“It means, possibly, you were born, technically, out of wedlock, Luke.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t feel quite so jubilant. Poor earnest Sally’s all atremble, hunching over herself as though to conceal herself behind a cloud of smoke . . . Poor Sally’s just a little girl suddenly, quivering before something vaster even than Poppa and Momma: before God Himself, Whose glittering sword of justice sweeps like a comet through the icy black cosmos.
“Okay, sure, I see the point, okay”—I chatter on—“let’s call it out of wedlock. So what—hm? What possible difference could it make to anybody now?”
“Luke, I wasn’t brought up in the sort of household that countenanced illegitimate children . . .”
“Hell, you can’t be blamed for what you didn’t know. It’s Wes who’s responsible. He’s the one will have to argue it out with his Maker.”
“I somehow didn’t expect you to take it like this.”
“So how should I take it? Should I be horrified? Embarrassed? No, I think I like this latest bit of news. I do. It’s just what I wanted to hear. I’ve been searching for the crowning touch in Wes’s career—maybe now I’ve actually found it.”
“Over the years, I kept asking myself over and over, How in the world did all of this happen to me? I try to make sense out of it all.” And Sally is coming round. With the burden of her secret at last removed from her shoulders, feeling almost giddy with relief, she’s now doing what she does best: looking back over her days with a born storyteller’s eye and linking one event to another. She is weaving her life into a satisfying narrative whole, a rich tapes-tried sequence—a tapestry whose central character is modest little Sally Admiraal of Restoration, Michigan, improbably placed in the role of global wanderer. “All I wanted, all I expected, was to raise a family in my own hometown, Luke. Do you ever get the feeling the world’s a sort of movie with wonderful screenwriters but a terrible casting director? Why was I chosen to play this part? I never harbored a bohemian ambition in my life.”
“But who better than you, Sally? To play the footloose divorcée in the south of France whose divorced and unemployed son discovers he’s illegitimate?”
“That’s not the way I see myself, young man, and it’s certainly not the way I see you.”
“But I like to think I have unconventional origins. And I like to think that when I die, I’ll leave a tangle for the obituarist.”
“Well I like to think that certain information stays in the family. Including what you’ve learned here this afternoon. You must promise me, you must solemnly swear, not to breathe a word of this to anybody . . .”
And I offer my oath: “I solemnly swear,” I tell her. (And you’ll have to forgive me, Sally, but by now there’s no point in my denying that there isn’t a single ancestral grave I wouldn’t rifle, in my headlong pursuit of a few corrections. Does this sound ruthless? I suppose so, but let’s not forget that my quarry is elusive as the yeti, or Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster. For I’m out hunting nothing less than the truth about a liar, and who in my shoes wouldn’t trade the family Bible for a packet of squalid letters, a few compromising photographs? Sorry, Mom.)
The day’s last light is spent and the windowpanes give nothing back but a flat blackness. We’ve come to the end of the line. The New Year is so close, I can almost reach out and touch it. The future beckons. It’s right there, just behind the closed door of the den. In the next room lies another season—the return of spring, just a few months off, when daffodils, cut from Sally’s own backyard, will stand in the vase on the desk in the very den where Gordon died.
. . . Or perhaps behind the closed den door lies a different spring. The past beckons. It’s April Fools’ Day, 1952, and the sun is filling the wineglasses of the big elms on the streets of Stags Harbor on this day when Wesley Cross Sultan will outmaneuver Miss Henrietta Scoobles and land a job at Great Bay Shipping.
A silence has descended upon the room. Sally and I are at the turn of the year, where past, present, and future commingle and blur. And Wes is closer than you know—
But when Wes enters the room, it’s not from any expected door. Sally cries, “Oh but you didn’t see the photograph! Look in the envelope!”
“Mm?”
In the second of the two airmail envelopes I find it. A snapshot. It’s Wes—or the closest approximation remaining on the planet today. It’s six-year-old Jessie, in her Halloween costume. Kids always love dressing up as ghosts, but what an exceptional, dear, lively, queer, incomparable little ghoul the girl-child makes! She’s wearing a man’s miniature gray suit, and a red tie, and Tiffany has done a marvelous job with the girl’s hair—transforming a pixie cut into a big gray glorious crowning pompadour. Here’s the man who got old Mrs. Callahan up on the dance floor, artificial hip and all, that arthritic grandmother who had waited for him on the sidelines, watching the dancers turn, for twenty years. And Jessie has instinctively reproduced not just the quizzical tilt of the head but also my father’s beseeching and hopeful gaze . . .
