by Dylan Hicks
“I know all that.”
“And then the news of Mr. and Mrs. Dickson’s death reached DeKalb after an unseemly delay. And Martha left for Enswell the next morning.”
“Right.”
“Yeah, so Marleen didn’t hear from Martha for over two years, didn’t expect to hear from her ever again. Then one weekend day, Martha called your grandparents in Palatine. Sorry: What was your grand pop’s name again?”
“Dick,” I said. “Richard.”
“Marleen’s sitting in her folks’ living room, reading Life or something, and Dick says, ‘Well, I’ve certainly always proceeded as if I were Marleen’s dad, heh, heh. And what’s more, she’s living at home for a spell and can come directly to the phone.’”
“He didn’t talk like that,” I said.
“But something along those lines,” Wade said. “Marleen came to the phone and Dick went out to mow the lawn. Martha was doing well, she told Marleen. She’d started up a small clothing line. She hadn’t gotten into any of the boutiques in Chicago yet, but that would come soon, she said. Kind of talking herself up, but unpersuasively. Then she told Marleen how she’d gotten married a few months before. ‘To an actuary!’ she said, like who woulda thunk it.”
“I thought you said he sold annuities or whatever.”
“He did. But when Marleen told me the story, it was actuary. I didn’t correct her. It’s obnoxious to correct people’s stories. Martha kept her update short, I guess, only asked Marleen a few general questions. There was a lull in the conversation, Marleen told me, and then Martha explained that along with an actuary and a thriving small business, she had a baby boy, a sweet, quiet, easy, handsome baby. ‘Well, that’s great,’ Marleen said, ‘he sounds wonderful.’ Martha said, ‘He’s absolutely amazing. You look in his eyes, and, I don’t know, it’s just, there it is, the music of the spheres.’” Wade was again imitating what he said was Martha’s wheat-bred singsong, girlish yet slightly edgy. “‘Wow,’ Marleen said,” Wade said. “‘Yeah, it changes your life,’ Martha said. ‘So I’ve heard,’ Marleen said. And Martha: ‘He’s just had a nice melk supper, so he’s sleeping now, and I—”
“Why are you like dramatizing this phone call?” I said. “You can’t possibly know how it went.”
“Marleen told me how it went,” Wade said.
“Why would she tell it to you like that, like a play?”
“I don’t know why she told it to me like that,” Wade said. “That’s how she wanted to tell the story. It was her story.”
I dropped my head for an instant, then looked back up at Wade.
“‘I wish I could see him,’ Marleen told Martha over the phone,” Wade went on. “‘Oh, I hope you’ll be able to,’ Martha said. Then there was another pause, and Martha said, ‘But you have to be in the right place for that change, you know. We’re still young. I know I don’t feel like a grownup yet. Mike’s older but he’s a kid at heart.’”
“That was the husband’s name, Mike?” I said.
“No, I just threw that in there,” Wade said. “I really don’t remember his name. So Martha said, ‘I could sure use more time to run my business. And Mike’s incredibly busy.’”
“If his name’s not really Mike, would you stop calling him Mike?”
“I’m starting to think it was Mike,” Wade said, and then in Martha’s alleged voice: “‘And we’d like to do more camping—pretty rugged camping, you know, and some rafting. Mike’s heavy into white-water rafting. Some of those rocks would split a baby’s head right in two, like Solomon.’ ‘Well, Solomon didn’t actually go through with that,’ Marleen said. ‘But you know what I mean,’ Martha said. ‘And we’d just like to go to a movie on impulse every so often without having to find a sitter. It’s ludicrous what these sluts want you to pay them just to sit and watch the boob tube, and as you know, my folks aren’t around to help, me being an orphan, all but disowned by my surviving siblings.’”
“This is how Martha talked?” I said.
“This is how she talked in Marleen’s story,” Wade said.
“Did my grandpa talk like you had him talking in Marleen’s story? ’Cause I don’t remember him talking that way—‘for a spell’ and all that.”
“Maybe he talked like that with his daughter’s friends, you know, stressing the avuncular in some innocently flirty way,” Wade said.
“But when my mom started talking as Martha, did it sound like Martha to you?”
