Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Since she’s been back from her own Wanderjahr, Sally has seemed unaccountably happy and hasn’t wanted to sit down for a full and frank debriefing, which is understandable and can wait forever if need be. I was in the hospital some of the time, anyway, and since then there’s been plenty to do — police visits and sit-down interviews with prosecutors, an actual lineup at the Ocean County Court House, where I identified the perpetrators, all this along with Clarissa’s difficulties in Absecon. (The pint-size accomplices were twins and Russians, boyfriends of the faithless Gretchen. It turns out there’s a story there. I, however, am not going to tell it.)

Paul and Jill, it should be said, proved to be much better than average ground support in all our difficulties, although they’ve now driven back to K.C. to celebrate the Yule season “as a couple.” Paul and I were never precisely able to get onto the precise same page because I was in the hospital, but we now seem at least imprecisely to be reading the same book, and since I was shot, he has seemed not as furious as he was before, which may be as good as these things get. I don’t know to this moment if he and Jill are married or even intend to be. When I asked him, he only smoothed his beard-stache and smiled a crafty, uxorious smile, so that my working belief has become that it doesn’t matter as long as they’re “happy.” And also, of course, I could be wrong. He did, as an afterthought, tell me Jill’s last name — which is Stockslager and not Bermeister — and I’ll admit the news made me relieved. But again, as to Sally’s and my true reconciliation (in both the historical and marital senses), it will come in time, or never will, if there’s a difference. In her letter, she said she didn’t know if there was a word that describes the natural human state for how we exist toward each other. And if that’s so, it’s fine with me. Ideal probably wouldn’t be the right word; sympathy and necessity might be important components. Though truthfully, love seems to cover the ground best of all.

When she arrived the day after Thanksgiving, Sally carried with her a wooden box containing Wally’s cremains. (I was zonked in the Ocean County ICU and she didn’t actually bring the box up there.) Wally, it seems, had just been a man who no matter how hard he tried could never find full satisfaction with life, but who actually came as close to happiness as he ever would by living alone, or as good as alone, as a bemused and trusted arborist on a remittance man’s estate (there are words for these people, but they don’t explain enough well enough). His nearly happy existence all went directly tits-up when Sally forcibly re-inserted herself into his life for reasons that were her own and were never intended to last forever — though poor Wally didn’t know that. After a few weeks together on Mull, Wally grew as grave as a monk, then gradually morose, apparently feared his paradise on earth would now not be sustainable, but could not (as he couldn’t from the start) explain to Sally that marriage was just a bad idea for a man of his solitary habits. She said she would’ve welcomed hearing that, had tried lovingly to make him discuss it and put some fresh words in place, but hadn’t succeeded and saw she was spoiling his life and was already planning to leave. But with no place else to run away to, and not realizing he could just stay in Mull, and thus in a fit of despair and incommunicable fearfulness and sorrow, Wally took a swim with a granite paving stone tied to his ankle and set his terrible fears and unsuitedness for earth adrift with the outward tide. She said when he was found he had a big smile on his round and innocent face.

Sally has admitted — seated at the same glass-topped breakfast table overlooking the ocean where she’d told me she was leaving and gave me her wedding ring only a short, eventful six months ago — that she simply never made Wally happy enough, though she loved him, and it was too bad they couldn’t have gotten a divorce like Ann and I did and freed each other from the past. In time, I will find words to explain to her that none of this is as simple as she thinks, and in doing so possibly help explain herself to herself, and let her and Wally off some hooks — one of which is grief — hooks they couldn’t get off on their own. It’s my solemn second-husbandly duty to do such things. In these small ways, there’s been appreciable progress made in life in just the twelve days since I got out of Ocean County. We both feel time is precious, for obvious reasons, and don’t want to waste any of it with too much brow beetling.

In any case, I rescheduled my Mayo post-procedure checkup, which will be tomorrow at nine with blunt-fingered Dr. Psimos. And since Chicago was, in a sense, on the way, Sally asked me to go with her to Lake Forest to present a solid-front fait accompli when she delivered Wally’s ashes to the aged parents. It is an unimpartably bad experience to have your son die once in a lifetime, as my son Ralph did. And even though I have officially accepted it, I will never truly get over it if I live to be a hundred — which I won’t. But it is unimpartably worse and in no small measure strange to have your son die twice. And even though I knew nothing to say to his parents and didn’t really want to go, I felt that to meet someone who knew Wally as an adult, as I did in a way, and who knew his odd circumstances and could vouch for them, and who was at the same time a total stranger they’d never see again, might prove consoling. Not so different from a Sponsor visit, when you settle it all out.

The elderly Caldwells were rosy-cheeked, white-haired, small and trim Americans, who welcomed Sally and me into their great fieldstone manse that backs up on the lake and is probably worth eight million and will one day be turned into a research institute run by Northwestern to study (and interpret) whatever syndrome Wally suffered from that made everybody’s life a monkey house. I couldn’t help thinking it could also be turned into four luxury condos, since it had superb grounds, mature plantings and drop-dead views all the way to Saugatuck. A big conical blue spruce was already up and elaborately lighted in the long drawing room with the stone fireplace, where Sally (I guessed) first re-encountered Wally last May. The Caldwells were soon to be off to a do at the Wik-O-Mek that evening and wanted us to come along and stay over, since there would be dancing. I’d have died before doing anything like that and, in fact, managed to work into the conversation that unfortunately I’d recently been shot in the chest (which seemed not to surprise them all that much) and had trouble sleeping, which isn’t true, and Sally said we were really just stopping by on our way up to Mayo for my checkup and needed to get going — as if we were driving all the way. They both acted cheerful as could be, fixed us each an old-fashioned, talked dishearteningly about the election (Warner described all their neighbors as decent Chuck Percy Republicans) and how they felt the economy was headed for recession, witness the tech sector and capital-spending cuts. Constance took grateful but unceremonious possession of Wally’s ashes — a small box upholstered in black velvet. They both guardedly mentioned Sally’s two children in a way that made me sure they sent them regular whopper checks. Then they talked about what an exotic life Wally had chosen to live—“Strange and in some ways exciting,” Constance said. We all sat around the huge but cozy spruce-and-apple-wood-scented room and drank our cocktails and thought about Wally as if he was both with us and as if he had never lived, but definitely not as though he’d sharked my wife away from me — even if unwillingly. At some point all four of us started to get not-surprisingly antsy and probably fearful of our words beginning to take on meanings we might regret. Sally and Constance excused themselves, in a southern way, to go upstairs together with the cremains box. Warner took me out the French doors to the low-walled patio, which was snowy and already iced in. He wanted me to see the lake, frozen and blue, and also where he’d put up his fancy covered and heated one-man practice tee he could use all winter. He wondered if I played golf — as though he was sizing me up as a son-in-law. I said no, but that my former wife was a golf coach and played for the Lady Wolverines in the sixties. With a pixyish grin — he looked nothing like Wally, which leads to speculation — he said he’d played for the purple and white when he came back from the Marianas. We had nothing else to say after that, and he walked me around the outside of the big rambling house through the gleaming crust of snow to where the ladies were just then exiting the front door (it was their standard way to hustle you out). And in no more than three minutes, after we’d all uncomfortably hugged one another and said we’d definitely visit somewhere, someday on the planet, Sally and I headed out the drive, out of Lake Forest, back toward the Edens and toward O’Hare.