by Dave Balcom
I wandered away and actually bumped into Betty Ralph’s wheel chair a few seconds later.
“I beg your pardon,” I said into the shadow before I recognized her, “Mrs. Ralph! I’m so sorry.”
“Think nothing of it, Mr. Stanton; could you help me extricate myself from this crowd?”
“Certainly,” I said as I took a position behind her and grabbed the chair. “I’m going to pull you backwards until I have enough room to turn us around, okay?”
“Have at it,” she said laughing. “I don’t navigate so well in a crowd.”
I pulled her out into the brighter-lit portion of the room. She was holding an empty glass. I grabbed a chair from a nearby table and sat to be eye level with her. “Can I fetch you another drink?”
“No, thanks; I’ll wait until dinner.” She was looking around with a peaceful smile on her face. “This has to be terribly boring for you, but it’s a real treat for me to see so many people I used to see in our store, at church and at school events. I never went to a class reunion of my own. I don’t know why, but even then Detroit’s schools were so huge. There were more than a thousand students in my graduating class.
“But up here, these kids were close to each other and we knew all the parents and there’s just a closer kind of ... I don’t know how to express it, but this is sure fun.”
At that moment her husband joined us, “Betty, I lost track of you in there; mesmerized by that slide show...” As he came around to see my face he broke into a smile of recognition. “Jim!” He turned to his wife, “I shouldn’t have worried, there’s always a shining knight to come to your rescue.”
“We were just discussing that slide show,” I said.
“You watched it?”
“Some. Then I almost trampled on Mrs. Ralph here, and she was kind enough to ask me to help her out of there...”
“He bumped me, gently,” she said to her husband while a smile played around her mouth and eyes, “and you’re right, he was gallant in rescuing me from that crowd. I don’t do well in crowds.”
Ralph was looking at me, “When we first walked in there, there weren’t ten people watching; next thing I knew I wasn’t standing right next to Betty anymore and I couldn’t see her for all the people who had joined the crowd.”
“It’s a fascinating idea, showing all those slides; where’d they come from?”
“Angela Ritter. She has been asking, collecting and collating them for twenty years. The museum has more than a million photographs, slides and images in its archives. Every year the museum offers a “scholarship” to a student or former student to add the most recent shots into the show and delete older photos...”
Mrs. Ralph interjected, “They inherited the entire photo morgue of the newspaper when it went out of business.”
“Well, it sure has to be fun for you and the grads. I mean, look at you two. I saw photos of you back then, and Tony is the spitting image of Paul here, and your daughters captured all your beauty... that has be fun to watch.”
“You’re very kind,” Betty said as she reached out and patted my hand; I couldn’t remember having my hand patted like that since my mother, maybe.
“Hey, Jim; there you are,” Greg Blake loomed over us with a big smile on his face. Jan said you probably had had enough of looking at pictures of strangers, and I’d either find you at the bar or over here.”
I stood up, “Greg, this is Mr. and Mrs. Ralph; their son, Tony, is one of our keynote speakers tonight. Folks, this is Greg Blake, he and his wife, Fran, own the Skeegmog Inn, where Jan and I are staying this week.”
Paul Ralph stood up to shake Greg’s hand, and I saw something in his eyes I couldn’t match with the moment. “I’ve heard good things about your resort,” he said.
Greg beamed, “That’s always good to hear.”
“Have you been there long?” Mr. Ralph said as he sat back down.
Greg pulled another chair away from a table and sat down with him. I was watching Paul’s face and then I looked at Betty, and they both seemed to be at ease with the moment, but I still couldn’t put my finger on that brief moment when I introduced them.
“We came in ’86,” Greg said. “Fran graduated in ’76. I met her when she was working in the old Pontiac Hotel in Detroit. When her parents announced they were going to give up the resort, I sold my interest in our business down there, and we came up to continue the Willard line as owners of the resort. Fran’s the fourth generation.”
