A Few Corrections
Page 5
This observation amuses her—and yet I can see that she weighs it seriously, too. I can see her filing it away, for examination later. For the moment, she has a story to tell, and Sally loves to tell stories . . .]
Wes, on the other hand, liked my reading. He was forever embarrassing me by boasting about my having been class valedictorian. I compensated for his shortcomings as a student, I suppose. Or that’s the pejorative way of looking at it. I choose to think he was proud of me.
Anyway, I’d spent this particular January day reading—reading Jane Eyre, I’d like to say. Given the afternoon’s later events, Jane Eyre would have been the most appropriate choice; I was about to be paid a visit by the first Mrs. Rochester.
But I honestly don’t recall what the book was. I know it held my attention, all day, while a freezing January rain came down, until finally even I had to feel guilty about neglecting the house-work. So in penance I went down and cleaned the basement. It was dirty work, dust and cobwebs everywhere, and when I finished I needed a shower. And I was just getting undressed when the doorbell rang.
Well, you get the picture. I couldn’t have looked more slatternly. I was dusty, and my hair was full of cobwebs, and I hastily wrapped myself in a ratty old bathrobe. I was a perfect Cinderella, really, and I opened my front door to let in a fairy-tale princess.
[Sally pauses, for emphasis. Or perhaps it’s to marvel once more, in her mind’s eye, at the beauty of her visitor—to pay due homage to someone whose life ended so prematurely and so tragically.]
Actually, I let three creatures in out of the freezing rain. For our princess was accompanied by what I thought of as an older woman—I suppose she could have been as ancient as thirty-five, or even forty—who was leading by the hand a little boy.
Neither the older woman nor the child looked any too healthy. Both had circles under their eyes, and hacking coughs. Absolutely resplendent, on the other hand, was the princess. I’ll never forget the moment when she pulled off her hat and out came this marvelous thing, this marvelous cascading flow: I swear that Klara’s red-gold hair lit up the entire room. And her skin really was as rich as cream, with a faint lovely nutmeg-dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose and on the backs of her hands. Really, the whole business was surreal. Out of the storm had come this fabulous glowing creature, with this exotic accent, who seemed to know who I was: She’d asked me, when I opened the door to her, whether Wesley Sultan lived there. I’d hardly understood her, if you want to know the truth; she called him Vesley Sooltan. But I let her in quite eagerly, for this was clearly the most wonderful and exciting thing that had happened to me in months: one part fairy tale and one part espionage thriller.
Once they were inside, it was the friend who did most of the talking. Klara’s English was quite rudimentary back then—and I don’t suppose she ever came close to complete fluency.
[I interrupt again: “According to Conrad, she wasn’t the smartest soul he ever met.”
Sally replies: “I’m afraid that, according to Conrad, no one’s the smartest soul he ever met. Besides, if your criterion for stupidity is being bamboozled by Wes at one time or another, there aren’t many of us who wouldn’t qualify.”
And she goes on...]
Anyway, the friend did most of the talking. She was all rather clipped and businesslike. She would not accept any of my hospitality. I offered them tea or coffee (I felt they needed something warming—I was worried about that cough of hers). No, they wouldn’t even accept a chair. It was the oddest thing. So there we all stood, the four of us, in my living room. I was dressed in that ratty old robe, and I was just pregnant enough to look fat rather than pregnant, and all the while I was being fixedly scrutinized by this gorgeous creature who looked gotten up for a party, with all sorts of bracelets, and big pearl earrings.
[Sally’s hands rattle with imaginary bracelets, her fingers reach up gingerly toward her own ears to touch imaginary earrings. She is enjoying this process immensely: recounting what was perhaps the most horrifying day of her life.]
But I used the word surreal a moment ago, and truly that’s a word that fails to do justice to this particular occasion. Honestly, truly, there are no words! The older woman, Klara’s friend, I don’t think I ever caught her name, she asked me whether Wesley was living there.
Well of course yes he was; I’d already told them that.
And was I living there too?
Living there? Of course I was living there—just where I belonged. With Wesley, my husband. In our home. We were expecting a baby.
