A Few Corrections

by Brad Leithauser

  “And what were his interests?”

  Coming from me, the question admittedly might seem a little odd; in any event, Adelle again fumbles for words. “Well, he . . . Wes was somebody who . . . There were all sorts of things—”

  I try to help her out: “Those last couple years, after his retirement, how did he prefer to spend most of his time?”

  “Well. The thing with Wes was simple, really: Wes was a people-person. He really loved people. He liked to talk, to socialize, although not on the telephone—I don’t think I ever had more than a twenty-minute phone conversation with him in my life—but in person, where he could look you in the eye, and maybe lay a hand on your shoulder.”

  “Actually, twenty minutes doesn’t seem all that—”

  “There was this warmth about Wes. Lots of people who deal with people, people like politicians and newscasters and ministers, they spend years trying to develop that kind of warmth, but Wes had it right from the go. Everybody felt it, and many people envied it. I don’t know if I’ve ever known any man who had to struggle more often with envy on a daily basis. And yet it didn’t get him down. Wes stayed Wes. Envy’s what kept him back at Great Bay Shipping. I’m not telling tales—everybody knew that. The other salesmen were jealous of his special gift, his talent for people. Mr. Haight, his boss, he was especially jealous, and a lesser man than Wes would have packed up and gone elsewhere. But Wes was loyal. He liked to start what he finished. Great Bay gave him his first real job, when he was only seventeen, and he stayed loyal to them.”

  And again Adelle’s lips clamp shut; she offers another big-jawed nod of conviction.

  “Do you have any photographs of her?”

  “Of who?”

  “Of Tiffany.”

  “Photographs of Tiffany?” It seems I might just as well have asked Adelle if she kept a pet rattlesnake. “No, not really. Nothing of that sort. No.”

  “But they were in love, Wes and Tiffany? Despite their lack of interests? I understand they were deeply in love.”

  “Oh Wes was in love. Wes was always in love with her. Till the day he died. It’s what I was saying: Wes was loyal. You mustn’t listen to anybody tell you otherwise. I tell you honestly: Wes was the most misunderstood man I’ve ever known.

  “Let me tell you something. Tiffany? She broke his heart. I can still see him like he’s alive right here today. He was sitting exactly where you’re sitting. ‘She has broken my heart,’ Wes announced, and you could see the man struggling ever so hard to keep back the tears. ‘That woman has broken my heart in two,’ he said, and you could see how those tears were struggling to get out.”

  Adelle herself puts up no such resistance: With startling rapidity, the lower rims of her lids redden and spill over—tears that somehow reproach me . . . Why am I here? Am I meddling among powerful loyalties and heartaches where, for all sorts of reasons, I have no business? Why am I conducting this (or so I term it in my own mind) interview?

  Adelle wipes away the tears with an appealing matter-offactness, and continues: “And that’s how his life ended—in a heartbroke state. That’s what that woman did to that man.”

  “You’re saying she never loved him?”

  “I honestly don’t think she did. F’you want my opinion. And that’s not a criticism. I’m not criticizing Tiffany if I say I don’t think she’s really capable of loving a man. Any more than she can love her children.”

  “But I’ve heard them described as very much in love, at least at first. You know, I was in Miami not long ago, on business, and I had dinner with Conrad, and the subject of Wes and Tiffany came up—”

  “Conrad?” On either side of her colossal nose, Adelle’s eyes narrow into slits. “Now listen: You should never listen to Conrad on the subject of Wes. Conrad is my brother, and I love him dearly, and I’m as sorry as sorry can be that ever since he’s been ill he doesn’t want to accept the family pity we’re all ready to extend him, and prefers feeling self-pity rather than having us doing it. But you must understand one thing: Conrad has never forgiven Wes Wes’s way with people. And Conrad’s always, always been so competitive, if he couldn’t beat Wes at something he simply wouldn’t try it even one bit. And that’s why he’s often the rudest person who ever lived. If you can’t be most charming, well then you have to be most rudest.” Yes—and isn’t Adelle in fact on to something? “That’s Conrad.”

