A Few Corrections

by Brad Leithauser

  But is he on to me? Beginning to suspect that this time, as was true last time, I flew down here expressly to see him?

  “And you’ve been to France, so my spies tell me.”

  “That was purely a vacation.”

  “And how’s the rich widow? I thought she was heading over there for only a month.”

  “Seems fine, actually. She’s extended her stay. I should have guessed she would from the number of books she shipped over there. Incidentally, it’s a lovely place she’s taken. You should reconsider your ban on European travel. You’d like Domat. Lovely hills. Wonderful food. Good cheap wine.”

  “And no sun, to judge from the look of you. You’re even paler than last time I saw you.”

  “It’s the light in here.”

  Again I’ve left up to Conrad the choice of restaurant, again under the pretense that it’s a dinner I’ll be charging to my firm. In truth, nearly two months have elapsed since I cleaned out my desk at Gribben Brothers. For the first time since my earliest childhood, I’m neither a student nor a wage-earner. But this isn’t something I’m about to let Conrad know. I don’t want to deflect him; don’t want to have to explain myself.

  The name of the restaurant is Pastures. Though it specializes in pasta, its atmosphere is far removed from what I think of as Italian dining. Where are the candles? The browns and reds? The watery operatic voices swimming over the loudspeakers? The music is the sort of jazz seemingly sprung direct from a computer’s innards, unfiltered through any human lungs or fingers. The light’s a cool, anemic blue, and the wood is blond, as are most of the servers, both men and women.

  I’ve ordered prosciutto-and-figs for an appetizer, and a glass of Pinot Grigio. Conrad has ordered fried three-cheese ravioli, and a Brandy Alexander, and a second Brandy Alexander. He has already consumed four warm sesame breadsticks, with butter. This has all the makings of quite a night.

  “Moved away permanently, has she? The rich widow?”

  “One more month definitely, a few more months possibly. She’s finally getting some time to herself. Every woman friend of hers from Grosse Pointe has gone out to visit.”

  “How gruesome: rich widows descending on a rich widow.”

  “I think it’s great. She’s talking about heading farther south. To the Mediterranean. She wants to take some French classes.”

  “Oh Lord save us.”

  “And she says she isn’t coming back to the States until she’s read all of Proust.”

  “All of what?”

  “A modern French writer.” It reassures me somewhat (never having read, if the truth be told, a word of Proust myself) to play the literary guide. “He wrote a four-thousand-page novel.”

  For somebody who probably hasn’t cracked a work of fiction in thirty years, Conrad manages a sharp, if slightly confused, response: “And what will she do when she takes up Kim? Move to Baghdad? And has she thought about Around the World in Eighty Days? That’s some life she’s got.”

  “I asked her about Klara Kuzmak.”

  “Tactful of you.”

  “She didn’t seem to mind.”

  “And?”

  “And I got a different sense of Klara than I got from you last time.”

  Instantly Conrad’s voice turns a little testy: “How so?”

  “What Sally kept stressing was Klara’s beauty. At least on that day when Klara first came knocking on her door.”

  Conrad hangs back a moment. Clearly he doesn’t like the thought of Sally’s contradicting him. But how is he going to challenge her?

  Of course when he plunges in, he plunges in boisterously: “Oh now that’s a scene I’d give my eyeteeth to have witnessed! The Day the Scales Fell from Sally Admiraal’s Eyes. She was quite remarkably slow to catch on to our Wesley.”

  “She doesn’t deny it. She calls herself Sally the Much Misled.”

  “But the odd thing is—have you noticed?—this particular misled woman always winds up better off than before . . . Richer, richer, richer. And socially grander. She trips upwards—that’s our dear clumsy Sally. Give her enough time, she’ll slip and stumble her way into being crowned Queen of England. Or even of France. Do the French still have queens?”

  “I think they have film goddesses.”

  “Maybe Sally has a future in Hollywood . . .”

  It’s something of an obsession for Conrad—this railing about the “rich widow” and her endless good fortune. I work to deflect him: “But Klara was a beauty, yes?”

  “Oh I suppose she was.” Conrad scowls at me. “And perhaps that explains, to a degree, Wesley’s otherwise inexplicable attraction to her.”

