by Lamar Herrin
But I could tell Walter wasn’t getting it. He thought as a young man I had been dazzled and, having worked for the brief time I had out in Hollywood, had come to my cousin’s wedding primed, when in fact the opposite was the case. I hadn’t been out in LA for more than eight months and already I was jaded. My tolerance for young, good-looking hopefuls preening in and out of the public eye had hit rock bottom. You could see through everybody out there, and what you saw was—nothing. A dull and glamorous sort of sameness. Why had the Frenchman come looking for his American in the midst of all that? Because he had a script, and because his American had grown to such enormous proportions in his mind’s eye that he would only fit on the silver screen.
Although we never talked about it in just those terms, I sensed that my Hollywood Ellie knew all that and only by keeping in motion did she manage to take a certain delight. Imagine her delight when, as later happened, she’d lit on the Frenchman’s American, that Plainsman of the mysterious keepsake and very few words, and turned him over to her boss. Imagine it before it turned to disgust. But Ellie didn’t really register disgust. Maybe later when she had the proper scales to weigh her delight in and saw that it came to nothing. If, for instance, she’d been standing at my side, playing her part as the groomsman’s spirit waif, and had seen my cousin marry his bride, and seen the way the town gathered on the street below, and the way the church doors opened and Howie and his wife, Big Howie and my aunt, and the other little Ellie, a toddler still, stepped outside, and cameras were not rolling and klieg lights were not blazing and there was no director there to call, Cut and print, none of that. A certain family in a small town, the right people on the right day. I said to myself, Damn, now there’s a good-looking couple, that’s what it’s all about. Let’s see how long they can make it last.
Walter would have to have been there. Those towns had a way of calling everything in around them. Rumor had it there was a big sophisticated world out there, but if something claimed your attention—genuinely claimed your attention—a town like the one the Whalens lived in became a stage sufficient unto itself. To be off in the wings was to be off in nowhere. Howie Whalen was not much taller than average, a shade under six feet, the shoulders not noticeably broad, the hair black and the eyes blue, a way of standing, squarely but lightly planted, with no need to run, really, since the world came to him, no need to move at all. But when he did, he was as supplely knit as some animal slipping through brush. If you studied his face, you kept waiting for the blue eyes under black brows to turn cold, but they never did. Unlike his mother, he wasn’t a big laugher, but the eyes shed light, a calming and even a companionable light, so that not only family members but also his workers, when he came to take control of the plant, could be said to bask in him, to take what he offered since it was, or always seemed to be, more than enough.
As an only child he’d been spoiled, of course. He’d gone through all that had been laid at his feet so quickly he was always ready for more, but even then you got the impression he was simply biding his time. When his sister was born, it was not competition he felt but relief. He was said to have matured. For the record, he was no longer spoiled. He needed none of it, things moved in and out of his hands freely enough; except for the real trophy-sized ones, he released the fish he caught; and game, even game that he killed in what must have been a moment of supreme intimacy, you could also say he’d released. He was accompanied by spirit deer, spirit bear, spirit long-horned sheep. Unlike his father, he did not have to wrest a business out of nothing and then hound it along; he could grow into it, and worker by worker, plant by plant, country by country, he could expand. It was a natural process, he was nature’s child, and nature always had her favorites.
His wife, Laura Kingston, now a Whalen, actually did have skin the softness and hue of a magnolia blossom, and eyes with shifting planes of rich brown light like a buckeye. Hair a lustrous chestnut brown, lips so lovely you couldn’t imagine them uttering an imprecation. In her smiles she held something back, and her laughs were never at full strength, there was always something left, something it was easy to suppose just for him. At full height she reached to his ear, and when she whispered an intimacy to him, you wanted—at times badly—a code of some sort that would allow you to read to the exact degree the crease in his smile. She was well-mannered; she was trained—self-trained; she struck, perhaps not as commandingly as he did, that balance between a small town and a large world. There was some mental instability in her family, but an aunt of Howie’s was also out on that limb. This was the South, womanhood in the South, and there would always be casualties. To all appearances she was very happy, but she was always on alert. She kept waiting for her prince of a husband to fail her, and he never did. Not until the end. Consequently, she lived a blissfully provisional life.
There on the church stairs, as Howie and Laurie Whalen stood in full view of the town, you could see all this, and you could sense what it meant. Surely, there were those who begrudged Little Howie his privileges and extraordinary good fortune, but they were vastly outnumbered by those who basked in the day’s well-being, as if every single one of them had been invited to the wedding feast. There was a feast, of course, where the family at large would assemble—my mother, father, and sister among them—and where the family would close ranks around our standard-bearers, where, whether we thought of it that way or not, we paid obeisance to the two people who were so obviously deserving of it, but that was not the moment that counted. That was a stroke of fortune, call it the crowning reach of the family tree, the latest and grandest instance of Whalen largesse, as if we’d all stopped by the plant and instead of common cotton Rosalyn had piled cashmere into our arms. But the real moment, the moment that counted, came when Howie and Laurie stood on the church stairs and were joined by Big Howie, Rosalyn, and their little daughter, and the townsfolk did not break into applause, but there was a murmur of such deep approbation that it was impossible to imagine anyone left out. I was reminded of when the earth trembles, when the earth becomes a vast unifying tremor but stops short of becoming a quake. As if the earth, in its own measured way, were leading the applause.