And did I know that on January twenty-seventh, 1955, Wesley and (and I’m afraid I couldn’t quite catch the name, for when Klara Kuzmak is pronounced in a thick Polish accent, it sounds a lot like cataclysmic ) had been married?
I beg your pardon.
And this was the signal, the dramatic cue. The friend nodded at Klara, who with a powerful flourish produced from her purse a wedding certificate that might well have been my own. After all, Wesley’s name was on it. But where my own name was supposed to be, there was another name. A stranger’s name. Klara Kuzmak.
Well, do you know what I felt like then? I felt like a heroine in one of those cheap old-fashioned movies where there’s simply no budget for special effects, and so in order to indicate to the viewer that everything’s topsy-turvy, the cameraman tilts the camera at an angle, or twists the lens in and out of focus. You know that old cliché, The mind reeled? Well, that may have been the only occasion in my life when I can literally say my mind reeled. The walls moved, the floor tilted, the furniture danced around . . . I thought I was used to Wes’s keeping me off balance. He was always saying and doing outrageous things. (For instance, when he’d take me out to dinner, before we got married, he’d sometimes say to the waitress, What do you recommend for a couple of newlyweds? He thought you got better service that way. But of course it mortified me. It meant the waitress naturally assumed we were intimates, and of course we weren’t yet intimates.)
Anyway, anyway I thought I’d grown used to surprises from Wes, but this one—this Klara Kuzmak and the wedding certificate—was something well beyond my furthest imaginings.
Is it any wonder if it took me quite a while before I understood why they’d come? They’d come, I’m afraid, for financial reasons. Klara felt that Wesley owed her money.
The friend explained it all to me. There’d been a “settlement”—a divorce settlement—and Wesley had promised to provide Klara with twenty-five dollars a week, which, back then, actually struck me as quite a substantial sum, I have to say. And I remember feeling, as I came back down to earth, a slight but growing resentment. Okay, even if one accepted the authenticity of this document, even if one were to assume the whole business wasn’t some terrible mistake or misunderstanding, why was Klara coming to me? Hadn’t all of this ended long before I’d come on the scene?
Do you see how confused I was? I suppose I was in a state of shock. I’d naturally assumed that the child belonged to the friend—she was the one holding the little boy’s hand, after all. The two of them even had the same cough, for heaven’s sake. I suppose I was busy throwing up strong internal resistance to any recognition that those payments were meant as child support. You see? I didn’t understand just how deeply Wesley’s involvement ran.
Well, perhaps Klara mispronounced Wesley’s name, but she had a better claim to it than I would ever have—for she had the prior claim. Now can you imagine? I had a baby in my belly, and here I was already looking into the eyes of Vesley Sooltan, Jr.?
Another jet passes overhead, moving from left to right, from east to west. It may well be flying off to America. It slides across the cumulus mountain range and bursts soundlessly into the blue valley, the heavens’ cheerful void. The earlier jet stream, which might have met it at a right angle, has bled away. The web fabricated by multiple aircraft exists only in the mind.
“It’s such a beautiful day,” Sally says, “I think I’ll have a second cigarette.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I’m wandering the streets of Restoration and something is missing—where are the people? It’s as if I’ve stepped onto a movie set when everyone’s on lunch break. Where are the people?—where’s the life? Long blocks of dilapidated houses, boarded-up storefronts, weedy parking lots, and the few straggling souls I do encounter might have been put here expressly to illustrate just how moribund the town’s become. A drunk fishing with a stick through a trash can. An aged orange-haired woman with a cotton ball in her ear, marching out of the post office and shaking her head combatively at a fire hydrant. A couple of ashen men lounging in mostly deserted Toledo Heights Park, where Chester Sultan used to while away warm afternoons, their collapsed faces so weathered it takes you a moment to recognize they’re identical twins. A shirtless, towheaded, obese young man wheeling a pair of shirtless, towheaded, obese babies in a stroller that isn’t a stroller but a supermarket cart. And not a single child on the elementary school playground—only a child-sized elderly woman dressed all in black who sits motionless on a swing, staring up into what is in fact a lovely blue sky on this sunshiny day in August. Where are the people?
“Where is everybody?” I ask at a gas station, and wind up following the cashier’s directions a few miles out of town, on Route 272, where the new Fairplay Mall has gone up, serving the twin populations of Restoration and Stags Harbor. It seems I’ve been here before: the plastic palms, the International Food Court, the vast wooden mill wheel beside the Food Court—a mill that turns but grinds nothing, and is nightly shut off with the flick of a switch . . . I don’t linger long at the mall. It’s Anywhere USA, but I’m looking for Someplace in Particular, for the town of Restoration, Michigan, in the forties and fifties. I’m looking for what Sally calls “a vanished world,” and I get in the car and circle back to Restoration.
I have a few addresses. I check out first the grand manse on Crestview Boulevard, where the Sultans resided until Chester’s death and the crash of the family fortune. And the sullen modest duplex on Scully Street, down by the Michicabanabee River, where Wes and Conrad and Adelle grew up and where old Dora, turned agoraphobe, cached herself in her final decades. I drive to Stags Harbor and find the little house on Majestic Avenue (quite sprightly, actually, in a coat of canary-yellow paint) where one rainy January afternoon, after a day of reading and basement cleaning, Sally opened the door to Klara Kuzmak. And I make my way to the later, grimmer lodgings on Downward Lane, the basement apartment that Sally took after leaving Wes. Each of these places interests me, but none evokes quite as much as I’d hoped. I’m waiting to feel that a key has been turned—a squeaky unused door been shouldered open.
I do better in the afternoon, after a diner lunch, when it occurs to me to explore the Restoration Christian Reformed Church, over on Grand Elm Street. I steal in through a back door and find my way to a punitively uncomfortable pew. The bareness of the whitewashed walls ought to speak of grandeur but seems merely dour. The carved oak pulpit, though, is prepossessing, with its zigzagging vines to suggest how, week after week, Reverend Koekkoek hurled premonitory lightning bolts—foretastes of the sizzling fireballs of Hell—at a cowering congregation. (To Sally’s young but literary imagination, the Reverend’s outsized magnificence was embodied and enhanced by the crisp cacophony of his name—the only name she’d ever encountered that held four k’s.) Even more evocative is a room in the basement, called the Consistory, with its friezelike line of black-and-white photographic portraits. These are the souls who have presided over the church since its construction, in 1909. Names like Vanden Akker, Dykema, Jacobusse, Ingelhousz, Opdyke. All men, of course. And all brothers in their sibling look of sustained rigor—in their resistance to any suggestion of latitude or hesitancy.
Of course I would love to have a look at the old high school on Cherrystone Avenue, but a Farmer Jack’s supermarket stands on its former site. The new Restoration High School, built in the seventies, holds little interest for me. Meanwhile, as I drive around in my rented car, I keep hearing an inner voice remark, You’re missing something important, and I have to remind myself, You’ll be back. Where I have the best luck is, unexpectedly, in the new and ugly town library, built in 1984, well after Wes and Conrad and Sally and even Adelle had left town. In a bright little nook in the back, aswim with blazing dust motes, I chance upon a collection of old Restoration High School yearbooks, including the ’52 edition. Will Wes be in it? Or, as a dropout, will he have been omitted?
I thumb slowly through the alphabetical gallery of the senior class. A businesslike list of honors and extracurricular activities anchors each photo. They’re a solemn lot, who often manage— boys with their flattops and sports coats and ties, girls with their starched fussy hairdos and starched plain white blouses—to look precociously middle-aged. I come near the very end of the S’s, reaching bespectacled, square-faced Thelia Stoneleigh, who looks less like a high school student than a professor emeritus of Latin. If Wes is present, he ought to appear on the following page.
I turn the page and—and my heart sinks. No Wes. Missing once more . . . And then I realize my mistake. A statistical aberration: an influx of Su names. Wes may still be present, pushed back a page by Sonia Sudbury (Future Homemakers Club) and Pierre Suffren (President, Microscope Club) and Wilhelmina Sugman (Vice President, Diary Club) and a host of Sullivans (Gerald, Nina, Stephen), who don’t go in for clubs at all.
