A Few Corrections
Page 25
“Anyway I keep thinking of the two of us in Toledo Heights Park, and one evening, as I’ve mentioned to you, he actually asked if I was a virgin. What in the world did he think? I was Sally-the-nose-in-her-book, I was Sally Admiraal the good daughter of the Christian Reformed Church, I’d been kissed by at most half a dozen boys, all of them notably fumbling and shy, and here was Wes doing something more intimate, in a way, than proposing marriage to me.
“And I’ve just been feeling, especially these past few months, it began really to hit me around Thanksgiving, Luke (which is interesting because of course there’s no such holiday in France), that an entire world is ending, and it’s absolutely going to break my heart when Conrad passes away.
“Here’s somebody who has spent the last forty years sniping at me. Here’s somebody with whom I’ve spent the last forty years pretending that sniping wasn’t sniping—but do you want to hear me say something I shouldn’t say? I think Conrad’s in a sense in love with me. Not passionately, not sexually—I’m not yet quite such a dotty old lady as that. But spirit to spirit, Luke. It doesn’t make sense? Well, who said love ought to make sense? He always wanted not just my approval but something more—maybe he’s always wanted me to reaffirm what crazy erratic Dora used to make plain on her more lucid days: that he was the more lovable, or more worthy, of the two Sultan brothers. Is that a terrible thing to say? I think he needs me . . .
“Or perhaps I should point out that in some way (I’m sure you won’t misconstrue this) I’ve been in love with him, in love with the good-looking but, from a woman’s point of view, always safely unreachable of those wild Sultan boys. And he was so handsome! Do you see what I’m expressing so inadequately? That it’s hard not to love the one without loving the other—the two of them were so close, in their funny, fiercely competitive way. And now Conrad’s my last remaining link, he’s my tie to a vanishing world, and when he goes, that girl in Toledo Heights Park, stuttering with shock to be asked whether she’s a virgin, will be further away than ever.” She reaches across for another cookie, catches my eye, and mumbles, a little sheepishly, “All that weight I lost in France? I can feel it coming right back on.”
“It’s the holidays. We all overeat.”
“And I didn’t finish Proust,” she confesses. “I got bogged down.”
“You’ve been reading other things. Closer to home. Calvinism and the history of the Dutch immigrants in Michigan . . .”
“With Monsieur Proust, I got three volumes in and decided I wasn’t doing him justice. So I started over. That was the mistake,” she adds mournfully.
“I do understand what you’re saying, though, about a vanishing world. Conrad, he’s the last link.” And then I recall another: “Of course there’s Adelle . . .”
And between us, in another quick exchange of looks over the dining room table, there’s a shared quivering acknowledgment of shame. We’ve done it too: We’ve overlooked Adelle. Oh, the world itself has conspired to overlook Adelle, and even the theoretically impartial eye of the camera lens does it all the time—how else to explain why, in photograph after photograph, Adelle emerges as a smudged, shadowy presence?
Poor Adelle . . . For no good reason that anyone can possibly see, when she was born Life declared, This will be an utterly lusterless child. And when it was time for her to wed, Life declared, Her mate will be a man whose afternoons are spent dozing before a screen on which tiny muddy uniformed men pile on top of each other in pursuit of a muddy ball. So mine is a protest against Life itself when I insist, “But it’s not as though Wes will have completely vanished. After all, he left various children. Including a son sitting right here. And including a daughter who looks uncannily like him.”
“I’ve had a couple of letters from her . . .”
“From Jessie?”
“Jessie? From Tiffany.”
“Good Lord, what did she say?”
“They’re in the den.”
“Can I see?”
“Well—of course. But there’s something you might want to look at first . . .”
I follow Sally into the den. When she tries the lamp beside the big oak secretary, the bulb blows. There’s an explosive blue-white flash, and a little ping, and then shadows once more. I turn on the dim lamp beside the TV, by whose pale glow Sally, after a minute’s searching, locates an envelope.
It’s a letter from someone I haven’t thought about in years, Agnes Callahan, a friend of my mother’s from Restoration days. Why is Sally showing me this? My Sherlock Holmesian surmise— an accurate one, it turns out—is that she is seeking to palliate various revelations still to come . . .
The letter from Mrs. Callahan strikes a tone that, my guess is, typifies the correspondence of widows with widows. The implicit message behind its bright, chatting updates is, We are carrying on. She first apologizes for not writing Sally sooner. She is living now in Mexican Way, Arizona, outside Phoenix. She talks at some length about the weather, the golfing opportunities “way out here,” the various professional successes of her children and her sons-in-law and daughters-in-law.
It’s not until page three that I reach what I suppose is the letter’s core and inspiration. Agnes Callahan is offering, in gingerly fashion, condolences on Wesley’s passing—not an easy burden, given that Wes was someone whose reputation in Restoration wasn’t the best and was someone, besides, whom Sally divorced some thirty years ago.
