A Few Corrections

by Brad Leithauser

  “Oh you’d have to say from Dora chiefly. I don’t mean to malign the dead, but she was capable of astoundingly poor judgment. On the one hand, she made it clear Conrad was her favorite. On the other, she made it clear even he couldn’t depend on her. She’d go from rages to funks to sulks. She was unbalanced, you’d honestly have to say.”

  “But exactly how did she display her preference for Conrad? How did she show it to Wes?”

  Indignation fires Sally’s gaze, and to my mind there’s something deeply stirring in this urge of hers to stand up for a man whom she herself, for more than ample cause, threw out of her house a third of a century ago. Injustice remains injustice to her. She says: “How did she do it? She did it in ways so blatant it would make your head spin! Ways so heartrending and comical you want to put them into a textbook called How Not to Be a Mother! I could give you hundreds of examples. Start with this: One Christmas, the two boys receive identical bow ties from an aunt, and this worries Dora. How are the boys going to tell them apart? Now you may ask, Why in the world was it necessary to tell them apart? But Dora was firm on the need to do so, and so she goes and sews a name tag into Conrad’s. Only into Conrad’s. Do you get what I’m saying? Conrad is, effectively, the son with the name. And Wes? He’s the nameless boy . . . And how are you going to tell apart their two identical model airplanes, their two identical toothbrushes? Draw a gold star on Conrad’s, or tie a blue ribbon to it . . .

  “I honestly think a lot of Wes’s womanizing was attributable to Dora. He could win the heart of every woman in the world except his mother. He certainly won over poor Adelle, who will never in her life meet another man who glows the way Wes did. You know you sometimes meet a grown woman who’s still a ‘daddy’s girl’? Well, Adelle is still a ‘little sister.’”

  “You don’t find her devotion touching?”

  “You don’t find it sad?”

  Sad? A garrulous, good-hearted woman in a Battle Creek suburb turning out batch after batch of burnt gingerbread men on a rainy September afternoon while her husband snores in the basement—yes, sad. But sad, too, the former wrestling champion turned fat-man-with-a-heart-condition biting down with spiteful recalcitrance into his sixth buttered sesame breadstick of the night. And sadder still the thought of the other Sultan child, the white-haired golden boy in his room at the Commodore Hotel, thumbing through an address book of prospects as his heart was slowly giving out. And their mother, a shattered agoraphobe, and their father, a possible suicide—something sad, and more than sad, to the whole Sultan clan . . .

  Sally continues: “Now Wes would have charmed the world’s women no matter how he was brought up, it was simply his destiny, but I can’t help feeling he wouldn’t have gone about it so desperately, compelled to win over every female he met from the ages of two to ninety-two, if he’d had a different mother.

  “And I don’t think it did Conrad any good to be quite so blatantly the favorite son. It would be one thing if he’d ever been happy in his as I guess they call it now orientation. But so far as I know, he’s never formed a real, a lasting love-attachment to anybody. When I first met him, it wouldn’t have occurred to any of us to doubt Conrad’s interest in women. And the funny thing is, I think he was, I think he still is, partly, interested in women. But he had no notions of how to deal with the opposite sex. On the one side, he had this unbalanced mother, and on the other, an older brother who, by the time Conrad discovered girls, had seemingly cornered the market on feminine affections.”

  “I’d have thought Conrad would have no trouble with girls. Assuming it was girls he wanted. A bright guy, a champion athlete, and good-looking besides, or so the old photographs suggest.”

  “Heavens yes he was good-looking, and yet there was something off-putting about him, Luke: He had no banter, no small talk. I can see how a girl would have been attracted to Conrad, to this burning assemblage of muscle and drive and ambition—but I can also see how she’d find him unapproachable. I suppose you have to take this on faith, now when he’s seventy pounds overweight and throwing one chocolate eclair after another down his gullet, and as full of banter and small talk as any man alive. Really, the man’s metamorphosis is extraordinary.”

  Sally draws morosely on her cigarette. “Let’s go,” she says, but does not rise.