“You still happy with that choice?” Mrs. Ralph asked.
“Well, we have never had children, so it looks like Frannie is the end of the line, but for all that, we both love what we do. I keep track of the place; Frannie keeps track of the people. It’s been good, and it’s still good.”
At that moment the lights went up at the slide show, and a man in a dinner jacket was tapping the microphone at the head table.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” He paused and waited for the crowd to quiet. “I am told that dinner is ready, and, to paraphrase a bit, our chef for the evening said it would be most appropriate if all the guests were to go to their seats.”
A collective chuckle rippled through the crowd as everyone translated that back into something Annie might have really said.
“Or,” the emcee continued, “food’s hot; come and get it!”
That brought real laughter as everyone made their way to their table. “Talk to you later,” Greg said as he rose. “I have to find the bicentennial table.”
“Where are you sitting?” I asked the Ralphs.
“We were invited to sit at the head table in Tony’s place; he’s sitting with his classmates.”
“I’ll see you later, then.”
“Of course,” Paul said as he started pushing his wife towards the front of the room.
A Catholic priest gave a very brief prayer of thanks for the food and the company, and after four youngsters from the high school choir sang “America,” Annie’s army started serving the main course. “I chose chicken,” Jan whispered into my ear; “the other choice was steak, and even Annie can’t do a steak justice for this kind of meal.”
I smiled at her; she well knows my affinity for yard fowl – I can’t choose my favorite way to prepare it, I love ’em all.
We were seated with Angela Ritter on my left, Jan to my right, and a woman I didn’t know to Jan’s right. Across from us was Mary Franklin with a guy I didn’t know, but who looked vaguely familiar.
“Good evening, Mr. Stanton,” Mary said as they sat down. “this tall drink of water is Ron Forrester.”
“Oh, my god!” Jan actually giggled. “You both look great! Ron, how does a guy tan like that?”
“I spend about three hundred days a year on the water,” he said in one of the deepest baritone voices I’d ever heard.
I again made a snap decision to pretend I had no knowledge of either of these successful folks. “Commercial fisherman?” I asked.
“Nope, fisheries biologist for the state. If I’m on land it’s because I’m working on a river; otherwise I’m on Michigan, Huron or Superior. Salmonids are my area of specialization.” He said all of that with a smile and a self-deprecating air.
“Don’t let him fool you, folks,” Mary chided. “He’s world famous. I caught him speaking in L.A. a couple years ago on the topic of ‘How to overcome Whirling Disease in Hatchery Populations.’ It had me on the edge of my seat, you can believe me.”
Forrester was laughing freely at the joke, “And the next day I attended a fashion show where razor-shaped ladies were parading around in scanty garments made of cloth that must go for something on the order of a thousand bucks a yard,” he said with a smile at Mary.
Mary was nodding as if this was an old line between two old friends, “They don’t buy my stuff by the yard, do they Jan?”
Jan stood up, “This little ol’ thing? In some circles the price of this little charmer is called a ‘yard,’ but no, I didn’t buy it for the material.”
&n
bsp; “It looks especially wonderful on a woman who is shaped like a woman,” Forrester said with a tilt of his head in Jan’s direction.
“It sure does,” Mary said and she was actually blushing, I thought.
“Mary,” I said gently, “I thought you told me your designs were for young women who were trolling for husbands?”
She started smiling like someone who’s been caught, “I did tell you that; and I’m pretty sure that’s the mind set of many of my clients, but,” and here she simply held her hand out with palm up and fingers down as if introducing a model in Jan’s direction, “this is what a mature woman who’s young at heart and interested in keeping the man she has is wearing this year.”
Jan piped up, “Especially if she thinks there’s a chance she’ll be sitting across from the designer during dinner.”
That brought a round of applause from the entire table where everyone had been tuned into the conversation.
The rest of the night was full of introductions to people I can’t recall by people I didn’t know.
