be like: that union so complete, a man and a woman fuse into a single creature.)
It was never quite clear to Sally when, exactly, marriage to Jacob Slopsema became an impossibility. During this period in her life, somebody else must have stepped in and taken over her body, for surely she herself (meek little Sally Admiraal, who had nodded understandingly, sympathetically when Mr. Hennepin explained that the Kakenmaster Fellowship would go to Tom Hendrix) wasn’t about to face down Jacob, to say nothing of her mother and her father. Yet face them down, face them all down, Sally did. (“And I’m afraid”—Sally explains, over another sip of wine—“we mustn’t discount the persuasive power of what might also be called the glamour factor. After all, when you got right down to it, the question confronting me was: Did I want to spend the rest of my
life as Mrs. Slopsema—or as the wife of a Sultan?”)
Wesley helped her, of course—he stood staunchly beside her. He vowed to convert to the CRC, and, during the period of their courtship anyway, never missed a single service. And if he was that suspect thing in her parents’ eyes—a salesman—there was no disputing his professional success. Parked out front, Wesley’s tomato-red Bel Air convertible cast a robust glow that warmed the very walls of the Admiraals’ modest living room. And he was the grandson of the mayor himself, Hubert Sultan.
In the end, Wesley won them over—he won them all over—so that no more than a momentary flutter resulted when Sally’s father happened to discover a slight irregularity in the sketchy oral résumé Wes had provided. Though Wes had once claimed, or at least strongly suggested, that after leaving high school he’d subsequently gone back and got his diploma, it seemed he’d somehow neglected to do so. Wesley was a dropout.
For her part, Sally hardly needed from Wes the reassurance of his Bel Air convertible, or the dynastic splendor of his grandfather the mayor, nor was she fazed by his lack of educational credentials. (Sally the valedictorian had enough of those for both of them.) Oh, she had the reassurance of love everlasting, expressed in a vow of unsurpassable beauty.
“Now can you imagine,” she says, washing down the last of her poulet de Bresse with a sip of Mâcon, “how utterly unprepared I was to learn, after I’d been married for three years, and now had a child in my tummy, that the very man who’d made such grand vows to me in Toledo Heights Park, that my own blue-eyed Wesley, had already, already, three years before, walked down the aisle with another woman?”
CHAPTER THREE
Here’s Photo #1, a bleached-out color snapshot of the two brothers. It’s 1954, it’s Conrad’s high school graduation. Arms are planted fraternally upon each other’s shoulders, yet neither brother looks altogether at ease.
Conrad is seventeen and Wesley is nineteen. At this point in their lives, each is thriving. In two years at Great Bay Shipping, Wesley has emerged as a natural salesman. He’s wearing an expensive-looking silver suit and a pink-and-silver tie. The ungainly crook to his arm suggests a proud desire to throw into the camera’s eye affluent glints from the face of his wristwatch. Conrad, too, has trophies to display. He has received the school’s Mulholland Prize, also known as the “leading man of letters” award. These are varsity letters. It’s an old but dependable joke: The man of letters award customarily goes to a semiliterate. But not this time. Conrad not only has received eleven letters (three in football, four in wrestling, four in track) but has also posted a more-than-respectable 3.5 GPA. He has been accepted at every college he applied to: Kalamazoo, Michigan State, the University of Michigan, and faraway Vanderbilt, in Nashville, Tennessee. Tennessee? Vanderbilt’s the alma mater of Coach Cairoli, Conrad’s wrestling coach, who steered him this past winter to the state Class B semifinals in the 148-pound weight class. Conrad will be heading south.
In the photograph Wesley looks like the taller of the two Sultan boys, though this must be a matter of positioning, or posture, or perhaps simply the unobtrusively elevated heel of a shoe. In this particular brotherly battle, height off the ground, we have a clear winner: Conrad, by half an inch. He has reached his full adult height of five eleven.
If the snapshot memorializes a day of triumph, it hints as well at some of the pitfalls in store for the Sultan brothers. In Wes’s too-wide and rather brittle smile, there are traces of the small-town smoothy—he doesn’t look too many steps removed from one of those slick, Brylcreemed men in pointed two-tone shoes who calls his women prospects Sugar and refers to their daughters as purty ballereenas. And Conrad? There’s a suggestion of something thick or occluded in his fierce gaze. You sense a tunneling approach to life—a forward-looking drive that dismisses as irrelevant the peripheries, the qualifications and the nuances, of the world around him.
And yet with hindsight, what’s most interesting about the photograph are the various ways it could mislead a viewer. In the breadth of Conrad’s face, the smoothness and regularity of his features, you might detect a touch of blandness—envision him eventually becoming, say, a slow-rolling bore among a crowd of Restoration Rotarians, a big-shouldered man in a powder-blue Ban-Lon shirt who tends, over a third whiskey sour, to amble back through the fields of his ancient athletic triumphs. But in fact with each passing year Conrad will cultivate a wilder appearance, wilder observations. No, if either brother ultimately becomes something of a bore, it will be Wesley, with his stalled career and gnawing self-doubts. Like a dog chained to a post, he will be forever winding round a central pivot—his fear of having “lost his stuff,” particularly with a female audience. For a couple of years in the early seventies, while living in Kalamazoo, Wes will take to dyeing his hair, a practice that will not relieve but merely relocate his anxieties: Are my roots showing?