  Across the pond, a couple of teenagers appear, a big athletic-looking boy with a crew cut, wearing a rugby shirt, and a thin leggy blond girl in black jeans. They’re holding hands. Suddenly he scoops her up into his arms and marches—unswervingly, robotically—toward the lake’s edge, as if about to toss her in. The girl’s legs kick and her arms thrash, and her cries of protest flutter across the water. At the very brink, the boy halts, raises her wriggling body as if to hurl her far and high—and sets her down upon the ground. They walk on, hand in hand. And thirty yards farther down the path, they repeat the whole process: He scoops her up and marches menacingly toward the water’s edge, she screams and wriggles in panic and alarm, he deposits her on the ground once more, they walk off holding hands . . .

  “But I seem to have lost my train of thought,” Sally says.

  “Conrad. His metamorphosis. His competition with Wes. His lack of banter. Dora. Her favoritism, as expressed in name tags, gold stars, blue ribbons.”

  “You really are something. It’s as though you’ve been taking notes.”

  I continue my catalog: “Wes being able to charm every woman but his mother. Adelle as the smitten ‘little sister.’ Wes’s decision to marry Klara Kuzmak. The moral code by which—”

  “That’s what it was. I knew something was chafing inside me. You see, you mustn’t let Conrad convince you that Wes got married purely out of some twisted love of intrigue. For Wes it was also a matter of honor. In his way, your father was a very honorable man. As one of his primary victims, I can attest that his code wasn’t the usual code—but the truth is, Wes really did want to do the right thing by everyone. He wanted them to be happy, especially if he could be the source of their happiness. There was nothing cruel in Wes, though I suppose there was enough selfishness, and immaturity, to ensure that he sometimes hurt people more than an overtly cruel person might.

  “D’you see what I’m saying? There is cruelty in Conrad— maybe no more than in your average person, but it seems like a good deal more, since for obscure reasons of his own he’s chosen to put his cruelty on display, to enlarge and expand it, just the way he’s enlarged and expanded his body. And I think this explains a lot of Conrad’s hostility toward Wes. Conrad couldn’t quite forgive Wes, in the end, for being a really nice man.”

  It’s a declaration that ought to be cheering, but Sally’s despondency is palpable. It’s in the hope of lifting her spirits that I say, “You were talking about Gordon before. About meeting him the first time, at the Art Institute.”

  “You’ve already heard that story any number of times.”

  “Tell it to me again. Every time you tell it, there’s something new in it.”

  “I suppose you want the long version.”

  “The longer-than-the-long version, if you please.”

  And as we sit on the bench beside the pond across from the old Cistercian abbey of Coppée, the story Sally unfolds (with a few of my own attempts to correct for her reticences or modesties) goes like this:

  In 1968 Sally was living with her asthmatic seven-year-old son in pretty much the worst lodgings in Stags Harbor: a dark, damp basement apartment on laughably named Downward Lane, not far from the (closed) Hyperion Fittings factory. The apartment was undeniably a drain on the boy’s health, and not much better for the mother’s health either.

  Even so, things were looking up—somewhat. Sally’s divorce was now a few years behind her, and she had reconciled—somewhat—with her parents. When she had first declared her intention of filing for divorce, Henry and Kathy Admiraal had cut her off. Their Church hardly countenanced divorce, particularly when instigated by the woman, and what had ensued were the grimmest days of Sally
’s existence. She’d needed her parents’ help, financial and emotional, but they had cast her aside, and the worst of it— the guilt that had nearly overwhelmed her—was the realization that the two of them were suffering over her as acutely as she was suffering for herself. They were decent, good-hearted, loving people who were weeping, and praying—praying with all their hearts—that their sole child might be restored to them. And by their lights, by the One True Light, they were doing everything they could to aid her. They sent round to her apartment (her sunless, damp, tomblike basement apartment, where her son, Luke, wheezed in the back room) various emissaries from the Christian Reformed Church, who patiently pointed out to her that she had, through sheer headstrong pride and willfulness, fallen upon evil ways. Pointed out that were she to divorce Wes, the Church would not recognize the divorce; were she to remarry, the new marriage would be invalid. Oh, she might be married in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of the Church she would be living in a state of “continual adultery.” Henceforth, the world of romance—of men and love and passion—would be off-limits to her. That was the only future she had to look forward to . . .