  “Inexplicable? What do you mean?”

  “Look, don’t be a dumb cluck. Obviously. Obviously inexplicable.”

  I’m growing somewhat used to Conrad, but he can still make me flinch, especially when he meets with what strikes him as a stupid question—and half the questions I ask seem to fall into this category. To say he’s in a cantankerous mood tonight would be charitable. Still, he’ll probably soften as the evening wears on. Each bite on a breadstick, each slurp on a Brandy Alexander, mellows him a little.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he goes on. “Don’t you see anything? Klara’s English was negligible, so what possible use could she be to Wesley? She couldn’t understand his rap, and what was any woman in Wes’s eyes but a chance to weave his little spell of words around her? She was a sweet piece, okay, and maybe even some sort of ‘beautiful creature,’ as Sally might say, but in the end she wasn’t challenge enough for our handsome blue-eyed salesman.”

  I seek to soften his tone: “Actually, you were completely right about that. Sally really did refer to her as a ‘fabulous glowing creature.’”

  “Those Sallyisms,” Conrad says, with a stiff, disapproving shake of the head that doesn’t fully conceal how much they amuse him, even appeal to him. “Who else do you know, who else could possibly have said, ‘The automotive term to total entered my vocabulary under most unfortunate circumstances.’ Or how about, ‘That McNally boy would perhaps be better employed employed’? In terms of verbal dexterity, it’s quite a long way from there to Klara Kuzmak, I can tell you.”

  “Still, Klara can’t have been all that dumb. She caught on to him in the end.”

  “Cluck, you’re being a dumb cluck, don’t you see that? The day she materialized so dramatically on Sally’s doorstep, Miss Klara Sultan, née Kuzmak, was every bit as confused as Sally herself. In fairness to Klara, she probably didn’t give a good goddamn about the truth one way or the other. Give her the benefit of the doubt and assume by then it wasn’t Wes but Wes’s money she hankered after. Hell, she’da stayed nice and quiet if he’d kept up the payments. She’d stayed quiet all along. Wes had her totally snowballed about his dying father and the inheritance and all the rest.”

  “The—I’m sorry. The what?”

  “You don’t know . . .” And it seems every cell in Conrad’s broad, bloated face—millions upon millions of cells—radiates a bathing joy. My ignorance elates him. “Well well. So so so. Haven’t yet broken through the big conspiracy of silence, have we, kid? I guess Sally wasn’t quite so forthcoming as she might have been and you could have saved yourself a trip to France. Miami’s got to be a helluva lot cheaper and as informants go I don’t think I’ve got quite so many scruples as our Sally does.”

  Conrad signals to a waitress (not our waitress, but this is typical: Conrad can never keep straight who has been serving him) and calls, “More breadsticks! More breadsticks!” It seems his rudeness customarily goes unchallenged—and I think I know how the waiters and waitresses feel. For there’s something awesome and over-mastering about Conrad’s bulk, his forward-thrust shoulders, his booming voice, his thinning silver hair gathered into its tight ponytail. Then he turns back to me and says, “Apparently you don’t know yet that Wes had to keep his marriage to Klara under wraps. Because? Because our father would have opposed his marrying a Catholic.”


  A crowd of objections immediately raise a clamor in my head—until I identify the one objection that renders all the others irrelevant: “But Chester was dead by then. And had been for many years.”

  “Precisely. So wouldn’t you have thought Wes might prefer to say it was Mother who disapproved of marrying Catholics? But then why, assuming you’re Wesley Sultan, would you ever stick to the possible when the impossible is so much more glamorous, and colorful, and fun?”

  Conrad bites the head off another breadstick. The look he gives me is bellicose. He appears to be awaiting some challenge or objection. But I say nothing. And Conrad, seemingly satisfied with my silence, goes on:

  “Okay, he confided in Klara that his father was very sick. In fact, poor old Dad wasn’t expected to live more than a year or two. And also happened to be quite rich. So you see where this is going? If Wes didn’t do something rash or stupid, well, he stood to come into a tidy packet. Hence, the two of them kept their marriage a secret.”

  This time I do speak up. I remember Sally’s saying that Conrad occasionally served as Wes’s “deputy,” and I can’t resist asking, “And you? How long were you in on the little secret?”