“It didn’t sound quite like the Martha I knew, but it wasn’t so far off from the one I talked to at Piggly Wiggly. So I guess Martha went on for a while like that about her hard luck, then said, ‘We want our weekends back, Marleen.’”
“Our weekends back?” I said.
Wade laughed. “Marleen repeated that in the exact same incredulous way. Nature/nurture, huh? Except I suppose Marleen said, ‘Your weekends.’ Then Marleen said, ‘Hey, I can’t imagine having kids now. Christ, I’m back living at home.’ Martha’s voice got more serious: ‘Marleen, I’d like you to imagine it.’ ‘I’m not sure exactly what you’re driving at,’ Marleen said. Martha said, ‘Where are you now? Are you someplace private?’ Marleen said, ‘I’m alone. My dad’s mowing the lawn.’ Martha said, ‘Is it a gas mower or a push?’ ‘Gas.’ ‘Okay,’ Martha said, ‘that should be pretty private. Marleen, I need to just be completely open here. I know we haven’t kept in close touch, but I’m not just blowing smoke when I say you’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met, the most intelligent, most beautiful, most deep—deepest. The instant I saw you in the back of that car, I thought, Now here is a great soul. Here is someone who knows what matters.’” Wade paused. “So then there’s a beat,” he said.
“A heartbeat?” I said.
“No, a little pause,” Wade said. “‘Listen,’ Martha said, ‘Mike and I are looking for a permanent foster mother. We’re prepared to offer three thousand dollars, cash on the barrelhead, for what we understand to be an immense commitment. We’d offer more if we could. But that’s our savings. Our savings is actually a few dollars less, but Mike thought we should use a round number. That’s one of the things I love about Mike: he rounds up.’”
“You’re making all this up,” I said.
“I’m not,” Wade said.
“This is so fucking cruel of you,” I said. “Everything you do is selfish and cruel.”
“This is the story Marleen told me,” Wade said, reaching out for my hand. “I’m telling you the story she told me.”
“Martha was a fucking burnout,” I said. I was crying. “It’s the kind of shit you think when you’re fucked up, selling a baby. That’s all it is, just burnout bullshit.”
“Well, Marleen reacted like you are. ‘Jesus, Martha,’ she said, ‘that’s not even funny.’ But after another minute or so, she knew Martha was serious. Marleen asked how many potential foster parents Martha had propositioned so far. You know, in a cool, sarcastic tone. ‘You’re the only,’ Martha said. ‘You’re the only. It struck me like lightning that you were the one.’” Wade was moving into a more earnest, womanly voice for Martha. “ ‘As a matter of fact, it struck me twice,’ Martha said,” he said. “‘I was still in the hospital, and the little guy was nursing, and I said—I don’t think I said it aloud, but I said, I don’t know who your father is, but Marleen Deskin is your mother. That’s why I had this baby, for Marleen. I set that thought aside. It’s crazy, I said. But then it hit me again, just last night, a totally external voice, your voice. It didn’t sound like your voice, but it was. This baby needs you, Marleen. Needs you, needs you, needs you. And you need him.’
“Marleen hung up in disgust, not quickly, not slammingly—slowly, but in disgust. Three days later, Martha called to apologize. It was a highly emotional time …, she told Marleen. But by then Marleen had given the proposal more thought. And a week after that she drove to Enswell in one of the smaller U-Hauls.” Wade paused for a few seconds and then began to rhapsodize: “The wheat fields, the sunflower fields, b
arley, flax, wheat, wheat, wheat, the stretches of tree-lined train tracks und die große Grassteppe, the hay bales, the clotheslines, the junkyards, the peeling barns, the grain elevators, the Plains sunflowers yellowing the roadside, the little bluestem empurpling the prairie, the lone tree in the middle of a field, rough and spindly like a Giacometti sculpture, the seductive hills as the western edge of the Drift Prairie foreshadows the Missouri Plateau—”
“Can you stop?”
“Marleen of course was no stranger to agrarian landscapes, but rural Illinois is comparatively rather dull, and as she got closer to Enswell, everything seemed beautiful, romantic, and authentic, and when she got to Enswell itself, the city looked green and hearty, antisuburban, with squat boxes and gray rectangles rising without ostentation above the trees, cars muscling down Foster in and out of the valley.”
I noticed the pizza chefs were staring at us.
