by Lamar Herrin
When did she call you, Jim?
Me?
She’s called all the cousins and rambled on, pleading with somebody to tell her it wasn’t true. So when did Ellie call you?
I lived up north, I answered evasively. I was out of her range.
I haven’t forgotten what she said. “I may need you, Jim. Not today, but sometime.” And there at your mother’s funeral—you called it your godfatherish moment—you told her, “When the time is right, you let me know.”
I looked out over this small lake, from the end at which we sat down to the other. Nothing was out there and nothing broke the surface. Pickerel swam below, I knew, as sharp-toothed as tiny crocodiles, but this strange heavy heat lay over the lake like a closed door.
Walter concluded, Then you’d see, you said.
And I faced him. His small, eager eyes held steady. He was a friend, at this stage of my life my best friend, and I must have believed my best audience. And he was an interrogator. I suddenly felt the need to consult my ex-wife Elaine, whom Walter and his wife had placed in my path. I could leave Molly out of it, but the truth was I loved them all. They were family, and it was not as if I were trying to build a bridge between them and what I had forfeited down south. That wasn’t it at all.
I breathed deeply. Walter, I said, we aren’t there yet.
First came the interventions. There came a time, I told him, when Harriet and her sister Beatrice and my sister Jean accepted an invitation to a summer reunion on the lake, only instead of two weeks they made it one and they didn’t bring the children, who were grown anyway and no longer interested in childish outings. But the three cousins went with a plan, and after the first night of listening to Ellie ramble on, the next day they took her into a bedroom and locked the door. Locked Leland outside. Jean told me the house, the big house, the one Rosalyn had had built in the wake of her son’s and husband’s deaths as sort of a citadel and an ark, was now swarming with Oldhams and hangers-on, and that the only descendants of that celebrity preacher James Pritchard with the commanding black eyes were locked in that room. Jean said that Ellie began to panic when she realized there was no bottle in there with her and no way outside where shouting children were running back and forth to the lake, as she had once been a shouting, carefree, and much heralded child. Her three cousins were the picture of sobriety, and sparing no words they informed her what she had done to herself and what her only recourse now was. They were three elder cousins of a like mind, whose smiles were no longer fond and forgiving and who didn’t cave in. It was a sort of mutiny, if Ellie wanted to think of it that way, and in these closed captain’s quarters they were taking control of the ship. Jean said that Ellie started to cry, but once she saw that none of her cousins was crying with her, she stopped. They hugged her and told her they loved her, but they didn’t sugarcoat it for her. They loved her and, confronted with her addiction, intended to save her life. If she had anything to say for the life they were intending to save her from, now was the time. And Jean said that Ellie didn’t fight it. Why should she, if she expected Leland to bust through the door and save her? Jean said she might have been wrong, but there came a time during that session when, instead of looking at the door or out the window for relief, Ellie looked at her three cousins in the most humbled way and appeared to give thanks. It was an instant’s recognition, and Ellie seemed to be saying in that instant that her life was in their hands. Her older daughter Jennifer, Ellie was informed, was on board too. But this intervention they were subjecting her to was a product of the second generation of the Pritchard girls. Before it was over, they’d shown her the brochures of a rehab center up north where they had already booked her in. It was the best that Whalen money could buy, and it would be hard on her. For four weeks she’d be lumped in with other abusers of other families’ love and trust, spendthrifts of other people’s fortunes. She’d open her eyes and see versions of herself everywhere she looked. Doctors, the best doctors, would be on hand, but the medicine that worked would be what she saw of herself in those other miserable souls around her. That’s what was being asked of her. And after what seemed hours and hours of this, a very chastened Ellie agreed. Jean repeated she could have been wrong, of course. Ellie might not have been all that chastened. Then when Ellie became as hard on herself as any of her cousins had been and agreed to go that very day, if someone would drive her to the airport and put her on the plane, Jean might have been wrong again. Four weeks alone, with more of her desperate and deeply humbled kind, and when Jean said she would drive her, Ellie went to pack, with Jean folding and then handing on her clothes. And when Jean decided at the last minute to fly with her to a northern state without not a breath of southern comfort in the air, perhaps wrong yet again. She turned her younger cousin over to the nurses and doctors paid to save her and flew back. She represented the last contact Ellie would have with anybody from her past life for four weeks, and Jean was utterly wrong about that. During her return trip their planes might have crossed in the sky. Leland took a hotel room in the town in which his wife’s rehab center was located, and day after day until the four weeks were up he managed to sneak Ellie’s allotment of scotch into the center or to sneak his wife out. By the time she got back to her town, he’d gotten her drunk again, and somehow en route from the airport to her house she got lost. Why had Leland let her drive? But why not, he’d saved her from those meddlesome cousins of hers and those officious know-it-alls up north. She was back on familiar ground. Her daughters drove over to look for her and, after searching the town, found her just inside the gate to the Whalen estate, not crashed into a tree but brought to a halt there nonetheless. Sleeping, so glad, so happy to be home.
Okay, Jim, Walter said, pleading it seemed for a pause in this heat we had somehow called down on ourselves. I get the idea. He’ll hound her to the ends of the earth, and she’ll wake up hung over back where she started.