  For a couple of moments Conrad steadily ponders my face, which I’m afraid falls short of his hopes or expectations. He gives me a dismissive shrug and says, “Jesus, dig, dig, dig, that’s all you do, and the dirtier the dirt, the better you like it, isn’t that right? Next thing, you’ll be asking me the really sordid stuff—like what Wes was up to with the Zidlers in Kalamazoo.”

  “The Zidlers? Who were they?”

  “See, didn’t I tell you? I said it’s the next thing you’d be asking me, and now it’s the next thing you’re asking me.”

  “So who were the Zidlers?”

  “Another time, buddy boy. Another time.”

  And again he eyes me—the old wrestler sizing up his opponent. Our arena may be an elegant table rather than a sweaty mat on the floor, but the battle is no less genuine for that. Lunges, feints, takedowns and escapes.

  And yet this remark of Conrad’s simultaneously may extend an invitation. Isn’t he saying, albeit as ungraciously as possible, Come visit me again . . . ?

  I agree to his implied conditions. I say to him, “Okay, okay. We’ll save it for next time.” Then I impose a new demand: “But at least tell me when you were in on the secret. About the secret marriage.”

  And Conrad, after a heavy pause, decides to meet me halfway: “It was after the baby was born. When Wes realized he’d taken on more than he could handle. Occasionally the point would be driven home for him: He knew how to dive, but he didn’t know how to swim.”

  “That’s very neatly expressed.”

  “For an old dumb jock—that what you mean?”

  “For an anybody. That’s what I mean.”

  “High praise from a Princeton boy.”

  “Praise from a Princeton boy to a Vanderbilt boy—a pair of Yankee boys at southern schools.”

  And again I’ve pleased him. I’ve found the right mixture of solidarity and contentiousness. I stir him up for all sorts of reasons, I suppose—and not least because of my career at Gribben Brothers. Conrad spent his working life in solo practice. He had plenty of years, based in an office on the outskirts of a Miami mall, to build up resentment toward the “hotshots,” the “megabuck boys,” the “fat cats.” Although he has retired, he remains vehemently hostile toward “Manhattan finance”—that exclusive zone where multinational, multimillion-dollar deals are transacted on a scale far beyond anything ever overseen by Conrad Sultan, CPA.

  He orders up another round of drinks.

  I ask, “But why did he marry her in the first place?”

  “Because he was an idiot? Because he was infatuated? Because the girl was pregnant?”

  “Maybe he was in love.”

  “Maybe I’m a monarch butterfly.”

  “According to Sally, it was a question of honor.”

  “Honor? Honor?” Such is his shocked tone, Conrad might well be crying out, Horror, horror. No doubt about it, mine is the flat-out dumbest explanation he’s heard in quite a while. “No. Hell no no no. It was an opportunity. It was a chance to have a secret family. Don’t you see anything? To be husband and father in your everyday, open, acknowledged family—well, that would be nothing special, right? Wes had spent his whole life around such families. But a secret family— that was different, that was right up Wes’s alley.”

  “But where did he get it? I mean, where do you think it came from, this appetite for . . .” And while I’m searching for a tactful term, Conrad again comes crashing down, like a wrestler throwing a body to the mat.

  “His appetite for dishonesty? For crookedness? You asking me why Wes was a pathological liar? How in hell should I know? Christ, I’m only his brother. Maybe it was genetic, and if so it’s got to make you a little uneasy, hm? After all, I’ve taken part in my share of deceptions, and of course Mother was, in her way, more devious than either of us.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The light in this restaurant is, as I’ve said, an icy inhuman blue, but on the table stands a little garnet-red glass lamp. Into the left corner of each of Conrad’s eyes it deposits a hard jewel-like glint. His gaze is burning. Febrile? Demented? Satanic? What extraordinary utterance will next emerge from his lips?

  “Okay,” he says. “All right, kiddo. I suppose it’s time you were told what you should have guessed on your own, if you were only half as psychologically acute as maybe I was at your age. Look around the family tree. Ask yourself the old accountant’s question: Does it compute?”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “Ponder poor Adelle.”

