American Wife

“You’re a Republican like your father?” she said, and when I did dare to glance at her, I saw that she was staring unabashedly at Charlie.

“Indeed I am,” he said, and his voice contained a jovial defensiveness.

“In a progressive town like Madison, I’d think that would put you out of step with your peers,” my grandmother said.

“Appearances can be deceiving.” Charlie’s tone was still perfectly civil. “The students holding their protests are loud and strident, but the backbone of Madison is hardworking middle-class families.”

Both of you, stop it, I wanted to cry out.

“A Republican I really admire is Gerald Ford,” my mother said. “What a difficult situation to enter into, and his poor wife, struggling like that with her health.”

“Jerry is a loyal foot soldier,” Charlie said. “He’s a man who knows his strengths and limitations.”

There was a pause as we all tried to determine which direction the conversation would go. Charlie seized the reins. “This is a lovely home, Mrs. Lindgren,” he said and it was clear that the Mrs. Lindgren he was addressing was not my grandmother but my mother. “How long have you lived here?”

“Oh, mercy, it’s been—help me, Emilie—we came here right before Alice was born, so I suppose thirty-one years. Now, Charlie, you must have met Alice’s dear friend Dena. Mack and Lillian, Dena’s parents, are just across the street, and they moved in not but six months after we did.”

“I have met Dena,” Charlie said warmly. “She’s the life of the party.”

“Oh, she’s a pistol. Lillian tells me business is booming at her store.”

“How’s her sister?” I asked.

“I think she’s doing better now.” My mother smiled. “Charlie, did Alice tell you her father managed Riley’s branch of Wisconsin State Bank and Trust?”

Charlie smiled too, but blankly.

“They also have branches in Madison,” I said. “There’s one at West Washington off the square.”

“They’re the best bank in the region.” My mother nodded fervently. “Are you sure I can’t get either of you something to eat? Alice, I made apple kuchen again last night, and you were exactly right about adding sour cream to the dough.”

“That I can vouch for,” Lars said. “I must say that if I’d known when I woke up this morning I’d end up sitting across from the son of the governor of Wisconsin, I’d have brought along my camera. Everyone at the post office will be tickled pink when I tell them on Monday.” Directing his comment at Charlie, he added, “That’s where I work, at the one down on Commerce.”

I willed myself not to be embarrassed or to give in to adolescent shallowness.

“You’d be surprised that even in a town like Riley, people send their mail to the most unusual of places,” Lars was saying. “The other day a gentleman shipped a package all the way to Brussels, Belgium.”

“Where Audrey Hepburn was born,” my grandmother said.

There was a lull, and Charlie, who appeared neither troubled by nor interested in Lars’s employment, said, “Mrs. Lindgren, have I missed my chance at the apple kuchen?”

“Not at all.” My mother sprang from her seat. “Alice?”

“None for me, but let me help you,” I said.

In the kitchen, a foil-covered pan sat on a burner, and my mother turned on the oven and stuck the pan inside.

“Charlie can eat it cold, Mom.”

“But it’s so much better warmed up. I just wish we had a little vanilla ice cream left—you don’t think I ought to run down to Bierman’s?”

“You definitely shouldn’t.”

“I had no idea he was the son of Harold Blackwell,” she said, and then, after a beat, “I know Lars’s presence must be quite a surprise. I was in buying stamps one day, and we got to talking—he’s a very kind man, Alice.”

“No, he seems like it. I’m sorry I didn’t call to say we were coming.”

“No one will ever replace your father for me.” There was a fierceness in her expression, as if she expected that I would not believe her.

“Mom, I think it’s fine. It’s good for you to, you know, socialize. You two should come to Madison for dinner, either with Granny, or just you and Lars if you want to come when Granny’s in Chicago.”

My mother appeared confused. “Did Granny tell you she’s going to Chicago?”

“Isn’t her visit to Dr. Wycomb in the next week or two?”

My mother shook her head. “Granny hasn’t visited Gladys Wycomb in years.”

I was startled. “Does she not have the energy anymore?”

“Well, she’s eighty-two,” my mother said. “She’s so sharp that it’s easy to forget.” My mother had picked up her egg timer, and I watched her set it for seven minutes. As she did, she said, “I’ve been meaning to say, Alice, thank you for selling the brooch. I know we probably didn’t get as much as it was worth, but every little bit helps.”

WE DID NOT stay long; I think all of us, with the exception of my grandmother, had found the encounter draining. My mother insisted on sending Charlie home with the portion of kuchen he didn’t eat, and the five of us stood in the living room exchanging goodbyes. “I can see why Alice speaks so fondly of where she comes from,” Charlie said to my mother, and his voice was loud and confident but also distant—it was the way I’d later see him speak to constituents. When my grandmother shook his hand, she said, “I never voted for your father, but I always admired your mother’s sense of style. There’s a picture I once saw of her in a stunning fox cape.”

Charlie was not smiling as he said, “I’ll tell her you said so.”

In the car, I directed him out of town, and after we reached the highway, neither of us spoke for nearly ten minutes. “I’m sorry if that was awkward,” I finally said. “You were a good sport.”

He said nothing.

“Are you angry?” I asked.

“You lecture me on how to behave, but you might want to save some of your etiquette lessons for your grandmother.”

“Charlie, she’s eighty-two years old. And she was joking around.”

“You must find her a hell of a lot funnier than I do. You’ll give me crap for saying this, but there are quite a few nice Republican girls out there who’d be plenty happy to date me.”

“I’m sure that’s true.”

“If we’re going to stay together, I need your support. Running for office puts pressure on a man. I’ve watched my father go through it, and now my brother, and it ain’t easy. It’s exhausting. I have to go out there and convince voters that I deserve to be elected, but if I can’t even convince the girl I’m dating, how ass-backward is that?”

I was quiet, and then I said, “I would vote for you.”

“Lucky for you, I’m not running in your district.”

“Do you not believe me that I would?”

He looked over. “Sure, I believe you. Why shouldn’t I?“

“Charlie—”

“It’s not like you have to put your money where your mouth is.” He leered a little. “So to speak.”

“You’re not being fair.”

“Alice, loyalty is everything to my family. There’s nothing more important. Someone insults a Blackwell, and that’s it. Starting in grade school, kids would think they’d lure me into an argument, or they were just busting my chops—I don’t care. I don’t try to convince people. I cut them off. So for me to hear your grandmother—”

“I wish she hadn’t said that.”

“As a public servant, you rally your supporters, and you try to win over the people on the fence, but your detractors, forget it. You’ll never get ’em. If you’re smart, that’s not how you use your time.”

We both were quiet, and I said, “What about this: What if we don’t talk about the political stuff? Spending time with you this summer has been the most fun I’ve ever had. It really has. But I don’t want to pretend that I believe things I don’t. I don’t want to stand at a rally chanting slogans.” (The number of times I have stood at a rally chanting slogans, chanting onstage, with cameras rolling—years and years ago, I lost count.) “What if I support you not as a politician but as a person?” I continued. “What if we put our differences to one side, you don’t try to convince me and I don’t try to convince you, and we just appreciate being together? Am I crazy, or is that possible? I can assure you I’ll never tell anyone if I disagree with you—that’s no one’s business but ours.”

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “I’m running for Congress on the Republican ticket, you’re a hippie who promises not to admit it in public or around my family, and together we make beautiful music?”

I hesitated. “Something like that.”

“And I can’t even try to convince you that Jimmy Carter is a pathetic chump?” But his tone had lightened; I didn’t need to hear him say we were on the same side again to know we were. “To answer your question,” he added, “no, you’re not remotely crazy. I’ve dated crazy girls, and you don’t qualify.”

“Thank you.”

He was looking over at me again. “You’re an unusual woman, Alice.”

I smiled wryly. “Some might say that you’re an unusual man.”

“You have a strong sense of yourself. You don’t need to prove things to other people.”

Did I agree? It had never felt to me like I had a strong sense of myself; it simply felt like I was myself.

“I have this image in my head,” he was saying. “We’re old, older than my parents are now. We’re eighty or hell, we’re ninety. And we’re sitting in rocking chairs on a porch. Maybe we’re up in Door County. And we’re just really happy to be in each other’s company. Can you picture that?”

My heart flared. Was he about to propose?

“I don’t think I’d ever get sick of you,” he said. “I think I’d always find you interesting.”

This was when my eyes filled with tears. But I didn’t actually cry, and he didn’t propose (of course he didn’t, we’d been dating for a month) and for another long stretch, neither of us spoke.

We had just pulled onto Sproule Street when I said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“That’s an auspicious start to a conversation.” He parked in front of my apartment and turned to me, his eyes crinkly, his lips ready to pull into a smile. I knew I had to forge ahead quickly or I’d lose my nerve.

“When I was a senior in high school, I was in an accident,” I said. “I was driving, and I hit another car, and the person in the other car died.”

“Jesus,” Charlie said, and I wondered if telling him was a mistake. Then he reached out to tug me toward him. “Come here.”

I put up one arm, holding him off. “There’s more. It was a boy I knew. I had a crush on him, and I think he had a crush on me, too. There were never repercussions in the legal sense, but the accident was my fault.”

Again, Charlie reached out for me, and I shook my head. “You have to hear all of this. I felt very guilty afterward. I still feel guilty, although I’m not as hard on myself as I was then. But I ended up”—I took a deep breath—“I ended up sleeping with Andrew’s brother. That was the boy’s name, Andrew Imhof, and his brother was Pete. It was just a few times, and no one knew about it. But I got pregnant, and I had an abortion. My grandmother arranged for a doctor she knew, a friend of hers, to do it. I never told Pete, or my parents, or anyone.”

“Alice—” He pulled me in so we were hugging, and this time I let him, and his skin was warm and he smelled exactly the way I’d come to expect him to. Against my neck, he murmured, “I’m so sorry, Lindy.”

“I don’t know that I’m the one who deserves sympathy.”

He drew back so we were making eye contact. “You think I haven’t made mistakes?”

“Of that magnitude?”

“As a matter of fact, I thought I got a girl pregnant in college. She missed her period two months in a row, and we were both beside ourselves. She was down at Sweet Briar when I was at Princeton, and I wondered if I could get away with pretending it wasn’t mine even though I knew I was the only fellow she’d slept with. When she did finally get her period, I never talked to her again, so how’s that for not deserving sympathy?”

“You were young.”

“So were you. And people fuck up. We just do. It started with Adam and Eve, and as far as I can tell, there’s been a steady flow of human error since. Can I make a suggestion? Let’s go inside so I can hold you properly.”

“Okay, although as long as I’m telling you everything else—Well, my mother just lost a bunch of money in a pyramid scheme, and the reason I didn’t go through with buying the house wasn’t because of the inspection, it was because of that. Oh, and I’m pretty sure my grandmother is a lesbian.”

To my surprise, Charlie burst out laughing. “Your grand—” He tried to compose himself. “Sorry—it’s just—that old girl back there is a muff diver?”

“Watch it, Charlie.”

“You have proof?”

“She has a . . . a lady friend. The woman who’s the doctor, they’ve been a couple for years. I think my grandmother has gotten too frail to travel to Chicago to see her, but they’re very devoted to each other.”

“Bully for her.” Charlie seemed genuinely admiring. “Anyone who finds women more attractive than men won’t get an argument from me. What else? This is getting juicy.”

“I think we’ve covered it,” I said. “No, I guess there’s also the fact that Dena isn’t speaking to me because I’m dating you. I was right that she’s furious.” The more I thought about it, the more it seemed Dena’s behavior had to reflect her frustration with her own life more than with me—her disappointment at not being married or having children. Perhaps she really had pinned her hopes on Charlie before she’d met him, but this seemed unrealistic on her part, and her anger at me felt excessive.

Charlie waved an arm through the air. “She’ll come around.” He pulled the key from the ignition. “I’m not cutting off the conversation, but let’s continue it inside.”

Though I don’t know if what he had in mind was sex—it probably was—that’s what happened: We stepped through the door of my apartment and he hugged me tightly, and soon we were grabbing and groping, impatient to shake off all the tension and verbiage. There had been too many words, they’d begun to overlap and run together, and now it was just his body on top of mine, his erection inside me, the jolting rhythm of our hips. You feel like a cavewoman saying it, but if there’s a better way than sex for restoring equanimity between a couple, I don’t know what it is.

After, he spooned me from behind. He said, “I want to take care of you and protect you and always keep you safe,” and this time I did start to cry, real tears that streamed down my face.

“I wish you could,” I said. “I wish anyone could do that for anyone else.”

“Turn around,” he said. I complied, and he said, “I love you, Alice.” With his thumb, he wiped a tear from beneath the outer corner of my eye.

“I love you, too,” I said, and it seemed such an inadequate expression of my affection and gratitude and relief, of my guilt-inflected excitement at all we had to look forward to. How had this happened? And thank goodness it had.

“What you told me in the car, I know that’s big stuff,” he said. We were facing each other, and he rubbed my hip beneath the sheet. “But from now on, it’s smooth sailing. It’s all going to be okay.”

MY GRANDMOTHER CALLED late the next morning while I was rinsing a paintbrush I’d used on Yertle the Turtle’s shell. “Charlie’s terrific,” she said.

I was stunned. “Are you teasing me?”

“Well, his politics are appalling, but he’s been suckling too long at the teat of the conservatives. I’m sure you can coax him over to our way of seeing things.”

“Granny, he’s running for Congress as a Republican.”

“He doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, my dear. That old coot Wincek has had a lock on the Sixth District since before you were born. Anyway, I suspect it’s more a rite of passage in the Blackwell family than a bona fide attempt to win on Charlie’s part. Why not let him get it out of his system? But he’s mad for you, there’s no doubt about that.”

“And you liked him apart from the political stuff?”

“He’s adorable. Very lively, very well mannered. Oh, he’s a real catch, and your mother agrees. At this very moment, she’s tidying up your trousseau. Speaking of which—should I say I told you so about your mother and Lars, or would you prefer to say it for me?”

“I think you just did.”

“That bit about his bloating and gas, and at the dining room table—it’s clearly not Lars’s debonair manner that’s attracted her, but we shouldn’t judge her for wanting to enjoy herself.”

“Granny, you baited him.”

She laughed. “Well, maybe a little.”

“I’m glad you approve of Charlie,” I said. Even, I thought, if it’s not reciprocated.

“Alice, you hold on to that young man.” My grandmother sounded positively ecstatic. “You’ve found a keeper.”

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, which was the one before school started, I drove my papier-mâché characters to the library. It took two trips to fit them all in my Capri, delicately stacked atop one another. Though no one had seen them besides Charlie, I felt nearly certain that they had turned out the way I’d wanted. Even Babar’s head stayed upright once I’d secured it to a hook behind him.

While I was situating Eloise on a shelf, I heard a deep voice say, “Those are real nice, Alice.”

“Big Glenn!” This was what we all, teachers and students alike, called Liess’s janitor, who was an extremely tall black man in his early seventies; he’d worked at the school for over fifty years. I hurried over and hugged him. “Did you and Henrietta have a good summer?” I had never actually met Big Glenn’s wife, though there was a famous pineapple upside-down cake she made that Big Glenn dropped off in the faculty lounge every May, some morning before the end of the school year. It was usually decimated by eight-twenty A.M. as if its consumption were a competitive activity.

“It’s sure been peaceful not having the hellions around.” Big Glenn smiled.

“You mean the teachers or the students?” He laughed, and I said, “I bet you missed us all.”

He stepped forward, his voice lowered. “Don’t go repeating this, but I hear Sandy’s husband is real sick.”

I winced. “Again?” Sandy Borgos taught second grade and was a friendly woman twice my age who knitted during faculty meetings and wore, whenever possible, a beige shawl that she’d made herself. Her husband had been diagnosed with throat cancer two years earlier, though the last I’d heard, he’d been in remission.

“It’s in God’s hands now,” Big Glenn said. “You know about Carolyn, anyone tell you that?” Big Glenn was, among other things, an extremely well-informed source of school gossip.

I shook my head. Carolyn Krawiec worked in the kindergarten and was seven or eight years younger than I was; she’d been at Liess just a short time, and I hardly knew her.

“Not coming back this year,” Big Glenn said. “Took up with a new beau and followed him to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” He arched his eyebrows meaningfully. This was always part of the transaction—the eschewal of explicit disapproval in favor of coded glances.

“Wow,” I said.

“Must be the real thing.” Big Glenn’s tone was highly dubious, and I felt a wave of defensiveness. Maybe it was the real thing.

“How long ago did she tell Lydia?” Lydia Bianchi was our fifty-five-year-old principal and a woman of whom I was quite fond. She was married but had no children, which led to speculation among her employees—that is to say, us—over whether her childlessness had been a choice or a private disappointment.

“Not more than a week or two,” Big Glenn said. “The gentleman is in the pharmaceuticals field, comes up to Madison on a regular basis, so you might think they could have seen each other like that.” He shrugged. “I must have forgot the passions of young love.”

“Have they hired her replacement?”

“You interested?”

“No way—I’m staying right here in the library.” This was when, somewhere inside, I knew that the opposite was true. I would leave. I would go away. If Charlie and I stayed together, if things progressed between us in ways I had not specified to anyone, including myself, since that conversation with Dena at the sandwich place, then my days as a teacher were probably numbered.

Standing there chatting with Big Glenn, I could feel the present moment rushing from me. I would leave soon, I realized, and when I did, in my absence, the other teachers would talk about me, too.

EVERYONE ALWAYS SAID there weren’t tornadoes in Madison because of the lakes. The city is an isthmus, a term children who grow up in Madison know from an early age. And while Wisconsin wasn’t hit by tornadoes with the regularity of towns in the states south and west of us, we tended to have a few watches a year and perhaps one warning and one real storm. In Riley, when I was a girl, we’d have tornado drills every spring. If we were in class, we filed out and sat Indian-style on the floor in the hall, knee to knee with the students beside us, all of us facing the wall, our heads down and our hands crossed over the crowns of our skulls. If we were outside—the drills happened sometimes at recess, which felt like a great waste—a teacher would lead us to a dip in the grassy hill behind the elementary school, and we’d lie flat on our bellies and join hands, forming an irregular circle or a human flower, our bodies the petals pointing out. In high school, we joked about the absurdity: That was supposed to save us? I pictured a net of children blown aloft, straining to hold on to one another.