  “When I’ve gone out to eat with him, he terrorizes every waiter and waitress.”

  “Sometimes he terrorizes me. I suppose he never has forgiven me for not siding with him when he and Wes had the fight about the painting. You heard about that?”

  “The painting? Conrad and Wes once fought about a painting?” But what could be more improbable?

  “Uh-huh. A painting belonging to Mama. When she passed away, and nobody wanted it, I took it home. But then later Conrad decided he wanted it, so I said all right. But then after Wes heard Conrad took it, he decided he wanted it, so I told Conrad he had to let Wes have it for a while. Only, Conrad thought I’d given it to him. Not lent it to him. So he thought I was siding with Wes all over again. When really I was just being fair.”

  “I never envisioned the two of them fighting over a painting. What was it of? Was it valuable?”

  “I don’t think maybe too valuable. Maybe it wasn’t a very great painting? It’s called Michigan Avenue in the Rain. That’s in Chicago. Someone who visited there brought it home to Mama as a souvenir. Wes and Conrad, they were always finding something new to fight over. I don’t think they talked to each other for a year over that one.”

  “And all because of an ugly painting?”

  “I didn’t say ugly. I just said not very great.”

  “Who gave your mother the painting?”

  “I . . . I don’t recall.”

  “But you were talking about Wes and Tiffany. Conrad described the two of them as very lovey-dovey. He called them ‘the necking newlyweds.’”

  “Oh it’s true Tiffany was all over Wes, and if your idea of love is somebody munching away like a caterpillar on somebody else’s earlobe I suppose you could say she loved him. But Tiffany wasn’t prepared to sacrifice anything. It was his age as much as anything. Rock concerts is I suppose what she expected him to be taking her to. Handsome as Wes was, and he remained so right up till the very day he died, eventually it dawned on Tiffany she’d married a man nearing sixty. And she. Was. Not. Happy. About. That. A sixty-year-old man with health problems to boot. Because Wes knew he was sick, and you couldn’t have lived with him day in day out and not known it yourself, even if he never complained much. He wasn’t that sort.”

  “So how did the heartbreak come about? When did he come to feel she’d broken his heart?”

  “When she threw him out, course that’s what brought it home, but you can be sure he’d been ailing at heart for a long time before that.”

  “Threw him out?”

  Adelle’s face studies my face; my face studies her face. Unexpectedly, we have crossed a threshold together.

  She speaks warily, but I know a revelation is at hand. “Well, I assumed you knew. They weren’t living together. When he passed away.”

  “No, I didn’t. Know. Where was he living?”

  “Two months before, she threw him out. And I’m not making any accusations, I’m simply stating a medical fact when I say that the shock of it, the blow of having to live alone, especially when you’re a warm people-person like Wes, with health problems to boot, it contributed to his death. I do think we have to face the truth square on and admit that that woman contributed greatly to his death. Why did he have a heart attack, except he was first heartbroke? Not that Tiffany wasn’t fully in her legal rights to do so, legally speaking. Bernie disagrees with me, but I do think we have to face the truth square on and admit she brought it about just as surely as dumping arsenic in his coffee. It’s exactly the same thing. Just the details different.”

  “I didn’t know he’d moved out. Where was he
living?”

  “See, I’m not accusing her of being malicious. I have no bone to pick with Tiffany. I accept her for what she is. Tiffany is Tiffany, and you don’t start there with her, you miss the whole point completely. But self-sacrificing isn’t the first word you’d use to describe her.”

  “Where was he living?” I ask a third time.

  “Well at the Commodore Hotel, you know, downtown Stags Harbor, but that was only a way station. Wes was finding his bearings. He didn’t have to stay in a place like that, with all those ratty old winos and fallen women and druggies and God knows what all.” And when was the last time I’d heard the phrase “fallen women” used without irony? And yet what could be more ironic (which is perhaps to say, more plausible) than the discovery that the very woman now employing the phrase might herself be the offspring of an adulterous union? And what could be more ironic than Wes’s winding up at the end of his life in the very hotel once owned, in its elegant heyday, by Mel Bellamy? “He could have stayed right here. In our guest room. It has its own separate john and everything. We both, Bernie and I, we both practically begged him . . .

