“And you know what the odd thing is? In many ways the oddest thing in my life? It’s the way in which, as I myself moved toward old age, both gods metamorphosed into kind old warmhearted gentlemen: Santa Claus figures. (Which is ironic, since the CRC always disapproved of Santa.) The God of Money? From the moment I met Gordon, I never had another realistic money worry in my life, though sometimes I maybe thought I did.
“And the other god? The one to whom this chapel was erected all those hundreds of years ago?” The light in here, indeed, is kind and warmhearted, one of its shafts falling through a high little window on our left, to curl up like a kitten at our feet. “Well let me tell you a little anecdote. Last spring, when I was back in Restoration visiting some friends, I found my way over to the Christian Reformed Church, where so many loads of fire and brimstone were dumped on my cowering head when I was a little girl. Though I left those fierce Calvinists definitively back when it became clear I was irredeemable in their eyes—back when I decided to divorce Wes—that particular stone edifice on Grand Elm Street will forever be the most resonant place in the world for me. Of course I’d been back now and then for funerals, including services for both of my parents, but it had been thirty years, more than thirty, since I’d last sat through a Sunday service there. And you know what? It was one of the great shocks of my life. The whole business was changed utterly. The minister was this folksy kid with a mop-top haircut—he looked like a fifth Beatle—and he had the oddest manner. He had all these facial expressions, these I suppose you could call them moues. One minute he’s looking quizzical, and the next minute studious, and the next minute outraged, and the next minute analytical—and gradually it dawns on me that in finding a preacherly style he hadn’t apprenticed himself to the men he’d seen in the pulpit when he was growing up. No, you know what he was exactly like? Like one of those talk-show hosts, a sort of young Phil Donahue or heaven help us Jerry Springer. It was people like that he’d emulated. Everything he did was for the benefit of the TV cameras, and for the TV audience— only, only there were no cameras and no television audience. Church services are supposed to be aimed at an invisible presence, I know, but this was something else again, this was something novel and weird . . .
“And you know what happened next? As God is my witness (I’m speaking now of the old God, the fierce overwhelming God of my childhood), as God is my witness, they brought in a rock band. The POOF Band. The Praise Our Original Father Band. To play us some inspiring music. Do you believe it? I mean, do you believe it? And I realized then that He was dead and gone—the Calvinist God under whose immense shadow I’d grown up. He still went by the same old name, but He’d been replaced. God— really—was dead. He’d endured for hundreds and hundreds of years, He’d survived transplantation from Holland all the way to the American Midwest. He’d persevered intact through the Civil War and the Great Flu Epidemic, the Great Depression and a pair of world wars. He’d survived endless schisms and purges, because those dour Dutchmen were in fact terrific infighters. But in the end, what did Him in? Things like rock music and TV talk shows. He, too, had been replaced by a sweet old gentlemanly Santa Claus of a god, maybe it’s time to get out of here?”
We step out of the pew and walk back out into the sun—out into a world where all the deities are kindly. Somehow the prospect doesn’t cheer Sally as much as it might. We head in silence toward the pond, on whose smooth surface the swans have been replaced by a duck. Sally says, “You’ve seen some people since I saw you last.”
“Well Conrad. And Adelle. They both send greetings.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Well, Conrad really outdid himself. After this absolutely gargantuan dinner, which included veal stuffed with sausage and ziti in Alfredo sauce, he orders two desserts. And then finishes mine.”
“And Adelle? I hope you’re not going to tell me she’s still holding that poor girl Tiffany responsible for Wes’s death.”
“Afraid so. She also told me something you hadn’t told me, by the way.”
“Oh?” Even while keeping my eyes on the pond, I feel a stiffening at my side.
“She told me Tiffany threw Wes out at the end. Is that true?”
“So I never did tell you that? No I guess I never did, and I suppose, even at this late date, I’ve been wanting to shelter Wes. The fact is, he didn’t even want me to know—I think he was deeply embarrassed that another relationship had soured. I didn’t really know until after he died.”