The tornado watch that happened in late August 1977 was on a Sunday afternoon, and the night before, Charlie and I had gone to a party at the house of a couple he knew named the Garhoffs. I was pretty sure people had been smoking marijuana in the upstairs bathroom, which surprised me—I’d been to parties where there was pot, but the Garhoffs had children who were asleep on the same floor. We left a little after midnight, Charlie came to my apartment for an hour, and he tried to persuade me to let him stay over. “Like in Houghton” was his new argument. “And see, the flames of hell haven’t licked us yet.”

I declined. I knew that the next morning, he was going with Hank Ucker to a church service in Lomira, followed by a pancake breakfast. I, meanwhile, was greatly looking forward to cleaning my apartment—there were dishes in the sink, several loads of laundry, unpaid bills, everything that you happily neglect in the early stage of a relationship.

On Sunday, I tended to this tidying up for several hours while the sky turned from blue to dark gray. By two P.M., the temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees since sunrise, and I shut my kitchen and bedroom windows and turned on the radio. A tornado was approaching Lacrosse, apparently, heading southwest, and it wasn’t yet clear if it would hit Madison. I called Charlie, and when he answered, I said, “I’m glad you’re home safely.”

“I am never eating another pancake. God almighty, Lindy, those little old ladies refuse to take no for an answer.”

“Have you looked outside lately?” I was standing in front of the kitchen sink, which faced the backyard and the rear of the house behind mine. “Even the birds aren’t chirping.”

“You’re not worried, are you?”

I could hear his television, and I said, “Are you watching baseball?”

“The Brew Crew is trouncing the White Sox, thank you very much. Victory tastes even sweeter after our last two losses.”

“Would it be annoying if we stay on the phone?” I said. “We don’t need to talk.”

“Why don’t you come over? Or want me to come there?”

“Do you remember that my TV is black and white?”

“Then you come here, and I’ll let you rub my tummy.”

“I’d rather not drive right now, in case—” I began to say, and outside a pounding rain abruptly started. Then I realized it was not rain but hail.

“Mike Caldwell’s the next at bat,” Charlie said. “I had my doubts about him, but he’s playing a decent game. Steve Brye, on the other hand—” This was when there was a flash of lightning followed by a terrific crack of thunder, and then the sirens went off, that menacing wail.

“I’m going down to the basement, and you should, too,” I said. “Please, Charlie, don’t keep watching the game.”

“You know everything’s fine, don’t you?” His voice was calm and kind.

“Charlie, turn off the TV.”

As if I were headed to the beach, I grabbed a towel and a book (it was Humboldt’s Gift), and a flashlight as well, and I hurried from my apartment. The door to the basement was behind the stairs in the first-floor hall. There was one other apartment in the house, a first-floor unit belonging to a doctoral student named Ja-hoon Choi, and though I’d waited out tornadoes with him a few times before, his car wasn’t in the driveway, so I didn’t think he was home. The basement staircase was rickety and wooden, with air between the steps, and there was a bare lightbulb whose string I yanked on when I reached the bottom. Our landlord kept old sailing equipment here, and some outdoor furniture, but for the most part, the space was empty. I unfolded a lawn chair with metal arms and a plaid polyester seat, but it was so rusty and cobwebby that I folded it right back up. Then I just stood there holding the towel, Humboldt’s Gift, and the flashlight. In the last few minutes, it had become hard to suppress thoughts about the unreliability of luck. I will not be the one it happens to—this is what we all believe, what we must believe to make our way in the world each day. Someone else. Not me. But every once in a while it is you, or someone close enough that it might as well be you. People to whom a terrible thing has never happened trust fate, the notion that what’s meant to be will be; the rest of us know better. I pictured a tree crashing through Charlie’s living room window, Charlie himself being lifted from the couch, trapped in the spinning air, violently deposited on the street or a roof. It’s a phenomenon that seems comic to those who don’t live in tornado-prone areas—the flying cow or refrigerator—and even to those of us who live in tornado states, it can be funny during calm times. But it was hailing outside, it was as dark as night, and anxiety clutched me. It can’t happen twice to a person I love, I thought, but I was not able to convince myself.

Then, over the dropping hail and the squeal of the sirens, I heard a pounding that I eventually realized was coming from the first floor. I did nothing, and then I darted up the steps, expecting to see Ja-hoon Choi through the window in the front door. Instead, I saw Charlie.

I opened the door, saying, “Charlie! My God!” He sauntered in, sopping wet, and I threw my arms around him and said, “You shouldn’t have driven over!” When we kissed, his lips were slick.

I pulled him back toward the basement, and when we were safely down there, he gestured at the towel I’d been holding all this time. “That for me?” He rubbed it over his head, and after he pulled it away, he surveyed the basement. “Nice ambience.”

“I can’t believe you’re here.”

“There’s fallen branches on Williamson, but I bet you anything the tornado bypasses us. This is just a thunderstorm.” Even as he said it, the sirens stopped. “See?” He grinned. “God agrees with me.”

“Still, it can’t have been safe to—”

He put his hand over my mouth, cutting me off. “I thought of something on the way here, but you have to stop scolding me. If I move my hand, will you stop?”

I nodded, and he withdrew his hand.

“I decided we should get married,” he said. “No more of this running-through-the-rain shit. We should live in the same place, sleep in the same bed at night, wake up together in the morning, and whenever there’s a tornado, I can take care of you and watch baseball at the same time.”

We regarded each other. Uncertainly, I said, “You mean—Is this—Are you proposing?”

“It sure feels like it.” He grinned, but a little nervously.

I said, “Okay.” And then I beamed.

When Charlie took hold of me, he embraced me so tightly my feet left the ground—literally, I mean, not figuratively. And here we were in the basement, the grimy basement: My life was changing, and we stood in the dankest of places. I was still myself, I didn’t feel catapulted into a different existence, the room was not aglow. It was only later that this moment would take on its proper burnish. While it was happening, everything felt new and strange and exciting and tenuous, which was the opposite of how it would feel later: weighty and familiar and reassuring. It would in retrospect appear to be a stop on a narrative path that was inevitable, but this is only because most events, most paths, feel inevitable in retrospect.

And so I had lost Dena, and in exchange I had gotten marriage; I’d traded friendship for romance, companionship for a husband. Was this not a reasonable bargain, one most people would make? I’d no longer be that allegedly eccentric, allegedly pitiable never married woman; my very existence would not pose a question that others felt compelled to try answering.

But what amazed me was that I would marry a man I loved; my choices had not turned out to be settling or remaining single. The generic relief of being coupled off was something I could have found by marrying Wade Trommler in 1967, or another man since. The remarkable part was that I’d be getting much more. Charlie was sweet and funny and energetic, he was incredibly attractive—his wrists with light brown hair on the back, his preppy shirts, his grin, and his charisma—and I had waited until the age of thirty-one, I’d sometimes felt like the last one standing, and then I had found somebody who was not perfect but was perfect enough, perfect for me. I was not to be punished, after all. I was to be rewarded, though it was hard to say for what.

It had been six weeks since we’d met.

WE HAD BACK-TO-SCHOOL faculty meetings that Wednesday and Thursday, before Labor Day weekend, and really, we teachers were no different than high school students, sniffing one another out after several months apart, comparing vacations, checking to see who’d gotten thin or tan. During the principal’s welcoming speech in the gym, I sat on the bleachers between Rita and Maggie Stenta, the first-grade teacher who’d had me to her house for sloppy joes and sangria the previous spring. As our principal, Lydia Bianchi, described the new schedule for after-school bus duty, Rita leaned over and whispered, “How’s your boyfriend?”

Maggie turned. “Are you dating someone?”

I shook my head as if I didn’t follow or dared not turn my attention from Lydia. Truthfully, I didn’t know quite how to talk about Charlie; I did not want to gush or boast. After three days, we still hadn’t mentioned our engagement to anyone. We wanted to tell our families first, and because we’d be spending Labor Day weekend in Door County with the Blackwells and would return to Riley the following weekend, it seemed nicer to wait and share the news in person. What his family would make of simultaneously meeting me and finding out I was to be their newest in-law, I couldn’t imagine.

Every year, all the teachers were required to watch the same half-hour filmstrip on head lice—it was a source of much grumbling, and I personally was seeing it for the sixth time—and the film was shown that Thursday in the library after lunch. I was walking back from the cafeteria with Rita and was still in the hall when Steve Engel, a science teacher who was six-five, hit his head on the Paddle-to-the-Sea canoe hanging in the library doorway. “Cool boat,” I heard him say to no one in particular.

After a bit of shifting, I’d found the right place for all the papiermâché pieces: the Runaway Bunnies and Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne perched on the lower shelves where the youngest children’s books were kept; Ferdinand stood guard over the card catalog; the Giving Tree received a place of honor on my desk. A part of me couldn’t believe I’d finished all ten of them, especially with the happy distraction of Charlie. I had probably spent two hundred hours total on the project—admittedly, most of those hours had been before Charlie—and I did not doubt that some people would have judged that a colossal waste of time.

When the filmstrip was over, Deborah Kuehl, the ostentatiously organized school nurse who was in charge of showing the film, was explaining the institution of a new no-nits policy. “I can’t believe she does this right after lunch,” Rita muttered. Although Deborah had a brisk manner, she was generous with her medical expertise and didn’t seem to mind when teachers hit her up for advice—she’d peer into your throat and tell you if it looked like strep, or advise you on whether the black fingernail you’d banged in a door needed to be treated for infection.

When Deborah asked if there were any questions, Rita raised her hand. “I just wanted to say, doesn’t the library look fabulous? Alice made all the animals herself.”

I could feel the teachers in the rows ahead of and behind us look at me.

“While that’s very supportive of you, Rita, I was hoping for questions pertaining to the nit policy.” Deborah scanned her audience. No one else raised a hand, and she seemed only a little disappointed. Primly but not ungenerously, she said, “The sculptures are indeed a colorful addition to this space. Bravo, Alice, for your creativity.”

Rita started clapping, and I murmured, “Rita, please,” but it had already caught on. I knew I was blushing.

As it happened, when the children returned to school the following week, they seemed to get a kick out of the characters but also to see them for what they were, which was background decoration. The characters did not wear well that year: Even by the end of the first day, one of Ferdinand’s horns had come off, a casualty of a second-grader’s overexcitement, and after the sixth-graders’ library period, I found a mustache drawn above Eloise’s lips (I was pretty sure I knew which two boys had done it). At the conclusion of the school year, I ended up throwing them all out except for the Giving Tree, which I still have; each time I move, I pack it more carefully, as if it is a priceless vase. But I can honestly say I didn’t mind the other characters’ short lives. I enjoyed making them, and if it’s great reverence you’re looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude—well, then you don’t work with kids.

What I couldn’t have imagined at the time was that the applause after the lice film was the moment of my greatest professional achievement. It was the most public recognition I ever received for being myself rather than an extension of someone else or, even worse, for being a symbol. Thirty-five teachers clapping in an elementary school library is, I realize, a humble triumph, but it touched me. In the years since, I have received great and vulgar quantities of attention, more attention than even the most vain or insecure individual could possibly wish for, and I have never enjoyed it a fraction as much.

THAT NIGHT, CHARLIE and I were eating dinner at his place, sitting on the living room couch with plates on our laps while the Brewers played the Detroit Tigers, and I said, “If we get married in the spring, what about doing it in the Arboretum? Would it upset your parents if we didn’t have the ceremony in a church?”

“I knew you were an atheist!” He pointed at me. “Nah, I don’t think they’d mind the outdoor thing, but it’s gotta be much sooner. I need to be settled in Houghton come January.”

“By yourself, do you mean, or with me?”

“That’s usually how it works, man and wife under the same roof.” Charlie’s expression was mischievous. He was barefoot, wearing white shorts and a white polo shirt because he hadn’t yet taken a shower after playing tennis with Cliff Hicken that afternoon. “Are you turned on by my virile man scent?” he’d asked when we were standing in the yard grilling hamburgers, and he’d pressed his body against mine and danced a little. Although I’d made a show of holding my nose—it seemed to be what he wanted—I found him cute when he was sweaty; he didn’t smell bad to me at all.

“But when would the wedding be?” I said. “January is only five months away, Charlie.”

“A wedding’s nothing but a party where the lady wears a white dress. Hell, we could have it tomorrow.”

“Your sense of romance is really sweeping me off my feet.”

“Let’s say October,” he said. “You free in October?”

I considered it. This was far sooner than I’d imagined, but it was doable. “I don’t see why not.”

“That’s the spirit. We don’t want some fancy-schmancy deal, anyway, do we? My brothers and their wives all did those country-club receptions with the receiving-line crap. Well, not John, he married Nan, who’s from back east, so they did it at her parents’ place in Bar Harbor. Hey, there’s an idea for you—what about Halcyon? Plenty of room, lots of beds, and you couldn’t ask for a more spectacular setting.”

“I’ll let you know after I see it tomorrow. But if we do it in October, there might be snow on the ground.”

Charlie thought about this for a moment, then said, “Damn your practicality.”

I hesitated. “I’ll finish out the school year, right? Even when we live in Houghton, I’ll just drive back to Madison?”

Charlie shrugged. “If it’s important to you.”

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable resigning in the middle of the year. People do it, but Lydia—our principal—hates when it happens.”

“So long as this is your last year at Liess, do what you like. I’ll need you around next summer, that’s for certain. Being the wife of a candidate is a job in itself, which Maj knows all too well.”

“I’ll never have to speak in public, will I? I won’t have to give speeches?”

He grinned. “Is that a condition of marrying me?”

“Charlie, I can hardly talk at faculty meetings.”

“Okay, okay, you never have to give a speech.” He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, his tone was serious. “I won’t win. You understand that, don’t you?”

“That’s not very optimistic.”

“This isn’t a fake candidacy, I don’t see myself as a straw man. That’s not what I’m saying. I’ll campaign my heart out. But the numbers aren’t there. The focus isn’t on getting elected, not yet. It’s about putting my name out there, letting people know I’m an adult. I’m a serious person with serious ideas about the state of Wisconsin.”

Looking at him, I had the uneasy thought that I could not imagine saying to someone: I’m a serious person with serious ideas. I couldn’t imagine needing to.

Slowly, I said, “But won’t a lot of people be putting a lot of time and money—”

He shook his head. “This is how it works. We’re laying a foundation.”

“A foundation for what? Are you planning to run for Congress again in two years?”

“I’m keeping my options open. Probably not in two years, no, but down the line, who knows? Maybe a position with the Republican Party, maybe a Senate run. So much of the political process is nothing but timing.”

I set down my hamburger. “You sound incredibly cynical.”

“I didn’t write the rules,” Charlie said.

“You seem happy to play by them.”

“Dammit, Alice—” He put his hamburger down, too, and moved his plate to the coffee table in front of the couch. The table was shoddy white Formica, and he’d told me with evident pride that he’d gotten it off the sidewalk a few months before, when his neighbors had set it out with their trash. “I thought you were going to support me. Isn’t that what you said in the car, or did I misunderstand?”

“Don’t you ever just want a regular life? I don’t see why it’s so much better to be a public figure than a private citizen.”

“For one thing, this is about service, not ego. Some people are in it to satisfy their own narcissism, sure, but not the Blackwells. Alice, if you’re trying to talk me out of running, we have a serious problem.”

“You gave me the impression that this was a onetime thing.”

“Meaning you also thought I’d lose. Here you pretend to be aghast at me wasting money on a campaign when you’ve been counting on the other guy winning.”

We both were quiet. “Let’s not argue,” I said.

He balled up his napkin and tossed it across the room toward the fireplace. When I stole a look at his profile, I saw that his expression was churlish.

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

“That might not be a bad idea.”

I stood and carried my plate into the kitchen, and my hands were shaking. Were we still engaged? Were we still a couple, even? If we hadn’t told anyone we were getting married, we wouldn’t need to tell anyone we weren’t. Perhaps there had been something vaporous about our relationship all along, something unreal. We could end things and there’d be nothing to explain. If anyone asked, I could simply say that it had fizzled.

Driving back to my own apartment, I thought that maybe it was for the best. Was I really so keen to trade my independence for a boosterish supporting role? Why would I want to sign on for a lifetime of listening to speeches like the one I’d heard him give at the Lions Club in Waupun? Putting aside the question of whether I agreed with his political platform, those types of speeches were just boring. Their repetition and their wheedling undertone and their righteous scorn and their phony clarity—they were so false and silly exactly as they pretended to be honest and important. And Charlie expected me not merely to tolerate his participation in this culture but to be excited about it? Yet would I ever expect him to come sit in the library and listen to me read Bread and Jam for Frances?

These thoughts roiled in my brain for over two hours—I was lying in bed, above the covers, reading Humboldt’s Gift—and then I looked up from the middle of a paragraph on page 402, my certainty disintegrated all at once, and I was left with a feeling of heavy, insistent badness. What Charlie and I had been quarreling about seemed abstract and insubstantial. I could hardly remember the words either of us had used, and I just wanted to be sitting next to him, lying beneath him, my arms around him and his arms around me. He was the opposite of vaporous; everything else was vapor, and he was solid and central. The possibility that we might have broken up was devastating; it was unbearable.

I willed myself not to give in to the temptation to call him—it would be better to wait until the next morning. It was presumptuous to think his anger was on the same time line mine was, to imagine that he’d already have forgiven me, too. And yet if I could call him, if I could make things all right, the relief would be so great that perhaps it was a risk worth taking. In the bathroom, I washed my face and brushed my teeth, and then I tweezed my eyebrows a bit, just to occupy myself. I went back into the bedroom and changed into my sleeveless cotton nightgown. It was ten-twenty, I saw, and I decided that I wouldn’t call him before eleven o’clock. I wouldn’t even make a definite plan to call him until then; I would leave open the possibility, and if I could restrain myself, I would, but if I couldn’t, at eleven I’d think through what I wanted to say.

I lay on my side, with the light on and the window open, and a warm breeze blew in. I tried not to cry. Who cared if I had to sit through speeches about taxes for the next fifty years? Perhaps I could learn to hold a novel in my purse at such an angle that no one would observe me reading it. No, it wouldn’t be a narrowing, a stricture, to become Charlie’s wife; whenever I was with him, my life felt dense with possibilities, fuller and noisier and far more fun. I had never been a person who believed life was an adventure. To me, it was more a series of obligations, some of which could be quite rewarding and some of which you just gritted your teeth for. But now I saw the case for larks and mischief. Here I was being offered my own personal tour guide in the country of good fortune, and I was stalling as I had once stalled with Andrew Imhof. What was wrong with me?