  “But you know what? It was almost as if Wes wanted a scummy place like the Commodore. Because, you see, that’s what that woman had reduced him to. She’d heartbroke him. Not that he didn’t retain his pride, it wasn’t like he went around advertising about living at the Commodore. Quite to the contrary. Most people didn’t know. And of course he continued to get his mail at Tiffany’s.

  “I understood Wes, you see. He was preparing to make another leap. It was like he needed to focus in on his pain. That’s why he moved there. And didn’t come here. And why we didn’t see more of him when she threw him out. Why nobody saw much of him. He needed to focus in on his pain. He was preparing for another leap, you see. And if he’d lived, that’s exactly what he would have done. Would have taken off. And surprised a lot of people, I can tell you.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I can’t believe my good fortune,” Sally says.

  “To be here? In Domat? It really is an amazing spot.”

  “I mean to see you again. Here. I never thought you’d be jetting over the Atlantic like this. I worry you must be spending a fortune.”

  “I told you before. I’ve banked enough frequent-flyer miles to keep me airborne for months yet. At Gribben I wouldn’t think twice about flying to L.A. for a one-hour meeting. First-class. With triple the mileage credits.”

  “And I can remember a time when I thought a trip to Detroit was quite an undertaking. I’ll have you know, I felt quite daring and worldly. I’m referring to the morning I set out from Stags Harbor for the Detroit Institute of Art—the day I happened to meet Gordon. And if I hadn’t set out that morning, if I hadn’t met Gordon, what’s the chance I’d be walking today through an abbey in Burgundy? Really, life is too peculiar for words. If you wrote it down as a simple factual account, wouldn’t it lack all plausibility?”

  “You’re saying it would call for quite a skilled interpreter?”

  “I suppose that’s the question, isn’t it? The one each of us ultimately faces? Whether we’re skilled enough interpreters to make even minimal sense of our lives.”

  “You’re sounding like quite the philosopher.”

  “Am I? And is that a worrisome thing? Actually, I think I’d rather be known as a contemplative. You know something? I can remember the first time I ever encountered that word—I mean as a noun.”

  “You can really? You’re amazing.”

  “I was reading a novel,” Sally tells me. “I don’t remember which one, but I remember I was a child reading in my bedroom when I came on this amazing notion. A contemplative. And it seemed such a weird, wonderful, thoroughly unnecessary word . . . After all, isn’t contemplation something everybody does? I remember snow falling, and looking out my window at the snow, and reciting the word over and over like a talisman.”

  “And this somehow explains what you’re doing here in France?”

  “I suppose it partially does. I feel as though—well, as though my whole life has gone by and I somehow never had an opportunity to think. What was I thinking when I wasn’t thinking? I don’t know. As I say, it’s all a bit odd and unsettling.”

  “But you’re enjoying yourself?”

  “You know I am.”

  “From the look of you, life here agrees with you.”

  Sally has lost weight—a fair amount, maybe ten or fifteen pounds. For years now, she’s been a self-described “round-faced little Dutch girl,” and yet here in France, week by week, the bone structure in her face has been reemerging. She says, “I can’t believe I’ve stayed this long. I’m working on two months. Just reading, and food shopping, and becoming a contemplative—or at least going over my past.”

  “And it’s a good feeling? Not too many regrets?”

  “Let’s say I’m amazed, anyway, when I look back at things, at how often good fortune stepped in to rescue me from my own ignorance.”

  We’re strolling through the grounds of the abbey glimpsed at a distance on my last visit, three weeks ago. It’s an old Cistercian monastery, Coppée, built in 1196. Most of it lies in picturesque ruins. The little guidebook, purchased for ten francs from a surreal figure, a—truly—giant hunchback, is written only in French, a language I haven’t studied since high school. But I can decipher enough to see that it records the usual chronicle of construction and destruction: new buildings erected in 1302, and 1492, and 1601, and fires bringing them down in 1386 and again in 1547. There’s a beautiful pond, on which a pair of swans are floating with otherworldly grace. The refectory, where long-vanished monks once dined twice a day, has lost its roof. Sprawling, angling swatches of sun spill across a floor that must once have been, every day of the year, a place of flickering candlelit shadows.