Mrs. Callahan reports that she last saw Wes three years before he died, at her daughter Lucy’s wedding. (Wes had been among the guests because Lucy had somehow befriended Tiffany.) As the night wore on, Wes danced with the bride, and then with the bride’s mother (Mrs. Callahan herself), and finally he approached the bride’s grandmother.
“Well, you remember, Sally, how badly Mother was ailing in her last years. The rheumatoid arthritis was really something awful (she finally had to have her hip replaced) and she suffered also from angina and emphysema. So when Wes approached her, I was very quick to refuse on Mother’s behalf. He was a little insistent, and I naturally went on refusing, until it became apparent that Mother actually very much wished to dance with Wesley. I’ll never forget it! She said to him, ‘Young man, I haven’t danced in more than twenty years.’ And Wes replied, ‘Well I’m honored that you’ve waited so long for me.’ And I’ll be darned, Sally, the next thing anybody knows, Wes had Mother up on the dance floor, spinning her slowly round and round. And I can’t tell you how many times Mother referred to that dance in the year before she died.”
“It’s a lovely anecdote,” I say, looking up from the letter.
“Isn’t it?” Sally’s eyes are shining.
“Always the gentleman.”
“Of course he was, but don’t you also think Wes’s reply, about being so honored, was quite clever?” Sally is clearly eager to ensure that Wes, who was rarely praised for his wit, receive his fair due in this regard as well.
“It was perfect,” I reply. A silence ensues. “You were going to show me Tiffany’s letters,” I say at last.
There’s a slight, reluctant hitch in Sally’s movements as she hands them over—which I begin to understand the moment I catch sight of the childish penmanship’s big balloonlike loops.
The first of the letters, dated November 3, reads as follows:
Dear Sally!
I hope this finds you happy and everything in FRANCE! We are all fine. Halloween has come and gone and you’ll never guess what Jessie went as, Wes. That’s right, she decided to trick or treat as her own father! I wish you could have seen her. I gave her some sideburns with an eyebrow pencil and I put some gray in her hair with talcum powder and in a suit and tie borrowed from a boy down the block. I’ll send photos as soon that they’re developed.
Sally, while I was going through Wes’s papers recently I found some evidence of something that surprised me very much. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seemed like it was the case you loaned Wes various sums over the years, which he didn’t tell me. (you know Wes)
Otherwise I would have thanked you before, long ago. Obviously.
Now this was a total surprise to me, and the money wasn’t any small sum from my point of view. Even if Wes didn’t invest the money too wisely, let me say I’m grateful to you. I think people that know me will all say I’m a grateful person. I just hope it isn’t too late to say THANK YOU.
Now with Wes gone and everything you may be feeling quite different now, but actually I’d be completely grateful if you thought it might still be appropriate to send another loan to Wes’s family. I’m just asking you to think about this. Even if he’s gone of course his kids are still here. You know I’ve always admired you more maybe than you know, and I wouldn’t be asking except that Dr. Cole (the dentist) predicted that Jessie’s teeth will come in crooked and I don’t see any way when I look into the future I can handle everything.
This past summer I met Luke (at last!), and I can see why Wes was always so proud of him and said he got your brain power. You must be proud too.
The kids put you every night in their prayers, and Wes too. Jess the other night said to me, Is Daddy’s hair combed the same way in Heaven.
Yours sincerely,
Tiffany
And the second, dated November 15:
Dear Sally,
I’m sure that France is the most elegant place on earth and I know that you are so happy there. I never studied French, but I did study Spanish back in high school: Buenas dias!
I wrote you a letter, I don’t know if you got it. Maybe you did, if you did you don’t have to worry about me now. I wanted to tell you what happened to me. You’re almost the first person to know it. I’m going to be married! (Again)
His name is Russell Bradway and both kids just love him! The first time she met him Jess said she planned to marry him, little did she know I would get there first! He’s an automobile salesman but very steady. (seven years at the same dealership) In my other letter I was worried about our financial situation but please ignore all that. (forget it) Everything will be fine again and wish me all the happiness in the world. I do for you.
Love,
Tiffany
Of course laughter’s an inadequate response at such a time, but what else is a person to do? I feel it leaking out of me—pure jets of mirth—in little snorts and giggles. More than anything I’ve encountered so far, Tiffany’s pair of letters lend a bouncy absurdity to this family quest I formally embarked on when I cleaned out my office desk at Gribben, six months ago, on a sweltering day in June. Days have gotten colder, and darker, since.
Is this where my father ended up? Did the man who in his twenties married Sally Admiraal wind up here? Is the voice in these letters that of the woman whose loss emotionally bankrupted Wesley Sultan? I think of Conrad proclaiming, Wes was simple, and for a moment Conrad’s right and everything’s clear as glass.
You do have to wonder: Did a white-haired Wes Sultan, one hard-pressed afternoon, lift his strained gaze to some vast Midwestern cumulus-cloud configuration that was new to him, that was new to the very heavens, and did he ask himself, frantically, How am I going to hold on to the woman?