“The next day, Marleen struggled with the faulty left rear wheel of your little stroller. ‘That’s the boing of a distant diving board,’ she told the baby you, ‘and that’s the squeak of a swing set, and that’s the chirp of a sparrow, on which His eye is said to be on.’ And three days later, she told me, she finally got you to drink the formula. And a month later she rented the two-bedroom next to the church.” Wade handed me a napkin. “Over a year passed before she told her parents, who missed her, you know, ‘tremendously,’ who didn’t understand why they were being ‘shut out.’ So finally she told them she’d adopted a baby, a baby a friend couldn’t take care of, because the friend was a druggie who later OD’d. The story she told you.”
“So Martha’s still alive?” I said.
“Probably,” Wade said.
“What do you mean, probably?”
“Just to infer from life-expectancy stats.”
“But you don’t know where she is?”
“For a while I guess it was Portland, or Eugene, Spokane, Seattle, like I said. Maybe Aberdeen. Marleen never heard from her again. An unqualified severing of contact was part of the agreement. It was a handshake agreement, but nonetheless.” He paused awhile. “The last time I saw Martha, though, was Pittsburgh in ’85. Bolling was playing this little club, and she came to the show, stood right up front smiling at us the whole time. I played a few flashy runs for her until Bolling gave me a gubernatorial look. She hung out with us after the show.”
Wade reached into the breast pocket of his coat, draped over his chair, and took out another instant photo.
“What’s that bank in Owatonna have to do with any of this?” I said.
“Oh, that’s the wrong photo. Here,” he said, replacing the shot of the National Farmers’ Bank with one of Bolling, his bearish right arm around a woman’s shoulders. They were in a skuzzy dressing room, just a few spots of black wall showing under the posters and graffiti. The woman did seem to be Martha. Her hair was permed and dyed a wheaty blond. She was wearing a yellow skirted suit with a broad-shouldered jacket, a silk blouse, and a pearl necklace. I compared the older and more recent Polaroids. It was the same face. In the later picture, Martha’s clothes and the Lone Justice poster over her head fixed the date at no earlier than 1985. “I took two photos like this,” Wade said. “One to give to Martha, and another for me. She’d come to the club from work. She’d been working late.”
“Where’d she work?” I said.
“I can’t remember. Some company.”
I studied the pictures a bit more and then put them in my jacket pocket before Wade could take them back. It was hard to tell when he was telling the truth, as I said before, but this time I felt strongly that the essence of his story was true, even if some of the details were fabricated.
“The main thing Marleen stressed when she told me the story was how much she loved you,” Wade said, “how Martha’s vision must have been true. You know how I told you about the girlfriend who believed in booksong, that you have to develop a ‘mystic’s ear’ for which book is calling to you?”
“Yeah.”
“That was Martha. I made fun of her spiritual leanings, you know, and I wondered why she was sometimes called by what I took to be inferior books. But she really did have that mystical quality.”
Wade was still holding my sweating hand across the table.
“I resisted her booksong idea for a long time. But then one day—this was after Martha and I broke up—I was at the library, and I was stopped in my tracks by the spine of Augustine’s Confessions. It was an unassuming spine, nothing eye-grabbing in itself. I borrowed it, read it over the next few days, felt the whole time that my senses were amplified, that every stubbed toe and steak sandwich held a poetic germ, that I was living both in the book’s world and in the real world and that the book’s world was making the real world absurdly interesting. Schopenhauer said that life and dreams are leaves of one and the same book, and I agree with that, but the way I see it, even though the words on the real-life pages are different from those on the dream pages, you can sometimes get the words to overlay, and then they can’t be read but can be understood. What’s important is that I knew through booksong that Confessions was what I’d been meant to read that week. The weird thing is that the spine that called to me from the stacks wasn’t Augustine’s Confessions at all, or even Rousseau’s Confessions, or Confessions of an English Opium-Eater or The Confessions of Nat Turner, or Augie March, or a book of Confucius, or any title that on peripheral glance might have brought Augustine’s Confessions to mind. The book that double-took me was Thirty Plays Hath November. By the drama critic Walter Kerr. And yet the second I touched Thirty Plays, I knew that Kerr was a go-between, that Augustine’s book had sounded the call. Isn’t that weird? So I think it was true what Martha said to Marleen on the phone, that you were born for Marleen and that Martha somehow knew that.”
