Dear Wesley Giardina,
Although you and I have never met, we have a great many things in common. My name is Luke Planter. But I was born Luke Sultan, on May 19, 1961, in Restoration, Michigan. My father was the late Wesley Sultan and my mother is Sally Planter, the former Sally Sultan, born Sally Admiraal. My parents were divorced when I was three and I was later formally adopted by my mother’s second husband, Dr. Gordon Planter, who passed away four years ago.
It seems one of the things we share, therefore, is a biological father.
I am an investment banker (with Gribben Brothers, here in Manhattan), who in his spare time is compiling some family history. For obvious reasons, I’ve been eager to track you down. At the moment, I am doing a little research into the life of Wesley Sultan, which as you can imagine is quite a tangled affair. I would be especially interested to learn whether you yourself have memories of Wesley that you wouldn’t mind sharing with me, either by letter or, preferably, in person. My job occasionally takes me to Pittsburgh and I would be quite pleased to meet with you there at your convenience. I would also be quite interested in any “family lore” you might know—any anecdotes about Wesley you may have heard from your late mother or from other relatives. Also, I would be very keen to see any photographs you might have.
Although it is my interest in family history—particularly Wesley—that has prompted this letter, I would very much like to meet you independent of my project. We may have more in common even than we know.
Yours sincerely,
Luke Planter
Not a nibble for three weeks—no note or call—and then the following handwritten letter, its penmanship a chaotic jumble of capitals and lowercase letters, cursive and printing:
Dear Mr. Planter,
Sorry I can’t help you but I’m afraid you are under some mistaken Impression. You say you were eager to track me down but I’m afraid you have found the wrong man and so you’ll just have to keep right on tracking. (or trucking) My father was Johnny Giardina, born and raised here in Pittsburgh, and the old boy may have got up to some weird business in his life but I’m pretty sure going around under an alias like WESLEY SULTAN wasn’t one of them. I’ve never been to Restoration Michigan, or to Detroit either; maybe I’ll go there some time. Sounds like quite a hopping Place.
Good luck
Wesley Giardina
He’s never heard of Wesley Sultan? The letter throws me for a loop. On the one hand, I haven’t a doubt in the world I’ve found my half brother. On the other, I realize (more and more clearly with each reading) just how closely I’ve skirted catastrophe. My dashed-off letter? It might easily have detonated a land mine. Good Lord, why hadn’t I foreseen this? Foreseen that Klara Kuzmak/ Sultan/Giardina would cover her tracks thoroughly? No, my half brother, Wesley Giardina, has never heard mention of his true father and namesake, and when my letter arrived out of the blue he must have taken me for a lunatic—which under the circumstances was a mercy and a kindness. The alternative? It was so ugly it made me squirm.
The alternative? I arrive in Wesley Giardina’s life like some sort of postal mugger—stepping out of the shadows in order to shatter the foundations of his existence. Who could say what zealously protective, whitewashed version of events Klara Kuzmak created for her son before she died? As Lou Gehrig’s disease took away first the use of her fingers, and then her hands, wasn’t there all the more reason for clinging to an artificial past? For me to destroy her rendition of things would be an absolute desecration of her grave . . . What had I been thinking?
The second time around, showing a good deal more reflection and circumspection, I write as follows:
Dear Mr. Giardina:
Many thanks for your letter, which indeed corrected a mistake of mine.
I will continue my research into my family history with greater accuracy, thanks to you. Actually, since I last wrote you I did succeed in locating the person I was looking for (the one I mistook for you). I apologize for the mistake.
I don’t suppose I can strongly recommend Restoration, Michigan, or even Detroit, to someone who has never been there. I’m sure what those places have to offer can already be had in Pittsburgh.
Yours cordially,
Luke Planter
I post the letter from Kennedy Airport. I’m again on my way to France.
