“Miss Ruby can verify that this is the only time in family history I’ve been the first one here,” Charlie said. “I didn’t want you to think you were in the wrong place, Lindy. Blackwell Standard Time is—What would you say, Miss Ruby, about forty-five minutes behind?”
“Don’t be fresh,” she said.
Charlie gestured toward her. “This woman took care of me from the day I came home from the hospital, and honest to God, I’d lay down my life for her.”
“I’ll bet you would,” Miss Ruby said as she walked back into the house.
“She’s hilarious, right?” Charlie said. “The genuine article.” I was not sure I agreed, but immediately, with Miss Ruby having stepped away and an audience of only me, he settled down a little. Still, I could tell that he was geared up for the night ahead. And I couldn’t blame him—it was obvious that for the Blackwells, family reunions not only involved competitive sports but were a kind of competitive sport in themselves. Being around the Blackwells (these impressions returned again and again in the years to come) filled me with a jealous wonder at their clannish energy, their confidence, their sheer numbers, and also with a gratitude that I had grown up in a calm and quiet family. So many inside jokes for the Blackwells to keep track of, so many nicknames and references to long-ago incidents, so much one-upmanship: Surely I was not the only one who found it tiring.
Within the next half hour, they all appeared, either from inside the Alamo or traipsing over from the other cottages, many of them wet-haired, the men in seersucker suits or khaki pants and navy blazers, the women in sundresses, holding the hands of children—little girls in green or pink dresses with smocking across the chest, or hand-stitched balloons or apples, wearing Mary Janes on their feet; little boys in shortalls and white socks that folded down and white saddle shoes.
Drinks were distributed—most of the adults had old-fashioneds, while the children had Shirley Temples or Roy Rogers—and Miss Ruby carried around the crab dip and I met the family members I hadn’t met before. It quickly became clear that there was no conversation in which I was required to do much more than nod and laugh. “We’re all so curious about you,” said Nan, the wife of Charlie’s brother John, and then she proceeded not to ask me any questions as she and John and Charlie and I stood there for ten minutes. John and Charlie carried the conversation, focusing first on the current quality of fish in the lake and then moving on to whether the Brewers’ 1–0 victory over the Detroit Tigers the previous night could be attributed more to the Brewers playing well or the Tigers playing poorly. I didn’t mind this; I have always had a soft spot for people who talk a lot because I feel as if they’re doing the work for me. I don’t usually have a great deal to say—I almost envy people their heated opinions, their vehemence and certainty—and I am perfectly content to listen. There are a few topics of particular interest to me (when another person has just read the same book I have, I enjoy comparing reactions), but I can’t bear pretending to have an opinion when I don’t. The few times I have pretended in this way have left me with a sour sort of hollowness, a niggling regret.
I subsequently found myself in a conversation with Uncle Trip, also loquacious, who explained that he divided his time—for reasons of business or pleasure, I could not discern—among Milwaukee, Key West, and Toronto. This seemed to me at the time to be the oddest triangle imaginable, but really, for the Blackwells’ friends, it proved not to be particularly unusual at all. Milwaukee and Sun Valley, Milwaukee and the Adirondacks, Minneapolis and Cheyenne and Phoenix, Chicago and San Francisco. They sold textiles, or mined ore, or owned a gallery in Santa Fe, or they were consultants—this was before consulting was as common as it is today—or they had just taken a cruise around the Gulf of Alaska, and it had, they reported, been marvelous.
As for the employ of Charlie’s brothers, Ed, the oldest, was the congressman; Charlie’s second oldest brother, John, was CEO of Blackwell Meats (on the dock that afternoon, Charlie had introduced John as “the sausage king’s sausage king”); and Arthur, who was two years older than Charlie, worked for the family company as a lawyer. None of their wives held jobs.
The porch was crowded, and I was discussing Wisconsin’s public school superintendent with John, which is to say that John was talking about the time Superintendent Ruka, whom he called Herb, had birdied a long par 4 at the Maronee Country Club, when Liza and Margaret, John’s two daughters, scampered between us and disappeared again into the thicket of adult bodies. The younger one, Margaret, returned and tapped my forearm. She was looking up at me with an expression of nervousness, excitement, and secrecy that made me almost certain she had been dispatched by her older sister. “Are you Uncle Chas’s girlfriend?”
