American Wife (44 page)

“Isn’t Oshkosh where you’re from?” I said, and he said, “Good memory.”

Good memory?
I thought.
We dated for a year!

“You might be surprised to know I ended up in the education field, too,” he said. “I’m a high school history teacher.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. It seemed that he was waiting for me to provide a comparable update
—I’m still plugging away in the library—
and I found that I did not want to share with Simon that I no longer held a job. I realized I’d been wondering if he’d know whom I’d married, or at least know that it was one of the sons of the former governor, and I was glad he appeared to have no idea. How disapproving Simon Törnkvist would probably be, how pathetically bourgeois my life would seem to him. “We’ll let you two get back to the game,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

“Maybe our families can get together when we’re next down here,” he said, and I smiled, banking on the fact that he’d never be able to track me down.

“Absolutely.”

Back at our seats, Zeke Langenbacher was gone, and I said to Charlie, “You’ll never believe who Ella and I just ran into—Simon Törnkvist.”

“You mean Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme?” This was the nickname that Charlie had made up for Simon years earlier, based on my brief descriptions. The two of them had never met, but Charlie had somehow gotten the impression that Simon was a long-haired guitar-strumming antiwar protestor; really, this said less about Charlie’s idea of Simon than his idea of me. “He was with his son,” I said, and Ella said, “He made me spill my fries!”

“Not all of them, by the looks of it,” Charlie said, and reached out to take several. Indignantly, Ella hit his forearm.

“I thought old Parsley didn’t want kids,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that why you broke up?”

It was my turn to feel surprised, pleasantly so, by someone else’s ability to remember the past. “I guess people change,” I said. I was aware that perhaps I should take Kyle’s mere existence as an insult, and who knew whether Simon had other children? He probably did. But in fact, I felt an almost giddy gratitude that I was married to Charlie instead of Simon. How stiff and unaffectionate Simon had been when we were dating, how tedious, really, and I’d realized it only afterward; Charlie, even with his many flaws, was infinitely preferable. I reached over Ella to rub the back of Charlie’s neck. “What did Zeke Langenbacher have to say?”

Charlie shrugged. “Just shooting the breeze.”

The Brewers won 7–1, and we all were contentedly sun-saturated and tired driving home. As we pulled into the driveway, I glanced in the backseat. “Ladybug, I want you to pick up your toys by dinner-time.”

“In case you’re wondering where Barbie is, she’s buck-naked and spread-eagle on the floor in the den,” Charlie said. “Looks like she had a rough night.”

“Charlie.” I frowned at him.

“What does
spread-eagle
mean?” Ella asked.

“I’m just telling the truth,” Charlie said.

To Ella, I said, “It means spread out. Why don’t you put some clothes on her so she doesn’t get cold?”

The phone was ringing as we entered the house, and my first impulse was to let the machine get it, but then I decided to answer because I thought it might be Jadey wanting to go for a walk.

“Hello?” I said. There was no immediate reply, then I heard the sound of a person sniffling, a sniffle I recognized, and my mother said, “Oh, Alice, I hate to have to tell you, but Granny has passed away.”

I HAD NEVER
bought Ella black clothing before. In fact, I’d told her it wasn’t appropriate for little girls, a line she accusingly repeated back to me as I sat on a bench in the dressing room at Miss n’ Master, Maronee’s overpriced children’s clothing boutique, and she wriggled into a gauzy black dress with ruffled sleeves and a sash across the mid-section. She peered at herself in the mirror and said with unexpected pleasure, “I look like the girl from
The Addams Family.
For Granny’s funeral, will you do my hair in braids?”

“Try this one.” From a hanger, I removed a navy blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar. When Ella had pulled it over her head, she frowned at her reflection, and I said, “That’s adorable. Why don’t you like it?”

“I like the other one.”

It was four o’clock on Thursday, four days since I’d received the call from my mother, and the funeral would be at eleven the next morning. I sighed. “Fine, we’ll get the black one.”

“Can I wear it for Christmas?”