She’s a sunny soul by nature, but even so Sally seems cheerier now than at any time since her widowhood began, four years ago. She is chatty and exclamatory, wide-eyed and indefatigable. She says, “I simply cannot stop marveling.” She says, “I gape out my window in the morning and declare, ‘Truly, this isn’t where I’m living.’ And yet this is precisely where I’m living.” She says, “Who could have foreseen it? It’s all so marvelously improbable that I would wind up here.”
“Happily so?”
“Happily? Blissfully. I think this must be the prettiest place I’ve ever lived.”
I’ve just rolled up on her doorstep. I’m feeling jet-lagged and disassembled and dazed and a little blissed-out myself. After a long, bumpy, stormy flight from New York to Paris, and a shorter but equally bumpy and stormy flight to Nice, I was set down in what felt like a rare global oasis of tranquillity. The winds had slipped into a doze, the clouds had evaporated, and the sun on the hills and valleys of this matchless countryside came down broadly, sweetly, evenhandedly.
In a little rented sky-blue Renault I drove up and down meandering mountain roads for an hour or so, giddily overjoyed with my surroundings even while fretting that I might be more tired than I supposed; I had Hollywood visions of winding up halfway down a hill, buried in a tangle of flowering vines, car upended and wheels still spinning. Disaster had been tracking me ever since I left New York. Could it be that I’d shaken it off my trail at last?
Here in the south of France, in the town of Mare aux Cerfs, somehow Sally has found a beautiful little apartment for herself in what I’d call a row house if this were Manhattan. But this is a medieval French village and she’s found an old, sloping slice of a house on an old, sloping street—a neighborhood that has the tilted reality, the skew lines, of a fairy tale. There’s a little sitting room and a dining room and a good-sized kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms and a study upstairs, and a thriving, appealingly untidy garden out back. She urges a nap on me, but I’m not yet ready to sleep. She makes me a cup of tea and again urges a nap, but I insist instead on a walk through town.
There are no sidewalks on Sally’s narrow street and we stride on cobblestones, past a butcher shop (dead chickens plucked only to the neck, their undecapitated heads still feathered) and a patisserie (whorled little pastries ornate as orchids). The scrolled orange tiles that make up the roofs of this town gleam in the afternoon sun.
In my jet-lagged, head-slightly-rotated way, I’m coming up once more against a sensation of all but boundless ignorance. For here is one more world I don’t know anything about; nothing is familiar here, everything is new. That I’m ignorant about the architecture is only the least of my lacks. I know next to zero about the town of Mare aux Cerfs or its workings, the history of the region, the flow of its commerce, and, most telling of all, the language in which such dealings are carried out, a language I last studied twenty years ago, for two years in high school, and a language in which, moreover, my mother is now—slowly, to be sure, with many stops and starts, and yet steadily—negotiating her way around. It grows apparent that Sally Planter, née Admiraal, has refashioned a European tie that is far realer to her than it will likely ever be for me. She whose grandparents emigrated from Utrecht, and whose childhood reverberated with mumbled Dutch admonishments, is getting around in yet another Continental tongue. She steps into a boulangerie and asks for a baguette, pas trop cuite, and into a pharmacy, where she determines, after consultation, which of two seemingly identical sunblocks is actually more effective, and into a papeterie, where she buys cartouches for her plume, and into a crêmerie, where she settles on a cindery disk of chèvre and asks the fromage
r if it is prêt à manger ce soir and he laughs and tells her it’s prêt à manger maintenant and ce soir aussi; ce fromage is formidable! And what’s more impressive still is to see that Sally is, already, not only recognized but welcomed in all these charming little establishments. In just a few weeks, that characteristic brio of hers (or perhaps the phrase is joie de vivre) has impressed itself upon the neighborhood shopkeepers, overcoming her various fumblings and incomprehensions. Sally’s joy in life is a participatory joy, openly inviting others to share in it—which they do, assembling around her a community within the community.