I nearly leaped from the bed, I hurried into the kitchen, I’d lifted the receiver and begun dialing and then my buzzer rang, and when I flew downstairs and opened the front door, we made eye contact, and without either of us saying anything, we were hugging tightly, and he said, “If you don’t want me to run again after this, I won’t. Hell, I don’t even need to run now,” and I said, “Of course you should.”

“I promise I won’t try to brainwash you,” he said. “You can vote for Fidel Castro and I won’t bat an eye.”

Although I hadn’t been crying, when I laughed, it was the kind of deep, gaspy laughter that follows tears.

“Can we decide there won’t be ugliness between us?” He was looking down at me, and he set his palms on my cheeks. “Because I can’t stand it, I really can’t.”

I still was giggly with nervous relief. “Charlie, I’m so sorry.”

“Obviously, we’re still getting to know each other,” he said. “No doubt some folks will say we rushed this. But I’ve never felt more sure of anything. Getting to know you better, the idea of spending all the coming weeks and years together—there’s nothing I look forward to more.”

“Charlie, I do know you’ve been raised for this life, and I think it’s honorable. You believe in making the world better, and I admire that.” As I said it, it became true. There was a skepticism that I surrendered in this moment, and the surrender was long-lasting; it was practically permanent. There is such a thing as lively debate, and Charlie and I weren’t cut out for it—so limited was our appetite for rancor that any taste of it was acrid. We could agree, or we could avoid discussion, and I was good at both; by generation, gender, and geography, and above all, by temperament, I was good at agreement and good at avoidance.

If I were to tell the story of my life (I have repeatedly declined the opportunity), and if I were being honest (I would not be, of course—one never is), I would probably feel tempted to say that standing that night just inside my apartment, me in my nightgown and Charlie in jeans and a red shirt, I made a choice: I chose our relationship over my political convictions, love over ideology. But again, this would be false honesty; it would once more contribute to a narrative arc that is satisfying rather than accurate. My convictions were internal—I’d rarely seen the point in expressing them aloud, and if I had, my entire political outlook could have been summarized by the statement that I felt bad for poor people and was glad abortion had become legal. And so I didn’t choose anything in this moment. I had met Charlie a matter of weeks before, and already the idea of living without him made me feel like a fish flopping on the sand. To go from being a Democrat to a Republican, or at least to pretend, through smiling obfuscation, that I had—this was a small price to pay for the water washing back over me, allowing me to breathe.

Charlie was grinning.

“What?” I said.

“I just realized.” His nostrils flared a little. “We get to have our first makeup sex.”

I HAD BOUGHT a basil plant in a small terra-cotta pot to give as a hostess present to Charlie’s mother, but we were less than halfway to Halcyon when I began to question my selection. This second-guessing occurred right around the time I came to understand that Halcyon, Wisconsin, was not, as I had previously assumed based on Charlie’s passing references, a town. Rather, Halcyon was a row of houses along a seven-hundred-acre eastern stretch of the peninsula that was Door County, and in order to own one of the houses, you had to belong to the Halcyon Club. Apparently, you became a member by being born into one of five families: the Niedleffs, the Higginsons, the deWolfes, the Thayers, and the Blackwells. Charlie’s first kiss, he explained cheerfully, had been with Christy Niedleff, when he was twelve and she was fourteen; Sarah Thayer, the matriarch of the Thayer family, was the sister of Hugh deWolfe, the patriarch of the deWolfes; Hugh deWolfe and Harold Blackwell, Charlie’s father, had been roommates at Princeton; Emily Higginson was the godmother of Charlie’s brother Ed; and those were about all the intramural details I managed to retain, though there were many, many more, and Charlie shared them with increasing zest the closer we got to our destination. The families had purchased the land together in 1943, he said; they each had their own house, their own dock, and everyone took their meals at a jointly owned and maintained club. Oh, and that weekend was the Halcyon Open, the long-standing tennis competition for which a silver trophy vase sat on the mantel in the clubhouse and on whose surface the men’s singles and doubles champions’ names were engraved each year. Charlie had won singles in 1965, 1966, and 1974, and he and his brother Arthur had won doubles in 1969.

“You eat all your meals at a clubhouse?” I said. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

“The peanut-butter no-bake bars are out of this world,” Charlie said. “And the apple pie, it makes you proud to be an American.”

“But who cooks? Do you take turns?”

“No, no, there’s a staff.” His voice was casual—naturally, there was a staff—and I tried to absorb this information quickly and invisibly. Just as I did not think I ought to apologize for having been raised middle-class, I did not think Charlie ought to apologize for or feel self-conscious about his privilege. “Mainly, it’s Ernesto and his wife, Mary,” he was saying. “Just terrific people, one of those couples that fight like cats and dogs but you know they’re crazy for each other. And they always hire a couple of kids from town. One niece of theirs, damned if I can remember her name, but she was—I guess plentifully endowed would be a nice way to put it. This has to have been twenty years ago.

She’s bending over to set down the French toast every morning, and my eyeballs are popping out of my head. My brothers and I were in pig heaven, let me tell you, until Maj caught wind of what was going on and told Mary she had to buy the niece a better-fitting uniform.” Charlie tapped his fingers against the steering wheel; he was in an exceptionally good mood. “What there used to be on Labor Day weekend,” he said, “and I guess no one wants to put in the time anymore, but there were annual musicals. Walt Thayer would play the piano, Maj and Mrs. deWolfe would write the lyrics, and I swear I believed I’d have a career on Broadway, which practically gave Maj a coronary, as you can imagine.”

“What were the musicals about?”

“Just things that had happened during the summer. We’d stay up here for two and a half, three months a year, so there were hijinks galore, and not only among the kids—the adults cut loose, too. Get a few G and T’s in them, and all bets are off. You know those pink flamingos, the lawn ornaments that are popular with white trash?”

When I had been a freshman in high school, our neighbor Mrs. Falke had acquired a pair and set them in her yard. But I merely said, “Uh-huh.”

“Well, Billy and Francie Niedleff buy a couple in town and put them in front of our place. After we figure out who did it, Maj wants revenge, so one night under the cover of darkness, she attaches them to the bow of Mr. Niedleff’s sloop. Mrs. Niedleff returns them to our yard a few nights later, and they’re wearing Cubs baseball caps, these little hats she made out of cardboard, because Dad just hates the Cubs. And so on and so forth for the whole summer, until the shenanigans culminate with Dad going into the lav one night, and what does he find standing in the tub but a real live flamingo.” Charlie chuckled. “I tell you, I’m not sure if Dad or the bird was more terrified.”

“But what did you do with it—you didn’t keep it, did you?”

“Oh, they took him to the zoo down in Green Bay the next day. He managed to take an epic crap before then, but hey, he was in the bathroom. Can you blame him?”

Charlie was still chortling when I said, “Maybe we shouldn’t mention our engagement to your family this weekend. Is that all right? We could invite your parents and my mother and grandmother to lunch in

Madison and tell them all together.”

Charlie turned toward me, grinning. “Having second thoughts?”

“It feels more respectful not to tell either family first,” I said. “Plus, it might be too much to say to your parents, ‘This is Alice, and by the way, she’s my fiancée.’ ”

“You’re not worried they won’t like you, are you?”

Not entirely honestly, I said, “No.” We were passing tall, skinny white birch trees, and along with my anxiety about the impending introductions, I had started to feel the restlessness that arises when you know you’re nearing water but it hasn’t yet come into view. The drive from Madison was almost four hours, and it was past three o’clock as we turned onto a series of smaller roads eventually leading to a dirt one, which we bumped along for three miles. Then, at last, I saw Lake Michigan through the trees, still distant but blue and sparkly in the sun. Charlie pulled off the road and drove onto a stretch of lushly green grass dotted with sugar maples, evergreens, and irregularly spaced white-shingled buildings of various sizes. I took the largest one to be the clubhouse.

“Halcyon sweet Halcyon,” he said, and he began honking in rapid spurts. He pointed to the big building. “That’s the Alamo, which is where Maj and Dad and some of the grandkids sleep. They might put you in there, but it’s likelier you’ll be in one of those.” He was pointing at the smaller cottages. “That’s Catfish, and Gin Rummy, and Old Nassau. And you see that one?” He grinned. “Smoked my first joint there, and nearly burned the place to the ground. It’s called Itty-Bitty.” He stuck his head out the window, and I saw that someone had emerged from the biggest house and was approaching us, someone who strongly resembled Charlie except with darker hair. Charlie drove directly toward this person—he was probably going fifteen miles an hour, not fast but not all that slow, either, given the proximity—and the closer Charlie got, the wider this guy’s smile grew. He walked with complete nonchalance, and at the last second, when I was already wincing, Charlie slammed on the brakes, and the guy called out, “You’re so chickenshit, Chas!”

Charlie parked the car next to a wood-paneled station wagon—there were five cars pulled up near the back of the house—and the other man approached my door, resting his forearms on the roof while peering down at me through my open window. “So you’re the reason none of us have heard from Chasbo in weeks,” he said. “Now I see why.”

“Back off, perv,” Charlie said, and there was a happiness in his tone I had not heard before, not quite like this. “Alice, meet my brother Arthur.”

We shook hands through the window. “I admire you,” Arthur said. “Not every woman is willing to go out with a retard.”

Charlie was out of the car by then, and before I really knew what had happened, he’d tackled Arthur from the side and they were rolling over and over in the grass, tussling and laughing. I opened the car door and stepped out. The smell, that sweet clean smell of northern Wisconsin—it almost made Halcyon seem worthy of its pretentious name. I looked around at the five buildings. I was pretty sure, though Charlie had not explicitly said so, that these structures represented only the Blackwells’ property, their compound, and not the entirety of Halcyon, as I’d thought when the houses had first come into view. With my own recent foray into real estate having taught me to think in such terms, I guessed that the largest house was five thousand square feet; three of the others were about eight or nine hundred square feet each; and the last, Itty-Bitty, couldn’t have been over two hundred. A bed of periwinkles grew around the base of an elm tree, and the grass was such a rich green that I was tempted to take off my shoes. I walked around the side of the big house. Perhaps twenty feet in front of me, a slate sidewalk was embedded in the grass, and beyond the sidewalk, past a sloping grassy descent of about forty yards, was a narrow rocky beach and then the water. A long dock extended into the lake. At the end of the dock, figures lay on towels and sat in folding chairs. Out in the water, there was a raft off which a person in red swim trunks jumped while I watched.

When I returned to the car, Charlie and Arthur were standing and they walked toward me, panting agreeably. “Tell me, Alice,” Arthur said, “is Chasbo’s impotence still a problem, or did he get that taken care of?”

“Cured by the same doc who treated your flatulence.” Charlie was grinning. “Super fellow.”

“Better gaseous than limp,” Arthur said, and Charlie replied, “Keep telling yourself that, ass-blaster.”

“Alice, be honest,” Arthur said. “Was it Chas’s silver tongue that won you over?”

Charlie set one arm around Arthur’s shoulders. “Everything I know, I learned from my older brother.”

They both were grinning the same grin, and Arthur said, “Welcome to Halcyon. You guys want a beer?”

We opened the trunk and carried our things toward the house—“I’m not sure where Maj is putting Alice, but we’ll stash her stuff in the Alamo for now,” Arthur said—and I held my purse and the basil plant (it now seemed officially cornpone, hippie cornpone), and Arthur took the suitcase I’d bought the previous winter from Dena’s shop, which was swirling pink and brown paisley vinyl with pink leather straps. As we reached a screen door at the back of the house, Charlie asked, “Who’s around?”

“Let’s see . . . Ed and John are out fishing with Joe Thayer, Ginger has a migraine”—Arthur raised his eyebrows dubiously—“Dad and Maj are swimming with the boys and Liza, Jadey, and the baby drove to town to get bug spray—careful, ’cause the mosquitoes are a bitch right now—Uncle Trip is sleeping, and Nan is playing tennis with Margaret. Am I leaving anyone out?”

“Uncle Trip’s here?” Charlie said.

Arthur grinned. “Would Labor Day weekend be complete without him?”

At that moment, as Arthur opened the screen door and Charlie and I followed him inside, I may as well have been listening to them speak Portuguese—very few of the names meant anything to me, and it seemed that a tremendous amount of time would have to pass before they did. But I was wrong, and even by the end of the weekend, I could have decoded the summary haltingly but accurately: Ed was the oldest brother, the congressman; Ginger was his wife, prone to migraines or to faking them, depending on whom you believed (either way, there seemed to be a consensus among all the Blackwells besides Ed that Ginger was joyless and rigid, and thus she served, perhaps as they intended, as a cautionary tale for me); the boys were their sons, Harry, age ten, Tommy, age eight, and Geoff, age four; also falling under the heading of “the boys” was Arthur’s son, Drew, age three; Jadey was Arthur’s wife, and the baby was their eleven-month-old daughter, Winnie; John was the second oldest brother, the husband of Nan; Liza, age nine, was John and Nan’s older daughter, and Margaret, age seven, was their younger daughter; Uncle Trip was nobody’s uncle but had been the third roommate in the triple shared by Harold Blackwell and Hugh deWolfe at Princeton University in the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940; and finally, Dad was Harold Blackwell, and Maj was Priscilla Blackwell. Joe Thayer, with whom Ed and John were out fishing (the Blackwells owned five boats: a cutter, a motorboat, two Whitehall row-boats, and a canoe), was, at thirty-six, the oldest child of Walt and Sarah Thayer—the Thayers were another Halcyon family—and was a lawyer in Milwaukee. Joe was also a man whom, eleven years later, at night on the campus of Princeton, I’d find myself kissing on the lips. But this was the least of what I didn’t know that afternoon.

We’d entered the big house—the Alamo—through a pantry that led to the kitchen. Both the existence of the kitchen and its lack of fanciness surprised me. The refrigerator was white with rounded corners (it looked to be from the forties and hummed loudly). There was a large gas range with four burners, and an oak table with a greasy finish was pushed against the wall, its other sides flanked by chairs with thin navy blue cushions. On the wall hung a clock with a cream face, black minute and second hands, and a Schlitz logo in the center. What was striking was how full the room seemed—it was stocked like any kitchen for a large family, onions and potatoes in a wire basket hanging from the ceiling, a spice rack next to the stove, boxes of cereal stacked atop the refrigerator, and an open bag of potato chips sitting on the table. I gestured toward the chips. “I thought you ate all your meals at the clubhouse.”

“Alice, man cannot live on breakfast, lunch, and dinner alone,” Arthur said.

“Only thing the Blackwells are better at than eating is drinking,” Charlie said. “Speaking of—” He opened the refrigerator and withdrew three cans of beer, passing one each to Arthur and me. After Charlie had snapped the tab on his, he took a long swallow, and when he was finished, he said, “Christ, is it good to be here.”

Arthur turned to me. “I assume Chas has gone through the whole plumbing spiel with you.”

I looked at Charlie. “Oops,” he said, but he was smiling. To Arthur, he said, “I was afraid she wouldn’t come.”

“I offer a math lesson,” Arthur said. “There are now—Chas, is it seventeen Blackwells here? Eighteen? And there’s one bathroom, and I don’t just mean in this house, I mean in all the houses. Well, Maj and Dad have a half-bath, but that’s off limits to everyone but them. What I’m trying to say is, efficiency is appreciated.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“The pipes aren’t the greatest, so flush early and often,” Charlie said.

“If you take a massive crap, let a wire hanger be your friend.” Arthur turned his hand sideways and made a slicing gesture.

He didn’t shock me; to be fair, I didn’t know if he was trying, or if he was just being himself. Arthur struck me as childish, but I didn’t mind childishness—it wasn’t by accident that I worked at a school—and besides, meeting Charlie’s family, I wanted to be a good sport. I said, “Is this the same bathroom where your father came upon the flamingo?”

“You told her about that?” Arthur laughed, shaking his head. “Classic, absolutely classic. You should have heard that thing honking and growling. Who even knew flamingos made noise? Let me give you the grand tour.”

The three of us walked from the kitchen into the living room, an enormous open space that contained, against its north wall, the largest fireplace I had ever seen—it was a fireplace I could have stood inside. On the walls above it were mounted animal trophies: High up were a moose and several deer (at least two with six-point antlers), and lower down were trout and salmon, pheasant and wild turkey and a ruffed grouse. In one corner was what I might have taken for the showpiece of the collection—a stuffed black bear standing upright at roughly eight feet, its mouth frozen open in a ferocious growl, a heart-shaped patch of white fur on its chest—except that the beast had been stripped of its gravitas by the placement of a cowboy hat on its head. I wondered, didn’t the bear frighten the younger grandchildren?

The furniture in the living room was mismatched and faded, dominated by two white bamboo couches with cushions I suspected had once been red but were now a washed-out dark pink; both couches held a smattering of aquatic-themed throw pillows featuring lighthouses, sailboats, and shells. On a shelf beneath the large bamboo coffee table, board games were stacked in boxes that were also faded and, in some cases, coming apart (I glimpsed Scrabble, Monopoly, and Candy Land, as well as a few jigsaw puzzles). On the front wall, jalousie windows ran vertically from waist height to the ceiling and horizontally from one end of the room to the other. Many of the panes were open, and they revealed a screened-in front porch crowded with wicker furniture on a vast straw rug. At the far end, between the walls, there was strung a hammock in which—it took me a second to notice—a middle-aged man appeared to sleep soundly. Beyond the porch was Lake Michigan.

“Bedrooms are this way.” Arthur guided us into a short hallway leading to two smaller rooms. The first had another straw rug, a low king-size bed covered in a white spread, two bedside tables stacked high with hardcover books and papers, and a mirrored dressing table whose light blue paint was chipping. The second room had a double bed on a mint-colored iron frame and a not-new-looking television set propped on the dresser. It wasn’t until I saw the two bedrooms on the other side of the house, both of which contained several single beds and were spare except for the clutter of children’s toys and small articles of abandoned clothing, that I realized the first bedroom must have belonged to Charlie’s parents.

“If it’s all right, I’ll use the famous bathroom now,” I said.

“That away.” Charlie cocked his head, and as I walked in the direction he was gesturing, Arthur called after me, “Flush early and often.”

I found myself in a hallway where old-looking coats and flannel shirts hung on hooks, and carelessly stacked items of household paraphernalia sat above them on a high ledge: a Frisbee and snowshoes, a plastic kite, a copy of the Milwaukee White Pages, a dusty one-gallon metal can of gray wall paint.