“Margaret, what do we say when we interrupt a conversation?” John chided.
“Excuse me,” Margaret said. “Excuse me, but are you Uncle Chas’s girlfriend?”
“I am,” I said.
“Do you wear perfume?”
I laughed. “Sometimes.”
“Do you know how to do cat’s cradle?”
“I do,” I said. “Do you know how to do cat’s cradle?”
“It’s Liza’s string, but she said if you play, I can, too.”
I looked at John. “I believe I’ve been summoned.” John smiled as if embarrassed (I can’t imagine he really was, but all the Blackwells understood how endearing a bit of self-deprecation can be—and the more privileged the source, of course, the more endearing the self-deprecation). “You certainly don’t have to,” he said, then, to Margaret, “What do you say to Miss Lindgren?”
“Thank you, Miss Lindgren,” Margaret said as she took my hand and guided me out the screen door and onto the porch steps, where Liza awaited us. A few feet away, their boy cousins were dueling with skinny sticks.
We were on our third iteration of a figure Liza called crab’s mouth when the sound of tinkling glass silenced the porch. On my watch, I saw that it was seven-forty. Had the children eaten yet? If not, they were behaving remarkably well. “If you’ll permit a doddering old man to say a few words,” Harold Blackwell said, and there were hoots and whoops of support; Arthur brought his fingers to his mouth and whistled. Charlie was just inside the screen door, and he poked it open and motioned for me to come up the steps. When I did, slipping in next to him, he took my hand and whispered, “Everything okay?” I nodded.
“What a tremendous pleasure for Priscilla and me to have you all here.” Harold Blackwell looked around the porch. “And how blessed we are as a family.” Although I was still prepared for his words to sound at least a little fake and canned, I was again struck by how kind and genuine he seemed. “Looking at the group assembled here, I can’t tell you how proud it makes me,” he said, and I thought he might cry. (I tried to imagine him as a presidential candidate uttering the phrase unwashed and uneducated, and it was difficult; already that notion of him was elusive, replaced by this man just a few feet away, his face lined, his hair brown like Charlie’s but thin and combed back, the vulnerability of his scalp.) He did not cry. Instead, smiling, he said, “We’re so very pleased to meet Alice. A special welcome to you, my dear.”
“Hear, hear,” Charlie said, and rattled the ice in his cup—he’d been drinking whiskey.
John called out, “Alice, think you can tame the Blackwell bronco?”
“She hasn’t been knocked off yet,” Charlie said.
“Was that knocked off or knocked up?” someone yelled—it seemed like a comment Arthur would make, but it could even have come from Uncle Trip.
“Settle down, fellas,” Harold said. “My point is simply that I hope someday all of you will have the opportunity to look out at three generations and feel the love and pride that are in my heart tonight. May God forever bless and protect the Blackwell family, and may the light of His spirit shine through all of us.” Here, he held up his glass, and everyone voiced assent; a few people said, “Amen.” Conversations had just begun to resume when Arthur loudly cleared his throat, the
n actually climbed atop a chair. “This seems as good a time as any,” he said. “When I heard Chasbo was bringing home a new girl, I wanted to do something in her honor. So I wrote a poem—” At this, the porch erupted into raucous cheers, including from Charlie. Arthur pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, looked at it, then refolded it. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got it memorized.”
“Watch out, Shakespeare!” Charlie called.
“All right.” Arthur swallowed and nodded once. “Wait, it’s a limerick—did I mention that?”
“Just say the friggin’ poem,” John yelled.
Arthur looked directly at me and smiled.
“ ‘Nymphomaniacal Alice
Used a dynamite stick as a phallus
They found her vagina
in North Carolina
And bits of her tits down in Dallas.’ ”
In the ensuing silence, I could hear the lilt of the tiny waves hitting the shore below us, and one of the little boys in the grass out front said, “But it’s mine.” And then on the porch there was a delighted sort of roaring, and I quickly realized, though I had trouble believing it, that the roar had come from Mrs. Blackwell. Soon everyone else joined in, guffawing and applauding. I was so shocked that I could have cried—they’d have been tears of astonishment, not of sadness or hurt—but I knew that it was very important not to. I kept my head up, smiling in a glazed kind of way. I didn’t look at Charlie because I was afraid I’d see a gleeful expression. I wondered, had the children heard? Had Miss Ruby?