She leads me to what she describes as her “favorite brasserie,” and over cafés noisettes she says to me, “We talked a lot about religion last time, in Domat, and I told you all about how the POOF Band, the Christian rock band, had chased God right out of that old Dutch church in Restoration, but I now learn that the Grosse Pointe Unitarians aren’t doing any better.” After years of drifting from church to church, Episcopal to Methodist to Presbyterian, Sally in her late forties had found a seemingly permanent home with the Unitarians. “Maybe you remember the minister—now ex-minister? Walter Willcocks.”
“S.”
“Mm?” Sally says.
“Not an M. An S. Walter S. Willcocks. He clung to the middle initial.”
“Truly your memory’s amazing . . . Anyway, I’m afraid he’s gotten himself into an unspeakable scandal.”
“Unspeakable?”
“Sexual.”
“Of what sort?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“He ran off with one of the ladies in the choir.”
“Worse.”
“He ran off with one of the little boys in the choir.”
“Worse. He makes someone who ran off with a choirboy look like a choirboy.”
“Geez, I really don’t want to know.”
“Suffice it to say that the entire congregation doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But the grisly details really don’t matter, my point is that, as I sit here in France, contemplating my life, I do feel that everything back there across the Atlantic, back where I really live, is coming undone. Is there a church left in the country that looks both sane and dignified? That doesn’t leave you feeling you’re watching a soap opera written by a drug addict? How was Conrad, incidentally? Speaking of coming undone.”
“Well he looked exactly like what he was—somebody who’d recently been in the hospital.”
“And did he talk to you about what put him there?”
“Not a word of that. I don’t know anything except what you’ve told me.”
“And I don’t know much. He had the prostatectomy two years ago, but evidently his PSA count is up, which suggests they didn’t get all of it. But where has it gone to? A CAT scan and a bone scan didn’t turn anything up.” With her love of virtually any sort of specialized nomenclature, Sally naturally absorbed, during her years as a doctor’s wife, some medical fluency. “And it seems at least two of his coronary arteries are ninety percent clogged, and needless to say his blood pressure is through the roof. Oh, I do sometimes think Wes was lucky to go so quickly. It would have shattered him, oh it would’ve broken his proud manly heart, to go the way his brother’s going.”
“Unfortunately, the hospital stay did nothing to curb his appetite. A meal these days with Conrad is a sort of dinner/theater spectacle.”
“Maybe it’s his way of hurrying the whole business along? Or maybe it’s the opposite—trying to convince himself the cancer’s under control. If end-stage cancer usually wastes you away, then isn’t it a good sign to be growing fatter and fatter? Either way, it’s a grim fix to find yourself in, isn’t it? To be wondering whether it’s cancer or heart disease that will get you first?”
“I’d bet on his heart. He told me he’s put on twenty-five pounds since January.”
“I’m not sure I want to see him at the moment. I think the technical term is cachexia, by the way. The medical term for wasting away.” And now the mother bird’s doing something she has been doing for thirty-six years: feeding vocabulary to her fledgling.
I say: “Food seems to be a substitute for a social life.”
“Count on Conrad to find a substitute more dangerous for him than the alternative.”
“The alternative?”
“Than promiscuous gay sex . . .”
It’s a surprising remark from Sally. Despite all her travels, her encyclopedic reading, and her running familiarity, as a doctor’s wife, with the medical hazards of intimate behavior, still the reticences of an upbringing in the shadow of the Christian Reformed Church run deep. To this day, she’s somebody who will flinch involuntarily at an unexpected profanity. In addition, she’s a great one for family discretion; the Admiraals “don’t go telling tales” about one another. Finally, she remains prone to a vestigial impulse (faintly ludicrous, given my age, and yet touching all the same) to shield her child from the wilder forms of adult behavior. She had made it quite apparent, over the years, that Conrad’s romantic forays are nothing the two of us ought to discuss.
So I feel I’ve been provided with a momentary opening, and I leap into it: “Tell me about all that—about your dealings with Conrad. When did you first guess the truth about him? Was it Wes who told you?”