Affixed to the outside of the bathroom door was a porcelain oval that said W.C. in fancy script. But this was disingenuous—it was no closet, I realized as I pushed open the door to find a room the size of my family’s dining room in Riley. In here were a washer and dryer; a clawfoot tub; an old toilet with a black plastic seat, a chain you pulled for flushing, and a tank situated above the user’s head; a small white porcelain sink; a low wooden table near the sink on which sat four mugs with two or three toothbrushes in each of them; a bookshelf with mostly paperback pot-boilers but also a few hardcovers—The Confessions of Nat Turner, a large green copy of Leon Uris’s Trinity; and a window blocked by a not entirely opaque white cotton voile curtain through which I could see parked cars and hear not just the breeze in the backyard but also the distant cries of the swimmers and sunbathers on the dock. I shut the door and was lifting my skirt—to meet Charlie’s family, I had chosen to wear a yellow knit dress with a collar, short sleeves, and a tie belt, along with my blue Dr. Scholl’s sandals—when I realized that the door had opened on its own. After a second attempt at closing it, I figured out that it didn’t stay put; no lock clicked into place, and the soft wood of the door slid away from the soft wood of the frame. Of course it did. I felt a brief rise of distress (one bathroom for eighteen people! for the next three nights!), but I swallowed it back, pulling Trinity and The Confessions of Nat Turner from the bookshelf and stacking them on the floor against the door—for all I knew, that was what they were there for. For good measure, I reached behind the curtain and shut the window; there was no screen.

When I reemerged, Charlie and Arthur were in the living room, where Arthur was showing Charlie an article about their brother Ed in Washingtonian magazine, a publication with which I was not familiar. “God almighty, is Eddie losing his hair.” Charlie held up the magazine for me to see. “I’m giving him grief about that, for sure. Alice, you want to put your swimsuit on?”

“It might be more dignified to meet your parents while I’m still wearing clothes.”

Arthur laughed. “If you’re looking for dignified, you’ve come to the wrong place.” He walked over to a small table between two white bamboo chairs, and he lifted from it a tarnished silver eight-by-ten picture frame. “I refer you to Exhibit A.”

“Oh, boy.” Charlie grinned. “You trying to get her to dump me here and now?”

Arthur passed me the frame. On the top, under the clouded silver, a monogram was discernible, the letters PBH, with the bigger B in the middle. The photograph showed a blond woman in a white wedding dress, Arthur in a tuxedo and tails, and fanning out on either side of them, a row of smiling young people; on the bride’s side were six women in matching satin pink dresses, and on Arthur’s side were six men in tails, the closest one to him being Charlie.

“This is beautiful,” I said. “When did you get married?”

“Seventy-one, but that’s not the point. Look closer.”

“All I can say is, you’d better watch your back,” Charlie said. “Not you, Alice.”

I was still scanning the photograph. Then I saw, and Arthur saw me see, and he said, “Quite a pair on him, huh? But I guess you already knew that.”

In the photo, in front of the place where Charlie’s zipper would be, hung a ruddy bulge. It was slightly out of context but unmistakable: He had (or at least I hoped it had been him and not someone else) removed his scrotum from inside his pants and displayed it for the photo.

I glanced at Charlie—really, the Blackwells were exactly like sixth-grade boys at Liess, the ones who’d use a dirty word in earshot of a teacher, waiting for a reaction—and I said mildly, “That’s an unusual pose for a picture.”

“Took about five years for Jadey to forgive me, but it was worth every minute.” Charlie grinned. “No, she knew it was all in good fun.”

“My wife is a huge admirer of the black-tie nutsack,” Arthur said. “And I do mean huge.”

Charlie took my hand and squeezed it. “I promise not to do that at our wedding.” Arthur chortled—having no idea that we really were engaged—and this was when we heard footsteps on the stairs leading up to the porch and then a voice, a refined, middle-aged female voice, calling out, “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an interloping girlfriend.”

“Do I call your mom Priscilla or Mrs. Blackwell?” I whispered.

Charlie was walking out to the porch with me behind him, and he said, “Hey, Maj, Alice wants to know if she should call you Priscilla or Mrs. Blackwell.”

“Charlie,” I hissed.

His mother laughed. “It depends,” she said. “We’ll have to see how much I like Alice.”

She had chin-length white hair that was slicked back, its wetness holding it in place in the way it does for only a few minutes after you emerge from water. She wore a navy blue tank swimsuit and a watch and nothing else, not even shoes or a towel. She was nearly six feet, and her legs and chest and shoulders were all both wrinkly and tan; her body was slim and athletic. (“I was field-hockey captain at Dana Hall as well as Holyoke,” she mentioned later in the weekend, and I murmured my approval not because I actually was impressed but because I could tell I should be.)

She had not yet glanced in my direction, and she reached out and set her fingers under Charlie’s chin—I observed the strange fact of Charlie and his mother not embracing—and after her eyes had roamed over his face, she said in a warm tone, “That haircut makes you look like a Jew.”

Without hesitation—sincerely, it seemed—Charlie laughed. “Hey, at least I still have hair, which is more than I can say for your oldest son.”

But she had already moved on; with no embarrassment or apology, she was looking me up and down. “Aren’t you a little dish.”

I stepped forward and extended the terra-cotta planter with the basil in it. “Thank you very much for having me.”

“Alice brought you some homegrown marijuana,” Charlie said. “Madison’s finest.”

“It’s basil,” I said quickly.

Mrs. Blackwell turned to Charlie. “I’ll bet you wish it were marijuana,” she said, and there was a note of pride in her voice that thickened as she added, addressing me, “My sons are incorrigibly naughty, except for Eddie, who’s straight as a ruler. Charlie tells me you’re from Riley, so you must know the Zurbrugg family.”

I nodded. “I went all through school with Fred.” The Zurbruggs were the richest people in Riley, maybe the only rich people—they owned one of the largest dairy farms in the state, and of course it had been Fred’s party that I was driving to the night of my accident.

Mrs. Blackwell said, “Ada Zurbrugg’s gladiola are the envy of our Garden Club in Milwaukee. We don’t know what her trick is. But such a shame about Geraldine, isn’t it? She was the most darling child.”

“Did something—?” I hesitated. Geraldine was Fred’s older sister, and if a great misfortune had befallen her, I wasn’t aware of it.

“Well, she’s fat as a house!” Mrs. Blackwell exclaimed. “She must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds! It’s absolutely tragic.”

“I haven’t seen her for a few years.”

“If ever the bikini should be made illegal . . . ” Mrs. Blackwell laughed merrily. “Alice, I’m putting you in Itty-Bitty. Chas, help her settle in, and do explain about the lav.” She turned back to me. “Halcyon can be a bit rustic, but I’m sure you don’t mind roughing it. Are you a singles or a doubles girl?”

It took me a few seconds to figure out what she was referring to. “Oh, I don’t play tennis.” I smiled ruefully. “Charlie told me about the tournament, though, and it sounds like a fun tradition.”

“If you don’t play tennis, what on earth do you do?” She was feigning confusion when I’m sure she wasn’t confused at all. Shrewdness emanated from her.

“Well—” I paused. Was her question rhetorical or literal? No one spoke, and I said, “I enjoy reading.” For the first time in this exchange, I did not strain to seem positive and sincere; I simply spoke, because I could see already that Priscilla Blackwell was a person who would hate you for trying to convince her you were good enough. She might hate you for not trying, too, but probably less so.

Charlie set one hand on my back. “Alice is a genius,” he said. “She’s read every book there is.” If the statement was absurd, it was also sweet. He added, “I hear Ginger has a migraine?”

Mrs. Blackwell snorted. “Ginger is a patsy.” She looked at her watch. “Drinks will be at six sharp, and we’ll leave for the clubhouse at seven-twenty.” She was looking at me again when she added, “You’ll want to change for dinner.”

ITTY-BITTY CONTAINED two sets of bunk beds, a mini-refrigerator (Charlie helped himself to another beer from it as soon as we walked inside), and a closet in which nothing hung except bare wire hangers; there was, of course, no bathroom. Of the four mattresses, only one was made up: tightly pulled white sheets, a single pillow in a white pillowcase, a maroon wool blanket folded at the foot of the bed.

Charlie sat on the blanket, hunched forward so he didn’t hit his head on the top bunk, as I hung my clothes. “This is ideal,” he said. “I was worried she’d put you in with some squawking niece or nephew, but you’ve got privacy so you can read, sleep in . . . ” He grinned. “Entertain midnight visitors.”

“Don’t count on it.” I slid a blouse onto a hanger. “I don’t want to risk getting caught by your mom. You’ve brought other girlfriends to Halcyon, haven’t you?”

“Is that code for how many girls have I slept with? You can ask me that.”

“It wasn’t code, but now that you mention it—”

“Eleven,” he said. “Before you, I mean. You’re twelve. What about you—how many dudes?”

“Counting you, four.” I set my white pumps on the closet floor.

“Really, four?” Charlie seemed surprised.

“What did you think?”

“The brother of the fellow in high school, and me, and—”

“I dated Wade Trommler during college, and a few years ago a guy named Simon.”

“You made the beast with two backs with Trombone Trommler? You were boned by the Trombone?” Charlie seemed not at all jealous but greatly amused. “That’s priceless. Oh, man, Wade has to be, hands down, the dullest man on the planet. Don’t get me wrong, he’s as nice as they come, but duller than dishwater. How was he?”

“Why do you want to talk about this?” During a recent badminton game at the Hickens’, Wade and Charlie had been on the same team, but I no longer thought of Wade as my ex-boyfriend; I simply thought of him as Rose’s husband.

“Does that mean he was bad or good?” Charlie asked.

“He was fine,” I said. “You’re right that he’s nice, and you’re right that he’s dull.”

“He was no Charlie Blackwell?”

I walked to Charlie and wrapped my arms around him. He was still sitting, and he nuzzled his face against my chest. “There’s only one Charlie Blackwell,” I said, and I couldn’t help adding, “Thank goodness.”

“And this other fellow, Simon who?”

“His last name is Törnkvist. I’m sure you don’t know him. He was kind of a hippie and a very serious person.”

“What about in the sack?”

“Charlie, come on.”

“I’m trying to get a sense of the full Lindy. To move into the future together, we must also honor our past.”

I gently tilted his head back so we were looking at each other. “Is that from a speech?”

He smirked. “Maybe.”

“I think Simon was haunted by having been in Vietnam,” I said.

“Aha.” Charlie nodded. “The embittered kind of hippie. Wise of you to move on.”

“Don’t make light of him,” I said. “He’s a decent person. You didn’t—” I had a hunch about the answer to this question, but I wasn’t certain. “You didn’t go to Vietnam, did you?”

“Couldn’t. Flat feet.” Charlie was barefoot, already wearing his swim trunks, and he extended his legs and flexed his feet.

“Did your brothers go?”

“First Ed was in law school, then he’d married Ginger, so he got draft deferments, and it turns out John and Arthur are flat-footed, too. What are the chances, huh?” Charlie grinned. Making air quotes, he said, “Those were my years in the ‘hospitality industry’—aka I was a ski bum. I was an instructor in Squaw Valley, and I grew a mountain-man beard, which I’ll ask Maj if she has any pictures of, because you have to see it to believe it.”

It was strange to have been reminded of Simon while standing in this guest cottage on the Blackwell vacation compound, strange to think how different this place was, surely, from the pea farm where Simon’s family lived. He would, I imagined, find the Blackwells indulgent and vulgar and self-satisfied, and they in turn would find him dour and humorless—not that they would ever cross paths. So what did it mean that I could dwell in either camp without much difficulty? Was I was mutable, without a fixed identity? I could see the arguments for every side, for and against people like the Blackwells, for and against a person like Simon. Yet it was hard to imagine Charlie’s behavior, unlike my own, changing depending on whom he dated; he would always be Charlie. He had told me I had a strong sense of myself, but I wondered then if the opposite was true—if what he took for strength was really a bending sort of accommodation to his ways, if what he saw when he looked at me was the reflection of his own will and personality. I was polite, adequately educated, and adequately pretty, and if I wanted to marry him, it meant he was a worthy person to marry. But no—this line of thought served little purpose. Lots of women would have married Charlie. How pompous to imagine my affirmation determined his standing in some sort of sweeping or official way, how truly laughable to a person like Priscilla Blackwell, who saw me, no doubt, as a humble teacher from a small town. I was a humble teacher from a small town. (And then, beneath this conclusion, which was the one I pretended to myself that I had drawn, there lay the conclusion that I actually drew: that I was right after all. While plenty of women indeed would have married Charlie, these were women like Dena, not women like me. I wasn’t marrying him for his money or social standing. I was marrying him because I enjoyed his company. And I was, from his point of view, a serious person—he saw me the way I had seen Simon—and it was my seriousness that fundamentally affirmed Charlie, explaining away his playfulness as a superficial distraction, alluding to hidden reservoirs of wisdom and stability. If Charlie Blackwell was really a spoiled lightweight, Alice Lindgren would not have been marrying him; we both needed to believe it. But again, as I said: This is the conclusion I pretended not to have drawn.)

Charlie patted my backside. “Hurry up and put your suit on,” he said. “I want to get in a swim before dinner.”

TWO HOURS LATER, as I climbed the steps leading to the screened-in porch of the Alamo at a minute to six, I saw that the porch was empty. Naturally, I wondered if I’d gotten the time or place wrong that we were to have drinks, and my apprehension increased when I looked over my shoulder and saw Charlie’s brother John walking up the grassy incline from the lake, wearing plaid swim trunks and holding the hand of Margaret, his seven-year-old daughter. As he approached, he made a wincing smile. “We’ll do a very quick turnaround,” he said to me. “Lightning speed, right, Margaret? Alice, you look lovely.” A thread-bare towel hung around John’s neck, and in his right hand he carried a rubber inner tube. Both he and Margaret had burnt noses and shoulders.

I’d met John and several other Blackwells on the dock that afternoon. Everyone was friendly—the children were busy splashing and playing—and I had trouble remembering who was who except for Harold Blackwell, who, when Charlie and I arrived, was climbing a wooden ladder out of the water. He looked like an older version of the governor I had paid only passing attention to in the newspaper and on television when I was in high school and college, except that instead of wearing a business suit, he wore swim trunks, his gray chest hair clung wetly to his skin, and his nipples were mauve coins; to see the nipples of the former governor was an unsettling experience on which I did my best not to dwell. (I had the thought that Dena would appreciate the awkwardness of this encounter, then I felt a twinge of regret that I wouldn’t be able to describe it to her, then I was distracted by meeting the many other Blackwells.) When Charlie introduced us, Harold Blackwell placed both his hands over both of mine. “I can’t tell you how delighted we are to have you here,” he said, and he didn’t seem the way I remembered him from television, which was distant and self-assured and generically middle-aged and generically male. Had time changed him? He possessed an air of kindness that was both sorrowful and authentic—a sad person whose sadness had, of all possible outcomes, made him nice.

I had just opened the screen door onto the porch of the Alamo when a thin, middle-aged black woman in a black dress and a white apron appeared from inside the house, carrying a tray of crab dip and crackers that she set on a large round table. Already there, sitting on the white tablecloth, were bottles of wine, whiskey, brandy, sweet vermouth, and bitters, as well as a silver ice bucket, a lemon, a dish of maraschino cherries, green cocktail napkins, and many glasses—wineglasses and highballs and old-fashioneds—off which the evening sun reflected enchantingly. A plastic cooler filled with ice and cans of Pabst and Schlitz waited adjacent to the table with the lid removed.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Alice Lindgren. I’m Charlie’s—I’m a guest of Charlie.”

The woman nodded in a not particularly warm way. “What do you want to drink?”

“Am I early?” I asked. “May I help you set up?” On the wicker tables between chairs, I noticed little bowls of peanuts and, separately, Cheetos; also, on closer inspection, I saw that the cocktail napkins featured a yellow ball midbounce and said in white letters TENNIS PLAYERS HAVE NO FAULTS!

The woman said, “You want some white wine, is that what you want?”

“That would be wonderful.” When I saw that she was opening a bottle, I wished I’d declined, but it seemed to be too late. She passed the glass to me, and I had just taken a sip when a male voice cried out, “Miss Ruby!” There was a whir in my peripheral vision, a quick-moving human figure, and the woman in the apron was swept off her feet. The figure, it turned out, was Charlie; he had lifted her into a spinning embrace, and as he set her down, the woman glared at him, smoothing her apron, and said, “You don’t have an ounce of sense.”

Charlie grinned. “Miss Ruby, meet my bride-to-be, Alice Lindgren. Alice, this is my first love, Miss Ruby.”

I might have been annoyed by Charlie’s disclosure about our engagement—it seemed a violation of our agreement in the car—except that as Miss Ruby and I shook hands, she seemed no more interested in me than she had before Charlie’s arrival. Had Charlie introduced other young women to her as his bride-to-be? It was not impossible. “Don’t you touch that crab dip, Charlie Blackwell,” she snapped, and I saw that he’d dipped his index finger into the crystal bowl beside the wine bottles. Miss Ruby exhaled through her nostrils. “You can’t use a knife like a civilized person?”

“It tastes better like this.” Charlie licked his finger. “Alice, want a drink?”

I held up my wine.

“Excellent,” he said. “And you look ravishing, of course.” He leaned in to kiss my lips; clearly, he was in a performative mode. I had seen this a few times in Madison when we were in groups. Sometimes he was charmingly silly but still capable of listening to what you said, and sometimes, particularly when he’d been drinking for several hours, he was wound up into a frenzy of goofiness, deaf to the remarks of anyone who wasn’t similarly drunk and wound up. I’d simply ridden out these episodes, waiting until we could go home for the night, sometimes exchanging sympathetic looks with the wives or girlfriends of other men. I didn’t want to encourage Charlie, but I also had no desire to tell him how to behave.

“Miss Ruby can verify that this is the only time in family history I’ve been the first one here,” Charlie said. “I didn’t want you to think you were in the wrong place, Lindy. Blackwell Standard Time is—What would you say, Miss Ruby, about forty-five minutes behind?”

“Don’t be fresh,” she said.

Charlie gestured toward her. “This woman took care of me from the day I came home from the hospital, and honest to God, I’d lay down my life for her.”

“I’ll bet you would,” Miss Ruby said as she walked back into the house.

