The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  It wasn’t until Royal’s final weeks in the hospital that Golden and Beverly spent any real time together. Before that, he saw her at church and occasionally at seminary study, where they took lessons on theology and church history in preparation for being baptized. Once, when Royal was out of town on business, she stopped by Big House to ask Golden if he’d noticed anything strange about his father’s recent behavior. To Golden, this seemed like the oddest of questions. As far as he was concerned, all of his father’s behavior was strange, recent or otherwise.

  “He’s got this look all the time now,” she said, “and he’s started forgetting where he is sometimes.”

  Golden knew the look she was talking about; he’d noticed it his first day in Virgin, and simply assumed that the manic glow in his father’s eyes had everything to do with the transforming fire of the Holy Spirit. In fact, all of Royal’s strange behavior—the sweaty, all-night prayer sessions, the spontaneous bouts of hugging and neck-kissing, the obsessive underlining of scripture with red pencil until there wasn’t a single line of scripture not shaded in red—struck Golden as nothing more than the slightly overzealous eccentricities of a man who had come into the Truth a little late in life and was making up for lost time.

  There were a few things, now that Beverly had mentioned it, that couldn’t be easily connected to Royal’s recent conversion. He had begun wearing military-issue aviator shades day and night, chewed aspirin by the handful, often lost his balance while doing nothing more than standing at the kitchen counter buttering a slice of toast. When Golden asked Royal how he was feeling healthwise, Royal explained that if weren’t for the excruciating headaches, the jags of nausea, and the fact that the left half of his face had gone numb, he could honestly claim he’d never felt better in his life.

  Golden suggested, in his mild way, that Royal see a doctor.

  “God is my doctor,” Royal said, in all apparent seriousness, smiling the slight, unnerving smile of a saint. “And He tells me every day I’m doing just fine.”

  When Royal passed out during a church social, going headfirst into the refreshment table, upsetting the punch bowl and having a leg-shaking seizure that terrified the children, everyone decided he could probably use a second opinion.

  The tumor the doctors found in his brain was inoperable, as were the clusters of cancer that lined the walls of his lungs. Even through the pain, the delirium, the drug-induced cycle of diarrhea and constipation, he was Royal to the end. He wore his gray Stetson—the one with a medallion of uranium-rich pitchblende affixed to its headband—when the nurses weren’t around, and sported his aviator shades because he couldn’t take the light. When the young, ruddy-cheeked doctor—who Royal referred to as Little Doc Fauntleroy—suggested with some querulousness that wearing a lump of radioactive mineral on one’s head might not be safe, and that long-term radiation exposure might in fact have been a contributing cause of Royal’s cancer, Royal made a show of removing the hat and licking the hunk of pitchblende all over as if it were a piece of hard candy. Golden had seen his father make such a display many times, along with the parlor trick of passing a Geiger counter over his face so that it chattered and ticked like an irate dolphin, its needle pegging off the scale. This was how Royal demonstrated the wonder and harmlessness of radiation, which, he claimed, had never been proven to hurt a soul—except, of course, for a few hundred thousand Japs—bada-bing!—and was the only reliable means of keeping our great nation safe from the Reds and all the combined forces of Satan.

  From the soapbox of his hospital bed he told anyone who would listen he had spent years breathing uranium dust in his own goddamn mine, had overseen the processing of yellowcake in the mills, had witnessed some of the biggest tests firsthand, and had breathed in the bouquet of radioactive fallout, which didn’t smell much different, he claimed, than a rich woman’s farts. And you didn’t see anything wrong with him, did you? Shit, no! Look at him! Strong as a fucking ox! And then a childlike bewilderment would smooth out the sun-gouged lines of his face, a touch of doubt would dim those luminous eyes, and he would glance around, confused as to where he was, exactly, and where it was he was headed.