“No, it wasn’t Wes. Was he in denial about his brother? Or didn’t know yet? I’m not sure, but it was Conrad who finally spoke up. I’d had my suspicions, but he didn’t actually come clean until long after I’d divorced Wes and married Gordon, and I don’t suppose that’s any accident.”
“Meaning . . .”
“Meaning, Conrad and I didn’t really become friends, become easy with each other, until after I divorced Wes.”
“Because . . .”
“Because he couldn’t really like me until I’d thrown Wes out? I don’t know, Luke. I can’t tell you how often, dealing with those brothers, I had to throw up my hands and say, The waters are too deep for me. You recently asked to see all my old Sultan photographs, and surely you’ve sensed it yourself: the extraordinary intensity of those two boys. They were simply more vividly there than other people. I don’t mean to say a single thing against your father”—and there’s a faint lurch in the conversation, a jarring recognition that in this particular conversation your father is an ambiguous phrase— “against Gordon, but that was something that took a little getting used to. Gordon didn’t wear his intensity on his sleeve. In many people’s eyes, I suppose he might have looked a little pallid beside those Sultan boys.
“And one of my first thoughts after I’d heard that Wes had passed away was, Now Conrad can go too. He’d won this particular race. Outlasted his brother. And the odd fact is, and I hope I’m wrong, but the odd fact is, I’ll probably turn out to be right: I can’t imagine Conrad will outlast Wes by all that long. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they both died at exactly the same age: sixty-two.”
“Which gives Conrad only a year to go.”
Sally’s gaze holds steady, though she blinks rapidly. “I suppose it does.”
I wind the conversation back one notch. “But eventually Conrad did level with you? About his social life?”
“Oh I don’t know if he ever leveled,” Sally says. She glances round the brasserie. She wants another coffee. “If intensity was the primary trait of those Sultan brothers, deviousness wasn’t far behind. Conrad likes to play games, and as the years went by, and he lost that aloofness of his youth, he volunteered all sorts of admissions. He became a great one for shocking non sequiturs. But I gather there was a time when he was very promiscuous. He certainly never had the knack of settling down with one person, I’m not sure why.”
“Maybe because he’s absolutely and utterly impossible?”
“That might have something to do with it. In any case, it’s regrettable now, when he so much needs looking after, there’s nobody to take care of him.”
“But he talks to you about his illness? He always shuts the door in my face
. . .”
“Well he does talk to me about it, albeit in his typically mordant and combative way. I suppose he likes to complain to me. This has something to do, I gather, with his notion that I—alone on the planet—lead some sort of charmed life. I can just see and hear him.” Sally narrows her eyes, in impersonation of Conrad’s hooded grin, and in a gruff, lowered voice declares, ‘Has cancer struck her yet? Oh no, not her, not our Sally, despite all those cigarettes . . .”
Oh, but she has Conrad down! In this brasserie in the south of France, she has placed him before me in all his vast, exasperated merriment. I say to her, “I think he scares people off.”
“He’s had a hard time. He’d probably deny it now, but he had a very rough coming out. I don’t mean to play amateur sleuth, it’s presumptuous of me to talk about it, who am I to sit here sipping a fancy coffee in Mare aux Cerfs and making pronouncements about my ailing ex-brother-in-law in Miami?—but I’ve often thought that’s the reason Conrad has no interest in anything you might call cultural life. Long ago, back in our Restoration days, when he didn’t know anything, when none of us knew anything, and he was in a state of absolute denial, I think he came to the conclusion that cultural life was the province of women and homosexuals. Poetry, painting, classical music—it all belonged to the homosexuals. As such, it had nothing to do with Conrad Sultan, who cared only about running track and wrestling and throwing a football. And when it came time to find a profession, he wasn’t going to be any hairdresser or dancer or interior decorator—God knows, he was going to be an accountant. And the rather sad and amazing truth is, I don’t think he’s ever conquered those initial prejudices. Am I making sense to you?”
A Few Corrections Page 17