Which sounds, Walter said, positively medieval, but I assume you already know that.
Look at it this way, Walter, I said. The town made its peace with Big Howie Whalen. He cruised around in his black Cadillacs, expected and got their applause, and gave them jobs and the necessary perks. Paternalism pure and simple, but the town put up with Big Howie because he got things done and because they knew they had Little Howie waiting in the wings. This was the day Little Howie and his bride stepped out onstage. A changing of the guard.
And this Little Howie they worshipped—
I didn’t say they worshipped him.
—they murmured their universal approval of, then—
And his beautiful bride.
—was the same Little Howie who let his father run you, his bearded first cousin, out of town?
Little Howie saw the humor in it at once. How foolishly both Big Howie and I had dug in. It’s taken me all this while.
Walter, whom I’d seen work in court and whose style was so deliberate it could drive young assistant district attorneys wild, let out a guffaw, and it was only then that his neighbor Byron Wainwright became aware that he had an audience. He was bowing away in that moment in a mounting crescendo, and a guffaw wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Walter stepped out to wave an apology down to him and with the bourbon bottle motioned Wainwright to come up and join us, but the damage had already been done. Wainwright picked up his cello (but left his stool) and walked back up his dock. It was getting dark, but enough light was left so that I could make out an old, stiff-backed man, long-jawed and bony-browed, plowing ahead like a figurehead on a ship.
Sorry about that, I said. And Walter replied not to worry, that Wainwright would be back the next day at five o’clock sharp.
And anyway, he reminded me, it was time to eat.
Walter fried po
rk chops and browned some potatoes and I tossed a salad, but neither of us was hungry. The chili, we agreed. The evening paled out again along the lake, then the darkness in its cloak of coolness seemed to rise from the lake’s depths. We stood on Walter’s dock, looking out over the water and noting at the far end some other dock’s light, an evening star sort of effect, tempting us to set out and guaranteeing safe passage. Finally Walter said, as if musing to himself, What’s the point of listening to the rest? Little Howie exceeded all expectations, the town prospered, the town loved him, his wife did, his children did, and then—what was it he had—?
A brain tumor.
A brain tumor did the rest.
No point, I said. No point at all.
The funeral was held in the same church they were married in. With some exceptions—and my father was one of them—the same people came. But there was a whole international contingent, too. There was a deputation from the Dominican Republic, where the Whalens had opened a couple of plants. There were Italians. Brits. A Japanese gentleman. It was not easy for me to understand how Little Howie had endeared himself to all these foreigners, other than through some extraordinary combination of personal characteristics and astute but unaggressive business savvy. He did business and it was as if he’d given them a gift. As if he were showing them a path. Even as a little boy he liked to follow the sinuous paths the deer made in the woods below their house. You could trust the deer, he’d tell me, and never get lost. But those paths were narrow. You had to learn how to slip along them through the brambles, or the thorns would tear you up. His sons, he had two—
Wait! Walter stopped me. Didn’t it ever occur to you that this was the man your Frenchman was looking for, not a Plainsman but a southerner dash hunter dash fisherman dash absolute natural in everything he did, including business? And with a Greek profile in the bargain. And a beautiful wife. Sure, it did.
I didn’t deny it, although it had not occurred to me. Howie Whalen was ours. He may have had his admirers the world over, but if he wasn’t in his town or on his lakes or in his woods, I couldn’t visualize him. Not passing through airports and landing in foreign lands. Not strolling down foreign avenues. Only once did I visit him in one of his plants—his home plant—when he’d taken my measurements, with his own tape measure gone over my body, my neck, my waist, my extremities, to make me a suit of clothes, but I didn’t want to tell Walter about that. Maybe later. A suit I had worn to Howie’s funeral and not again. I preferred to leave Walter with the image I’d started with. Howie fishing the jumps, with an unflagging and unerring exuberance casting into that upheaval, then standing calmly above it all, eyes on the distance, waiting for it to erupt again.
His sons, I repeated, never set foot on those deer paths. His first was bookish, unathletic, almost gnomish when you compared him to his parents, a quiet and gentle boy but hard to account for. His second son was the fourth of his children, and he looked like Howie—in the eyes at least, the black brows, and the full mouth, with a pout you could only hope he’d grow out of—but there wasn’t enough time, Howie fell ill and there wasn’t time for the boy—
Name? Walter said.
—for little Joey, I said, to measure himself against his father, to out-fish and out-hunt him and out-win the town’s approval.
And go out and marry a girl as pretty as his mama, too, I bet.
I don’t know, I’ve lost contact. I don’t know what’s happened to any of them. There were two girls in there, too. They each inherited a million dollars when their father died and probably went off and spent it as fast as they could. Laurie …
Yes? Walter said when I hesitated.
