John's Wife: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  Alf had happened to be on call that night that Winnie died, and the ambulance swung round to pick him up on the way to the wreck. He was not as sober as he should have been, but under the circumstances it hardly mattered. Old Stu had, anyone could see at a glance, joined him in widowerhood, and, unscathed except for a scratch across his nose, was himself able to walk away. Or would have been if he had been sober enough to walk at all. Winnie had probably been killed on impact, though the anger and alarm on her face suggested she had seen it coming. The police officer, examining the road, could find no skid marks: “Must have rammed that fucker at full throttle,” he muttered, looking a bit rattled, seeming not to want to get near the wreck itself. They had hit the side of the bridge on Winnie’s side, but may have already been rolling, ending up wheels high in the creek below, so it wasn’t easy getting them out. There were a few drunks from the tavern down the road, come to lend a hand, but they all seemed a bit disoriented by it all, staggering around bleakly in muddy circles, in and out of the beams of the headlights piercing the damp night eerily, and the photographer, something of a nutcase anyway, was preoccupied with getting it all on record just as it had happened, so it was pretty much left up to Alf and his drivers to pull Stu and Winnie out of there. While they were struggling, knee-deep in weedy water, with the Mercury’s crushed doors, a strange-looking bespectacled woman with an exaggerated limp came down into the ditch and gave them a hand. She had apparently just been driving by. She was strong and efficient and especially useful in helping them work the dead body out through the smashed window so she could be stretchered off, though the man she was with, evidently having no stomach for such labors, remained in their car up at the side of the road, staring straight ahead and clutching the steering wheel with both hands. When Alf accompanied the young woman back to the car, thanking her for helping out, he saw that the man was his nurse’s brother Cornell, Oxford’s youngest boy, and he knew then that this woman was his new bride. Her first night in town probably. One she would no doubt long remember.

  Alf’s nurse Columbia would not have been surprised at this display, that Gretchen was a real take-charge girl, that was definitely the impression she had brought back from the wedding, though it was not her immediate one. Her first impression had been that Gretchen was ill-tempered and pushy, stomping around aggressively in her orthopedic boot as if she were hammering nails, a haughty and sharp-tongued shrew who was abusive to Corny and quarrelsome with strangers and, on top of it, blind as a mole, which in some ways she unfortunately resembled. Not a good start. But her bad humor, Lumby soon learned, was mostly her brother’s fault as usual. Gretchen had arranged a whole series of appointments with doctors and labs and county clerks and photographers and justices of the peace and what all, and Corny had wandered off to play a pinball machine somewhere and had missed them all, meaning everything had got thrown off by a day, the lesser things just abandoned. Luckily it was only a civil marriage and they had no big honeymoon plans (though those reservations had to be changed, too), but still, Columbia could understand how her baby brother, who had also somehow managed to misplace the rings (they found them finally in the lining of his tatty jacket, bought for a quarter off the Salvation Army racks—the rings, of course, Gretchen herself had purchased), could exasperate a person. Certainly he had tested his own family’s patience over the past few years with his indolent numskull ways, ever since that awful high school graduation trip to Paris. When Corny had announced the wedding to them in a phonecall a few days before, startling everyone, her father assumed the stupid boy must have got some damned hippie pregnant. Lumby didn’t think so. She had played doctors with Corny once upon a time, and so had some idea what his problems were. On the other hand, she could not imagine who would marry the little dummy, and so drove up to the ceremony feeling nearly as skeptical as her father did. She was the only member of the family to attend, acting as one of the witnesses, Harvie being totally out of touch, her father too depressed to go. Her father was depressed all the time back then, it was a kind of endless soapbox routine and frankly getting a bit much to take. It was like he thought he was the only one who missed Yale and Mom. Lumby was mad that he wouldn’t go up there with her, and she let him know how she felt about it—what kind of father was he, for pete’s sake?—but given the sort of wedding that it was, it was probably just as well. He and Corny would have just got into another whining match, and her father, half blind himself, would not have noticed what a real find Gretchen was, and so, like the man who wasted the only wishes he ever got, might have turned her off before she could ever come here and work her magic on them all.