“Christmas is in seven months, sweetheart.”

“Can I wear it at Princeton?”

“We’ll discuss it later. Turn around and let me unzip you.”

At the cash register, Ella announced to the middle-aged woman ringing up the dress, “It’s for my great-grandmother’s funeral because she died of blood in her head.”

The woman looked startled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

IT WAS A
strange thing to be in Riley without my grandmother. In the past, I’d been there when she was in Chicago with Gladys Wycomb, or I’d arrived for a visit when she was napping, but those times I had felt the force of her even in her absence, and now she was nowhere at all. Or who was I to say, what did I really know about the mysteries of the afterlife, and maybe she was right next to me, watching as I turned around to greet the people sitting in the pews behind the front one at Calvary Lutheran Church. A constricting band of sadness, like a belt that was too tight, was ever-present, but I also felt the tug toward social pleasantries that always surprised me at funerals—how the focused, mournful moments were the exception, the moments when you truly thought of the person who had died instead of being dimly aware of yourself in a church, part of a crowd, reciting prayers or talking to others. Perhaps sixty people had shown up for the service, primarily our neighbors as well as Ernie LeClef, who was now manager of Riley’s branch of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust, and this turnout was higher than I’d expected, given that my grandmother had few close friends and had outlasted most of her peers and a fair number of people a generation younger, including, of course, my father.

The pastor was a man I hardly knew, Gordon Kluting, who opened the service by saying, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the source of all mercy and the God of all consolations.” After his greeting, we sang “Jesus, Lead Thou On,” then there was the Litany and the Twenty-third Psalm, my mother reading from the book of Revelation (she was largely inaudible), and then it was my turn to read from the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they will be comforted . . .
I was glad to have been assigned this reading instead of my mother’s, because of its tone of compassion rather than faith; after all these years, my faith remained decidedly shaky. That the world was miraculous, frequently in inexplicable ways, I would not argue. That these miracles had any relationship to the buildings we called churches, to the sequences of words we called prayers—that I was less sure of. Mostly, I found a place among believers, whether in Calvary Lutheran or at Christ the Redeemer, which was the Episcopal church we attended in Milwaukee, through isolated lines from the Bible, sometimes out of context. From the Letter of Paul to the Philippians, for example:
For I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content in it. I know how to be humbled, and I know also how to abound. In everything and in all things I have learned the secret both to be filled and to be hungry, both to abound and to be in need . . .
In simple ideas or graceful language, I felt a resonance that was absent when I took Communion or said most prayers. (The Nicene Creed, with its exclusionary, aggressive certainty, made me particularly uncomfortable, and sometimes, if I thought I could do so inconspicuously, I refrained from saying it; but if, for instance, it was Christmas Eve and I was in the pew next to Priscilla Blackwell, that simply wasn’t a stand worth taking.) I considered it important to raise Ella in the church, if for no other reason than that years in the future, should she wish to take solace in religion, she would have a foundation for doing so; she would not need to seek it out as a stranger. The irony, then, was that on most weekends, I was the one who made sure we attended Christ the Redeemer. Early on in our time in Milwaukee, Charlie had been enthusiastic, but I think that had been related more to establishing us as a married couple in the community than to his faith, which was of the default variety. In Charlie’s mind, of course there was a God; of course we ought to pray to Him, especially at Christmas and Easter and in times of unrest; and no, it was not wrong to impose on Him even with our smallest concerns (that was what, like a concierge at a fancy hotel, He was there for). In recent years, Charlie had become less diligent about going each Sunday to Christ the Redeemer, and sometimes Ella and I went without him; she attended Sunday school, which she loved because the teacher was a nineteen-year-old named Bonnie who had a prosthetic eye, and at the end of classes during which the children had behaved, she would remove it for them. Bonnie had lost the eye, Ella somberly informed me, when she was three and her older brother shot a rubber band at her, but Bonnie had long since forgiven her brother because, as Ella reminded me, quoting Jesus, “If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you.”