  Even when he was too weak to lift his head from the pillow, and hat-wearing had become a luxury left to the hearty and spry, to spite the doctors and all the other doubting Thomases, he made sure his Stetson was displayed prominently on the hat rack in the corner, where it stayed until the day he died.

  Together Golden and Beverly watched him go, inch by inch. From his bedside, they took turns reading to him from the Book of Mormon and Prospector’s Quarterly and, when he could no longer take solid foods, fed him ice chips to keep him hydrated and soothe the sores in his mouth. At some point, when he was nearly blind and had lost so much weight the depressions and bony knobs of his body were hard to distinguish from the twist of bedsheets, he finally came to accept that he would not be spared. In his lucid moments, which seemed to come more frequently the worse he got, he made Golden promise, over and over again, that he would take care of Beverly, that they would live the Principle together, that he would make her his first wife and secure for her a place in the Celestial Kingdom.

  Take care of her, boy, Royal would say, once or twice when Beverly was right there in the room with them, and she’ll take care of you.

  Golden, of course, never doubted this. In fact he had nothing but wary admiration for Beverly’s resourcefulness, her stoic calm in the face of so much pain. Her Uncle Victor, her guardian and only living relative, had died after a long illness only a little more than a year before and now her fiancé was being taken from her in a similarly brutal fashion, and did she once curse God or beat her breast at the unfairness of it all? No. She just kept feeding Royal his ice chips and quietly doing battle with the nurses over his morphine dosages.

  One bitter winter morning when Golden was on duty while Beverly was at her apartment sleeping off a long night-vigil, he found the will to bring up something that had been nagging him since Royal’s diagnosis. “What about Mama?”

  “Mama?” said his father.

  “Malke. Your wife.”

  For a moment Royal’s big, watery eyes went soft, as if he were remembering long-ago days bathed in golden light. He licked his lips. He said, “What about her?

  “What should I tell her?”

  This time, Royal didn’t take too long to think. “Tell her about this,” he said, with the slightest gesture of his head. “Tell her how I went. That ought to put her in a good mood for a while.”

  The rest of that morning and afternoon Golden spent watching his father suffer: wracking coughs and whole-body tremors and two watery bowel movements requiring a crack duo of cheerful orderlies to change the bedsheets out from under him while he wept and cursed as if under attack by ghouls. By nightfall Golden was heartsick, all but done in with boredom and dread, and, as always, Beverly showed up just in time, when he was certain he couldn’t take another minute.

  Go home, she told him, as she always did, squeezing his wrist in a way that brought a lump of gratitude to his throat, get yourself some sleep.

  No, there was simply no way he could have managed it without her. It might as well have been the motto of his existence, tattooed on the billboard of his forehead: COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT BEVERLY! Not only had she seen him through his father’s death and initiated their limited courtship and eventual marriage, she had helped him gain control of his father’s finances and assets while he took a bruising crash course in the construction business. She suffered four miscarriages before having her first success and then gave birth to ten healthy children in a row, losing one along the way, even as she managed her day-to-day household down to the color of the hand towels in the bathrooms, almost single-handedly raising their children even as she brought her husband along slowly on the finer points of duty and fatherhood, talking him through sibling spats and IRS audits and client lawsuits and the tricky inner workings of the church, all the while overseeing the expansion of
the greater empire, which involved arranging the courtships of and marriages to his three other wives as well as steering the whole hurly-burly crowd of them through privation and sickness and loss and every other conceivable sort of domestic weather, fair and foul.

  And what had he ever done for her? Besides offering himself as a figurehead, a convenient mannequin she could dress and pose and move about as she saw fit? Not much. Unlike some others, she had never expected anything from him, he knew this. She understood better than anyone that he was not so much his father’s son as a pale, off-brand imitation, a cheap replacement, a consolation prize who offered little in the way of consolation. Though she still occasionally pushed him to take the lead, to put more trust in his “patriarchal instincts,” she seemed to have accepted that he would always need her steadying hand, that she would always have to be there to prop him up when the hard winds began to blow.

  He was thinking about all this as he eased himself up from the porch steps and entered a queerly silent Old House. There were children inside, they were just being exceptionally careful not to make any noise: Nephi pretending to read a book, Louise and Sariah sandwiched between the couch and the wall, carrying on a cryptic conversation in sister-sign language, Em at the piano, staring at the sheet music like a mannequin in a music store window display.

  “Your mother?” Golden put his hand on Em’s shoulder and she whispered, hardly moving her lips, “Upstairs.”

  Beverly was seated on the cushioned stool at the side of the bureau. The late afternoon sun, partially blocked by a raft of clouds, filled the room with swirling motes. She was sitting straight-backed, as always, with her hands in her lap, looking shrunken, significantly smaller than the bigger-than-life woman who loomed in his imagination like a giantess. But mostly it was the look on her face that unnerved him. It was as if all the pins and clasps and fasteners that had been keeping her expression so securely in place for so many years had suddenly sprung loose, giving way to reveal an entirely different person, one who looked, despite the sharp cheekbones and wrinkles around the mouth, to be a lost and frightened girl.

  He had seen her like this only one other time: the day his father died, driving home from the hospital in his dusty Thunderbird, the hard morning glare on the windshield. She sat next to him, her eyes dry but her face cracked open as it was now, Royal’s last effects held tightly in her lap: his boots, his rings and wristwatch, his Stetson with its gaudy uranium brooch.

  As they came around the big bend in the river she told him to stop the car. He pulled over near the bridge, and she got out, picked her way down the rocky slope, and, with a wild-animal screech and a surprisingly athletic throwing motion, slung the hat Frisbee-style toward the river. At first Golden didn’t think it was going to make it, but the hat had stopped its end-over-end tumble and for a moment caught the air like a kite, spinning out into an elongated parabola and settling softly into the water, where it bobbed along shallow eddies between scrims of bank ice, listing to one side until the bowl filled with water and it sank from sight.

  By the time she made it back to the car she had already recomposed her features into that famously impervious countenance, the one she would maintain dutifully and without variation until, as far as he knew, right now.

  In their shadowed bedroom that smelled of stale sunshine, she looked up at him, eyes glimmering with an eerie vulnerability that made the bottom drop out of his stomach. She said, her voice airy and slight, “He’s gone?”

  Golden nodded. “He’s not coming back.”

  “He told you, didn’t he. About me.”

  Golden considered denying it—denial was his best and dearest friend these days—but this was a lie he knew he could not carry off just now; his own face, he was sure, had already revealed everything. “He told me, but Bev, listen to me, I don’t care. I’m sure he told you what I’ve been doing—what I’ve been building this whole time.”

  Beverly shook her head. At the moment, Golden and his petty indiscretions weren’t really registering with her. And while he should have felt some relief for this, as well as for the fact that Ted Leo had not revealed anything about Huila, what he was experiencing was a strange, lurching sense of vertigo. He had been relying for so long on Beverly as the only immediate source of stability in his life that seeing her like this—diminished and uncertain, ambushed by a past she thought she’d left forever—gave him the sense that there was nothing solid under his feet. Even in the midst of everything, he’d been operating, as he had for years, under a single, standing assumption: that if all else failed—and it probably would—Beverly would be there to save him. He would go to her and confess everything, prostrate himself before her and plead for mercy. Either she would go Old Testament on him, kick him out, banish him to someplace far away and unpleasant, or, as she had done any number of times before, she would swallow her anger and deep disappointment in him long enough to take care of everything. And then she would hold it over him for the rest of his living days.

  He tried to sit, realized there was in fact nothing underneath him, and at the last moment shifted his weight to the side so that his wide behind landed with a humpf on the corner of the bed.

  “Bev, don’t worry about it, please, it doesn’t matter, I myself, I’ve done some things—”

  In a thin, toneless voice that seemed to belong to another person, she told him she had worked in “that place” only a few months. Her Uncle Victor had been injured working construction under the table, and to buy groceries and pay off his medical bills she had, in her desperation, gone for the quick money.