Only the next time she didn’t make it home. She drove out early in the morning, stark naked, not driving erratically, the opposite, in fact, the windows down and the wind in her hair, stopping for all the lights, signaling for her turns, around and around the town square. Naked as the day she was born, her bare left arm hung out the window as though to sample the air. I guess it was the bare arm that seemed to be beckoning other drivers to follow, for when the police stopped her she had gathered her own little motorcade. The police threw a blanket they had in their trunk over her. They admitted she was coherent but insisted she belonged in another world. I don’t think they ever tested her blood alcohol level. They probably assumed she was on some mind-bending drug. It’s always possible, I don’t know if she had slipped onto drugs or not, but it’s just as possible she’d woken out of a blessedly happy dream, a dream she refused to part with and committed herself to taking with her out into the world. A dream from her pre–Leland Oldham childhood given an early morning tour around town. This time, though, they did take away her license for public misconduct, dreaming naked, I suppose, in the early morning air. Although I’m not sure she was ever charged. She’d never driven more responsibly. They probably just turned their heads and said, Put your license in my hand and please keep yourself covered while we take you home.
All right, Walter said. Ellie was Lady Godiva, but who was Peeping Tom? You know the story?
I know the story. The Peeping Tom would be us, I said, wouldn’t he, Walter? He would be everyone drawn to the spectacle, cheering her on. But not her daughters, they tried another intervention with her, and this time Tracy, the younger, the one that Leland had robbed of her inheritance, was squarely on board. She wanted to be a doctor, do premed, go to med school and do doctoring, save somebody in a family where the doctors had not fared well—and she and her sister got together and sent their mother to dry out, but this time in a rehab center down south. Same result, Leland got wind of it and busted it up, and in retaliation Tracy might have killed a patient before she saved one. She hated Leland with a passion, and she hated the part of he
r mother that clung to that hateful man. Leland’s children—and remember, he’d set them up—then forced him into a detox unit, and for a while that seemed to have stuck. He discovered he could keep his wife’s addiction more efficiently in order when he was sober, but it put him at a distance from her and it probably made him realize he preferred, rather than not, to have her to cling to as they both went down. That children’s camp didn’t close, but it passed out of his control. Another church took it over and didn’t want a drunkard wandering proprietorially over its grounds. The statue stood, but Leland himself became persona non grata. He and Ellie hunkered down in the Whalen house and put Rosalyn’s huge house on the lake up for sale, thereby not ending the summer reunions but ending them on such a massive scale. They still had the original lake house with the long dock and boathouse, the only one I cared anything about. As their debts piled up and second and third mortgages they’d taken out came due, the moment arrived when the bank threatened to foreclose on the original Whalen house, the one I’d driven down to with Phil Hodge hoping to show him a good time, and the one Ellie had gone to sleep before after her harrowing experience up north. Which, I suppose, was the other house I cared about. So in fact there were two.
I stopped there, but it was Walter who drew a long pensive breath. The heat had continued to gather. It occurred to me, such were the preemptive powers of storytelling, that I could take the Whalen house away from Leland and Ellie, too, before the bank did. At the last minute the bank might have relented—deferring to the Whalen name and all the benefits the Whalens had brought to the town—but I didn’t have to. I could make it one away from a clean sweep, and the house I would allow to stand would be up on the lake, originally a small cabin and then extended, stained a cedar-red, with a boathouse at the end of a long dock containing not just boats but all the tools and playthings needed to thrive out on the water. Walter, I could hear myself saying, when it got down to that house with the chaise lounges lined up facing the lake, sunset, the swallows swooping, the fish splashing, the doves settling, neighbors across the way pulling into their docks, that long, long pause with the water stained darker and darker shades of orange and pink and red as the sun set and the stars began to blink on, when that moment came that a whole family occupied those chaise lounges and seemed to breathe as one until you heard your aunt laugh and the stories began to be told, it was precisely at that moment, which could last a long time, Walter, an entire childhood, the evenings being so mild and slow to fade, that toads were declared off limits, that toads with their bloated bellies and horny warts were deemed unimaginable in the presence of the Pritchard girls, where everything was beautiful and bountiful and aboveboard, and so given to extending itself through all the years.
But then Walter expelled the breath he’d drawn, drew another, and I turned my attention to him. It was then that Ellie finally called you, he said. It wasn’t even half a question.
Yes, I said.
What did she want?
She wanted to talk, just to go on, her monologue as the other cousins knew it.
How did she sound?
She was trying to keep her voice light, nothing more than a late evening chat, but she was dragging it along.
And then it stopped.
You’re right, Walter, it did. And then I asked her if she was still there.
And?
She began to cry, hiccup, whimper, stammer, blow her nose.
And drink.
I heard every swallow and I heard every tinkling note the ice made—before it melted. I’d been warned by my sister that once she’d made contact these monologues could go on.
And now, finally, it was your turn. What did she want? Money?
No, she was like Leland. She never thought the money would run out. Even when it did, she refused to believe it. There was always money.
