“But how in the world would you know anything like that about your own father? Come on, who would possibly tell you such a thing?”
“Maybe in the past I did a little of what you’re doing now— maybe I did a little digging? This was years ago, incidentally. A little party at Adelle’s. You can imagine what a lively affair that was, what with Bernie as host.”
Bernie De Vries is Adelle’s husband. He’s a retired plumber, originally from the Upper Peninsula.
Conrad goes on: “By the way, do you know what Bernie’s short for? It’s short for Hibernation. I greet him, I say, ‘Hi, Bern’— and what’s he do? He takes it as a cue, wanders downstairs for a nap. At the gates of heaven, Saint Peter’ll ask how he enjoyed married life, Bernie’ll be able honestly to say, Don’t know, slept through. Anyway, who do I run into that afternoon at Adelle’s party? None other than Mrs. Hornman. That name, too, means nothing to you and I wish it meant nothing to me; we called her ‘Mrs. Horrorman.’ She was an old neighbor. A really terrifying woman.”
Actually, I am finding all the names a little confusing. But I’m getting the gist, and I’m eager for more . . .
Conrad says, “But where was I? Well, the years hadn’t been any too kind to Mrs. Horrorman, who’d apparently gotten in the habit of washing down her wine with a couple martinis. She and I weren’t five minutes on Adelle’s living room sofa before she’s talking about how she used to throw herself bodily at old Chester. But never with any success.”
And there’s something about Conrad’s free-flowing, hell-bent taste for the scandalous that, after a while, seems to spur in me some earnestly sophomoric need to protest. I was—I’m afraid—captain of the debating team at my high school, and even now Conrad rouses in me old schoolboyish calls for fairness. I find myself saying, “But that hardly means he didn’t have any . . . any sex drive. Has it occurred to you, maybe he was simply being faithful to his wife?”
“Well. I like your theory. It’s very tender. Got one hole in it though. How you going to account for what Mrs. Hornman tells me next? This look comes over her face, this hideous, gloating, almost flirtatious look—it was a frightening moment—and then she offers up ‘a little secret.’ It seems that Mother, in an uncharacteristic moment of openness, one afternoon went to Mrs. Hornman with a problem. What was she going to do about Chester? Mother wanted another child, but how was she going to have one if . . . if there was no longer any . . . how would Mother have put it? Relations? Activity ‘of that sort’?”
“Did you ever communicate your suspicions to Wesley?”
“Communicate? My suspicions? What the hell’s this, a goddamn court of law? Incidentally, you made a big mistake not ordering the veal, this was one little calf whose blood wasn’t spilled in vain.”
“I’m quite happy with my—”
“Actually, actually I did communicate my suspicions, and it turned into one of the most laughable encounters I ever had with Wes. You know what? He becomes indignant. He becomes indignant. Wes the legendary skirt-chaser absolutely won’t countenance the notion that Dora Sultan might once have taken a tumble in the hay with Mel Bellamy.”
“Well isn’t that only natural? Aren’t children always doing that? Holding their parents to a standard of behavior, of uprightness, they themselves don’t begin to uphold?”
It’s Conrad’s gloating look that makes me go on this way, I suppose. Or the fact that—unwisely trying to keep up with him in another sort of arena—I’m now on my third glass of Pinot Grigio.
“Not bad. Okay, that’s not bad. Far as it goes. But the waters are deep here. Can you swim? My father couldn’t swim—or couldn’t on the day when it counted, June twenty-first, 1942. And you know what I think happened on that day? I think the lake was very cold—it’s never warm, not even in the real heat of the summer— and his heart stopped. He was too much of a coward for suicide, if you want the truth, and there are faulty tickers up and down the Sultan line, my own included. Hell, let’s roll out of here. Go for a drink at my local.”
“Your local?”
The next thing I know, I’m a passenger in Conrad’s car and nighttime Miami is racing by—a city I don’t know and tonight enjoy not knowing as it breezes past my lowered window in all its colorful, jangly, palm-tree-crested unexpectedness. Loud shirts, loud neon signs, loud music from the overlapping, competing rhythms of car radios and boom-boxes. The wine has made me sleepy.