“She’s hilarious, right?” Charlie said. “The genuine article.” I was not sure I agreed, but immediately, with Miss Ruby having stepped away and an audience of only me, he settled down a little. Still, I could tell that he was geared up for the night ahead. And I couldn’t blame him—it was obvious that for the Blackwells, family reunions not only involved competitive sports but were a kind of competitive sport in themselves. Being around the Blackwells (these impressions returned again and again in the years to come) filled me with a jealous wonder at their clannish energy, their confidence, their sheer numbers, and also with a gratitude that I had grown up in a calm and quiet family. So many inside jokes for the Blackwells to keep track of, so many nicknames and references to long-ago incidents, so much one-upmanship: Surely I was not the only one who found it tiring.

Within the next half hour, they all appeared, either from inside the Alamo or traipsing over from the other cottages, many of them wet-haired, the men in seersucker suits or khaki pants and navy blazers, the women in sundresses, holding the hands of children—little girls in green or pink dresses with smocking across the chest, or hand-stitched balloons or apples, wearing Mary Janes on their feet; little boys in shortalls and white socks that folded down and white saddle shoes.

Drinks were distributed—most of the adults had old-fashioneds, while the children had Shirley Temples or Roy Rogers—and Miss Ruby carried around the crab dip and I met the family members I hadn’t met before. It quickly became clear that there was no conversation in which I was required to do much more than nod and laugh. “We’re all so curious about you,” said Nan, the wife of Charlie’s brother John, and then she proceeded not to ask me any questions as she and John and Charlie and I stood there for ten minutes. John and Charlie carried the conversation, focusing first on the current quality of fish in the lake and then moving on to whether the Brewers’ 1–0 victory over the Detroit Tigers the previous night could be attributed more to the Brewers playing well or the Tigers playing poorly. I didn’t mind this; I have always had a soft spot for people who talk a lot because I feel as if they’re doing the work for me. I don’t usually have a great deal to say—I almost envy people their heated opinions, their vehemence and certainty—and I am perfectly content to listen. There are a few topics of particular interest to me (when another person has just read the same book I have, I enjoy comparing reactions), but I can’t bear pretending to have an opinion when I don’t. The few times I have pretended in this way have left me with a sour sort of hollowness, a niggling regret.

I subsequently found myself in a conversation with Uncle Trip, also loquacious, who explained that he divided his time—for reasons of business or pleasure, I could not discern—among Milwaukee, Key West, and Toronto. This seemed to me at the time to be the oddest triangle imaginable, but really, for the Blackwells’ friends, it proved not to be particularly unusual at all. Milwaukee and Sun Valley, Milwaukee and the Adirondacks, Minneapolis and Cheyenne and Phoenix, Chicago and San Francisco. They sold textiles, or mined ore, or owned a gallery in Santa Fe, or they were consultants—this was before consulting was as common as it is today—or they had just taken a cruise around the Gulf of Alaska, and it had, they reported, been marvelous.

As for the employ of Charlie’s brothers, Ed, the oldest, was the congressman; Charlie’s second oldest brother, John, was CEO of Blackwell Meats (on the dock that afternoon, Charlie had introduced John as “the sausage king’s sausage king”); and Arthur, who was two years older than Charlie, worked for the family company as a lawyer. None of their wives held jobs.

The porch was crowded, and I was discussing Wisconsin’s public school superintendent with John, which is to say that John was talking about the time Superintendent Ruka, whom he called Herb, had birdied a long par 4 at the Maronee Country Club, when Liza and Margaret, John’s two daughters, scampered between us and disappeared again into the thicket of adult bodies. The younger one, Margaret, returned and tapped my forearm. She was looking up at me with an expression of nervousness, excitement, and secrecy that made me almost certain she had been dispatched by her older sister. “Are you Uncle Chas’s girlfriend?”

“Margaret, what do we say when we interrupt a conversation?” John chided.

“Excuse me,” Margaret said. “Excuse me, but are you Uncle Chas’s girlfriend?”

“I am,” I said.

“Do you wear perfume?”

I laughed. “Sometimes.”

“Do you know how to do cat’s cradle?”

“I do,” I said. “Do you know how to do cat’s cradle?”

“It’s Liza’s string, but she said if you play, I can, too.”

I looked at John. “I believe I’ve been summoned.” John smiled as if embarrassed (I can’t imagine he really was, but all the Blackwells understood how endearing a bit of self-deprecation can be—and the more privileged the source, of course, the more endearing the self-deprecation). “You certainly don’t have to,” he said, then, to Margaret, “What do you say to Miss Lindgren?”

“Thank you, Miss Lindgren,” Margaret said as she took my hand and guided me out the screen door and onto the porch steps, where Liza awaited us. A few feet away, their boy cousins were dueling with skinny sticks.

We were on our third iteration of a figure Liza called crab’s mouth when the sound of tinkling glass silenced the porch. On my watch, I saw that it was seven-forty. Had the children eaten yet? If not, they were behaving remarkably well. “If you’ll permit a doddering old man to say a few words,” Harold Blackwell said, and there were hoots and whoops of support; Arthur brought his fingers to his mouth and whistled. Charlie was just inside the screen door, and he poked it open and motioned for me to come up the steps. When I did, slipping in next to him, he took my hand and whispered, “Everything okay?” I nodded.

“What a tremendous pleasure for Priscilla and me to have you all here.” Harold Blackwell looked around the porch. “And how blessed we are as a family.” Although I was still prepared for his words to sound at least a little fake and canned, I was again struck by how kind and genuine he seemed. “Looking at the group assembled here, I can’t tell you how proud it makes me,” he said, and I thought he might cry. (I tried to imagine him as a presidential candidate uttering the phrase unwashed and uneducated, and it was difficult; already that notion of him was elusive, replaced by this man just a few feet away, his face lined, his hair brown like Charlie’s but thin and combed back, the vulnerability of his scalp.) He did not cry. Instead, smiling, he said, “We’re so very pleased to meet Alice. A special welcome to you, my dear.”

“Hear, hear,” Charlie said, and rattled the ice in his cup—he’d been drinking whiskey.

John called out, “Alice, think you can tame the Blackwell bronco?”

“She hasn’t been knocked off yet,” Charlie said.

“Was that knocked off or knocked up?” someone yelled—it seemed like a comment Arthur would make, but it could even have come from Uncle Trip.

“Settle down, fellas,” Harold said. “My point is simply that I hope someday all of you will have the opportunity to look out at three generations and feel the love and pride that are in my heart tonight. May God forever bless and protect the Blackwell family, and may the light of His spirit shine through all of us.” Here, he held up his glass, and everyone voiced assent; a few people said, “Amen.” Conversations had just begun to resume when Arthur loudly cleared his throat, then actually climbed atop a chair. “This seems as good a time as any,” he said. “When I heard Chasbo was bringing home a new girl, I wanted to do something in her honor. So I wrote a poem—” At this, the porch erupted into raucous cheers, including from Charlie. Arthur pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, looked at it, then refolded it. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got it memorized.”

“Watch out, Shakespeare!” Charlie called.

“All right.” Arthur swallowed and nodded once. “Wait, it’s a limerick—did I mention that?”

“Just say the friggin’ poem,” John yelled.

Arthur looked directly at me and smiled.

“ ‘Nymphomaniacal Alice

Used a dynamite stick as a phallus

They found her vagina

in North Carolina

And bits of her tits down in Dallas.’ ”

In the ensuing silence, I could hear the lilt of the tiny waves hitting the shore below us, and one of the little boys in the grass out front said, “But it’s mine.” And then on the porch there was a delighted sort of roaring, and I quickly realized, though I had trouble believing it, that the roar had come from Mrs. Blackwell. Soon everyone else joined in, guffawing and applauding. I was so shocked that I could have cried—they’d have been tears of astonishment, not of sadness or hurt—but I knew that it was very important not to. I kept my head up, smiling in a glazed kind of way. I didn’t look at Charlie because I was afraid I’d see a gleeful expression. I wondered, had the children heard? Had Miss Ruby?

“Again!” Mrs. Blackwell cried. “Encore!”

And in case anyone had missed a word, Arthur began, “ ‘Nymphomaniacal Alice . . . ’ ”

When he’d finished, Mrs. Blackwell, still smiling joyfully, said, “I defy anyone who says I don’t have the cleverest sons in Christendom. Arty, you’ve outdone yourself.”

“Far be it from me to offer praise to one of my younger brothers,” Ed said, “but that was masterful.” (And here Ed was supposed to be the uptight one.)

Uncle Trip nudged me. “It’s not every day you get a poem written in your honor, is it?”

I gave a spluttery fake laugh that was the best I could manage.

Charlie and I were still standing side by side, not looking at each other, but I was pretty sure he was grinning while speaking through clenched teeth when he said, “You’re horrified, right?”

“Arthur didn’t write that.” I was barely moving my lips, either. “I first heard it from a boy named Roy Ziemniak in 1956.”

Charlie chuckled. “Beg, borrow, or steal,” he said. “That’s Arthur.” Then he said, “You’re doing well. I know this isn’t easy.” He turned to me, and we looked at each other straight on, and his expression wasn’t gleeful; it was tentative. His face in that moment was very familiar to me; perhaps this was in contrast to everyone else I’d just met, but I was surprised by the familiarity. Charlie’s brown eyes and the crinkles at their corners, his bristly wavy light brown hair, his light pink lips, dry right now, which I had spent a good deal of the last seven weeks pressing my own lips against—his features were comforting. It was much harder not to touch him than it would have been to touch him, to set my palm against his cheek or neck, to lean in and kiss him, to wrap my arms around his body and be hugged back. It was comforting also to know that eventually—if not tonight, then soon, and for a long time to come—I’d again be alone with him and we could talk about everyone else or not even talk but just be together in the aftermath of interacting with these other people. I felt so lucky, it seemed practically a miracle, that of everybody on the porch, he was the person I was paired off with, he was my counterpart. Not Arthur, thank God, or John or Ed, but Charlie—Charlie was the one who was mine. Certainly he could be a joker, too, but I felt that he had a more sympathetic heart than his brothers, that he understood more about the world, about human behavior; Charlie’s joking seemed a decision rather than a reflex. (Of course I later wondered: When you are the object of a person’s affection, do you naturally credit him with a sympathetic heart and an understanding of the world? Perhaps your impression is right only insofar as it applies to you; in your presence, he is indeed possessed of these qualities for the very reason that you are the object of his affection. He is not observant so much as observant of you, not kind so much as kind toward you.)

As Charlie and I regarded each other, surrounded by the chatter and clinking of the Blackwell cocktail hour, it occurred to me that if I had visited Halcyon before he and I had gotten engaged, there was a good chance we would not have done so. In the contexts of our families, the differences between us loomed large. But in this moment it seemed a good thing that I hadn’t known what I was getting into; I was glad it was too late.

WE WALKED TO the clubhouse for dinner in a sloppy sort of caravan, and beyond a grove of pine trees, another compound appeared on our right, a grouping of houses whose sizes and layout were similar to those of the Blackwells. Apparently, Charlie’s family owned the northern-most plot of land; at the next large house, a throng of men, women, and children was emerging, led by a silver-haired octogenarian who dragged his right foot, leaned on a hooked cane of dark wood, and wore navy blue pants embroidered with little green turtles. “Harold, I won’t have you eating all the sweet-potato puffs,” he called in a plummy tone, and Harold Blackwell called back, “Wouldn’t dream of it, Rumpus!” Or at least this was what I thought Harold said, but I doubted my own ears until I ended up next to this same man in the clubhouse dining room. Four long tables extended north, south, east, and west from the center of the room—they were like a tremendous cross—and the tables were not divided by family, as I’d have imagined (I later realized they couldn’t have been, because there were four tables and five families), but rather, by the clucking, seemingly arbitrary instructions of the matriarchs. Mrs. Blackwell directed the grandchildren toward one table, her older sons and their wives to scattered points, and then she turned her attention to Charlie and me. “Chas, go sit by Mrs. deWolfe, because she’s dying to hear your theory about Jimmy Connors. Alice, you’re right here.” She pointed to the second-to-last place at one table. “I find it so tiresome when couples are seated side by side, don’t you?” I nodded, unable to remember the last place I’d been that had featured assigned seating. White linen covered the tables, and there were full place settings. The china and silverware all were nice enough, if far from new-looking, but the clubhouse as a whole shared the same worn quality I’d found in the Alamo—the curtains, of forest-green cotton, were faded, the hardwood floor was scratched, the chairs were of the not particularly comfortable wooden sort you might have found with a dormitory desk. A large vase of purple hydrangea sat at the intersection of the four tables, and over the mantel was a handsome oil painting of dark water: Lake Michigan, quite possibly.

When we’d all taken our seats—the men waited for the women, I observed, and the women first seated their children—the man next to me, the wearer of the turtle pants, extended his hand. “Rumpus Higginson,” he said.

“Alice Lindgren.” As we shook, I felt slightly proud of myself for not laughing, not even smiling or letting my lips twitch. (TWO weeks later, back in Madison, I picked up the Wisconsin State Journal to find a front-page article about the expansion of Wall Bank—a rival of Wisconsin State Bank & Trust, my father’s employer for over thirty years—and a small photo accompanied the article, a photo that was grainy and no larger than a postage stamp but still recognizable to me, of a man identified as Leslie J. Higginson; he was, apparently, the bank’s founder. This meant my father surely would have heard of him, though I doubted that my father had ever known he answered to Rumpus.)

We had a first course of vichyssoise served in shallow white bowls with a sprinkling of chives. Over the soup, Rumpus, or Mr. Higginson—really, I had little idea how to address anyone—said, “Have you spent much time in Door County, Allison?”

I did not correct him. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t made it here before, but it lives up to its reputation.”

“You couldn’t buy a better day.” Rumpus shook his head. “Absolutely gorgeous.”

On being assigned this seat, I had wondered if Mrs. Blackwell might be exiling me, but she had sat across the table and one over (to keep an eye on me? But no, I was being silly). She said then, “Rump, tell me it isn’t true about Cecily and Gordon. If they move to Los Angeles, we have no hope of seeing them again.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Rumpus protested. “A flight to California is nothing for an inveterate traveler like you, Priscilla.”

She shook her head. “The last time I was in Los Angeles, I said to myself, ‘Enough is enough.’ Terrible traffic, lousy food, and the staff at the Biltmore was appallingly incompetent. It claims to be a world-class city, but I find it quite provincial.” I know there are people who would not believe that a person from Wisconsin would dare to make such a remark; they are wrong. Mrs. Blackwell was saying, “I saw Cecily down in Sea Island last March, and I said, ‘Cecily, if the two of you even think of defecting to the West Coast, that’s the last you’ll hear from Harold and me.’ ”

“It’s really Gordon, though, isn’t it? I know he’s keen to cultivate relationships with Asian investors, which makes it a good deal more convenient. . . ”

The conversation proceeded in much this way as we moved on to the main course of broiled chicken. They discussed another couple named the Bancrofts who, I inferred, lived in Milwaukee, were renovating their kitchen, and had had the misfortune of hiring a feckless contractor; they discussed a couple named the LeGrands, whose son was in his second year of medical school at Dartmouth, though Mrs. Blackwell questioned whether he had “the goods”—she tapped her temple—to earn his degree (“His grades at UW were worse than Chas’s at Princeton!” she exclaimed); and finally, they discussed a Viennese cellist who had been playing with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for the last several months and staying with Emily and Will Higginson, who were Rumpus’s son and daughter-in-law. “The Italians say that houseguests are like fish.” Mrs. Blackwell smirked. “After three days, they start to smell.” (Of course I quickly calculated that if Charlie and I had arrived on a Friday and were leaving on a Monday, that was no more than three days, was it? Though only I was a guest; Charlie was family.)

During the whole of dinner, I nodded at what seemed to be the appropriate intervals, I smiled when they smiled and laughed when they laughed, I even answered a question about my own taste in music—“Allison, do you prefer the classical or romantic era?” Rumpus inquired, and I said, “I’ve always enjoyed Mahler’s Fifth”—and at the same time, I became first tipsy and then solidly drunk in a way I had never been in my entire life. The waiters and waitresses, most of whom appeared to be about fourteen years old, refilled our wine-glasses frequently. On my second trip to the bathroom, I left just as coffee was being served with dessert, and the walls shifted as I walked.

There was a sitting room outside the dining room, and both its walls and those in the halls leading to the bathroom were densely covered with framed photos, the majority of them black-and-white: Halcyon inhabitants holding fish or playing tennis (the latter activity featured action shots and posed ones, with the players crossing their racquets in front of their bodies). One picture was of Mrs. Blackwell gripping the hand of a toddler who might well have been Charlie, standing on the porch of what I believed to be this very building. Mrs. Blackwell had not been beautiful, but she’d been dark-haired and attractive, the skin on her face smooth and unlined, a canny glint in her eye. On my return from the bathroom, I was studying the photo when a woman appeared from nowhere and threw herself into my arms. “I am so excited to meet you!” she cried. She spoke in a drawl that, like Charlie’s, was vaguely southern.

Even when she’d extracted herself from our nonmutual embrace, she held tightly to my upper arms, looking at me with great enthusiasm. She had white-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, big front teeth, and tanned skin; she was pretty, but in this moment she was also far too physically close. “And I heard about that raunchy poem Arthur wrote, and I am mortified. I was with the baby in Gin Rummy, but if I had been there, I would never have let him do that. You must think we’re the most disgraceful family in the entire world.”

Then her eyes widened, and I do not exaggerate when I say that she proceeded to shriek. “Oh, you don’t even know who I am! Oh my stars!” She began to laugh, bringing a hand to her chest. “I’m Jadey! Arthur’s wife! I’m Jadey Blackwell! Oh, Alice, you have to forgive my terrible manners!”

“What a pleasure to meet you.” I could hear the expansiveness in my voice, a decidedly unfamiliar tone. “But your husband forgot there’s an alternate ending for the limerick.” Both the words alternate and limerick had been daunting to pronounce, and I was proud that I had surmounted them. “What he said was ‘And bits of her tits down in Dallas.’ But also, it can go ‘And her anus in Buckingham Palace.’ Did you know you’re married to a plagiarizer?”

Jadey peered at me more closely, then whispered. “Oh my Lord, are you drunk?” I shook my head, but she was saying, “Oh, I would be, too! Oh, you must be just beside yourself! I can only imagine what this weekend is like for you. They tease you so much, don’t they? My first year of marriage, I was on the brink of tears the whole time, and I had grown up with the Blackwells! Oh, I just hated all of them, and after Arthur made me marry him, I thought to myself, Jadey, are you crazy? You knew that family was a bunch of hooligans!”

Was Jadey crazy? I had been in her company for about a minute, and already, I felt that I could have answered this question accurately.

“Stay right here,” she said. “I’m getting Charlie. You poor baby, you’re drunk as a skunk.”

Because I was indeed drunk, I didn’t mind standing there doing nothing; I gazed up at the silver trophy vase sitting on the mantel above the fireplace—it was about a foot tall—and by the time Charlie emerged from the dining room, Jadey just behind him, I was holding the trophy in my arms, squinting down at it. “Where’s your name?” I asked Charlie, and he seemed both amused and perturbed.

“Let’s put that back where it belongs, sticky fingers.” He eased the trophy from my hands and returned it to the mantel, then said to Jadey, “Tell Maj you think Alice has whatever the baby is sick with.”

Jadey made a face. “Colic, Chas?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Make something up. I’m taking her back to Itty-Bitty.”

Jadey set her hands on the slopes where my shoulders became my neck; the effect of her standing like this was halfway between a babushka pinching your cheeks and a lover moving in for a kiss. “Alice, we are going to be best friends,” she said. She dropped her voice. “Ginger and Nan are no fun. They mean well, but they’re worrywarts. But I heard about you”—she was talking louder again, and more quickly—“and I just knew right away. I said to myself, ‘Alice sounds like my kind of girl.’ ”

What had Jadey heard about me? And when—that day or earlier?—and from whom?

“You seem like a very special person,” I said, and Charlie burst into laughter. To Jadey, he said, “She’s never like this. Seriously, I’ve never seen this before.”

“She’s adorable,” Jadey said, and she held the clubhouse door for us as we stepped outside. “Don’t let her fall, Chas.”

The slate sidewalk was lit only by the stars and the half-moon, and the distance we needed to go seemed significantly greater than it had on the way there. Charlie had one arm across my back and the other hand holding my elbow. “Steady there, party girl,” he said. “Was Rump Higginson that bad a dinner companion?”

We were passing the family compound closest to the clubhouse—this one, I’d learned a few hours before, belonged to the Thayers—and I said, “Everyone here is so rich.”

Charlie laughed but not all that heartily. After a beat, he asked, “You like that?”

“Rich people are bizarre!” I exclaimed. (This was a remark Charlie quoted back to me many times in the years to come.) “I love you, Charlie, but all this fuss about tennis and Princeton and the Biltmore Hotel—if you were the foreman at Fassbinder’s, sometimes I think that would be easier.”

“You mean Fassbinder’s the cheese factory?”

“They make butter, too,” I said. “Want to go swimming?”

“I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”

“You’re supposed to be the fun one.” I poked him in the ribs. “Good-time Charlie. Are you scared now? Remember when you told me you’re scared of the dark?”

“I’m doing my best to keep it together for my blotto girlfriend.”

“I know you’re scared of the dark, because I wrote it down in my dossier. My Charlie Van Wyck Blackwell dossier.” I pronounced each of his names lavishly. “And now I can’t protect you because I’m”—I thought of Jadey—“drunk as a skunk.”

“That you are,” Charlie said. “What I’m trying to figure out is if you’re a good drunk or a bad one.”

“If you let me go swimming,” I said, “we’ll be naked, and you can put your penis inside me in the water.”

“Oh, man!” Charlie said. “Okay, I’ve decided you should become an alcoholic. You’re an excellent drunk.”

“It’s my first time,” I said.

“Sorry, but it’s a little late for me to believe that one.”

“No, no,” I said. “My first time being drunk.”

“Well, you seem like a pro.”

“No, honestly—I can tell you don’t believe me, but I’m telling the truth.”

When we reached the Blackwell compound, he said, “The problem is, I don’t know how long till the others get back, and if we’re splashing around in the lake after Jadey told Maj you were sick—”

“I don’t think you’re afraid of the dark.” I tapped the end of Charlie’s nose with my fingertip. “You’re afraid of your mother.”

He laughed. “You would be, too.” I suspect Charlie’s own fondness for drinking, his lifetime spent around it, made him especially tolerant of the drunkenness of others. “I’d love to take you up on the whole penis-inside-you offer,” he said, “but how about if we go in Itty-Bitty?”

“Let’s do it here.” I slipped from his arms and lay on the grass. We were in front of the Alamo; Miss Ruby may still have been inside, or she may already have gone for the night to the dormlike building behind the clubhouse where she and the other Halcyon families’ maids slept, but either way, I had forgotten about her. The grass was cool, the blades slightly sticky.

“God almighty, woman,” Charlie said. “Who are you?” He scooped me up and half-carried, half-dragged me across the lawn toward Itty-Bitty. All its lights were off, and he settled me on the bottom bunk before flicking the switch. “I gotta take a whiz,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

I knew he didn’t walk back to the Alamo to use the bathroom but stayed somewhere very nearby because I could hear him urinating as I lay in bed. I giggled a little, I thought of teasing him when he returned, I thought of how his penis would feel in my hand. But this was the last thing I thought, because abruptly I fell asleep. As Charlie told me the following day, by the time he reentered Itty-Bitty, I was snoring obliviously.

AROUND FOUR A.M., when the darkness of true night had faded into a pre-sunrise gray, I awakened with a clenching in my stomach and knew I desperately had to use the toilet. It would have been better if I needed to vomit, because that was potentially something you could do outside; this was not. Yet for several minutes more, I lay in agony on the bottom bunk, the prospect of darting across the lawn to the Alamo and then of sitting on the toilet, making rude noises in a house where everyone else was asleep, just a little worse than remaining in discomfort in bed. Before making an early-morning lavatory journey such as this, did one first change into real clothes? Was there some sort of protocol established, and was I expected to guess what it was? When I could stand it no longer, I rose from the bed, realized to my surprise that I was wearing not my nightgown but my dress from the night before—it smelled of food and alcohol—and hurried outside barefoot, the grass cool and dewy. I had feared that the house would be locked, which it wasn’t. (I later learned that it was never locked, not even during the winter, when no one came up from month to month; it was only looked in on by a local caretaker. “If vandals want to get in, I’d rather have them use a door than a window,” Mrs. Blackwell said wryly, as if she were being a very good sport. It was rarely possible, especially in the early days, for me to guess Mrs. Blackwell’s reaction to a particular situation, but no matter what that reaction was, when mine did not match hers, I was left with the feeling that this was the case because I came from a different class. Or at least I knew she would chalk up any disagreement to this discrepancy, and she’d believe it so heartily that it might as well have been true.)

I slipped inside through a back door—not the one off the kitchen, but another one off the hallway leading to the bathroom. As I had expected, the house was completely silent. I shut the bathroom door, knowing this time to push the books against it, and then I sat down, and it felt as if a snake were uncoiling in my stomach—it was uncoiling very quickly—and still I couldn’t release it. I wanted to, but I was incapable because I was so anxious about the sounds I’d make. I leaned forward, hugging my sides, trying not to whimper. They’re all asleep, I told myself, but I was immobilized, and then the snake reared up, baring its fangs and forked tongue, and everything inside me gushed out, a prolonged and mortifying splatter. Recalling the warnings about the fragility of the plumbing, I immediately yanked the flushing chain. But I wasn’t finished—I knew I wasn’t—and the water in the bowl had not yet resettled when another grotesque gush surged from inside me. How humiliating that I had drunk so much, and also how foolish. (Never since that episode have I had more than two drinks in a single evening.) My belly was empty now, blissfully empty, but still sour and shaky. I wiped myself, then flushed the toilet a second time, and when I stood, when the water had climbed back up the bowl, I saw that mere flushing was not going to suffice; brown smudges clung to the porcelain. Ought I stick my hand in there? I was accustomed to cleaning up after children; it was usually just urine, but the younger ones had accidents regularly, or someone would throw up, and if Big Glenn was otherwise occupied, I’d sprinkle the sawdust on the carpet myself rather than waiting for him. I flushed a third time, and when the water swirled down, I reached in with a wad of toilet paper and wiped at the most egregious clumps and streaks before the water could rise. Then I dropped the toilet paper, flushed a fourth time—was Priscilla Blackwell at this very moment listening to me wreak havoc on her plumbing?—and washed my hands. The soap was a light blue oval, cracked in many places and rubbed down to the thinness of a guitar pick; as I moved my palms against it, it broke in two, and I thought—it came to me so naturally, such a casual reaction—I hate it here.

This was the sort of thought I never had, and even in the moment, I felt an immediate reassessment. My upset stomach was no more the Blackwells’ fault than a summer storm would have been! (Oh, but how they loved their one toilet, how they loved their faded furniture and mossy, rickety dock, their chipped saucers and tarnished picture frames and hard mattresses. They loved this false, selective form of roughing it, and their own ease with its conventions, and a visitor’s potential unease. In the house I’d grown up in, we, too, had had one bathroom, but it had never occurred to anyone in my family to take pride in this fact. It did not surprise me at all—by then I understood—when, just a few weeks later, I accompanied Charlie to the Blackwells’ house in Milwaukee, their primary residence, which dwarfed even the Alamo; the Milwaukee house was, I suspect, closer to twelve thousand feet, a fieldstone behemoth with a slate roof. It sprawled horizontally, with multiple peaks and chimneys, banks of windows, sections that jutted forward or hung back; the combination of the stones and the sheer size evoked a castle. The front lawn was as green and meticulously mowed as a golf course, the garage held four cars—this usually meant, with household help and visitors and members of the younger generations, that three or four cars were still parked outside in the gravel driveway—and in the back was a pool that they kept at a punitive sixty degrees; Charlie referred to it as “scrotum-shriveling.” Inside were hardwood floors and vast Oriental rugs, chandeliers, floor-length draperies, massive furniture, oil paintings of fruit still lifes and skulls, and in the dining room, covering an entire wall, a mural of an English hunting scene: lords and ladies, fields and trees, dogs and birds. Also, there were seven bathrooms. So of course—of course the deprivations of Halcyon tickled them. They loved them as suburban children love sleeping in a tent in their own backyard. But I filed this not-quite-knowledge about the Blackwells, this sub-awareness, in the same place I’d filed my ideas about Charlie marrying me because I lent him credibility: the basement of my mind. It is, I think, a tendency of coastal urbanites more than those of us from the Midwest to believe you need to bring all your impressions to the fore, to dwell on the unpleasant feelings those close to you provoke—to decide these feelings matter, that they are a subject worthy of discussion, perhaps with a therapist, and that you might ride your own ideas toward a resolution, or at the very least spend time comparing them with your peers, who undoubtedly harbor similar sentiments.)

No. I did not hate it here, I did not blame Charlie’s family for my upset stomach or for anything else. Hate was such a melodramatic emotion, so blustery and silly. If the Blackwells incited in me a certain skepticism, I was scarcely the first person to have reservations about her prospective in-laws, or about the wealthy.

I reshelved the books and opened the bathroom door slowly, to minimize creaking. As I let myself out the door to the outside, I heard a person coughing, but I had no idea which bedroom the sound came from. I retraced my steps across the wet grass, and just before I entered Itty-Bitty, I glanced to my right, and the lake was flat and gray, a darker gray than the sky, so somber and severe and lovely that my breath caught. No, it was not pretentiousness and affectation that drew the Blackwells here—how unfair of me to presume such a thing. Rather, it was that they recognized the beauty of Halcyon and could afford it. Wouldn’t my own parents, had they the same luxuries of time and money, have liked to spend a few months each summer in a place like this?

Or maybe, standing on the steps of Itty-Bitty, I was just more forgiving of the Blackwells because I was tired and wanted to go back to bed. Perhaps it was simple fatigue that made me inclined to surrender to rather than try to extricate myself from the future Charlie and I had begun to plan.

AT BREAKFAST IN the clubhouse a few hours later, Arthur said to me from across the table, “Alice, the word of the day is legs. Please spread the word.” Jadey, who was sitting next to him holding the baby, slapped Arthur playfully and said, “She hasn’t even had her coffee yet.” Jadey made no mention of our interaction the night before, for which I was grateful, though I did detect in her expression a discreet merriment.

Breakfast, I discovered, was a more haphazard affair than dinner, with people appearing and departing at various times, and if you wanted toast or an English muffin or cold cereal, you fixed it yourself from the buffet set out on a long table; only if you wanted eggs or bacon or waffles did you order from the waiter, a pale and skinny teenage boy with an enormous Adam’s apple.

Some of the children were already in bathing suits, and several of the adults, in anticipation of the day’s competition, were in their tennis whites, the women in pleated skirts so short they would have bordered on the obscene were it not clear that they had been approved at some point in the distant past. Priscilla Blackwell wore one of these minuscule skirts, and very low socks with pink pompoms on the back of the ankle. (It was 1988 before the Halcyon Board of Overseers—which had its own charter and held as a requirement of membership that you first be male and second be elected, so that two men from each family served for five years at a time—decreed that it was permissible to wear non-white apparel on the Halcyon tennis courts. The dissenters in this decision, foremost among them seventy-six-year-old Billy Niedleff and his middle son, Thaddeus, then forty, continued to grumble about the decline in standards for the next decade.)

When I’d arrived at Halcyon the previous afternoon, I had felt a fear that the weekend would pass slowly, but the opposite proved true. While I did have a splitting headache at breakfast, the pain had dulled by late morning. I spent most of the day sitting on a blanket on the sidelines of the tennis courts, observing the matches, either watching Charlie play or sitting next to him when he wasn’t playing. He’d work up a vigorous sweat during his sets, then fill a cup of water from the large thermos by the net, pour the cup over his head, and shake his head like a dog. That morning, when he’d come to Itty-Bitty to find me for breakfast, I’d been awake and dressed, waiting for him, and as he’d entered through the screen door, he’d called, “Where’s my favorite lush?” and I’d said, “Charlie, I’m so sorry for my behavior last night,” and he’d said, “Only part you have to apologize for is getting me all horned up and then passing out, but I’ll take a rain check.” He’d leaned in to kiss me, and I’d felt the great relief of dating a man who does not hold a grudge, or at least not toward you (Simon had been the other way). Then he’d said, “Bring your toothbrush to the clubhouse, because Maj already had to call a plumber out this morning for the Alamo toilet, and the guy’s trying to work a miracle as we speak. Right now the lead suspect for who took the huge shit is John.” I nodded neutrally and—forgive me, John, for my lie of omission—said absolutely nothing.

At the tennis courts, after beating Emily Higginson 7–3, 6–4, Mrs. Blackwell said to me, “I take it a good night’s sleep was just what the doctor ordered.” I was almost certain that she knew I’d had too much to drink, and I wondered if she knew the clogged toilet was my fault as well, but all I did was murmur my assent.

I had brought a novel to the tennis courts with me—it was Pale Fire, which I’d purchased after Nabokov’s death earlier in the summer—but because of the sun and the conversation, I didn’t end up reading a word. I spent quite a bit of time playing with Jadey and Arthur’s baby, Winnie (as a single woman in my early thirties, I was careful not to coo excessively over other people’s infants, lest it seem like I was telegraphing my desperation; the necessity of this precaution annoyed me, making me want to defiantly announce that I’d always liked babies, since I was a child, but Jadey was the generous kind of mother who acted as if I was doing her a favor by keeping Winnie on my lap). Really, during that day and the next, there were so many conversations and activities and meals, so many changes of clothes, into a swimsuit and out and back in when the suit wasn’t quite dry, back into the water (it was the ideal temperature, cool enough to be refreshing but not chilly, the way Lake Michigan often can be), and then we rode the motorboat to the town a few miles over for ice cream, then back to Halcyon, back into a skirt, up to dinner, and suddenly, I realized I’d acquired a tan on my face and arms. On Sunday morning, an Episcopal priest, Reverend Ayrault, arrived at ten to hold a service for the Blackwell family on the porch of the Alamo, complete with Communion; apparently, he had driven from Green Bay solely for this purpose, and afterward he sat beside Mrs. Blackwell at lunch in the clubhouse. “That’s nice of him to come all the way up here,” I remarked to Charlie, who replied, “Republicans give the good reverend a hard-on.”

The winners of the Halcyon Open were awarded their trophies on Sunday afternoon, small cheap gold figures perched on wood bases, about to serve a ball; the silver vase would be engraved later but was presented to, in men’s singles, Roger Niedleff, and in men’s doubles, Dwight deWolfe and his brother-in-law, Wyman Lawrence. In women’s singles, Sarah Thayer had won, and in women’s doubles, Priscilla Blackwell and her daughter-in-law Nan. “Roger is such a competitive douche bag,” Charlie grumbled as the winners accepted the trophies, followed by twelve-year-old Nina deWolfe playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on a recorder. Mrs. Blackwell, for her part, gloated magisterially. As we walked back from the tennis courts to the Alamo—a distance of about half a mile—I thought of leaving the next day and felt a flicker of preemptive nostalgia. I was just settling into Halcyon’s rhythms.

We were nearing the Alamo when Jadey caught up with us and set her hand on my forearm. “Come wash your hair with me in the lake. I’ve got twenty minutes before the baby wakes up and all holy hell breaks loose.” She jogged toward Gin Rummy, the cottage she and Arthur and their children were staying in, and I glanced quizzically at Charlie.

“You heard her,” he said. “Shake a leg.”

“She washes her hair in the lake?”

“It’s to avoid waiting in line for the bathroom.”

In fact, the impression I got a few minutes later as Jadey and I stood in the water near the dock, her plastic shampoo bottle set on the top step of the wooden ladder, was that she washed her hair in the lake mostly because she thought washing her hair in the lake was fun. She held her hands up to her head, massaging, until her scalp was covered in white lather. “Remember doing this at summer camp?” she said.

I laughed noncommittally, having never attended summer camp.

“I’ve been meaning to say, that’s the cutest swimsuit,” she added. “Is it from Marshall Field’s?”

“It’s from a store in Madison owned by a friend of mine.” Jadey’s swimsuit was a Lilly bikini, and mine was red with white stripes. I was not yet aware that Jadey was a superb shopper—she had a sixth sense about when something was about to go on sale or, conversely, when it was worth paying full price because if you waited, it would disappear. It had occurred to me already that Jadey and Dena would have quite liked each other, or else the opposite—as with Charlie and my grandmother, their personalities might have overlapped in just the wrong ways.

“You’re lucky your boobs are still so perky,” Jadey was saying. “Are you thirty yet?”

“Thirty-one,” I said.

“Well, that’s no fair! I just turned twenty-seven.”

“Look at my crow’s-feet, though.” I brought my face closer to hers and angled my right eye to the side.