“She said he was living at the Commodore Hotel.”
“Yes—that’s right. It was only temporary.”
“Temporary? Meaning what? Was he going to move back with Tiffany? Or find his own place?”
“I don’t honestly know. You’re asking what Tiffany was planning? I don’t think she knew. Whatever a contemplative is, Tiffany isn’t. But I do know that after Wes moved in at the Commodore, Tiffany started dating somebody else.”
“A serious relationship?”
“Not so serious that it lasted. But I suppose serious enough in Wes’s eyes. He’d been supplanted. By someone young enough to be his son . . .”
“Adelle says she broke his heart.”
“Maybe. Yes, I suppose she did.”
I say, “You know I think I’d like to meet her. Tiffany. What do you think? I’m not sure she’d be willing to meet with me.”
“Why not? Under the circumstances.”
“I don’t suppose I absolutely need to meet her. But it might be useful.”
“Useful?”
What am I on the verge of revealing? Has Sally begun to see that I’m out for more than talk? That I’m pursuing this subject systematically? That after each of these conversations I’m transcribing every last detail?
I retreat a bit: “Useful for understanding the situation. As you know, I’m trying to sort of sort out Wes’s life.”
“ ‘Sort of sort out’? I suppose I’m meanwhile trying to sort of sort out Proust.”
She discusses, as we round the lake, how her reading is going. She’s in the second volume of In Search of Lost Time. There are seven interlocked novels in all. She’s very excited. For years and years now, she’s been meaning to read through the whole of it, savoring every word, and already she’s feeling, only two volumes in, that the experience will be even more rewarding than she always envisioned, although she is having trouble keeping track of all the characters. In truth, I’m having trouble keeping track of what she’s telling me. (It seems the novel takes place in the French countryside, or maybe a portion of it does—for suddenly the characters she speaks of seem to have all gone off to the seashore. And the protagonist is never named—though she has been advised that if she merely waits a few thousand pages, his name will appear . . . But who’s got time for such devious games? My mind is on other things.)
—Therefore, she now finds herself wondering whether she should perhaps start the whole project over again, go right back to page one, this time compiling some companion notebook of notes and names and impressions . . . Could it be, she appears to be wondering now, that her great literary undertaking, deferred until the approach of her sixtieth year, has somehow been fatally impaired at the outset?
We find a bench and sit down. The pond stretches before us, with the abbey in picturesque ruins on the other side. I’ve heard enough about books and I return to the subject that weighs on me: “I’m thinking I need to see Tiffany if I’m ever going to make sense of Wes’s last years.”
“You keep calling him Wes. In a certain tone of voice. Almost as if he were no relation to you.”
“No relation?”
“As if he weren’t your father, Luke.”
“Not my father?” The last bird on the pond, a duck, breaks and lifts into the air. One more vanishing act . . . “Well yes, in a lot of ways I don’t feel he was my father. Now that’s not a complaint, as Adelle would say. But maybe I should point out that that’s what makes this all the more interesting. All the more challenging. In
many ways he’s a complete stranger.”
My mother says: “I think it’s time for the day’s first cigarette.”
She looks harried, even a little desperate as she fishes in her purse for her pack of Salems. For all the artful games she plays with her “filthy habit,” she might be just another sixty-year-old woman who’s never quite had the gumption to kick her addiction.
Behind a voluminous cloud of cigarette smoke, she delivers a mild reply: “Of course you might want to meet Tiffany. She’s your stepmother, after all.”
“And you can’t use the word and keep a straight face any better than I can. Stepmother? She’s younger than I am.”
“Wes did leave a bit of a tangle, didn’t he?”
I say, “You have to understand, I have virtually no memory of Wes as my father. The two of you were separated by the time my memory was up and running. I think of Gordon as my dad. I’m not blaming Wes, but the simple fact is, I hadn’t seen him in many, many years when he died. By his choice more than mine, you’d have to say.”