  In the end, it was Wesley who set things right. Once he finally, finally accepted the notion that the marriage was truly over, and under no circumstances would Sally ever take him back, he chose to do the honorable thing. He went to Henry and Kathy Admiraal and told them it was he, and not Sally, who was insisting on the divorce. He informed them (which was mostly true) that he had fallen out of whatever belief he’d ever had in the Christian Reformed Church. And he informed them (which was hardly true) that he’d fallen in love with another woman and wouldn’t consider returning to Sally. And at this declaration of their son-in-law’s apostasy, in combination with the prospect of his public infidelities, Henry and Kathy conceded that their daughter could do nothing but end the marriage. Reverend Koekkoek concurred. Sally had chosen unwisely in welcoming Wes as a suitor; now she must face the consequences of that choice.

  During the worst of the worst, when she was broke at the bank and all but broken in her spirits, Sally found a job as a cashier in a Kroger’s supermarket, while taking classes to get her teaching certificate; she still dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher. It was an almost impossible schedule, made possible only by a neighbor on Downward Lane, Mrs. Breskin.

  Judith Breskin, now many years dead, God rest her soul, was then a widow in her fifties, and a Jew—one of very few Jews in Stags Harbor. She was a little gray wisp of a woman, notoriously short-tempered, who didn’t seem altogether to like or even approve of Sally. Still, she’d taken an interest in Luke. She was drawn to him partly because (so Sally learned only subsequently) she’d lost, thirty years before, her sole child, a son, to infantile leukemia, and partly because of Luke’s already-evident flair for mathematics (he liked to do sums in his head), and perhaps partly because her convictions of elementary justice led her to sympathize with Christianity’s outcasts. In any case, Judith Breskin was, in Sally’s words, “a lifesaver.” She would baby-sit Luke while Sally was off at work or at her classes. And wouldn’t accept a dime for it. (Of course this was one more dubious step in the Church’s eyes— Sally’s leaving her only son to be reared by a Jew.)

  That grim apartment on Downward Lane had a single artwork adorning its living room walls, a reproduction of a Winslow Homer watercolor of a pair of trout leaping from a brown mountain lake. (Sally’s “original artwork”—a pair of watercolors by the head of the Art Department at Bayview—had fallen victim to a burst pipe.) The actual Homer painting was to be found only a few blocks away, in the Stags Harbor Historical and Art Museum, a whimsical miscellany assembled by the wife of one of the founders of Great Bay Shipping. The Homer watercolor was the jewel of the establishment, and throughout Sally’s childhood, when the museum, Stags Harbor’s sole museum, had served as a popular school field trip, the painting had represented for her the very apex of mankind’s artistic achievements.

  And now, in that spring of 1968, something unprecedented occurred. Sally read in her local newspaper about an exhibition in distant Detroit—only one hundred miles south, and yet, for all the traveling Sally had done in her twenty-nine years, a city at the edge of the known world. The Detroit Institute of Art was hosting a Homer show composed of sixty (sixty!) watercolors.

  It had been years, literally, since Sally had taken a day out from the constricted routine of her days—her job, her classes, Luke’s asthma, Henry Admiraal’s objections and doom-laden prognostications. To an extent that she couldn’t bear to confess even to herself, the daily atmosphere she breathed was poisonous: air reeking of failure, and suspicion, and stigma, and hopelessness. (It was no easy thing, back then, to be living in Stags Harbor as a lost daughter of the Christian Reformed Church and a divorced single mother.) And Sally decided she would make the pilgrimage, drive all by herself to Detroit. Mrs. Breskin agreed to watch Luke for the day.

  This had to be a covert operation, naturally. It would never do to confess to her parents she was leaving their grandson for the entire day in order to drive all the way to Detroit for the purpose of inspecting an exhibition of paintings. Sally prudently stopped once for gas, two dollars’ worth, although her tank was far from empty. Otherwise, the trip was happily uneventful. She even found a free parking space.

  Yet the exhibition, the unimaginably vast expanse of sixty Homer watercolors, unnerved Sally more than it pleased her. Oh, it was all too much—too many scenes, moods, colors! She was feeling jumpy and guilty and flustered. The polychromatic worlds that Homer conjured up (sullen silvery Florida coastlines massed against a coming storm; Cuban highlands basking in a tropical sun; deep Adirondack ravines where ferns wrestled with boulders) were evidently situated too far from the apartment on Downward Lane for her to bridge the gap. It occurred to her—an intimation that burned at the corners of her eyes—that this entire day, that her whole minutely planned extraordinary adventure, might turn out to be an extravagant failure. Why had she come at all? What was the matter with her—that she would even think of trying to run out on her own child, on her own life?