Conrad’s local? It’s a dingy little Mexican place called La Rosa Rosa. The air conditioner is ailing and the posters taped to the walls (Mazatlán; a jaguar peering out of a jungle; a pop singer in an old-fashioned pink party dress) have begun to buckle. All of the clientele (four older men at a back table; three kids at a table by the door; two off-duty security guards in one of the two booths) are male, and Spanish-speaking.
Still, Conrad appears to feel at home. He settles into the remaining booth with a grunt. “Where was I?” he asks me.
“You were talking about Wes’s resistance to your theory that—”
And Conrad launches right in: “When I questioned Adelle’s paternity and Wes got so indignant? At first I thought he was just being a stuffed shirt. You have to understand about Wes: In his ideal world, everybody else would behave impeccably. Hm? He was very keen on virtue—for everybody else. Because everybody else’s virtue was what made it so much fun. Other people’s virtue was the most piquant spice imaginable. For his own vices. You see? What’s the fun of being bad in a truly evil world?”
“I do see your point.”
“And then I thought, No, it’s just egotism. It’s Wes in some cockeyed way defending himself by defending his father. After all, how could Wesley Sultan’s old man fail to be anything other than some bangety-bangety stud? You get the idea . . .”
The elderly waitress is slow to approach our booth, and yet Conrad—another surprise—addresses her mildly. “Evening, Graciela,” he says. “How are you?”
She shrugs and lays a hand on her flank. “My hip,” she says. She walks with a limp.
“I’m sorry,” Conrad says.
She sets a bowl of taco chips before us.
“We’ll have two rum-and-Cokes,” he says, ordering for me, and adds, “Please.”
We sit in silence for a minute or two. Not until the drinks arrive does Conrad begin again, as fervently as ever: “But finally I find out, years later, that one of the women Wes so gallantly seduced in his youth (and what I want to know is, Did the seduction take place in the cramped backseat of his red Bel Air? And did our gallant lover-boy spring for a couple of chili dogs first?), that one of his many conquests was—can you guess? Bella Bellamy. So that when I’d pointed out, when I’d innocently pointed out, the sisterly resemblance between Bella and Adelle, what had I inadvertently done? Hm? Well, I’d effectively accused Wes of incest. Going to bed with Bella was tantamount to going to bed with his kid sister—a kid sister who, let’s face it, was nobody’s idea of a looker. It would have been a different kettle of fish, I guess, if Adelle’d been a looker. But as it was, Wes could get quite indignant on behalf of Mother’s honor. Oh, Wes could get quite huffy—and Wes was always at his godawfulest when he was being huffy. You’ll have to excuse me. Piss time.”
Given Conrad’s bulk, this is something of a production: the unpacking himself from the booth and the rising to his feet. As a speaker, when indefatigably holding the floor, Conrad could be something of an ageless presence. But he is something else again when glimpsed from the rear as he shuffles off toward the men’s room at La Rosa Rosa: an elephantine soon-to-be-elderly man, at once pitiful and poignant and silly as he retreats in search of relief for his overloaded bladder. The Master of the Mats. Or so he’d once been called. Now he’s a sixty-one-year-old man with high blood pressure and a heart condition who ten years ago decided he’d lived long enough without cream and sugar. The Fall Guy.
Even so, all his vital energies seem replenished when he squeezes into the booth once more. He tosses down a handful of t
aco chips, drains the last of his rum-and-Coke, and says, “I feel you resisting me, but you have to embrace it. Embrace the ironies. As for me, I like the ironies. Given all the problems and upheaval and torment that arose over the years as a result of Wes’s sexual impulses, to say nothing of my own impulses, it tickles me pink to suppose the two of us sprang from the loins of a man with sleepy balls. I’m telling you the straight dope: Between his legs, Chester carried a toy boat. And that’s what launched me and brother Wes on the great seas of life. Ironies? You see before you, in all my rolling mountains of flesh, dramatic proof that life is, above everything else, a succession of ironies. I used to be a sprinter and now I weigh more than an eighth of a ton. Wrap your head around that one and then tell me you think it’s implausible that Adelle is Mel Bellamy’s daughter.”
CHAPTER SIX
“Sure now? You don’t want me to wake him?”
“Absolutely. Absolutely sure.”
“I hesitate to only because he didn’t sleep last night. Not a wink.”
“Then you mustn’t,” I say. “Absolutely mustn’t.”
“He’ll be getting up soon anyway. On his own steam,” Adelle reassures me.
It’s four in the afternoon. Her husband, Bernie, is napping in the basement of their bric-a-brac-packed ranch house in Pheasant Ridge, a suburb of Battle Creek. She and I are sitting catercorner at her little kitchen table, under a framed needlework sampler that reads HOME IS WHERE THE HEARTBURN IS.
“I was so pleased to get your card. I didn’t expect to see your business bring you to of all places Battle Creek.”
Had I said as much in my note? Surely I hadn’t stretched the truth so far as that . . . “Well to Detroit, actually. But it’s an easy drive.”
“You haven’t been here before.”
“Not to this house. But your old house in Restoration. I remember you had a swing in the tree.”
“The city cut it down. The tree. On account of the Dutch elm disease. Then, after we moved away, the house itself burned down. To the ground. They were terrible people, the Mendozas. They came from Cuba.”
“That’s where my wife’s family, her parents, came from.”
Mine’s a precautionary reminder, and probably unnecessary, but I’d just as soon the conversation didn’t take a creepy, bigoted turn. Actually, the hard glint in Adelle’s eye doesn’t seem to reflect any sort of prejudice, only simple inquisitiveness: She’s as curious about my story as I am about hers. I add, “My ex-wife.”
“Let me offer you a cup of coffee.”
It turns out to be instant coffee. I’m grateful for it anyway. Winds are whistling and a chilly rain slaps against the windows. This early September weather’s unseasonably cold—autumnal. And here in the “breakfast capital of the world” (where, a hundred years ago, the city’s favorite sons, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and younger brother Will Keith, were visited by a vision of a flake), Adelle pushes toward me a plate of cookies made of various breakfast cereals glued together by marshmallows, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips. I select the smallest cookie on the plate and take a hesitant bite. But as the child within me eagerly responds to its overload of sugar, I’m grateful for the cookie, too.
In the foreground of the needlepoint sampler, a man reclines in a living room lounger. Spokelike lines of pain radiate from his chest and his throbbing heart is stitched in flaming red yarn. In the background, a woman stands in the kitchen, industriously stirring a pan on the stove—no doubt concocting another dinner disaster. HOME IS WHERE THE HEARTBURN IS. Adelle’s actual kitchen partakes of the sampler’s cartoon atmosphere. A chartreuse-haired ceramic troll stands guard over the sink. A bespectacled raccoon peers down from the top of the refrigerator.
Adelle offers me a plate of charred gingerbread men. There must be a dozen of them, all dry as dust. I break one in half and chew on a cindery leg.
Over refilled cups of coffee we talk for half an hour without touching on anything of much use or interest to me. That’s all right. I’m glad to be here, grateful to be experiencing so heightened a sense of shelter. The cold rain against the glass lends to the afternoon an air of amplitude: Adelle and I, we have all the time in the world.
In back of or underneath the drumming rain, there’s another sound, which I’m slow to notice and slower still to identify: It’s the tranquil din, muffled behind a couple of closed doors, of Bernie’s snoring. It makes a shuffling and leisurely fall, like soil sliding down a chute. Conrad’s arch little gibe comes back to me: Bernie is short for Hibernation.
Adelle talks, I nod; Adelle talks, I nod. Her monologue is a wandering creek of so gentle a propulsion, you have to take on faith the notion that you’ll eventually get out of the woods and into open waterways. I eat another cookie. I finish another cup of coffee. We’re pared to elementals: falling earth, winding water— and outside a raw wind ripping at the first leaves of the season to call it quits. Adelle’s talk slides along, taking in her neighbors, the local school board, Bernie’s hateful ex-boss (now retired, in disgraceful affluence, with his ex-secretary in Tucson), Bernie’s sensitive digestive tract, America’s trade imbalance, the problem with dental floss, falling standards at the Big Hatch supermarket.
Meanwhile, I’m busy with a clandestine task: I’m studying Adelle’s fifty-nine-year-old face, seeking to piece out some resemblance to either Wesley or Conrad. But in truth, I can find little of either brother in her eyes, eyebrows, forehead, lips, ears. She’s a long way from either, certainly, in her bulldog jaw, and further still in what Conrad, with typical gallantry, calls her “honker”—a big cartilaginous slab of a nose, outfitted with various surplus curves and knobs. This nose of hers bears no resemblance to either Conrad’s flat, vaguely Asian wedge or Wesley’s arty, aristocratic prow.