  We climb stone stairs that lead us to the roof of what seems to have been a granary, now overgrown with grass and flowers. We walk across, in a field of sunlight. French bees are busily pawing at French flowers and I’m acutely, elatedly aware of how foreign is the scenery, how far I am from home.

  The chapel itself has been spared from fire, from lightning, from the whole fearsome armory of the Lord’s instruments of destruction. We step inside—the only visitors on this weekday morning—and take a seat in one of the narrow wooden pews. We inhale a smell as old as any odor on God’s green earth, indeed older than the green earth, older by far than chlorophyll: the smell of chill damp gray stone.

  Sally and I sit side by side, looking not at each other but at the altar, where our drooping Savior, carved in dark wood, hangs— His three hours on the cross ramifying out across the soul’s dark eternity. Sally says, “I mentioned earlier that I’ve been replaying various scenes of my life. And one of the things I’ve come to realize is that there really were two gods in my childhood household.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There was God Himself, naturally, to Whom we paid our respects before we broke bread in the evenings, or even had a glass of milk in the mornings. And to Whom we dedicated our Sundays, of course. It was to please Him that Grandma Admiraal was never glimpsed seated in anything but a straight wooden chair before evening; anything resembling an easy chair was reserved for after supper.

  “And then there was the other god, the God of Money or Mammon, or whatever you want to call it. I know that sounds a little harsh, and the last thing I want to do is to be harsh toward either Mama or Daddy, but the fact is that Daddy’s little store, though he slaved away day after day inside it, never really prospered. All the other Dutch immigrant families in Michigan seemed to flourish so naturally, and so many of the relatives had these big handsome homes and motorboats and suites of fancy Grand Rapids furniture, and I don’t think either Daddy or Mama could every fully shake the suspicion that their relative poverty was some sort of divine judgment. Oh we weren’t poor—only relatively less well-off than the others. But if you habitually see everything as a sign from Above, what do you make of the fact
that your bankbook’s empty? Maybe the two of them weren’t among the Elect? They’d both gone through the Depression, and in the back of their minds was always the fear of losing everything—of being cast into outer darkness.

  “Why did they agree to my marrying Wes, despite all the strikes against him? Why did they allow me to marry someone who was niet een van ons, who was not one of us at the CRC? Surely one of the powerful reasons was that tomato-red Bel Air convertible of his. This all sounds so crass and cynical, and that’s not at all how I mean to sound. I’m talking about two kindhearted, God-fearing people who brought to every large decision in their lives the question, Is it right? These were lives utterly permeated by a sense of moral imperatives. But who can blame them if Wes seemed blessed in their eyes? Does this make any sense to you?”

  “A lot of sense. I’ve been thinking along the same lines.”

  “Well now we come to the really odd and funny part, the little twist in the story . . . Obviously those two gods in our household were very harsh gods—or at least exacting gods. There was the Lord Himself, who watched over your every move with an unblinking and reproachful eye, and who might very well have selected you personally for eternal damnation. Calvin was our patron saint, after all. And then there was this other god, the God of Money or the Marketplace, who was always conspiring to take your little grocery store away from you, to see that you wound up begging for bread in the street . . .”

  And while she rattles on, I begin better to understand her underlying seriousness of a moment ago, when she gaily, facetiously described herself as a contemplative. Sally has, these past few weeks, entered one of the oddest eras of her life. She who has never had an extended overseas sojourn has left her home and her friends and come to reside in an old French village—has come, as much as anything, to ponder her existence. She has shipped over dozens of books that bear in some way on her upbringing: books on Calvinism, and the Dutch emigration to America, and Michigan, and social histories of America during World War II, America in the fifties. She is taking stock. Her month here has already stretched into two, and as we sit in the chapel her words flow with the fluidity of practiced reflection: