99 Stories of God

78. The Fourth Wife

My father’s fourth wife lived the long death, as they say. In other words, she became mad as a hatter while still quite young. She believed my father, a novelist, had quite imagined every aspect of her life before they met and there was nothing for her to do other than thwart this unholy talent and become brutishly mad, quite unlike the gracious creature he had imagined. She lived in soiled pajamas, collected rocks, and drank staggeringly inventive gin concoctions all day long.

My father had imagined his other wives as well, even my mother, but rather than take such dramatic measures to command their own fate, they had simply divorced him. The fourth wife, however, found her own way and stuck with it. Our days are as grass and our years as a tale that is told, she quite rightly believed.

She just did not want her tale to be my father’s.

He could have written another novel, of course — he was always writing — in which a fourth young wife became quite mad, but this would be quite after the fact, she was clever enough to realize, and quite irrelevant.