  “Adelle?”

  “My sister, Adelle? My kid sister? Blood of the Sultan blood, flesh of the Sultan flesh? Adelle Marie Sultan. Well, she’s not my sister. She’s my half-sister. Her father was Mel Bellamy. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “Bellamy? Wait a minute . . . I don’t think so.”

  “And why should it? It’s all before your time. But a name to reckon with on Crestview Boulevard, I can assure you. When I was a little kid, the Bellamys were my parents’ very best friends. Constant companions. Mr. Bellamy owned the Commodore Hotel, in Stags Harbor, back when it was a place of some elegance, before it became a haven for pimps and druggies. Mrs. Bellamy was a sweet woman with a strong sense of justice—I remember she once went to Mackinac Island and brought me back a bag of taffy and nothing back for Wes, because so many of the neighborhood women babied and spoiled him. And I still remember her doing that; you don’t forget thoughtful little kindnesses like that. But Mrs. B. had lupus, the sun was deadly for her. She stayed out of it—she was as pale as you—but she died before her time just the same. Are you with me so far?”

  “I think so.”

  “All right. So then add this to the picture. In my entire life, I saw my mother cry only once. Wanna guess when? Are you guessing June of 1942, at her husband’s funeral? If so, your guess is wrong. It was much later. No, the only time Mother cried, she was sitting in our living room, our embarrassingly little living room on Scully Street, with a neighbor who happened to mention that that eligible bachelor and widower and wealthy man-about-town Mel Bellamy was going to remarry. At first Mother flared up in anger— she actually called her guest a liar—and then? Then she burst into tears.”

  “But that hardly means there was anything going on. You said yourself, they’d been good friends.”

  “And when her guest went home, she retreated into her room and cried some more.”

  “Okay sure, maybe there was some attraction and disappointment, but it’s hardly the case that that necessarily means Adelle—”

  “Ah, but you never saw Bella.”

  “Mm?” I say.

  “Bella Bellamy. Sorry about the name. Forgive me, and forgive my parents’ friends. Mea mucho culpa. Your crowd, the Princeton/ Wall Street, making-megabucks crowd, they don’t have names lik
e that, do they? I suppose most women you meet are named Priscilla Pettingfarm.”

  “A fair number. But not most.”

  “But stop and think—hey, you can understand the logic. Mel Bellamy says to himself, I’ve got an atrocious name, but if I give my kid a worse one, hell, no one’ll notice mine. He was a pushy son of a bitch. Anyway, Bella was their daughter—the only Bellamy child. And yet a dead ringer for—for who? For Adelle Sultan. As like as twins, the two of them. Even named like twins, Bella and Adelle—makes you almost feel sorry for that poor pinochle-playing knucklehead Chester Sultan, doesn’t it? Bella and Adelle— twins right down to the same exact unmistakable honker of a nose. The Bellamy beak. Unmistakable.”

  “But it’s—well, it’s hard to picture, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? Doesn’t it above all and everything make perfect sense? Mother was a proud woman, proud to be a Sultan, God help her, and when Mel decided to remarry? The poor girl felt dumped. It was humiliating—she’d cried in front of her son and an old snoop of a neighbor. Surely she was dreaming every day that old Mel would swoop down and rescue her—restore her to Crestview Boulevard and the Heights, where she belonged. And what better explanation to explain the rest of her life? How else do you account for that cold, determined, shuttered-up widowhood of hers? Hell, she’d borne the ugly-nosed child of a man who, later on, when they both were single and free, still wouldn’t make an honest woman of her . . .”

  “I can think of all sorts of reasons why she might never have remarried.”

  “Can you? And I can think of all sorts of reasons why she bedded Mel Bellamy. Let me tell you another: The man she was married to had all the raw animal drive of . . . of . . .”

  Conrad’s eyes fly round the room, seeking out some apt object of comparison, before at last alighting, with seeming inevitability, upon his own dinner plate. The entrées have arrived. “Of a bowl of cold pasta.”

  Actually, the meal before him is steaming mightily. Conrad has ordered a Toscana wrap (thin slices of veal wound round spicy sausage and melted cheese, served on a bed of angel-hair pasta), with a side order of ziti Alfredo.