Tony Ralph was a proven orator and received a standing ovation as did Superintendent Baker whose recitation of the history of education in Stoney, Michigan was eloquent, funny, and left more than a few in the audience dabbing at their eyes when he was through.
It was, in all, a grand event.
By nine p.m. the crowd was thinning when I felt a tug on my sleeve, turned and found myself eye to eye with a breath-taking beauty I recognized immediately from a yearbook picture. I was struggling to dredge up a name, and she supplied it, “Angela Albertson Wizocki, Mr. Stanton.”
“Hello.” I’m not used to looking eye to eye with women while standing up, and I stepped back to see if she was standing on a box or something; that brought an even wider smile to her face.
“I am tall,” she said in a mocking tone.
“I am too; pity those who aren’t.”
That brought the smile to a full fledged grin. “I’m a big fan of your books. I have them all, and if I’d known you’d be here, I would have brought them all for you to sign.
“I don’t usually gush, Mr. Stanton; but I’ve really grown to love your work.”
“That’s very flattering.” I was looking around for Jan, and caught her eye; she did a double take and then started working her way to us. “Where are you living now?”
“Oh, I’m in Traverse City; been there forever. This is the first time I’ve been back to Stoney since we graduated. I read that it would be the last chance, and I thought ‘why not?’”
“Angela Albertson Wizocki,” Jan said as she sidled up to us. Now Jan’s in the five-foot, ten-inch range, but Angela towered over her. And while Jan is thin and curvy, Angela is just plain big and broad; probably weighing twice what Jan weighs.
“Jan, I hear I missed a recital at lunch today. I’m thankful that you still play and play well.”
“I’m happy to see you, Angie. I saw you had signed up at the last moment, and I wanted Jim to meet you – he’s heard so much about you.”
“Oh, I’m sure he has,” the tall woman said with an arched eyebrow, “I’m just a little surprised he would have heard it from you.”
“I gave him short bios on all my classmates, but, come on, Angie, you were pretty mysterious and cut a wide swath back in those days; a memorable wide swath.”
“You’re right I suppose. But the things I didn’t do that you all thought I did are what haunt me nightly. Ignoring people like you, Cora, and Tony Ralph who wanted to be my friends are chief among them.”
“You never did anything to me!” Jan said with surprise.
“Nope, I can be thankful for that, I guess, but I never did anything for you, either, and that’s my regret in each and every case. I was just too busy satisfying myself to think of how I might have enriched someone else’s journey.
“I came to that much later in my life, and that’s why I’m here tonight. I’m not going to miss a single chance to tell those of you whom I overlooked how sorry I am.”
Jan’s jaw had dropped, and tears were welling in her eyes. “You have nothing to apologize for to me; I’m just glad to see you again after all these years...”
The big woman put her arms around her and they hugged for more than a few seconds. Both needed to check their eye makeup when they parted. “Thanks for that, Jan.”
“I need the powder room,” Jan said, and grabbed Angela’s hand, “and so do you. We’ll be back in a minute, Jim.”
I was lost in thought about what I’d seen and heard when Fran Blake waved a hand before my eyes, “Earth to Jim...”
“What’s up?”
“We’re heading home.”
“No post-party?”
“No, Greg’s not feeling well. It’s not like him. He called a buddy, and he’s already in the car. I wanted to let Jan and some of the others know.”
“I’ll spread the word.”
“Thanks. See you tomorrow. You’re not leaving tomorrow are you?”
“No, Monday.”
“That’s what I thought. Have fun tonight.”
CHAPTER 25
Sunday morning was so still the trees didn’t drip out loud.
We’d gotten home well after 2 a.m. Jan had played and sung herself into a hoarse cough; I had nursed one drink after another up to a total of four, three past my standard dosage.
I looked at the kitchen clock as I put coffee makings together and found it was 10 a.m. Judy was patient, as usual, and eager, as is her nature. I let her out, and she bounced from one end of the little yard to the other before relieving herself. Then she was at the door, patient once again.