Certainly there’s nothing bland about Adelle. She looks like somebody’s daughter, bears someone’s distinctive stamp and irrepressible genes. And why shouldn’t that somebody be Mel Bellamy? It doesn’t appear to be Chester Sultan.
The possibility opens up for me dim inklings of another world, that murky and musky and ever-alluring zone called Sex Before One’s Own Birth . . . It’s a notion that’s hard to believe when you’re quite young: Somehow, our ancestors managed to figure it all out without us—got the mechanics down, anyway. Really? You mean even the very elderly, those gray figures hunched over their walkers, even they may once have been driven into acrobatics of clawing desperation? It’s not a notion that fits very well into a twenty-year-old head. You have to get partway down the road, I guess, to make sense of it.
Could Adelle truly be the offspring of a scandalous union between Dora Sultan and Mel Bellamy? If so, where did the lovers do it? How often did they do it? Were there other lovers in Dora’s life—was her affair with Mel notable chiefly because of the birth of the woman sitting before me? Or was Mel Bellamy (as Conrad seemed to believe) the one great explosive irregularity in Dora’s existence, bringing in his wake a pain so deep she retreated for the rest of her life behind a barricaded, spinsterly widowhood?
If I can’t quite imagine it all, for just a couple of moments I can almost imagine it all. Another erotic world beckons to me: desperate assignations with their own outmoded undergarments (girdles, garter belts, middies) and their own scents (cut-glass bottles of eau de toilette, men’s hair tonics, medicinal aftershaves), rushed gropings with their own unspoken inhibitions and prerogatives and obstacles and liberated, the-hell-with-it pantings. And then, with a half-awakened, reality-restoring snuffle rising up out of the basement—an arrested rattle and a bold, pathbreaking snort from the depths of Bernie’s nasal passages—the moment closes.
Is the bear in his lair about to crawl up into the light? A long silence ensues, followed by the sound of soil again subsiding down a metal chute. No, Bernie has taken up his burden of excavation once more.
Adelle and Bernie have no children. (And why not? Doubtless there’s a story there, too.) But various kids’ photographs and drawings adorn the refrigerator.
Neighbors’ children? Probably. It’s easy to imagine how the kids on the block would find a refuge here: the warm kitchen stocked with bowls of candy and little toy knickknacks, the plates of cookies, the kindly gray-haired woman who talks incessantly but doesn’t seem to expect anyone to pay her any mind . . .
Adelle asks me about Sally and I tell her a little about the house in Domat, the French lessons, the open-air market where pheasants hang upside down, the eight-hundred-year-old Cistercian monastery. And it’s apparent from the rapt but dazed expression on Adelle’s face that I could just as well be telling her that Sally had settled in Alexandria or Zanzibar, Constantinople or Kathmandu, Troy or Tenochtitlán: Anything is possible for the former Sally Admiraal. (Anything is possible for the woman who once got Wesley Sultan to marry her, and then divorced him, and somehow managed nonetheless to inspire his lifelong loyalty and devotion.)
“But tell me about someone,” I say. “I’d like to hear about Tiffany.” Wesley’s last wife. “You know I’ve never met her?”
“I have no problem with Tiffany.”
And Adelle’s mouth snaps shut upon this declaration, her sizable jaw swells. In her voice, defiance contends with pride, as if she fully expected me to challenge her on this very point.
“What’s she like?” I ask instead, and this woman who has been talking so volubly hesitates, falters, halts. She’s momentarily at a loss for words.
“Well, she’s quite pretty,” Adelle eventually pronounces, and adds: “Though nothing like as pretty as some of the women Wes used to go around with. Nothing like.
“She’s quite young,” Adelle continues, and again immediately qualifies: “Though maybe not quite as young as she acts.”
“But what’s she like? Did they have much in common?”
Adelle ponders. “Well-l-l, I don’t think they had anything in common, f’you want to know the truth. The woman has two interests: talking on the telephone and watching television. Preferably at the same time. But neither activity ever had much appeal for Wes. Her interests bored him, you want my honest opinion, just as his interests bored her.”
A Few Corrections Page 7