“Is Charlie like Arthur about wanting you to wear sexy underwear? Arthur tells me to buy these getups that would make a prostitute blush. And I say to him, ‘Until you have been through the hell of childbirth yourself, you cannot fathom what has happened to my body. You need to give me five years’ peace before I’m halfway ready to be a tart again.’ ”

I laughed, although I was conscious that voices carried on the lake. Furthermore, fifty yards away, one of the Higginsons was swimming laps perpendicular to their dock; I didn’t recognize which Higginson it was, but when we’d arrived, he’d paused midstroke to give us a wave.

Jadey and I were standing in water up to our chests, the lake dark blue now, and the sun in the western sky was heavy and yellow. Jadey let herself fall backward, dunking her shoulders and head, and when she reappeared, the shampoo was washed out; the wetness made her blond hair almost gold. She arched onto her back, kicking her feet to stay afloat. “How’s Maj treating you? She can be rough, right?”

I raised one finger to indicate a pause, then held my nose as I sank underwater. When I broke the surface, Jadey said, “She wanted a girl, is what they say, but she just kept having boys and finally—”

“Shhh!” I couldn’t stand it—not the information, which I was curious about, but the sense that other people, perhaps Mrs. Blackwell herself, might be overhearing the discussion.

Jadey laughed. “You really are a librarian.”

“No,” I was whispering, and I gestured toward the house. “I’m afraid they can—”

“Gotcha.” Jadey nodded, lowering her voice. “That’s the theory, anyway, why she doesn’t like girls—because she feels rejected by them. Do I sound like Sigmund Freud?” She was smiling in a self-deprecating way, and I wondered whether she had picked up the Blackwells’ habit of alternate teasing and self-mockery or whether she’d had the habit all along. She’d told me earlier that her parents were friends of the Blackwells, that she’d met Arthur when she was an eighth-grader and he was a senior in high school, though they hadn’t started dating until she was in college. She’d also told me—I’d asked—that Jadey was a nickname given at birth by her mother; her real name had been Jane Davenport Aigner, and of course she’d taken Blackwell as a surname when she married Arthur.

“Don’t be afraid of Maj, is my point,” Jadey said. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of her.” I really wasn’t. Here in Halcyon, I was on her turf, but the more general notion I kept returning to was that there was something Mrs. Blackwell could bestow, some sort of approval, that did not fundamentally matter to me. It would have mattered to Dena. But all I wanted was adequately pleasant relations. I didn’t need to be close to Mrs. Blackwell, didn’t need to be one of her favorites. If she disliked me, it would be unsettling, but as long as she thought I was fine, that was enough. And over the course of the weekend, I’d had the sense that she was warming to me—late the previous afternoon, before the cocktail hour, she had walked past Charlie and me as we played Scrabble on the porch of the Alamo and had said, “Give him hell, Alice.”

Jadey began doing backstroke, thrusting one arm and then the other over her head, and I watched, impressed. I was not a strong swimmer. Although my father had taught me at Pine Lake in Riley, I couldn’t do much more than dog-paddle, and I could not have emulated Jadey’s backstroke or the smooth, confident slice of that Higginson family member’s freestyle.

Jadey flipped forward, coming back toward me. “You’re lucky that you’re older,” she said. “No offense. Just, you know, I was twenty-one when I married Arthur, and I was so easily intimidated. If Maj said boo to me, I’d be crying in the corner. Plus, Arthur used to—” At this point, unmistakably, we heard a baby’s wail. Jadey rolled her eyes. “Never have children,” she said, but already, she was swimming toward the ladder.

“Jadey,” I said, and she looked over her shoulder. “Thank you for being so nice about Friday night.”

ON SUNDAY EVENING, during the cocktail hour (if there was a day of the week the Blackwells abstained from drinking, I never saw it), I found myself for the first time talking one-on-one to Charlie’s brother Ed. Though we had been in the same general space several times in the past few days, I had hardly spoken to him directly. I’d felt aware of not wanting to seek him out just because he was the congressman—not that I secretly did want to seek him out, but I most certainly didn’t want to seem like I was. But he was the one who approached me on the porch, saying, “I hope you haven’t found us overwhelming.” (Of course, they took pride in their overwhelmingness, as all families that are both large and happy do.)

“No, I’ve had a wonderful time,” I said.

“I hear you’re an elementary school librarian. I confess that I don’t read as much as I’d like, but I do think teaching is a wonderful profession for women.”

“I imagine your sons are very strong students.” I wasn’t just trying to ingratiate myself—I’d noticed that Harry, Tommy, and Geoff were all articulate for their ages, and energetic but not wild.

“They’re good boys,” Ed said. “Ginger has her hands full, but there’s never a dull moment.” With his thinning hair, Ed bore the strongest resemblance to their father, I realized as he spoke. He also was the only Blackwell who was even slightly pudgy, and he wore glasses. “I’ll tell you that raising three sons makes me appreciate Maj even more in retrospect—I don’t know how she managed four.”

“Do you find it difficult going back and forth between Milwaukee and Washington?” So I’d taken the conversation in this direction after all; I hoped it was not a gauche error.

Ed shook his head. “It’s really a privilege,” he said. “To serve this country, Alice, what an honor. And my boys know it. When their daddy’s not around to tuck them in at night, it isn’t easy, but they’re proud that he’s out there protecting the interests of the people of Wisconsin.” As I listened to Ed, it struck me that his use of words that he obviously had used many times did not automatically make them untrue—weren’t they true if he believed them? That was my first thought; my second was Please, please don’t let Charlie win the election.

As if sensing my psychic betrayal of him, Charlie materialized beside us. “Eddie, you in for poker at ten? Gil deWolfe just called.”

“Alice, how do you feel about consorting with a gambling man?” Ed pulled his glasses down to the tip of his nose and looked over them with mock seriousness. “Is this something you approve of?”

“The only poker Alice plays is strip poker,” Charlie said, and I said, “Charlie!”

Ed laughed, pointing at his brother. “You’ve got to guard your wallet with this one, or he’ll rob you blind. Now, what’s this about?” Ed’s middle son, Tommy, had approached, in tears, and he announced mournfully, “Drew is hogging the Slinky.”

Ed shrugged at Charlie and me. “Duty calls.”

“You don’t mind if I head over to the deWolfes’ for a couple hours after dinner, do you?” Charlie said.

I shook my head. “I need to pack anyway.”

“Eager to make your escape?”

“I like your family, Charlie,” I said. “They’ve been really hospitable this weekend—well, besides the limerick, but I’ve gotten over that.”

“You know what? I like you. And I think you look very pretty right now.” Charlie leaned in and kissed me on the lips. It was a quick peck, but right away I heard someone cry out, “Look at the lovebirds!” Then John, who was nearby, said, “Good Christ, can you two not keep your hands off each other?”

I stepped back, though we truly hadn’t been touching at all inappropriately. The porch grew quiet, and from the other end of it, Uncle Trip called, “Chasbo, now that Alice has seen the kind of stock you come from, think she’ll stick around?”

“Hope so,” Charlie said, and—I could feel the Blackwells’ eyes on me—I smiled stiffly. Do not cower. These weren’t the words Jadey had used, but that had been the message.

John said, “Alice, if you’re not careful, it looks to me like Chas here might pop the question.”

There was a silence, a short one, and before someone could fill it with an off-color joke, I said, “Actually—” My voice was hoarse, and I cleared my throat in as genteel a way as I could manage. “Actually, Charlie has already asked me to marry him, and I’ve accepted.”

I might have imagined this part, but I think I heard a gasp—a woman’s gasp, which I’m pretty sure was Ginger’s. Charlie set his hand on the small of my back, and then Harold, who was standing by the hammock, said, “Golly, that’s tremendous. That’s just super news. We couldn’t be happier for both of you.” Soon all the Blackwells were talking at once. “No shit?” Arthur was saying, and he and John were manfully hugging Charlie, and Ed returned to kiss my cheek, and Arthur gave me a noogie and cried, “Welcome to the fam-damily, Al!” Harold leaned around Charlie to pat my hand, then Jadey enveloped me, shouting, “I knew it! I knew it! I told you we’d be best friends, and now it’s even better, because we’ll be sisters!”

I disentangled myself from Jadey’s arms when I saw Mrs. Blackwell approaching; I smoothed my hair. The rest of them—they faded around me. That I was not afraid of Mrs. Blackwell was more or less true, at least in the abstract. But it was also true that when she turned her attention to me, I always felt, and not in a positive way, as if we were the only ones in the room and total vigilance were required.

She did not hug or kiss me, she didn’t touch me at all. She seemed both amused and dubious as she looked at me for a long moment before speaking. Finally, she said, “What a clever girl you are.”

IN THE CAR driving back to Madison, Charlie said, “I’m not angry. I’m really not. In a perfect world, would it have been better if we’d told Maj and Dad first, without everyone else around? Sure, but what’s done is done.”

“Do you know that your mother is displeased, or do you just think she is?”

“Maj likes to be deferred to.” Charlie grinned. “Like all women. Listen, you were the one who wanted to wait and tell our parents together, but everybody was going to find out eventually, so I don’t see the big difference.” He reached across the seat and squeezed my hand. “If Maj is unhappy about anything, it’s how the news broke. She’s not unhappy with you.”

“I’ve never had trouble getting along with people,” I said. “If she’d prefer a daughter-in-law from a more socially connected family, I don’t fault her. That’s what she’s accustomed to. But I think she’ll get used to me, and I don’t want you to worry about having to run interference.”

A minute had passed when Charlie said, looking straight ahead out the windshield, “Just so you know, I’d choose you over them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

“We could run away to—Where have you always wanted to run away to? In my fantasies, it’s Mexico, but I’d probably just get giardia. California might be a safer bet.”

“I’m not that concerned,” I said.

“A little shack on the beach,” Charlie said. “We’ll sleep in a ham-mock, live off the conch that I spear, and you’ll wear a coconut bra.”

What if I’d said yes? Not to the cartoon version but to a real one, a move to another state. Lives that we carved out for ourselves rather than inheriting, distance and space. What would we—would Charlie—have had to prove, away from his family? Could what has happened in the years since have been prevented, could I have prevented it by merely capitulating? Did Charlie have more foresight than I gave him credit for? Perhaps the future appeared with greater clarity to him than it did to me. Or perhaps he was simply bluffing.

“We’re from Wisconsin, Charlie,” I said. “This is where we belong.”

AND THEN SCHOOL had started, that inimitable, unmistakable sound of children crying out and running around before the bell rang in the morning, the checkout cards that I kept on my desk, the careful way the students gripped the pencils to print their names, and the pride of the ones who were just learning cursive. I read Tico and the Golden Wings to the first-graders, and Flowers for Algernon to the sixth-graders—I believed eleven-year-olds, even if they didn’t admit it, still liked to be read aloud to—and the fourth-graders made paper cranes during our origami unit. There were our Monday-morning assemblies, there was recess duty, when I tried to keep the viciousness of the foursquare games in check, and there were lunches in the cafeteria: chili hot dogs and pepperoni pizza and peach halves in syrup, and on alternating Fridays, breakfast for lunch, which the students loved and the teachers hated—French toast, hash browns, sausage links. You’d be finished with this meal at a quarter to twelve, your stomach churning with sugar and starch and cheap meat, and you’d feel like what you most wanted to do was lie down, and then another class would come flying in, frantic about who got to sit in one of the two bean bags during story time, or who was next in line to check out the newest Encyclopedia Brown. Every day, when school let out at three o’clock, I felt exhausted and happy.

But here was the difference: Whereas for all the years I’d been working, I’d spent vast amounts of time focused on school during the hours it wasn’t in session, I now spent almost none. Once I had stayed in the library until early evening, preparing for the next day, or after the final bell had rung in the afternoon, I’d gone to Rita’s classroom to discuss some student I was concerned about—had Rita also noticed the rash on Eugene Demartino’s arm, or did she think it seemed like Michelle Vink and Tamara Jones were ganging up on Beth Reibel? But with the start of this school year, I hurried to my car when classes were out, and I experienced mild irritation on the days I had bus duty. I felt the press of my other life, my life with Charlie—I wanted to go to the grocery store to buy food for the dinner we’d eat that night, or go home to straighten up my apartment or shave my legs. If it was a day he had neither met with Hank Ucker nor driven to his job in Milwaukee, well, then I just wanted to spend time with him, to lie together on top of the bedspread on my bed with the warm yellow light of a September afternoon filtering through the window, to luxuriate in what was ours and new and exciting while it still was ours and new and exciting. In the library, I remained energetic and patient with the children. Outside of it, there were times when I left my school bag by the front door to my apartment, or sometimes even in my car, and I didn’t open it from the moment I drove away from school until the moment I returned. Instead, I kissed Charlie’s lips and his upper arms, his flat abdomen, all his salty skin, and he moved inside me, over and over; I loved to lie beneath him, to receive him. Now that we were engaged, I finally let him stay the night, or I slept at his place, and he was right that it was awfully nice to wake up together. I gave thanks, not for the first time, that being a librarian meant I had no grading to complete.

OUR WEDDING WAS on Saturday, October 8, in Milwaukee; it was at eleven in the morning, held in the front hall of the Blackwells’ house, officiated by the Right Reverend Wesley Knull, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee. There was a luncheon afterward, champagne and lemonade, watercress and egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off; these were prepared by Miss Ruby and her daughter, a nineteen-year-old named Yvonne.

When I’d told my mother and grandmother that I was marrying Charlie—I’d taken that trip to Riley without him—my mother had wept with happiness, and my grandmother had, while sitting in a chair, simulated a dance of glee. I had explained later to my mother that the wedding wouldn’t cost much because we’d be using the Blackwells’ house and their household help; if she wanted to write a check for ninety dollars for champagne, that would be more than enough. I’d settled on this figure by coming up with the lowest possible number that I thought would seem plausible to her. I am not sure how much the wedding really cost the Blackwells, but I let them absorb the expense. I also, in a way that I hoped would discourage questions, admitted to my mother that Dena and I had had a falling-out and she would not be invited to the wedding. Nevertheless, I received a gravy boat from her parents.

Forty-nine guests came: Twenty-nine were Blackwells, twelve were friends of Charlie’s (men he knew from Exeter or Princeton or Wharton) and their wives; two were Hank Ucker and his wife; two were Kathleen and Cliff Hicken, who were the only ones we invited from that extended Madison friend group; and four were my mother, my grandmother, our longtime next-door neighbor Mrs. Falke, and my closest friend from Liess, Rita Alwin; Rita proved to be the only black person present besides Miss Ruby and Yvonne. It could have been a much different wedding, a much larger one, but I didn’t see the need for it; I didn’t yearn to be fussed over. We had no attendants except Liza and Margaret Blackwell, our flower girls, and no dancing, though a harpist played near the buffet. Jadey applied my makeup and styled my hair in an upstairs bedroom before the ceremony, and my dress was a matching skirt and blouse I’d found on the rack at Prange’s a few weeks before: white cotton, a blousy V-necked top with a cinched waist and a calf-length skirt that I wore with my white pumps. (When Priscilla Blackwell peered into the bedroom where I was dressing, she exclaimed, “Isn’t that a sweet little frock! Why, you look like a pioneer preparing to cross the Great Plains.”) I carried a small bouquet of five white lilies; Charlie wore a boutonniere of a single white lily, as did his father; Mrs. Blackwell, my mother, and my grandmother wore corsages.

I walked alone down the aisle, a space created by the rows of white wooden folding chairs that it turned out we didn’t need to rent because the Blackwells owned nearly two hundred of them, as well as round folding tables; they kept these stacked in their vast unfinished basement, and the help brought them up for parties and fund-raisers. When I saw Charlie waiting for me by the staircase next to Reverend Knull, I did not feel any sort of epochal emotion; I felt a slight embarrassment to be drawing such attention to myself, to the affection Charlie and I had for each other. What was the reason to declare this so publicly? But the reason was convention, and there are worse rationales. It was necessary, I recognized, for everyone else. As I passed the front row, I saw that my mother and grandmother were beaming. The ceremony was short; afterward, the toasts from Charlie’s brothers, a source of worry for me in advance, were crude but in an essentially harmless way.

At the reception, when Charlie was talking to my mother, I went and sat by my grandmother; Mrs. Falke was using the bathroom, and my grandmother was surveying the room, smoking a cigarette. “It’s a swell family you’ve married into,” she said. We looked at each other, and she added, “They’re lucky to get you.”

“May I have a sip?” I gestured toward her glass of champagne on the table, and my grandmother nodded. I said, “Mom told me you haven’t been to see Dr. Wycomb for a while, and if it’s because of the hassle of the train, I could drive you to Chicago sometime. One of the next few weekends, even. Things will be pretty quiet for me with the wedding behind us.”

My grandmother looked startled.

“Not if you don’t want me to,” I said quickly. “I just thought—”

“If we showed up at Gladys’s doorstep, I’m afraid she wouldn’t let us in.” My grandmother smiled sadly. “She became cross with me years ago.”

“Was there—” I hesitated. “Did something happen?” And so we had arrived at the subject I’d studiously avoided for as long as I could, and instead of being gripped by nervousness or distaste, I felt a to-hell with-it sort of nonchalance; I found myself wondering why I’d invested quite so much energy all this time in evasion.

“Gladys wanted me to move to Chicago,” my grandmother said. “After you went away to school, particularly, she’d say, ‘What’s there for you in Riley?’ She couldn’t understand, never having had a child or grandchild of her own. She thought I was wasting my twilight years in this square little town when she and I could have a cosmopolitan life together. But I didn’t seriously consider it. Your father wouldn’t have understood, and if I was to choose between Gladys and my own son, it wasn’t much of a choice.”

I swallowed. “And then you lost touch?”

“She took up with another friend.” My grandmother’s expression was wry as she inhaled on her cigarette. “A younger lady, if I’m not mistaken. It would be hard not to be younger than me, but I mean a good deal younger than Gladys, too. Cradle-robbing, isn’t that what they call it?”

“I’m sorry, Granny. I’m sorry that—” I paused. That I was childish about what you wanted in the world. That I was unable to accept a thing that caused no harm, that I acted as if it were shameful because someone somewhere gave me the impression that it was and not because I bothered to consider the situation for myself. “I’m sorry it turned out like that,” I said.

“Well, it’s scarcely recent history.” She lifted her champagne flute toward me. “Find me something stiffer to drink, would you? Don’t Republicans like old-fashioneds?”

“I’m sure I can get somebody to fix one.”

As I stood, my grandmother said, “Your new mother-in-law seems like a crafty broad.”