I treated her to a biscuit and let her roam the cottage, knowing I’d find her on the floor beneath Jan’s head when my bride finally awoke.
The coffee in my cup tasted good. I took a place on the little porch and wondered at the absolute stillness of the world I was part of. The lake was absolutely flawless, a mirror reflecting the sky and clouds. A ripple from a bug that had become breakfast worked its way across the lake in an unbroken echo of the fish’s rise.
I realized I was thinking about the previous night, and my thoughts were focused on Paul Ralph. I kept coming back to that moment when I introduced him to Greg Blake. That look.
It had flashed so quickly through Paul’s eyes that while I saw it, I couldn’t catalog it. That was plaguing me. What was that look?
I closed my eyes and listened; there was nothing. Not a breath of breeze, not one of the ubiquitous chain saws in the distance, not a single outboard motor droning off across the waveless lake. I sat there, listening like that, and I heard Jan rise out of bed and pad to the bathroom; I heard Judy licking at her feet.
I found my center and tasted my pulse on my tongue, assuring myself that I was as calm as I wanted or could expect. I listened, and then a thought blossomed out of my subconscious – a thought fully formed in complete sentences and all the more shocking for its simplicity: Fear.
That’s what I saw in Paul Ralph’s eyes in that instant when he saw Greg Blake in the flesh. Stark, morbid fear.
I put that moment into replay in my mind’s eye, and I marveled at the speed with which Ralph had hidden that reaction. I focused on Blake.
I remained as silent as my tai chi and this still morning would allow and I thought about what I’d seen there, in that instant; parsing it down to the millisecond. And, again, the thought came to me in fully developed form, nothing to doubt or question: Recognition!
I was literally shaking when I stood up to pace about the cottage, trying to put my thoughts into perspective and finding little to grab onto.
I forced myself to be calm, and I sat back in my chair. My blood pressure and pulse went back to normal by training, but my mind was racing with the “so what” questions. Who, what, when? I demanded control, but it kept slipping away. Fear? Recognition?
Fear of what or whom?
Recognition of what or whom?
I saw Paul Ralph fear Greg Blake
; I saw Greg Blake recognize Paul Ralph. I was sure of it, but, so what?
“Jim? Darling?”
I snapped out of my reverie and saw my beautiful wife, bundled in my robe, standing in front of me with a real look of concern on her face. “Hi?” I said weakly.
“Hi, yourself. What are you doing out here?”
“Thinking.”
“Bullshit, you’re out here shivering and daydreaming. I’ve never seen you in such a state.”
I shook my head as if I had water in my ear. “No, really; I was just out here drinking coffee and watching Judy...”
“Judy’s in her bed; your cup is empty and dried. Jim, it’s nearly noon. How long have you been out here? It’s freezing.”
I looked out at the lawn and saw Judy’s tracks through the hoar frost that coated the grass. I saw the lake steaming from the sudden drop in temperature overnight. I realized I was freezing.
“I guess it turned cold overnight.”
“Yeah,” she said with her usual sardonic smile in place, “October in Northern Michigan, who knew?”
“Let’s go in where it’s warm,” I suggested.
“Yes, let’s.”
She was putting new coffee together and I was sitting at the table. Judy was snoring from her bed.
“Something strange happened last night,” I started.
“I know,” she answered from the stove. “I played jazz for more than an hour for my classmates and they fell all over themselves admiring me... just thirty-five years too late for my self-assurance, but still strange no matter how you slice it.”
“That was the highlight of this trip so far, but that’s not what I was talking about.”
“Really? The highlight? Not yesterday morning? That was a Sports Center Top Play, I thought; really, THE highlight?
I put my hands on her arms, “You’re feeling pretty good about yourself, aren’t you?”
She pretended to self-inspect, to consider the question. “Yep! I do.”