It was as I was concluding my reading of the Beatitudes that I looked out and caught sight of Harold Blackwell, sitting in the church’s second-to-last occupied row. This was when I first felt tears well in my eyes. Even Jadey had not come—I had told her she didn’t need to, and I’d had the sense she was relieved. Harold had made a special trip back to Wisconsin, I realized. And while my grandmother herself had been wary of Harold’s political leanings, I was very moved. When I returned to my seat in the first pew, sliding past Lars and my mother into the space between Ella and Charlie, Charlie squeezed my hand and whispered, “Nice job.”

After the homily, Pastor Kluting delivered a eulogy that I didn’t think captured my grandmother—among other things, he referred to her as a pillar of the Riley community—and following the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Prayer of Commendation, the final hymn we sang was “Lift High the Cross.” Again I became choked up. It wasn’t that anything in the song reflected my grandmother, but it was a song I had heard and sung since I was a child, and as the organ played and the church was filled, or partially filled, by the voices of people who knew my family, there reared up in me a terrible sadness. Oh, how different my life would have been had I not grown up in the same house with my grandmother, how much narrower and blander! She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant and contradictory place, and it had made me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions. And would I have married Charlie if not for my grandmother? Surely not, less because of her high opinion of him on their first meeting than because of the qualities they shared, the traits I valued in him because I’d valued them first in her: mischief and humor and irreverence, an implied intelligence rather than an asserted one. He stood beside me now, I could see his gray suit in my peripheral vision, and I thought, hadn’t my grandmother been right about everything else? From fashion to education to helping me end my mistaken pregnancy, when had she not looked out for me, what had she ever misguessed? And must not she have been right, therefore, about him, too?

Her casket was on wheels, and the pallbearers were men from the funeral director’s office. During the last verse of the song, they walked down the aisle first, then the pastor, then the family members, and I could tell that my mother was smiling at people hostess-style and also crying. In the car en route to the cemetery—we had not rented a limousine, even then, people in Riley didn’t do such things—Ella leaned into the front seat and tapped my shoulder; Charlie was driving, and I was sitting in the passenger seat. When I turned, Ella seemed earnest, as if she’d been giving the subject serious thought. She said, “I think Granny would like my dress.”

AT THE RECEPTION
afterward, which was at our house on Amity Lane, I had just set a dish of Jell-O salad on the dining room table when Charlie slipped up behind me and said, “You think you’ll want to linger here awhile or get on the road?” He was chewing the last of something—it appeared to be the cold bacon-cheese dip, served with potato chips, that I had only ever seen at funerals—and he swallowed and wiped his hands on a cocktail napkin.

“Are you in a hurry?” I asked.

“I don’t want to make you feel pressed, so if you’re trying to tie up loose ends here, maybe Ella and I should catch a ride back with Dad. Just a thought.”

Nearly everyone from the funeral was sprinkled in the living room and dining room. The graveside ceremony had been short, and we’d arrived back at the house fifteen minutes earlier. Harold approached us then, standing between Charlie and me and setting a hand on each of our backs. (Since our arrival at the house, I’d sensed the other guests noticing Harold’s presence, nudging one another and whispering
—I think that’s Governor Blackwell.
But Harold either didn’t realize it or was so accustomed to it, he paid no attention.) He said, “Alice, on behalf of the extended family, all of us are holding you and your grandmother in our hearts today.”

“It was very good of you to come,” I said.

“Where could I be that would be more important? I’m only sorry I have to take off now, but I’m due in San Diego for a speech this evening. As you can imagine, Priscilla was terribly sorry to miss being here.”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“We just couldn’t love you one bit more,” he said, and as we hugged, I thought how there was nothing else in the world as endearing to me as Harold Blackwell’s sentimental streak. It was enough to make me wonder if there were other elected officials I was as wrong about as I’d been about him. Were there men (and it would be primarily men) who, instead of creating personas that were fakely righteous and honorable, were the opposite: fakely cruel, fakely callous? Men who, through the distortion of the media or a perceived pressure to act a certain way, sublimated, at least in public, their own decency and kindness?