She remarried, or that’s what I heard. There may have been some prescription drug problem, some addiction of that sort, but … I don’t know …
I peered up the lake at that distant dock light. A cool breeze had now begun to blow. Keep that light in sight and I wouldn’t lose them. Blink it away, I told myself, and they’d be gone. Maybe I had drunk too much and the storytelling had taken on a life of its own. Maybe I could prolong the blink and get rid of everything south of that line those two intrepid surveyors had plotted out where a road, eventually a turnpike, would run. Even in a continent this vast, a single infinitesimal line like that could make all the difference, become in effect a fault line along which a country would break apart.
After the wedding, the next time I saw Howie and Laurie was up at the lake in the mountains where already they had their own house, which they called their fishing cabin. It sat back up off the road, not on the water. There was a semi-steep drive. I was to call for Howie up there at some very early hour and out we’d go, not to fish the jumps, since that was best toward midday when the water had warmed and the minnows rose, but up in the incoming stream mouths as fresh food washed down. I took my time walking up the drive even though I only had a day in the mountains, with no idea now, thinking back on it, of where I had come from and where I was to go. I was on that drive, then on the side porch and quietly knocking on the screen door. They’d left the main door open to let in the breeze. I knocked twice and then, not wanting to knock a third time, I peered through the screen mesh to see what I could. I had not been in this cabin. I did not know the bed stood on an oblique line of sight to that door. I saw my cousin roll out of bed and lift a hand in my direction to signal he was on his way. I turned and gazed down the dirt drive to the glitter of lakewater across the road beyond the trees. I heard my cousin pull on his pants, buckle his belt, scuff around for his sneakers until he’d put them on too. He visited the bathroom and then came out. The lakewater had not ceased to glitter as he searched for something in a kitchen cabinet and then in the fridge. After he closed both doors and began to move in my direction, I had one last chance before he joined me to peer in through the screen door again, and I seized it. Past the veil of that black mesh, I was able to make out Laurie Whalen as she lifted her head off the pillow, with her dark hair tousled over half of her face. She said something indistinct to her husband as he passed by. Howie may have mumbled something back. But before he could join me, Laurie had raised her head a notch higher, turned it in a slightly unnatural position toward the screen door, so that her hair fell more freely, and looked at me as I looked at her. I saw the dark shine of her eye, part of her chin, and a crescent of her cheek. That deeply shaded magnolia glimmer of her skin. I believe she said, Luck. She certainly said something before she sleepily spoke my name and her head fell back into the pillow. But all through the morning as we fished, her hair kept getting in the way, and the cicada screech back in the marshy bottomland where a stream entered the lake kept me from hearing her voice and the exact intonation she had given to my name. Howie pointed out where a sycamore limb had fallen across the stream and told me to cast just beyond it, letting the lure go still before twitching it in a crippled minnow effect. The bass, when it struck, left behind a radiant crescent of spray. The secret, of course, would be to coax it, not horse it, over that fallen limb and not get hung. It was tedious and strenuous and finally exhausting, but I reeled it up beside the boat, then reached down and grasped the lower lip, where it was possible to all but paralyze a bass, and held it up for Howie and his wife—the glimpse I’d caught of her—to admire. I would never see her again with her head half raised from a pillow, her hair falling freely across her cheek, and that would also be the last fish I’d catch with her husband looking over my shoulder. He was married now, had begun a family, and as a remarkably young man was taking over at the plant. It was possible I never went fishing with Howie Whalen again.
A sad story, however you look at it, Walter observed, standing beside me, out at the end of his dock.
Yes, a sad story and one that had worn me out. It left a weight on your shoulders, and under that weight it sometimes required a special effort to continue to believe that there was anything extraordinary about the Whalens—that in any given town down there a comparable tale couldn’t be told. For what family, surely some of them lo
sers, didn’t have a fabulous story to cling to, and what fabulous branch of an otherwise unillustrious tree was ever exempted from death? A sad story. It might indeed make you believe in some kind of curse, I said. Big Howie made a fortune from the perils and excesses of the times, Rosalyn laughed it all off, Little Howie, as gifted as they got in those towns, was really a performance artist, who through some wholesome sleight of hand made believers wherever he went. And Ellie …
Yes?
Ellie is still with us. She’s had a life.
Unterrified? Untraumatized?
No, I wouldn’t say that.
We paused at that point. Darkest night had fallen, but that distant dock light remained lit. Walter and I had come up here to step away from our lives for a long weekend—not that our lives were hemming us in. After a period of some ill-advised advances and some tactical retreats, our lives had settled, and although our ages and professions were not the same, the way we’d come to terms with our lives and made our peace might have been. This was the way it was going to be. Who could have foretold it? This was the town, these were the people, this was the professional path you found yourself wandering down. Time to stop wandering and make it yours.
The curse, I told Walter, was probably as simple as a law of physics. Powerful families, when they came apart, came apart powerfully. They were sailing along, they hit a reef, they cracked up and created their own whirlpool going down. Power was relative, of course. Whirlpools came in all sizes. Some you could stand close to and get a spectator’s thrill. Others you’d better not.