“But he was always proud of you.”
“How would I know that? I never heard from him.”
“Wes always had so many balls in the air . . . Maybe you were the one thing he knew was doing fine.”
“You mean I was off at an Ivy League school? Or I was making money?”
“And I’m afraid he felt ousted. With no real role to play. Certainly Gordon didn’t make Wes any too welcome round our house. Gordon was a true saint in many ways, but he could be a jealous man.”
“Okay, it was everyone’s choice. I certainly didn’t do anything to keep in touch with Wes. I was busy, I was making a career, I was visiting Gordon after he got sick. And then there was no funeral for Wes, just an odd little family service.”
And Sally’s tone is suddenly defensive: “Just tell me how, under the rather bizarre circumstances I found myself in, we were going to arrange any sort of regular funeral. I was in no position to organize it—I’d thrown him out more than thirty years before. And can you imagine anything more grotesque and unfair, more disfiguring to Wes’s memory, than to let Tiffany loose on the ceremony? The grieving widow who’d already found herself a new boyfriend? Let me tell you something else, something Tiffany conveniently seems to have forgotten: She’d filed for divorce just before Wes died.”
“I didn’t know that . . .”
“I’m telling you, Tiffany doesn’t either. It seems to have skipped right out of the head of the grieving widow.”
“Listen, don’t think I’m criticizing you. About the lack of a funeral. I’d honestly like to think I’m not criticizing anyone. And the simple fact is, his death happened to coincide with a phase in my own life when everything had gone smash—as you know all too well. So back then I was simply in no position to do what I’m doing now: to look at Wes dispassionately. You say I talk about him as if he were no relation. Well, I’d like to think this sort of pilgrimage, or whatever it is I’m pursuing—this attempt to clarify things, to make a few corrections—will ultimately be taken as an expression of filial piety.”
If I’m feeling a need for self-justification, so is Sally, no less urgently than I, and in our momentary, jostling neediness neither one has time for the other. She reproves me: “After Gordon arrived, everyone thought it was better for you if we just started over. That was the point in Gordon’s formally adopting you. A fresh start. We were thinking of you, Luke.”
And I counter with: “And Wes wasn’t thinking of his own convenience? Maybe—just maybe—he had too many items on his plate to be worrying about a kid who was safely provided for? When I was growing up, years went by and I didn’t lay eyes on him. He became some sort of remote, vaguely disreputable uncle.”
“I think he felt he had nothing to provide. In some ways he’d made such a botch of things, and there was Gordon, offering so much security . . . Maybe Wes felt bested? Unneeded? I don’t know—I’m sure we should have done things differently. But Gordon thought— we thought you at last had a father, a real father, in Gordon.”
“But what about after I’d grown up and moved out? D’you know how many times Wes wrote when I went off to Princeton? Zero.”
“Wes was always a hopeless correspondent.”
“You know how many times he telephoned in those four years? Two? Three?”
“I’m afraid he wasn’t much of a telephone-user either.” She adds: “Were you telephoning him?”
I ignore her question. “You wouldn’t call that being disowned?”
“What I would say is that Wes always had trouble with Gordon. Gordon was jealous and Wes was—what? Bewildered? Truly, in his heart of hearts, I don’t think Wes fully believed Gordon was real—that I’d honestly gone off and found another man.”
“And what does Gordon have to do with it? At least Wes could have kept in touch after I’d left home. When I was in college, or later in New York. And what about after Gordon died?”
“You’re right, of course you’re right, Luke, maybe we should have tried to get things on a new footing after Gordon’s death. But I thought—oh maybe this is all my fault. But you see, Wes was starting a new life, a new family, Tiffany and the twins, and I so much wanted this one to work for him. I wanted Wes to feel that he’d done it right this time, that he’d become a real family man. I wanted him to invest everything he had, emotionally, into that marriage—was I wrong to want that? Maybe I was wrong to want that . . . The truth is, I do believe Wes would have had an easier time of it if you’d been born a girl.”