Eventually, Wesley’s search for some explanation to his life’s various disappointments will take a broader sweep. His conversations will grow increasingly political. In this, ironically, handsome Wes will come to resemble homely Chester, his likewise-stalled father, who after the loss of his store in 1935 regularly launched into tirades against Hoover and the Republicans. Wesley’s condemnations will be wider still. It will be typical of him, as he downs the last of a beer and swabs delicately at his lips with a monogrammed handkerchief, to conclude that “Each political party’s worse than the other,” and “The whole rotten thing’s a racket.” If the sixties are destined to be America’s Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories, they will find in Wes an easy recruit and fervent disciple. He will discern in each of the decade’s political assassinations a collusion of actors and analysts—obviously the newspapers are in on it too. And in the seventies, he’ll begin sounding like something of a crackpot on the subject of Japan’s conquest of the American automobile industry. Isn’t it all clear? The bigwigs, the politicians and the CEOs, they’ve sold the average Joe down the river, haven’t they? Payoffs, bribes, cowardice, and greed. They’ve peddled away our industrial base, and in the modern world, hell, you lose your industrial base, man, you’ve lost everything . . .
The photograph might also be misleading about how the two brothers will weather the years. From the hints of something dandyish yet heedless in Wesley’s looks (note the cigarette dangling from the hand slung over his brother’s shoulder), you might think he will eventually let himself go, subsiding into a potbellied and short-winded middle age. Wes looks a little soft beside his younger brother, whose graduation gown cloaks but does not conceal a sprinter’s supple springiness, a wrestler’s compacted reserves of power.
In truth, it’s Conrad and not Wesley who will let his body go— spectacularly. This is all some decades off. For many years to come, Conrad will maintain a spartan discipline; in his thirties, in his forties, he’ll beat and whip and starve his body into a state of perpetual honed fitness. But in his fifties, the sprinter will drop by the wayside, the wrestler take a tumble, and Conrad’s body inflate into a sort of overstuffed lounge chair—a transformation so complete that you can only wonder whether the woman who appears in Photo #2, the boys’ mother, Dora Sultan, would have recognized the figure he’s destined to become: the mammoth silver-ponytailed man in the lime-green T-shirt who sits before me.
He’s my guest. We’re in a Miami restaurant of his choosing called Bar Barcelona. Prices are steeper than either the food or atmosphere might warrant, but Conrad seems pleased with his choice. At my urging, we’ve brought along the graduation photos.
The images work on his imagination, they stir him up. After telling me he doesn’t recall a “single damn thing” about the day on which they were taken, Conrad gradually embarks on an unbroken thirty-minute reverie. He talks constantly. He eats constantly too, one little dish of tapas after another—scallops ceviche, shrimp in garlic, spicy olives, a little bowl of chorizo stew, slices of ham cut translucently thin, meatballs, a sturdy wedge of salt cod. As though to minimize the risk of being i
nterrupted, Conrad seems always to be taking his bites in midsentence; in this performance of his, nothing ever comes to a complete halt. Food goes in and words spill out in a hectic, dynamic equipoise.
We’ve brought along three photographs of that high school graduation. Photo #1, the two brothers. Photo #2, the two boys flanking their mother. And Photo #3, the three siblings.
This third tableau, too, seems pointed and symbolic. On Adelle’s left stands the graduate, the man of the hour, his sunlit face a smooth clenched fist of determination. To her right stands the dapper businessman, and his face too is sunlit. He’s clowning around, having donned his brother’s tasseled graduation cap. Perhaps some tree-shadows have fallen on the girl’s features. Adelle is not sunlit. She is eclipsed and her gray face can hardly be made out. What can be discerned, even so, is how her upturned energies are trained not on the brother to whom this day belongs—not on the school’s “leading man of letters”—but on the other, whom she idolizes: the deathlessly beautiful one to whom not only this summer day but every summer day belongs, and the one destined to be the first among the three Sultan children to die.
“Of course you do understand that absolutely nothing Wes said or did was to be trusted. The picture where he’s fooling around, wearing my graduation cap? That’s not fooling.” Into Conrad’s mouth goes a baby octopus. A pair of tentacles, trailing from his lips, writhe frenziedly for a couple of seconds, as if the creature even yet were struggling to escape. “He wanted to know what it felt like. To be a”—slurp: no escape—“high school graduate. He envied me desperately. Told some people he’d gone back and finished up those last few credits. Told others he’d done his equivalency elsewhere. Lies. Big fat lies. You do see, don’t you, that Wes was an instinctual”—Conrad swigs his piña colada—“liar?”
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