I turn the page and—and there’s our Wes. A late arrival at the party, perhaps, but as buoyant, confident, and winning as he can be. Not a single hair, in the edifice of his pompadour, out of place. The gaze forthright and soulful. Wesley Cross Sultan. Social Committee. Future Businessmen of America Club. Although the picture is of course in black-and-white, you’d know those eyes of his must be a freezing and fiery blue and you can understand how a bright and pretty but inexperienced nineteen-year-old girl, sitting on a bench with him in Toledo Heights Park, might trust him utterly as he pledged, “Everything between us is going to be all right, forever and ever.”
A white-haired woman approaches the information desk and asks, in that querulous, slightly aggrieved tone common to the partially deaf, “Where do you keep the large-print books?” She might well be Sonia Sudbury. Or Wilhelmina Sugman, ex–vice president of the Diary Club. Or Nina Sullivan. Meanwhile, outside the library, the town of Restoration goes about its business—its slow business of dying. On a front lawn, someone hammers in the stakes of a FOR SALE sign; in a back parlor, someone else packs up a foot-locker. But here in the library, Wes gazes up at me, invincibly youthful, and time itself is arrested. How long do I contemplate Wes’s photo? Five minutes? Ten? As he and I regard each other, the bravado leaches from his expression, leaving him less winning but even more appealing. A note of entreaty filters through his eyes—a look that says less I’m lovable than Love me.
I’d like to take this yearbook home with me for a while. Perhaps Sally has a copy I might borrow? Or Conrad? And then it occurs to me that, charming as the photograph is, this yearbook isn’t a volume that anyone associated with Wes would be likely to treasure: the graduation keepsake of someone who failed to graduate.
I spend the rest of the afternoon inside the yearbook’s pages. It’s the closest I’m ever going to come to entering the classrooms and corridors of the old Restoration High on Cherrystone Avenue. For here, truly, is “another world.” The Future Nurses Club. The Radio Club (“aims to interest boys and girls about radio”). The Square Dance Club (“helps promote social adjustment among the students”). The Ushers Club (“composed of uniformed girls who are on call for working the checkroom at school parties”). And my own favorite, the Lost and Found Club (“formed to aid the school and students in locating their lost articles”). Page after page, all stringently devoid of levity, prankishness, humor. Most of it’s intended to be as funny as your average utility company’s shareholders’ report. No, these were young people launched on a
grand and grave mission. The class of ’52, Restoration High School, Restoration, Michigan, clearly was intent on declaring, to a nation they never seemed to doubt was listening to them, Having now reached the brink of adulthood, we stand prepared, as responsible and square-thinking young men and women, to take our places in American society.
Even the advertisements are wonderful, everything from the watch repairman, whose little meditation on punctuality soon embraces larger themes (“Young people, you need to know the time and the times, especially now when the communist threat is at our Gates”), to the men’s store (“the smart look for the young man with smarts”), to the daring plug for ladies’ swimwear (“A classy lassie has a streamlined chassis”).
A soft bell pings and an almost comically mellow woman’s voice announces that the library will close in ten minutes. It’s only then that I discover, tucked away in the back of the yearbook, behind the advertisements, a sort of parting gift. There are four pages of “casual shots,” complete with what I suppose are “arch” captions. On the penultimate page, I find it. I’m drawn to a caption that reads “The Master of the Mats,—or, The Fall Guy.”
It’s a skinny little kid in an old-fashioned, loose, singlet-style wrestling tunic, knees bent and hands outstretched warily before him. In 1952, though only a sophomore, he was already the main-spring of the wrestling team. And though he can’t weigh more than 130 pounds, the penetrating scowl he levels at his opponent— at the camera, at the world at large—does not seem ludicrous. No, Conrad’s fierceness survives the translation into a little black-and-white snapshot. He looks formidable.
Another penetrating scowl: “So: back in Miami, are we? Business seems to be booming for us in the Sunshine State.”
“Travel comes in spurts. I’ll make three trips in a week, then nothing for months on end.”