“Again!” Mrs. Blackwell cried. “Encore!”
And in case anyone had missed a word, Arthur began, “ ‘Nymphomaniacal Alice . . . ’ ”
When he’d finished, Mrs. Blackwell, still smiling joyfully, said, “I defy anyone who says I don’t have the cleverest sons in Christendom. Arty, you’ve outdone yourself.”
“Far be it from me to offer praise to one of my younger brothers,” Ed said, “but that was masterful.” (And here Ed was supposed to be the uptight one.)
Uncle Trip nudged me. “It’s not every day you get a poem written in your honor, is it?”
I gave a spluttery fake laugh that was the best I could manage.
Charlie and I were still standing side by side, not looking at each other, but I was pretty sure he was grinning while speaking through clenched teeth when he said, “You’re horrified, right?”
“Arthur didn’t write that.” I was barely moving my lips, either. “I first heard it from a boy named Roy Ziemniak in 1956.”
Charlie chuckled. “Beg, borrow, or steal,” he said. “That’s Arthur.” Then he said, “You’re doing well. I know this isn’t easy.” He turned to me, and we looked at each other straight on, and his expression wasn’t gleeful; it was tentative. His face in that moment was very familiar to me; perhaps this was in contrast to everyone else I’d just met, but I was surprised by the familiarity. Charlie’s brown eyes and the crinkles at their corners, his bristly wavy light brown hair, his light pink lips, dry right now, which I had spent a good deal of the last seven weeks pressing my own lips against—his features were comforting. It was much harder not to touch him than it would have been to touch him, to set my palm against his cheek or neck, to lean in and kiss him, to wrap my arms around his body and be hugged back. It was comforting also to know that eventually—if not tonight, then soon, and for a long time to come—I’d again be alone with him and we could talk about everyone else or not even talk but just be together in the aftermath of interacting with these other people. I felt so lucky, it seemed practically a miracle, that of everybody on the porch, he was the person I was paired off with, he was my counterpart. Not Arthur, thank God, or John or Ed, but Charlie—Charlie was the one who was mine. Certainly he could be a joker, too, but I felt that he had a more sympathetic heart than his brothers, that he understood more about the world, about human behavior; Charlie’s joking seemed a decision rather than a reflex. (Of course I later wondered: When you are the object of a person’s affection, do you naturally credit him with a sympathetic heart and an understanding of the world? Perhaps your impression is right only insofar as it applies to you; in your presence, he is indeed possessed of these qualities for the very reason that you are the object of his affection. He is not observant so much as observant of you, not kind so much as kind toward you.)
As Charlie and I regarded each other, surrounded by the chatter and clinking of the Blackwell cocktail hour, it occurred to me that if I had visited Halcyon before he and I had gotten engaged, there was a good chance we would not have done so. In the contexts of our families, the differences between us loomed large. But in this moment it seemed a good thing that I hadn’t known what I was getting into; I was glad it was too late.