  It was a great comfort to discover the museum’s cafeteria. She needed to sit down, she needed a cup of coffee, she needed to eat something; part of her problem was simple hunger. (She’d been too excited that morning to swallow anything more than a cup of coffee.) She progressed through the cafeteria line with a sense of pace and deliberation, eventually settling on an egg-salad sandwich, a piece of chocolate cake, and a cup of coffee.

  Sally was beginning to feel she was getting everything back under control when, reaching the cashier, she came upon an unimaginable, a catastrophic discovery. She opened her wallet, where her twenty-dollar bill was securely stored, and—and there was no twenty-dollar bill! But how could this have happened, when, before leaving home this morning, she’d checked it three times, four times, five times? How could this have happened? It had been there!—yes, it had been there when she’d removed the other bills, yes, the two one-dollar bills, yes, in order to pay for her gasoline . . .

  The truth struck Sally like a stinging slap to the face: When paying for the gas with the two one-dollar bills (when paying for the gas in her overexcited, agitated state), she’d somehow dropped the other bill, the twenty. Her twenty-dollar bill—all of her money—was gone!

  This revelation came down like a judgment: Twenty dollars— gone!, and now it seemed she was only a minute or two away from a hot flood of tears. Sally started digging frenziedly through her purse, upsetting things, jumbling things, half the contents spilling out upon the floor (her comb, her compact, her handkerchief), as though the very components of her life were tumbling to her feet. In the bottom of her purse lay a nickel, and a dime, and a pair of pennies, but she was never going to make up enough to buy herself lunch . . . Her eyes were overflowing with tears, and of course she was aware that she was holding up the cafeteria line, delaying everybody while she went about spilling her life out on the floor of the Detroit Institute of Art�
��when a hand reached in front of her toward the cashier, bearing a ten-dollar bill in its fingers, and a man’s voice said, “Please, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to pay for that.”

  Beg your pardon?

  Of course Sally could never normally have permitted a male stranger to do any such thing. But she swung round and discovered that the man with the ten-dollar bill was the most reassuring, the least compromising figure imaginable: a round-faced gentleman with thick glasses and a kindly crooked-toothed smile. His voice, too, was reassuring, for he had a slight stammer. What he had in fact announced to the cashier was: “P-p-please, if you’ll al-la-low me, I’d like to pay for that.” And behind the gentleman stood a woman (the deciding factor, in the end), an overweight middle-aged woman who said in a faintly southern accent, “Do, honey, do let him do it. It’s all all right.”

  Sally let the kindly gentleman pay for her lunch. Shamefacedly, stammering herself, she thanked him and pumped his hand, and then she applied herself to the business of retrieving her belongings from the floor. And of course when he invited her to join them (they were a party of three; there was another man with them), Sally consented.

  The woman turned out to be his sister, and the other man, his brother-in-law. Sister and brother-in-law were visitors to Detroit. They lived in Chattanooga.

  The stranger who had paid for Sally’s lunch turned out to be named Gordon Planter, of Grosse Pointe. Sally could be quite precise on these details because she was scrupulous about taking down both his name and address; she would of course pay back every cent she owed him.

  In fact, in Sally’s eagerness to clear her reputation and make plain that she had every intention of squaring her debt, she went over his name and address a number of times; it seemed she couldn’t quite shut up. It turned out he was a doctor, and so what did she do next? She pointed out how disillusioned she’d lately become with the medical profession—none of the doctors she’d consulted had been any help at all with Luke’s, her son’s, asthma. Then she mentioned her divorce. Then she volunteered that she’d never been to Chattanooga; in fact, had never been to Tennessee; in fact, had never crossed the Mason-Dixon line—but a great-uncle had marched with Sherman through Georgia . . . Truly, truly she couldn’t shut up. Well, the only sensible thing to do was to eat fast and beat a hasty retreat, but while hurrying through her chocolate cake she managed to spill a crumb—a gooey, dark, frosted crumb—on her white blouse. Honestly, she’d never made a bigger botch of things in her whole life.