“Why did you tell me this?” I said. “What good can it do me?”
Wade paused for several seconds. His expression was raw and earnest, like when he sang Joni Mitchell’s song that night over pizza. “People should know the truth about their origins. You have to know where you’re from to know where you’re at and where you’re going.”
“That doesn’t sound at all like something you’d believe,” I said.
“No, it is.”
“Are you saying you’re my dad?”
“Almost certainly I’m not,” Wade said.
“You’re not saying that? Or you’re not my dad?”
“Martha and I were probably still together when you were conceived, although my dates are a little fuzzy. But even if we were, we were pretty estranged by that point.”
“You weren’t having sex, you mean.”
“Not that I recall.”
We looked at each other.
“We don’t resemble each other in the slightest, you and me,” Wade said.
“But you know when we were at the vegetarian restaurant a couple weeks ago and we ran into that friend of mine from high school. She started to laugh ’cause we were standing by her booth in the same pose.”
“Was it an unusual pose?” Wade said.
“I don’t know, but I know that’s why she laughed, ’cause later I talked to her by the bathrooms and she said we were like two peas in a pod.”
“She seemed like a ditz.”
“She’s not a ditz.”
“‘Two peas in a pod’: it’s such a dumb thing to say.”
“I’ve always felt something, that we were connected.”
“You might be Tauber’s kid. You probably saw from the author bio that he’s teaching at Grinnell now, if that interests you. They have a nice bank down there. You might want to do some sightseeing and just see what happens.”
“But she never said anything about me being Tauber’s kid, right?”
“No, no. It’s just a possibility. That’s why I wanted you to have a signed copy of his book. It might open a door. If nothing else it gives you a souvenir. Did you notice anything about his inscription?”
“He d
idn’t say much.”
“Well, I don’t know if handwriting has a genetic component or not, but you might study it, see if you spot a family resemblance. Another possibility is the pedal steel player from the Seed Sacks. They broke up years ago, but he’s probably still around. I could get you the name if you want.”
I shook my head no. I was burping pizza but had a worse taste in my mouth. I felt that Wade was contaminating my air and wished he would stay at a motel for the night, but at the same time I wanted badly to go with him to Berlin.
“Don’t dwell on the three thousand dollars,” he said. “It was a grassroots adoption. Marleen didn’t have any money to get you two settled.”
I tried to clear my head by analyzing the pain in my stomach. I felt a cold coming on.
Wade patted my hand twice, put his coat back on, and nodded for us to leave.
The Blues and the Abstract Truth
ONE AFTERNOON IN THE SPRING OF 1987, I WALKED two or three intermittently seedy miles from my high school to a record store I sometimes visited and where that afternoon I bought a used LP, Hope Springs Eternal, by the jazz pianist Elmo Hope. From the store I walked another two or three miles to our apartment, the smaller unit of a duplex in a quiet middle-class neighborhood. It wasn’t a hot day—probably only in the midseventies—but I’d jogged part of the way home, holding my backpack’s straps to stop its textbook-heavy bounce, and when I got home I was sweaty under my jean jacket. I wiped a damp washcloth up and down my nape, grabbed a budget-brand soda from the fridge, put Hope’s record on my mother’s stereo, and took a seat on the sofa. On the end table to my right was a silky, often-flowering mammillary cactus that I sometimes teased or studied, but that afternoon I mostly studied my new album, whose previous owner had written his name, Grady McGill, in neat script in the upper right corner of the jacket’s verso and on the A-side’s prosaically designed label. I particularly liked the tail of Grady’s y and the ligature of his Gr and Gi. I stared at the script as I listened to Hope’s trio, then read the album’s liner notes, endearingly bad I see now. During the second side, my mother came home through the back door. “I love how jazz sounds from another room,” she said while passing through the dining room to the living room. “There’s something sirenical about it. I like how it sounds in the room where it’s playing too,” she clarified, maybe so I wouldn’t think she was insulting my record, “but I especially like it from another room.” We talked about that, and she brought up Sonny Stitt’s show at the Plugged Nickel, recalled how emotive Stitt’s horn had sounded from the women’s room. Then we went into the kitchen to make a taco salad, and that was one of the times she told me about Martha Dickson.