WE WALKED TO the clubhouse for dinner in a sloppy sort of caravan, and beyond a grove of pine trees, another compound appeared on our right, a grouping of houses whose sizes and layout were similar to those of the Blackwells. Apparently, Charlie’s family owned the northern-most plot of land; at the next large house, a throng of men, women, and children was emerging, led by a silver-haired octogenarian who dragged his right foot, leaned on a hooked cane of dark wood, and wore navy blue pants embroidered with little green turtles. “Harold, I won’t have you eating all the sweet-potato puffs,” he called in a plummy tone, and Harold Blackwell called back, “Wouldn’t dream of it, Rumpus!” Or at least this was what I thought Harold said, but I doubted my own ears until I ended up next to this same man in the clubhouse dining room. Four long tables extended north, south, east, and west from the center of the room—they were like a tremendous cross—and the tables were not divided by family, as I’d have imagined (I later realized they couldn’t have been, because there were four tables and five families), but rather, by the clucking, seemingly arbitrary instructions of the matriarchs. Mrs. Blackwell directed the grandchildren toward one table, her older sons and their wives to scattered points, and then she turned her attention to Charlie and me. “Chas, go sit by Mrs. deWolfe, because she’s dying to hear your theory about Jimmy Connors. Alice, you’re right here.” She pointed to the second-to-last place at one table. “I find it so tiresome when couples are seated side by side, don’t you?” I nodded, unable to remember the last place I’d been that had featured assigned seating. White linen covered the tables, and there were full place settings. The china and silverware all were nice enough, if far from new-looking, but the clubhouse as a whole shared the same worn quality I’d found in the Alamo—the curtains, of forest-green cotton, were faded, the hardwood floor was scratched, the chairs were of the not particularly comfortable wooden sort you might have found with a dormitory desk. A large vase of purple hydrangea sat at the intersection of the four tables, and over the mantel was a handsome oil painting of dark water: Lake Michigan, quite possibly.
When we’d all taken our seats—the men waited for the women, I observed, and the women first seated their children—the man next to me, the wearer of the turtle pants, extended his hand. “Rumpus Higginson,” he said.
“Alice Lindgren.” As we shook, I felt slightly proud of myself for not laughing, not even smiling or letting my lips twitch. (TWO weeks later, back in Madison, I picked up the Wisconsin State Journal to find a front-page article about the expansion of Wall Bank—a rival of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust, my father’s employer for over thirty years—and a small photo accompanied the article, a photo that was grainy and no larger than a postage stamp but still recognizable to me, of a man identified as Leslie J. Higginson; he was, apparently, the bank’s founder. This meant my father surely would have heard of him, though I doubted that my father had ever known he answered to Rumpus.)
We had a first course of vichyssoise served in shallow white bowls with a sprinkling of chives. Over the soup, Rumpus, or Mr. Higginson—really, I had little idea how to address anyone—said, “Have you spent much time in Door County, Allison?”
I did not correct him. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t made it here before, but it li
ves up to its reputation.”
“You couldn’t buy a better day.” Rumpus shook his head. “Absolutely gorgeous.”
On being assigned this seat, I had wondered if Mrs. Blackwell might be exiling me, but she had sat across the table and one over (to keep an eye on me? But no, I was being silly). She said then, “Rump, tell me it isn’t true about Cecily and Gordon. If they move to Los Angeles, we have no hope of seeing them again.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Rumpus protested. “A flight to California is nothing for an inveterate traveler like you, Priscilla.”
She shook her head. “The last time I was in Los Angeles, I said to myself, ‘Enough is enough.’ Terrible traffic, lousy food, and the staff at the Biltmore was appallingly incompetent. It claims to be a world-class city, but I find it quite provincial.” I know there are people who would not believe that a person from Wisconsin would dare to make such a remark; they are wrong. Mrs. Blackwell was saying, “I saw Cecily down in Sea Island last March, and I said, ‘Cecily, if the two of you even think of defecting to the West Coast, that’s the last you’ll hear from Harold and me.’ ”
“It’s really Gordon, though, isn’t it? I know he’s keen to cultivate relationships with Asian investors, which makes it a good deal more convenient. . . ”
The conversation proceeded in much this way as we moved on to the main course of broiled chicken. They discussed another couple named the Bancrofts who, I inferred, lived in Milwaukee, were renovating their kitchen, and had had the misfortune of hiring a feckless contractor; they discussed a couple named the LeGrands, whose son was in his second year of medical school at Dartmouth, though Mrs. Blackwell questioned whether he had “the goods”—she tapped her temple—to earn his degree (“His grades at UW were worse than Chas’s at Princeton!” she exclaimed); and finally, they discussed a Viennese cellist who had been playing with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for the last several months and staying with Emily and Will Higginson, who were Rumpus’s son and daughter-in-law. “The Italians say that houseguests are like fish.” Mrs. Blackwell smirked. “After three days, they start to smell.” (Of course I quickly calculated that if Charlie and I had arrived on a Friday and were leaving on a Monday, that was no more than three days, was it? Though only I was a guest; Charlie was family.)
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