  “Before that I’d always been a good girl,” she said. “Mass every Sunday, daily rosary, all of it, but I was stupid. I thought I could cheat God, get us out of debt and then make it all disappear with confession and a few Hail Marys. But it was the worst thing…” Here she trailed off, her gaze falling to the floor. “And your father was the one who got me out of there. After Uncle passed I had nowhere else to go.”

  “No, please, you don’t have to explain a thing,” he said, desperate not to hear any more. Certainly there was a part of him that wanted to hear it all, every detail, to make a list of each man she’d been with—Ted Leo included—so he could track the bastards down and smother them in their sleep. And no, the irony of such a feeling at this moment in his life was not entirely lost on him. But mostly he stopped her because he didn’t want to be responsible, didn’t want to pity or second-guess her, didn’t want the burden of her secrets and sins to be added to his own. It was selfish, of course it was, but then so were most all his thoughts and choices these days. Besides, he knew the rest of Beverly’s story, because it was his story too. His father, with his money and influence and irresistible gonzo charisma, had saved her. He had invited her out to Virgin, where she would be offered a great gift: the chance to walk away from her previous life forever, to toss aside her stained and tattered self as if it were nothing more than an old sock meant for the rag box, to be cleansed and redeemed, to be chosen as one of God’s special few.

  “You don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” he said, worrying a loose thread on the hand-stitched bedcover with his big fingers. Unable to resist the urge to make his own confession, to relieve the pressure on his conscience just a little, he added, “I’ve been doing some things, you know, that I’m not so proud of lately.”

  At this, she looked up at him. “You were building one, not working in one.” And he was heartened by the bit of steel that had come back into her voice. But it was only temporary. She coughed twice into her fist and seemed to go a shade paler. She whispered, “I’m sorry,” and he said, “No. I don’t care. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  She sighed. “It should.”

  “Then it does,” he said. “But I still love you.” It felt good to say this—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d made such a claim—eight, ten years ago, probably, before he knew any better. And it came to him that something peculiar was going on: I love you. What could have
possessed him, especially during these uncertain times, to utter such potentially destabilizing words to three of his wives in as many days?

  She did not respond, but seemed to relax a little, her shoulders dropping an inch or two. She would not look at him now. He noticed, as if for the first time, the mole under her left ear, the trace of down along the hinge of her jaw. She was the most familiar person in the world to him and therefore had always been that much harder to see.

  Slowly she began removing the hardware from her hair, clips and barrettes and chopsticks and pins, placing each implement carefully on the top of the bureau, her springy iron-gray locks loosening, then falling around her face. She said, “I think I need to lie down for a while,” and while Golden could not remember Beverly ever having taken a midafternoon siesta as long as he’d known her, he said, Yes, of course, I’ll take the children so you can have some quiet. Unsteadily she rose to her feet. He stood and offered his hand and then she did an amazing thing: she accepted it. She grasped his wrist and leaned in to him, letting her weight rest against his, and for just a moment, before she pushed away, it felt very much as though he were holding her up.

  37.

  IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE AND INCENDIARY DEVICES FOR THE GUERRILLA FIGHTER

  FROM THE BUS STOP HE HUFFED ALL THE WAY HOME, DID ALL HIS chores as fast as he could, and wandered into the kitchen swaying around like somebody with a bad case of cancerous malaria. He had to do a little sick-person moaning and bump into a chair for Aunt Beverly, who was standing at the sink coughing, to notice him. She asked him if he was all right and he licked his lips and said in a weak prisoner-of-war voice that he couldn’t hear her very well, that everything sounded far away. She touched his forehead, which was hot and sweaty because after chores he’d done like a hundred jumping jacks behind the chicken coop until it felt like he would faint or his arms would fly off his body into the weeds.