  Oxford’s failing in truth was not in wasting wishes, but in having no clear second wish when the only wish he ever wished did not come true. Oxford was a reasonable man, and his sole desire was simply that the world be at least as reasonable as he was, a certain recipe for despair as just about anyone in town could have told him, and as often did close friends like Alf, closer when they both were suddenly left alone and then more often, too: “Human reason is an evolutionary deformity, my friend, an aberrant mutation, a miserable freak. Don’t trust it. The life force itself is savage and mindless. Ruthless. Like a trapped beast. Believe me, I witness its stupid cruelty every day. And in its ruthlessness, it engenders monsters, human reason just one of its grotesque miscreations. Just thinking about it, Oxford, is enough to make you shit your britches. The brain thinking about itself: better than a damned enema.” This said by the old gynecologist, emergency room surgeon, and general practitioner over hot bitter coffee in the Sixth Street Cafe, peering out the window at a dirty rain splashing the cracked blacktop in the empty center of a decentered town. A pause. A rueful sigh. “The only consolation is that monsters, cast off by the force that made them, usually self-destruct. Sooner or later.” Oxford had no reply. He could only gaze out through his tears upon the horror, somewhat fuzzy because of his myopia. Alf’s and Oxford’s wives, Harriet and Kate, friends in life, had paired themselves in untimely death as well, perishing of lingering diseases of the inner organs two years apart (though Oxford’s Kate had cut her suffering short with an overdose of sleeping pills, taken from the store), a double loss to the community and a reminder to all of the brevity of life’s fitful fever, as Ellsworth put it, in a rhyme with “forever grieve her,” in his special Town Crier eulogy to Kate as the longtime city librarian. Perhaps it was this morbid reminder that had caused Alf that particular day, two years of grieving fever welling up behind his own eyes, to leave his finger inside John’s wife a contemplative moment longer than he needed to, or that made Marge cry when she saw the wrecking ball bring down the old Pioneer Hotel which she had never even entered except when obliged, as at John’s wedding, for example, or that inspired Nikko the golf pro to abandon his wife Daphne a few weeks later and run off with the orthodontist’s uninhibited teenage daughter, or that prompted young Cornell to drop completely out of sight for a year and more, further sorrowing his heartbroken father, left now with so little. Poor Oxford. His wife was dead, two of his sons had turned into wildly irresponsible crackbrains, utterly unrecognizable even to those who loved them, the third, the one with the most promise, had been senselessly killed in a distant war, and he himself was reduced to living alone with his churlish daughter, a fat and rather stupid girl who had tried but failed both pre-med and pharmacy, and had ended up working now as a practical nurse for Alf, largely thanks to her father having asked this of his old colleague as a personal favor, so the downtown pharmacist had reason, his noble and rational dreams of a noble and rational world come to such ruin, to feel a bit crushed in the spirit. Cornell had been his last fond hope, his most bitter disappointment, and so he saw nothing to cheer about when his mad son surfaced suddenly a year or two after his mother’s burial to announce his impending marriage to the staggering half-blind creature described shortly thereafter by his daughter on the telephone. The woman sounded like the very emblem of that deformity Oxford’s dream of reason had become. She w
ill be the death of me, or anyway of my sanity, he thought, weeping as he often did in those dark days, when he hung up. He was wrong about this, however. As he admitted to his friend Alf over a sunny midmorning feast of blueberry pancakes and vanilla icecream many years later, his tears long dried and two of his eight grandchildren in the double stroller at his side, Gretchen was in truth the real son he no longer had.

  Gretchen’s fecundity amazed the town. A patriarchal future was not the vision most had had, lacking Pauline’s privy knowledge, when autographing little Corny’s high school yearbook. Maybe Gretchen’s myopia helped, some said, to find what others could not see or even say for sure was there. Or was it, others asked, that trip to Paris with Yale’s old flame that made the child child-maker? Drew him out, in a manner of speaking? They say the toilet was in the living room of that strange bohemian garret, and the bathtub was the artist’s sofa, naughtily aimed mirrors everywhere, where could innocence hide in a place like that? Maybe Corny learned a little French after all, in other words, before the lights went out. It was possible, but if so, there was little sign of it on his return, his heart-shaped face with its gaping stare and unwiped mucus streaks reminding some of crackled porcelain, others of a dead child, too long unburied. An odd boy, made odder still, that was the judgment, so when the babies started to drop by twos and threes, it caught the whole town by surprise (old Stu, elbow sliding on the country club bar, said he’d asked the lady druggist if she got three every time, and what she’d said, he said, was, “Oh no, sometimes we don’t get none at all!”), not least his family, though they soon got used to it. For all her minute playroom examinations and later health ed and anatomy courses and her career in a doctor’s office, after all, Columbia never had figured out exactly how males worked (Gretchen promised to show her), and as for Oxford, that reasonable man, he had been wrong about so many things it did not surprise him to be wrong about another. Columbia, being a nurse, or nearly, to a sometimes gynecologist, was a great help through all the pregnancies, giving Gretchen her shots and sometimes a back massage, even once an enema, and accompanying her, since she worked there, through all her visits to the doctor and often to the lab for her scans and blood tests. During the backrubs, Gretchen would tell her about all the problems she was having with her wacky husband, how sometimes he was all over her like a rabbit and other times she couldn’t get near him, he’d hide under the bed or in the closet, or else out in the alley behind the drugstore, prowling around like he was looking for his lost wits. Corny seemed to get it in his head from time to time that he wasn’t really married to Gretchen, that it was all a trick of some kind, or else he’d fallen asleep and couldn’t wake up, he was a real lunatic. Columbia of course was always very sympathetic, having had to put up with her demented little brother all her life, and she said she thought it all had something to do with that crazy trip to Paris, and Gretchen agreed. Gretchen said sometimes it was like there were two Cornys. And neither of them worth a bent penny, Lumby would add, and they’d both giggle, and sometimes hold hands.

