William Krueger - Ordinary Grace

The cooing went on a moment or two more then stopped and I thought someone would answer but no one did and the gentle dove-like song began again.

I’ve compared the sound to that of a bird but in truth it wasn’t like any bird I’d ever heard before, or any animal for that matter, and once the mystery had presented itself I was a goner. I had to know.

I eased my way down the hall one soft and utterly silent step at a time keenly aware that the Brandts’ farmhouse though renovated was still an abode of ancient construction, like the house that served as our parsonage, and at any moment my foot could hit a loose board that would cry out like a kicked cat. There was a beautiful runner over the floor into which had been woven an Oriental scene of trees with bare black branches where bluebirds sat and I tiptoed on those thin branches and on the mute bluebirds toward a door that was slightly ajar at the end of the dark hallway. I put my eye to the gap in the doorway and saw half a bed neatly made and on the far wall a window with gauzy curtains that muted the morning sunlight but I couldn’t see the source of the noise. I reached out and nudged the door open farther.

I had never before seen a fully naked woman in the flesh. Not even the photographs I’d ogled in Playboy a few days earlier prepared me for what I beheld in Lise Brandt’s bedroom on Independence Day in 1961. The room was a glory of flowers cut from her garden and bursting from vases set on every flat surface and the air was powerfully redolent with their fragrance. Her back was to me. She’d let her hair down and it fell in a long brown flow over her shoulders. She stood at an ironing board with a hot iron in her hand and she bent to the work of pressing her brother’s freshly laundered clothing which was in a basket near her feet. She was the source of the cooing, a sound full of contentment as if the hot tedious labor in which she was engaged was the most delightful pastime imaginable. With each stroke of the iron she swayed dramatically as if to music only she could hear. I watched the strong muscles of her shoulders and back and buttocks tense and release and every part of her body seemed alive in itself and not just an element of some larger configuration of flesh.

I was stunned but not senseless and I knew that any moment I might be discovered. I remembered well the near-catastrophic incident in the garden only a few days earlier when I’d accidentally touched her. I backed out of the room and crept silently down the hallway though I could have screamed bloody murder and it would have made no difference. I stepped outside onto the front porch where I sat with my hands on my lap waiting for Ariel’s return.

Twenty minutes later Lise Brandt appeared at the screen door fully clothed. She’d tied her hair back in a ponytail. She eyed me suspiciously and using that voice I knew she hated she asked, “Wha you wan?”

“I came for Ariel,” I said facing her so that she could read my lips.

“Gone. Driving with Emil,” she said in a flat voice and slurring the words she could not hear.

“Do you know where they’ve gone?”

She shook her head.

“Do you know when they’ll be back?”

Another shake. Then she asked, “Where’s Jake?”

“On an errand for my mother.”

She stared at me. Then she said, “Wan lemonade?”

“No thanks. I’d better be going.”

She nodded and, finished with me, turned away.

I walked home trying to set in my mind so that they would be there forever every detail of Lise Brandt naked and ecstatic at her ironing board. My mother when she did the ironing at our house did it grudgingly and was always in a foul temper. But she did it fully clothed and I couldn’t help wondering if that made a difference.

Ariel had been driving with Emil Brandt at his request. She’d taken him on a long swing that morning through the river valley with the windows of the Packard down so that he could absorb the summer day. He was, he told her, ripe for inspiration. He needed the feel of the country air in his face, the smell of the land in his nostrils, the sound of the birds and the rustle of the cornfields singing in his ears. Emil Brandt who’d written no music in a long time claimed he was ready to create something great, a celebration of the Minnesota River valley. His brush with death, he told Ariel, had changed his outlook. He was more inspired than he’d been in years. He was ready to knuckle down and compose again.

She related this to us all at lunch around the kitchen table while we ate fried bologna sandwiches with chips and cherry Kool-Aid. My father said, “That’s wonderful to hear.”

But my mother was skeptical. She said, “Just like that?”

My father put down his glass and shrugged. “Like he says, Ruth, a brush with death. It can change a man dramatically.”

“When we last talked, it was clear to me he’s still struggling with that darkness of his.”

“Work is what he needs to bring him back to happiness,” Ariel said.

My mother looked at her. “Is that your opinion?”

“It’s what Emil says.”

“Can I have another sandwich?” I asked.

“Fry yourself up a slice of bologna,” my mother said.

“Me, too,” Jake said.

I threw two slices into the frying pan which was still on the stove and started the burner.

“I don’t know,” my mother said.

“You don’t know him,” Ariel said.

My mother shot Ariel a look I’d never seen before, edged with meanness. “And you do?”

“Sometimes I think I’m the only one who does,” Ariel said. “He’s a genius.”

“I won’t dispute that,” my mother said. “But he’s a great deal more. I’ve known him all my life, Ariel. He’s a very complicated man.”

“Not really,” Ariel said.

My mother said, “Oh?” That one word. Like an ice cube against bare skin. I glanced at Ariel who clearly was not about to back down.

“I’ve put his life story onto paper,” Ariel said. “I know him.”

My mother propped her elbows on the table and folded her hands beneath her chin and stared at Ariel and asked, “And who, pray tell, is Emil Brandt?”

“A wounded man,” Ariel replied without hesitation.

My mother laughed but there was a chill to it. “Ariel, dear, Emil has always been a wounded man. He’s always been a man too misunderstood, too little appreciated, too bound by our provincialism here, too everything that did not advance the wants, needs, and desires of his own often selfish heart.”

Jake left the table and came to the stove. I figured he was moving to safety.

“You told me once that greatness demanded selfishness,” Ariel shot back. “And anyway he’s not selfish.”

“He’s simply great?” Mother laughed again. “Oh, sweetheart, you’re so young. You have so much to learn.”

“You throw my age at me like it was some kind of handicap.”

“It is in a way. Someday you’ll see that.”

My father held up his hand as if to make peace, but before he could speak Ariel said angrily to my mother, “I thought you were his friend.”

“I am. I have always been. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see him as he is. He has many faults, Ariel.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I’ve seen him in moods so dark I’ve wondered if he would ever come out into the light again. It’s amazing to me that he hasn’t tried suicide before.”

“He has,” Ariel said.

My mother looked at her in a startled way. “You know this how?”

“It’s in his memoir.”

“He’s never said anything to me about it.”

“And maybe there’s a reason for that.” Ariel’s eyes were hard and sharp in the way of railroad spikes. She scooted her chair back and rose to leave the table.