Poor rich kid. So she just wanted to cry on your shoulder.
That and to reminisce, to let one thing take her to another, tying one thing to another as if in that way she could make a safety net that would catch her when she began another free fall. She even mentioned that lunch we’d had when I tried to convince her to sign a prenup.
She did? Just another reminiscence?
I thought so, but as she kept talking I realized that the real reason she didn’t sign a prenup was that she was too proud. She could take care of her money, she could hold her liquor, she could educate her daughters. She could get square with her mother. But the truth was, she couldn’t do any of those things. She was weak and she was lonely. Very lonely. Of all the reasons people drink, finding a way to live with your loneliness may be the one that counts. Drunk, you have company. Drunk, you can get along with yourself.
Really?
There’s more than one of you then, Walter.
I see.
Drunk you feel more in a family mood, as if you were conducting your own little family reunion.
You’re not referring to the Oldhams, are you?
No.
Maybe not even the Whalens.
Maybe not.
You really mean the Pritchards, and since you were the firstborn of your generation, Ellie had worked her way up the Pritchard family tree to you. That’s why it took her so long to call you.
You’re very astute, Walter. Very good.
And it wasn’t just a shoulder to cry on or an authority on reminiscences to consult. She had a favor to ask. The last born to the firstborn, to make the circle complete.
It wasn’t as impersonal as that.
Of course not. She remembered as a little girl reaching up and touching your beard.
Ahhh. I let out a breath I’d been holding, a light laughing pant. But it brought the little golden-eyed girl back again, as she darted in and out from behind her mother, my favorite aunt. It was devastating the way memory worked, but only because life was, every step of the way. From there to here, devastation.
And, Walter continued, she remembered you standing up to her father. As a four- or five-year-old she wouldn’t have been left with much more than that. The touch of your beard, the giggles it gave her, and you and her father confronting each other as equals, with neither side giving in. Her father is dead, and so is her brother, but in her world of drunken lights and shadows, it’s as if her father is alive again through you, you’re the back side of his front side, or vice versa, but drink enough and sink down far enough and you might as well be the same man. What did she want you to do?
Walter, I cautioned him, this heat is getting to you.
You’re right, Jim, it’s bad.
We could jump in the lake, cool off, then turn the air-conditioner on and drive home.
We could.
We could get Molly and Elaine and go out for supper, then sit out on your patio and …
Count our blessings? Walter said.
Something like that. They are numerous, our blessings.
You stood up to the Big Man, Jim.
And as a reward we went back North and got to catch all those fish. End of story.
You, the oldest of the cousins, stood up to the Big Man, and the youngest of the cousins took note. That young, you don’t calculate the chances or break down the percentages, you remember the outcome.
The outcome was we got run out of there.
With your honor intact.
What would a four- or five-year-old know about honor?
Everything! You became a hero facing another of her heroes, and it turned out both of you could win. You’d traveled down south with Phil Hodge to show her that, how to keep two heroes in your head at the same time.
Like, how many heroes can you balance on the head of a pin?
Big Howie on the head of a pin? I’ll need to consult the Beam brothers on that one.
Walter, it is time to go back, you know. We’re the only ones left out here.
There’s Byron Wainwright.
Before he cranks it up again, for God’s sake!
Jim, your story has come full circle, but
it’s not the end. Remember her grip on your arm? In the cemetery, at your mother’s funeral? If you’re anything like me, you can still feel it. And then when she loosened it but didn’t let go all the way. What did she want you to do?
She babbled on, Walter. And then she babbled herself to sleep.
Really?
Half the time I wasn’t listening.
It took her all this time to call you, and then it was all gibberish?
Some old grievances, sentimental grievances, the way Leland’s family had taken over summers on the lake and, she claimed, squeezed our family out. Certain other cousins who’d given her the cold shoulder. Topics too painful to mention, so she didn’t, she talked around them, such as her children. She didn’t talk about all the money they’d lost, either, or what the banks threatened to do. Childish stuff.
As if, Walter said with perfect timing—I could never forget he was a pro—when you got down to it, only the child was worth saving.
It may be that’s still how she thought of herself. As if she were stranded back there somewhere.
Waiting for her hero to show up.
I smiled.
So, she wanted you to come save her. That was what she wanted.
Of course she did. That goes without saying. It’s what she wanted from everybody she called.
And she’d gotten round to you.
No one makes calls that late at night, that lost in themselves, laying it all out there, meaning anything else. Come save me. Come save the child. Remember that slogan the phone companies used to have? Reach out and touch someone? All that means is come save me. It’s as simple and sad as that.
I heaved up out of the chair. An oppressive Monday was upon us. A year’s worth of Mondays in one. And that, Walter, I said, is the end of the story. It ended where it began. There was no talking to Ellie at the start and there was no talking to her at the end. As a family’s firstborn, you think you’re somebody, and you’re not. The Pritchard girls are dead. The Pritchard girls’ girls and boys are blurring out. The world has reached a kind of stalemate where history is no longer made. Everything is local legend now, the Howies are, and soon the copyright will expire on them and you can make of them what you will.