It’s night and the room is ankle-deep in shadows. Oh, the den is awash with ghosts: the ghost of Gordon, who built this house and lived his life in it and died here in this room, and of white-haired Wes of course, and of glowing-haired Klara Kuzmak, whom I never met, and, further in the shadows, of Henry and Kathy Admiraal, who watched their only daughter drive off with a devilishly handsome salesman in a red convertible, and of Dora Sultan, who today endures only in a few curled and cracking photographs but who may once have housed in her belly the first unthinkable stirrings of a daughter conceived in adultery. If they have been importunate (as ghosts will be), they have also been (as ghosts must be) patient. Their time has come: the turn of the year: We’ve reached one of those borderless moments when the departed are given the run of the house . . .
A ghostly mother says, “I could heat up some more tea,” and her ghostly son replies, “I’m okay.”
“Can I get you anything else?” one ghost says.
And the other ghost answers, “I think I’ve got everything I need.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Wesley Cross Sultan, 62, of 2135 N. Westhampton, Restoration, and the Commodore Hotel in Stags Harbor, and 27 Arrow Road, Gastaw, died of cardiac failure in the Silk and Satin Saloon in Stags Harbor. His entire professional career was spent at Great Bay Shipping. He worked there for 42 years—not long enough, apparently, to inspire any reciprocal feelings of loyalty or obligation among Company management, who effectively fired Wes two years before his death.
He worked chiefly in sales, mostly out of the Company’s Stags Harbor office. For a six-year period in the seventies, he worked in Kalamazoo, and for a five-year period in the eighties, in Cincinnati.
Despite his long and stable career, Wesley might reasonably have been described as a man without a compass. Or perhaps as a restless soul who never went much of anywhere. Although he retained his good looks to the end of his life, evidently he felt too old, on leaving the Company at the age of fifty-nine, to seek out salaried employment elsewhere. He set off on his own, embarking on a number of speculative, poorly researched investments. These predictably came to nothing. Wes was probably handicapped by knowing no other employer than Great Bay Shipping, a notoriously ill-run organization. (Personnel records would indicate, erroneously, that he joined the Company at the minimum age of eighteen; in truth, Wes at the age of seventeen altered his birth certificate in order to render himself prematurely employable.)
Distraught and disoriented at the loss of his job, and eager to conceal from friends and family his feelings of humiliation and betrayal and heartbreak, Wes grandly announced that he was retiring in order to devote himself to various community and commercial organizations: the Rotarians, the Restoration Chamber of Commerce, the Stags Harbor Betterment Society, and the Thumb of Michigan Prosperity Council. It seems fair to say, however, that his ties to these organizations were lukewarm at best.
The deceased’s affiliation with the Restoration Episcopal Church
was perhaps a different matter. Cynics might be quick to declare it no accident that he joined the community’s wealthiest congregation; a good argument could be made that this decision, too, was business-inspired. Yet there can be no question that Wesley Sultan, with his fine voice—a thin but clear tenor—loved singing in the choir. And the church’s sumptuosity may have held natural appeal for a man who was unfailingly dapper, even a bit of a dandy.
So where did Wesley stand with God? If that’s a line of inquiry ultimately beyond the charge of any obituarist, nevertheless a strong case could be made that the deceased was a person of cryptic but intense private yearnings. In the last years of his life he became an increasingly regular churchgoer, attending services even when his job took him on the road. It’s certainly possible that Wesley’s religious fire was stoked by internal intimations of mortality; he may well have silently recorded various early warning signals of the heart disease that killed him.
He was born in Restoration and attended Restoration Central High School, although he failed to obtain his diploma. He dropped out a few months before graduation to begin working at Great Bay Shipping. His formal education ended, then, at the age of seventeen. Informally, there was little additional schooling; Wes’s reading was largely confined to the Restoration Oracle and the Detroit Free Press.
The deceased was heir to a distinguished local family. His paternal grandfather, Hubert Sultan, was the mayor of Restoration for two terms, from 1908 until 1912, when his bid for reelection foundered amid accusations of financial irregularities, including graft and embezzlement. (Although Mayor Sultan was never proven guilty of anything more venal than a lack of discernment in his appointees, it must be noted that financial irregularities are a persistent Sultan family theme.) Wes’s father, Chester Sultan, ran Sultan Furniture, Restoration’s leading home-furnishings supplier, until the business collapsed in 1935. He drowned in Lake Huron in 1942, in an accident involving alcohol. (Problems with alcohol, too, are a Sultan motif.) His death may conceivably have been, but probably was not, an act of suicide. Wes and his younger siblings, Conrad and Adelle, were reared mostly by their mother, Dora Sultan, whose mental health was apparently undermined by the sudden collapse of the family fortune. She turned agoraphobic in her old age, and for most of her life may well have been an undiagnosed manic-depressive.
And Wes’s self-image? He appears to have regarded himself as the balked scion of an illustrious midwestern family—a family whose glory days, it seems fair to say, he failed to reinvigorate. When viewed at some distance from the small town of his origins, the “tragedy” of Wesley Sultan naturally assumes a diminished and provincial flavor, although it could well be argued that the contours of his life speak volumes about a country hurtling forward so rapidly that its values and mores, its jokes and idioms, its graces and ambitions expire even before the generation that begot them. Wesley Cross Sultan’s tale might be viewed as that of a man who slowly perceived that his charm had grown quaint, that he was someone whom the world had outrun. (Or so it might be interpreted by a 36-year-old man of the next generation, who is to be envisioned revising Wes’s obituary in a little bar in Miami, La Rosa Rosa, alone, working with his head down, taking comfort in the rumble of Spanish voices around him. He’s a 36-year-old man prepared to swear that— in the light of life’s overriding darkness—the loss of anybody who once, in his own local corner of the cosmos, threw off something of a glow is no small-time tragedy. Prepared, further, to swear, with the runaway lyricism of someone sipping his third rum-and-Coke, that some mystical equivalence obtains between all extinguishings of the light—be it the flare and fade of a supernova or, on some stump by a Michigan riverbed, a swallowed firefly, glimmering for an instant in a frog’s translucent gullet . . .)
Wes’s marital history was extremely complicated and may never be wholly untangled. He was married first to Klara Kuzmak, born in Cracow, Poland. Wes had one child with Klara, a son named Wesley, currently residing in Pittsburgh under the name Wesley Giardina. Klara died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1977.
If, as the scanty evidence suggests, Wes’s marriage to Klara was never formally terminated, then his subsequent “marriage” to Sally Admiraal, also born in Restoration, was on his part an act of bigamy. They were divorced, or “divorced,” in 1964. Wes later married Tiffany Fitchett, of Cincinnati, Ohio, from whom he was estranged at the time of his death and by whom he fathered twin daughters, Winnie and Jessica. There is some evidence that he may have fathered other, unacknowledged children.
At the time of his death, Wes was survived as well by a brother, Conrad, of Miami, Florida, and a half-sister, Adelle De Vries, of Pheasant Ridge, Michigan. And also by a son, Luke Planter; formerly of the New York investment firm of Gribben Brothers; now a novelist.
BRAD LEITHAUSER
A Few Corrections
Brad Leithauser was born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is the author of four previous novels— Equal Distance, Hence, Seaward, and The Friends of Freeland—four volumes of poetry, and a book of essays. Among the many awards and honors he has received are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill grant, and a MacArthur Fellowship. An Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, he lives with his wife and two daughters, Emily and Hilary, in Amherst, Massachusetts.
ALSO BY BRAD LEITHAUSER
Novels
The Friends of Freeland 1997
Seaward 1993
Hence 1989
Equal Distance 1985
Poems
The Odd Last Thing She Did 1998
The Mail from Anywhere 1990
Cats of the Temple 1986
Hundreds of Fireflies 1982
Essays
Penchants and Places 1995
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2002
Copyright © 2001 by Brad Leithauser
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are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Leithauser, Brad.
A few corrections: a novel / by Brad Leithauser
p. cm.
1. Businessmen—Fiction. 2. Middle West—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.E4623 F49 2001
813’.54—dc21
00-062010
Author photograph © Michael Malyszko
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