  Cornell’s hostess in Paris, on a high school graduation trip arranged by his father, was his big brother Yale’s French sweetheart Marie-Claire, penpal of John’s wife and bridesmaid at her wedding, the one Daphne thought seducing Bruce. Had the horny maid of honor had her eyes on anyone all that day but the best man, however, she would have seen the gazes Yale and Marie-Claire were exchanging during rehearsal and at the dinner after, would have noticed that they’d stayed behind while the others drifted toward the bar, Yale there more as the bride’s pal than the groom’s and so easily forgotten when it came time to play stags and hens. Yale was the serious one in that family, both parents’ admitted favorite—but no hard feelings, he was also Harvie’s favorite and the younger kids’, too, a boy born to love and be loved as well. Greatest thing, as is often said, Yale had it. Daphne’s classmates had voted him both Most Popular Boy and Most Likely to Succeed, two accolades rarely paired, not even John in his day had been so honored. By the time he met Marie-Claire—and forget the bridal bouquet and the garter next day, this was that wedding’s one true (to quote one of their love letters later on) full-blown romance—Yale was halfway through Princeton, majoring then in chemistry and what was coming to be known as computer science, but soon to switch to French, foreseeing a life that would take him far from these parts forever, correct in this, as it turned out, though not in the way he had imagined. The plan, elaborated in their long weekly, sometimes daily, love letters, which each wrote in the other’s tongue, delightfully cross-pollinating and scrambling their endearments, double entendres’ meanings doubly doubled, was for Yale to finish his degree and then find a teaching or translating job in Paris where they could live together, which folks back home, lovingly envious, thought of as the French way of doing things. With the diploma in his hands, he already had the airline ticket in his pocket, a graduation gift from his family, sent him in a packet from the drugstore Oxford labeled a “prescription for peace and joy,” to which his mother Kate appended one of her succinct aphorisms: “Love is the source code!”—but before he could join Marie-Claire he got drafted, was made an officer, went off to a war that was not a war, and loved by those he led with love, got shot on patrol in that part of him that had once memorized the conjugations of être and foutre and devised on the computer a pioneer on-line concordance for the collected works of Mallarmé and Baudelaire, who, the shocked and grieving community learned from The Town Crier, were French literary personages, known best as poets, contemporaries of this town’s early settlers, few of whom by contrast could even write.

  It was during a routine business call home while on his second honeymoon in Paris that John learned of Yale’s fall on the field of battle, so it fell to him to break the tragic news to their hostess Marie-Claire, an awkward situation, made worse by hainqui-dainqui’s recent mischief, but John handled it with his usual panache, as the natives there would say, and proved that he was a man, as his mother Opal often asserted, not without compassion. Although, true, few who knew him would have described John so, in this matter John himself would have agreed with his mother: he was, he had no doubt of it, a compassionate man. Except when he was in a tough ballgame. Which of course was just about all the time, since that was mainly how he defined life. Compassion was the most natural thing in the world but you could rarely get down to it, that’s how he felt. Too much of life’s rough-and-tumble in the way most of the time, and a good thing, too, else he’d be bored silly. Compassion, in effect, was what was left over when the game was easy: a generous party, a timely job or a business tip, a tax-deductible gift. It was a bonus at Christmastime for his employees, even if he planned to fire them. A visit to the bedside of a guy you’d hit, flowers for the wedding of a rejected lover. Sometimes just a thoughtful phonecall, or a slap on the butt. Three rooms and bath in a retirement community was what stricken Barnaby got, Oxford an offer to save his pharmacy which he foolishly rejected, Lenny a piano for the church basement that Beatrice had asked for, Snuffy new team uniforms, then an airport job, and later, in politics, John’s endorsement. Waldo got business trips when Lollie was too hard on him, Lollie the chance to partner John sometimes in mixed-doubles foursomes. He suffered nights of bridge with his hardware man and his simple wife, even to Mad Marge threw a cookie now and then, though usually by way of her husband’s insurance business, and to Harvie he once sent a marabou stole to show he cared and understood, compassionate man that he was.