“Meaning what?”
“Oh I don’t mean the very obvious thing—that you were a source of competition. Or I suppose I do, but that’s the smallest portion of what I mean. But Wes never knew quite what to do with a boy. He had no interest in sports. Oh he had wonderful coordination—”
“Unlike his son.”
“Whereas, if you’d been born a girl, he would have had a natural role to play. His role would have been to charm you, honey. He would have sung you songs—you remember he really did have a lovely delicate voice, a fine clear tenor, and if he wasn’t very keen on teaching you tennis or bowling, he was absolutely adroit when picking his way through a tune. To hear him singing ‘Danny Boy’ or ‘The Streets of Laredo’ or ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was enough, I can assure you, to bring tears to any girl’s eyes.”
To judge from the rapt look on her face, Sally can hear him singing even yet. Meanwhile, what I hear is a bird in a branch overhead, issuing a message that may well be territorial or amorous, but which appears to express, on this sublime summer day, nothing but unalloyed joy.
“But I’m losing the thread,” Sally says. “What I meant to say is that being the father of a girl would have fit him—father to some little bright-eyed, curly-haired Tammy or Bonny or Shirley.”
“He got his daughters in the end.”
“Yes, in the end. But before they came along he was given this somber, and very cute, but deeply contemplative little baby-man. You scared people off with your grown-up look! You made it so obvious, in your scowling owly way, that you were thinking harder than anybody else in the room.”
“You’re saying I made Wes nervous?”
“Everybody, you made everybody nervous. You were this mini-magistrate.”
“Conrad says Wes would never have married Klara if she hadn’t gotten pregnant.”
“Perhaps not. But perhaps he would have. Wes loved her, I’m sure of it. She was an extraordinary beauty. At one time, he must have loved her very much.”
“And he told me Wes concocted a very elaborate story about why they needed to keep the marriage a secret. About Chester Sultan’s being opposed to his son’s marrying a Catholic, combined with an upcoming inheritance—all this at a time when Chester Sultan was already dead and buried.”
“Oh my.” All at once Sally looks very tired; that thinner, French version of her face has become drawn. She turns away from me in order to address her words across the pond, as though speaking to th
e souls of the ruined abbey. “You have to understand: Wes was very young. And very ambitious. And very confused. And also: stories grow. This isn’t to say Wes was fully honest with the girl. But especially with someone like . . . like your father, Luke, people are always wanting to exaggerate his exaggerations. It’s an interesting process, actually: the way that even very honest people will feel not the slightest compunction about embellishing a story when it concerns somebody with a reputation for stretching the truth.”
And whom is Sally—that born protectress—protecting now? Wes again? Or this time is it Klara Kuzmak whom my mother feels an impulse to shelter?
“And Conrad also said the main reason Wes married her was because it allowed him to fabricate things—to live a double life.”
She turns toward me once more: “Now that’s just not so. The main reason? The main reason was that the girl was pregnant, and, according to the moral code of the time (ridiculous as it now may look to you), a young gentleman had to marry a girl he’d ‘got in the family way.’ All the more so when the girl was a Catholic.
“Honey, you’ve got to take everything Conrad says with a grain of salt. On the one hand, he probably knew Wes better than anyone else could. Good heavens, there was such an intensity between them—I’ve seen few relationships, even between man and wife, as intense as theirs. On the other hand, in my entire life I’ve never met anybody like Conrad for saying things purely for effect.”
“So where did it come from—that degree of competition? Given how different they were . . .”
The two of us seem to have located once more, after a troubled interval of resentments and self-exculpations, a happy armistice. Sally is again my interpreter of a mysterious past—one that I never saw but one that circumscribes me yet. And I am (through my curiosity, through my hunger for amplification) the validator of that past of hers.
A Few Corrections Page 9