Was Wes’s “tragedy” as ridiculous as that? Perhaps it was. Oh yes, life is like that . . . a contemplative voice inside me concurs, meaning, Life’s a bitch, meaning, Life’s a series of pitiful erosions, meaning, Life could be defined as that force in the universe that undertakes the systematic humiliation of all its Wesley Sultans.
In the sickly half-light of the den’s dim lamp, it seems only fitting to match embarrassing revelation with embarrassing revelation. So, passing the airmail envelopes back to Sally, I say to her, “I’ve got something to tell you I should probably have told you before. I chased down my half brother. Klara’s son. Wesley Giardina.”
“Oh Good Lord . . .” And Sally regards me warily, eagerly. “What is he doing?”
“Managing a health club.”
“And what did he say?”
“Very little, actually. He wrote me an obscene response. I gather there’s a certain amount of hostility to Wes even now . . .”
“He’s living—”
“In Pittsburgh.”
“And you got his address from Conrad?”
“Conrad? No, although probably I could have, he seems to have his hands in every pie. No, I guess I wanted to take a more complicated line. You know when I started all this—this whole business of looking into Wes and the truth behind his life—I had this notion that I was going to discover my father. Well maybe I have, to some degree, but what I really feel I’ve done is discovered an uncle and an aunt, Conrad and Adelle. And you, too. I mean I hope it’s all right for me to say this, but I feel that your life, too, has come clearer to me.” I add: “I go out in search of the dead and I find the living . . .”
My words are meant to be heartwarming, frankly, and I have every confidence that that’s how Sally will take them. Why, then, does she nod so blankly—or uneasily?
Then she says, “And there’s something I haven’t told you. Something I perhaps should have told you long ago. Only, I wasn’t sure how much you wanted to know. It’s only lately I’ve come to understand how really determined you are, Luke. This is a hard thing to discuss—it’s something that has tormented me over the years. Oh heavens, this is very, very difficult. Hold on.”
Sally goes out into the kitchen—she’s on a cigarette run. I take a seat on the couch. Is there another room in the world that has as much resonance for me as this den? This is the room Gordon loved best of all rooms in the world and these are the last walls he ever saw. It was here, too, a few months before his death, he uttered perhaps the most moving lines I’ve ever heard anybody utter. I was sitting beside him when he got a phone call from a friend at the hospital. His latest test results. He hung up, glanced over at me, his adopted son, and said, “Bad news, I’m afraid.” We looked at each other for a moment. Two generations, and not a drop of shared blood between us, but the naked exchange of glances was secure: it would hold over time. When Gordon spoke next, he stumbled over an inessential word but—as was clear from the proud, forthright look in his eyes—he showed himself steadfast in the clinch. He said: “It seems I’m ga-ga-ga-going to die.”
Sally returns and sets a pack of Salems and a lighter on the coffee table. She’s nervous. I’m nervous—and fearful. And excited, for what statement in the universe could be more exhilarating, when delivered by one of your parents, than There’s something I haven’t told you . . . ? As if all life’s essential mysteries might, even yet, be deciphered.
Sally has spoken sorrowfully of gaining weight, but in the flare of the lighter her face looks drawn and haggard and for a moment I’m conscious of the unfleshed skull beneath her skin. She inhales deeply, exhales a spectral cloud, and says: “Oh my. Well. Well, as you know, Conrad always kept a sort of eye on Wes over the years. And in many ways he was the only real source of information I had. You could say Conrad snooped around, and maybe there’s some truth to that, but he was also quite useful to Wes, who sometimes needed a counselor or an intermediary. You’ve heard all this, how Conrad was the one who smoothed things over with Klara Kuzmak, for example. But many, many years later, after I’d divorced Wes and married Gordon, I was given a pretty strong indication, Conrad was characteristically oblique but I think the import of what he was saying was hardly in doubt, I was given the impression—Oh dear Lord . . .”
Even by Sally’s standards, her delivery is growing roundabout. She pulls again, hard, upon her cigarette. “Well: I was given a pretty strong indication that the secret marriage between Wes and Klara was not quite officially terminated—or at least not quite officially terminated at the time when, I’m afraid, when Wes and I were married in the Restoration Christian Reformed Church. He somehow—well—honey, it seems Wes maybe somehow failed to actually follow it through. You see? You know how Wes had trouble following things through . . . Well, in this case your father maybe failed to follow it through . . . through to an official divorce.”
And Sally, exhaling a triumphant plume of smoke, cries, “But isn’t that like you, Luke! Bless you, child, isn’t that kind of you to think first of me! Don’t you see it has all sorts of other repercussions? Repercussions for you?”
“Of course it does,” I reply, and the sentence that follows— words as straightforward as hers have been elliptical—constitute the richest, most satisfying utterance that has issued from my throat in years: “It means I’m a bastard.”