“I don’t think she approves of me.”

My grandmother tapped her cigarette against an ashtray. “You must be doing something right.”

AFTERWARD, AS WE pulled out of the driveway, Charlie smacked his hand against his forehead and said sarcastically, “Oh, shit—we forgot to do the dollar dance!” In Riley, if not in Madison, I had attended many weddings where dollar dances occurred; Charlie, I suspected, had never attended one.

We were to stay overnight in a bed-and-breakfast in Waukesha, a Victorian house painted blue-gray. “It looks haunted,” Charlie said as we turned up the gravel driveway.

I was the one who had chosen it, based on a recommendation from another teacher, and I replied, “Then you should have picked out someplace else.”

“Are you always so grumpy when you get married?” he asked, and we grinned at each other across the front seat.

Around three in the morning, I woke to find Charlie shaking me. “I’ve gotta take a leak,” he said.

I shooed him away. “I’m sleeping.”

“Come with me, will you?” The bathroom was outside our room and down the hall about twenty feet. He leaned across me and switched on the light on my nightstand. “Just come. One minute. I’ll be fast.”

I was covering my eyes with the inside of my elbow. “Turn it off,” I said.

“Come on.” His tone was both cajoling and whiny. “This place gives me the creeps.”

I lifted my arm. “You seriously want me to go with you to the bathroom?”

“Lindy, you’ve known since the night we met that I’m afraid of the dark. There was no false advertising.”

I shook my head, but, just the tiniest bit, I was smiling. In the hall, a night-light stuck into a plug gave off a weak glow, but neither of us could find the main light switch. I walked in front, and when a floor-board creaked, Charlie whispered, “You hear that?” and I whispered back, “Calm down. This house is probably a hundred years old.”

In the bathroom, I perched on a low radiator against the wall while he stood over the toilet. After he was finished, he turned and kissed me on the lips. “I knew I married the right woman.”

“Wash your hands and let’s go back to bed,” I said.

WHEN I FELL asleep again, I dreamed, as I had not for many years, of Andrew Imhof. We were in some sort of large, vague, crowded room—the poorly lit auditorium of a school, possibly—and we did not speak or even make eye contact, but I was acutely conscious of every place he moved; really, he was all I paid attention to, though I was pretending otherwise. Then, abruptly, he was gone, and I was deeply disappointed. I had been planning to approach him, I’d known he wanted me to, but I’d put it off so long I’d missed my chance. When I awakened, it was half past six, and our room in the B and B was just getting light; we were sleeping on a high, canopied bed, beneath a patchwork quilt so heavy I had broken into a sweat. The feeling of disappointment stayed with me—that what I wanted was the boy in the dream. Without turning my head to look at Charlie, I knew. Not this. That. Andrew. To be with Andrew would have been utterly natural; everything had been set in place, and I’d needed only to give in. And that feeling of being adored by a handsome boy, that feeling of being seventeen, of life being about to happen—how was it all so long ago, how had my path gone this way instead? My sense of disappointment wasn’t because I’d had to escort Charlie to the bathroom—that was practically endearing. It was because of everything else: I was now married (married ) to an aspiring politician from a smug and ribald family, I had a mother-in-law who didn’t like me, my husband was a man who basically (I rarely, even in the privacy of my own head, admitted this) did not hold a job. I’d been meant to grow old in Riley; I’d never been meant for ribaldry or riches.

Charlie stirred then, pulling me to him, and when I finally looked at his face, the dream began to dissipate. I rolled toward him, feeling the tops of his feet with the bottoms of my toes, feeling the hair on his calves against the skin of my own legs, and his bony knees—they almost hurt me sometimes, when his legs were bent—and I pressed my torso to his, I huddled beneath his chest and shoulders. I recognized the smell of his skin, and he was handsome; he was not as handsome as Andrew Imhof had been, because Andrew had been a teenager, perfect and golden, but surely, had Andrew lived, he would no longer be handsome the way he’d been then. If what I had with Charlie did not feel as ripe with promise as what I’d had with Andrew—well, of course it didn’t. That earlier promise had hinged on never being realized. Charlie and I already knew each other far better than Andrew and I ever had. If Charlie couldn’t name the bakery on Commerce Street, or give the reason why Grady’s Tavern had caught fire in 1956, if he didn’t fully understand where I came from, he understood who I was now—he knew how well done I liked my steak, knew the color of my toothbrush, the expression I made when I realized I’d forgotten to roll up my car windows before it rained. And if I’d been meant to stay in Riley, wouldn’t I have? Charlie wasn’t the reason I’d moved to Madison—I was the one who’d chosen to go over a decade earlier, and I’d rarely doubted my choice.

There then occurred the first and only paranormal incident of my marriage. Charlie shifted in his sleep, opened his eyes, looked at me, and, without preamble, said, “You have to forgive yourself for killing that boy.” (He was the first one who had ever said killing—though I had used the word plenty in my own thoughts, no one had used it with me. Years later, that was how people put it in articles and especially on the Internet, but Charlie was the first.) “For your own sake but for mine, too,” he was saying, and his voice was hoarse from sleep yet also certain and insistent. “If you don’t forgive yourself, you’re making that accident too important, you’re making him too important.” Charlie paused. “And I want to be the love of your life.”

I was so surprised that I don’t recall what I said—probably nothing more than “Okay”—and we fell back to sleep, Charlie first. When we awoke over an hour later, we did not refer to the exchange. We chatted idly, Charlie tried to persuade me to have sex—“We need to consummate this thing pronto”—but I didn’t want to until we got home that afternoon because the walls of the B and B were so thin we’d heard the owner sneeze the night before. For breakfast, we went downstairs to eat biscuits and cherry jam. The bewilderment my dream had left behind, that jarring sorrow—they were gone, and now that we were up and dressed, walking around, now that it was an ordinary day, I could see the dream’s utter irrationality. I did love Charlie; I was extravagantly lucky.

But the dream came back—the truth is that it has come back and come back and come back. For the entirety of my marriage, I would estimate I have dreamed of Andrew Imhof every two or three weeks, almost always as he appeared to me the night of my wedding: present but elusive. He stands nearby, we do not speak, and I am filled with exquisite longing. When I wake, the longing takes more time to fade than the dream itself.

But the dream is also, I have thought, a kind of gift: It allows me to remember Andrew without the memory being overwhelmed by my own sense of guilt. Perhaps Charlie’s exculpation had some effect, along with the passage of time. By my wedding night, it had been so many years. I was scarcely the same person I’d been that September evening in high school, and because it was no longer me, exactly, who had crashed the car, I could forgive the girl it had been as I would have been willing, much sooner, to forgive a classmate who’d been driving.

And so the dream was the first time that I experienced our separation not as Andrew’s loss but purely as mine. Not as I am so very sorry for the thing I did to you. But as Come back to me. Come back to me because fourteen years have passed, but still I miss you terribly.

IT WAS THE following spring, in early May, when I ran into my former realtor Nadine Patora. It was a Saturday morning, Charlie was off with Hank dashing from a 4-H dairy conference in Kimberly to a nursing home in Menasha to a diner in Manitowoc, and I was picking through a bin of apples at the farmers’ market when I felt the weight of someone staring. I glanced up. Nadine stood directly across the table from me. Unsure what to do, I smiled at her.

“I hear you got married.” She nodded at my wedding ring, which was a plain gold band.

I realized I had never written her a note apologizing for backing out of the purchase of the house. I had intended to, but during my courtship with Charlie, I’d forgotten. “Nadine, I’m really sorry about what—”

“I saw the wedding announcement in the paper,” she said. “You should have had the courtesy to tell me the truth.”

“My decision didn’t have anything to do with getting married,” I said.

“I don’t know what realtor you two went through, but I’ll say this: I was good enough to work with when you were a single gal on a tight budget, and I know, even if you don’t, that I could have done a first-rate job finding the right house for you and your husband. When you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you’re familiar with lots of areas.”

“No, no,” I said quickly. “We haven’t bought a house. We’re renting a place in Houghton.”

“There are public records, Alice. I can go on Monday and find out who brokered the deal and how much you paid.”

“Honestly,” I said. “We’re renting.”

Nadine pursed her lips. “The former governor’s son is running for Congress, and you expect me to believe he lives in some crappy little apartment?”

I DID NOT have another confrontation with Dena, but I am sorry to say this may have been only because I didn’t speak to her again before I moved from the city. The day she’d walked out on our lunch, I hadn’t thought that our friendship was over, her declarations to the contrary; I’d have guessed that she would forgive me. I still believe this may have been the case but that circumstances—geography, really—kept us apart. If I’d had the nerve to go into her store one day after enough time had passed, or if she’d found a serious boyfriend while I was still in Madison, I think we might have been able to pick up where we left off.

But only once before I moved did I see her, and I lacked the courage to say hello. This was a few months prior to when I ran into Nadine, a dark weekday afternoon in February, and I was coming out of a stationery store on State Street after buying a valentine for Charlie. I saw Dena from across the street, from the back, and my breath caught; I stood there, unmoving, against the brick exterior of the store, until she was all the way up the block. I did not lay eyes on her again for thirty years.

IN NOVEMBER 1978, Charlie lost the Sixth District congressional election to Alvin Wincek, 58 percent to 42 percent. Charlie had done better than people anticipated, but he still hadn’t come close. I had given notice to Liess’s principal, Lydia Bianchi, the previous spring, and I’d spent the summer and fall riding with Charlie in lawn chairs set in the flatbed of a pickup truck with BLACKWELL FOR CONGRESS signs affixed to the sides. I’d heard him introduce himself to thousands of voters and give the same speech hundreds of times, I’d passed him lozenges when he lost his voice and still kept speaking, I’d held his hand, I’d clapped, I’d eaten onion rings and french fries, I’d clapped again and eaten more onion rings and more french fries, and when Charlie gave his concession speech at the campaign headquarters on election night, we both had cried a little bit, and if our tears were not for exactly the same reasons, they weren’t for entirely different ones, either. We had gone together through something big; what we wanted was much more merged than it had been when we were dating.

In February, three months after the election, we bought a house in a northern suburb of Milwaukee—Maronee—and moved in on March 31, 1979. I was ten weeks pregnant, which I’d found out at the doctor’s office the day before we closed on the house; once we were in our new home, Charlie would scarcely let me unpack a box. We both were thrilled. We had stopped using any form of birth control a few weeks after our wedding, and given that seventeen months had passed since then and I was almost thirty-three, the arrival of my period had become a discouraging event; with increasing frequency, we’d been discussing the possibility of adoption.

The house we bought on Maronee Drive had five bedrooms, and it had cost $163,000. If Nadine had been our realtor, she’d have made almost $5,000, but we’d used a guy named Stuey Patrickson who played squash with Charlie’s cousin Jack. We made one bedroom ours, one we designated as a nursery, one was Charlie’s office, one was a guest room, and one was a mini-gym for Charlie where he could lift weights; we even had a large mirror installed along the wall, though more often he worked out at the weight room of the Maronee Country Club, whose golf course was across the street. (The weight room was a grim little affair back then, but it became increasingly fancy as the national interest in exercise grew.) Charlie and I did not discuss the possibility—it didn’t occur to me, and I don’t think it occurred to him, either—that I would also have an office in our new house. The second-floor hallway was spacious, and at one end, near a window, we set a desk where, kept company by my papier-mâché Giving Tree, I paid bills and wrote thank-you notes. I had gotten quite good at writing thankyou notes; after our wedding, we’d received dozens and dozens of gifts from Blackwell family friends whom we hadn’t invited to the ceremony. For years, this was how I kept Milwaukee people straight in my head: the LeGrands, who had given us the toaster oven; the Wendorfs, who had given us the white porcelain serving platter.

Charlie and I settled easily into our new life together; the headiness of our courtship passed, but its passage seemed organic rather than lamentable. The rhythms of keeping a house suited me. I had wondered if I would be bored, but there was a lot to do when we moved in, painters and contractors to oversee (we renovated the master bathroom), and I also had a garden to maintain. Every morning after Charlie left for work—he was going to Blackwell Meats four and sometimes five days a week—I’d read for at least an hour, and I had worked long enough to recognize this for the great luxury it was. I admit that early on, I’d sometimes reach the end of a chapter, look up, and be startled by my surroundings; while inside a fictional world, I had forgotten what I’d become, it had slipped my mind that I was a married woman with a house, living with my husband in a suburb of Milwaukee. At these moments, and at others, I’d think of my apartment on Sproule Street, my former students and colleagues, my friendships with Dena and Rita (I had given my mother’s brooch to Rita when I quit my job—though it was pretty, it held such unpleasant associations that I’d never have worn it myself ). While on balance, I didn’t regret the changes that had taken place in my life, I’d feel a small twinge for what was no longer mine.

Charlie and I were newlyweds, and then, very quickly, we were just another married couple, socializing often with his brothers and other couples who belonged to our country club and our church. Charlie usually played squash or tennis after work and brought me flowers once a week. On Sundays, if Harold and Priscilla were in town, we went to their house for dinner—I learned to call them Harold and Priscilla rather than Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell—and we traveled, sometimes with Jadey and Arthur. In our first five years of marriage, we visited Colorado, California, North Carolina, New York, and New Jersey, and I was only slightly disappointed when Charlie decided for us against accompanying his parents to Hawaii. By then our daughter, Ella, was two and quite a handful to take on a plane.

In the early years of our marriage, we were very happy—for most of our marriage, we have been happy, though like all couples, we have experienced bumps. This is not necessarily the story the public wishes to hear, that the good times have greatly outweighed the bad, but it is the true story. The longer we have been together, the more far-fetched our compressed courtship has come to seem. Engaged after six weeks! Married after six more! How impulsive, how bold or foolish. Did we know each other at all? But I think we did. In most ways, I believe we’re the same people we were then, though the circumstances of our lives have changed dramatically.

During that initial congressional run and in later elections, when pundits or journalists underestimated Charlie, I could not be surprised; after all, when we’d first met, I had underestimated him, too.

PART III

402 Maronee Drive

B

ECAUSE WE HAD

theater tickets for seven-thirty, Charlie had promised to be home by six-fifteen, and I’d made a chicken marsala we could eat with Ella before we left. But by six-forty, Charlie still wasn’t back, and our sitter, a college sophomore named Shannon whom Ella adored, had arrived. I called Charlie’s office, where his answering machine picked up, his secretary’s voice explaining that he was away or in a meeting. Had he forgotten about the play—it was Chekhov’s

The Seagull—

and gone to the country club to play squash or lift weights? Had he gone to a baseball game? It was a Wednesday in May, and though we had season tickets to the Marcus Center, we usually went to performances on Friday or Saturday nights.

I checked the paper, and the Brewers were indeed playing at home; they were playing the Detroit Tigers. That was the likeliest explanation for Charlie’s absence, but just in case, I called the country club, and the operator connected me to the athletic building, where Tony, the seventy-year-old who tended bar in the oak-paneled lounge between the men’s and women’s locker rooms, told me he hadn’t seen Charlie. This still could mean Charlie had entered the squash courts or the weight room through the side door, or it could mean he’d gone to his parents’ house, where he and Arthur liked to watch baseball games together in peace and quiet. Harold and Priscilla had moved to Washington, D.C., in 1986, two years earlier, when Harold was elected chair of the Republican National Committee, but the house was still fully furnished.

I called Jadey—she and Arthur also lived on Maronee Drive, a mile west of us—and their son Drew, who was fifteen, said, “Mom’s walking Lucky.”

“Is your dad home yet?” I asked.

“He’s working late.”

When I hung up, it was ten to seven, and it would take a solid twenty-five minutes to get downtown. Shannon and Ella sat at the kitchen table, Ella finishing her dinner. I crossed the kitchen and kissed Ella on her forehead. To both of the, I said, “Upstairs at eight-thirty, lights out at eight-forty-five, and no TV.”

“Mommy, your earrings look like thumbtacks,” Ella said.

I laughed. The earrings in question were gold, and they did look a little like thumbtacks. I also wore a pale pink suit—a skirt and jacket—and pink Ferragamo pumps. “Make sure to put away Barbie’s tea party,” I said to Ella, then looked at Shannon. “There’s some cooked steak in the fridge if you want to reheat it. We should be home by ten-thirty. I’m stopping by Mr. Blackwell’s parents’ house, because I think that’s where he is, but if he comes here, tell him to meet me downtown.”

He wasn’t at his parents’, though. At first, pulling into the driveway of their castlelike dwelling, I’d noticed lights in the kitchen and thought I’d found him, but when I approached the side door on foot, I saw through a window that it was Miss Ruby; she was cinching the belt of a tan raincoat.

She opened the door for me, and I said, “Charlie’s not here, is he?”

“You try the country club?”

“I don’t think he’s there, either.” I glanced at my watch. “We’re supposed to go to a play that starts at seven-thirty.”

Miss Ruby regarded me impassively. Over the years, I had observed the Blackwells competing for her opprobrium—if she scolded Arthur for, say, setting a glass on the living room table without a coaster, he’d treat it as a minor victory—but this was not a competition in which I wanted to participate. If Miss Ruby was grumpy, she was also an unfailingly hard worker, and on more than one holiday, I’d walked into the kitchen to find her scrubbing dishes at eleven

P.M.

, then I’d returned to the house the following morning and found her setting out breakfast fixings by eight o’clock. Just a few years before, I’d learned she had a bedroom off the kitchen, as well as her own adjacent bathroom, but sleeping at the Blackwells’ rather than going home for the night seemed to me more a drawback than a perk of her job.

It was by this point exactly seven, which meant I’d likely miss the start of the play, which meant why bother? I nodded toward the back door. “You’re headed out, I take it?”

“Just making sure the house is ready for Mr. and Mrs.”

I had forgotten that Harold and Priscilla were coming to town for the weekend, and that in fact we all were due for dinner there Saturday night. I made a mental note to call Priscilla and ask what I could bring.

I gestured to Miss Ruby to walk out in front of me, and almost imperceptibly, she shook her head; I walked out first, and she followed. It was about sixty degrees, the late-May sky darkening, the Blackwells’ lawn canopied by trees thick with new leaves. As we crossed the gravel driveway, I realized my car was the only one parked, and I turned to Miss Ruby. “Can I offer you a ride?”

“No, ma’am, I take the bus.”

“Then at least let me drive you to your stop. It’s on Whitting, isn’t it?” A few times, in the late afternoon or early evening, I had driven past her waiting there.

“You don’t need to,” she said.

“No, I insist.” I laughed a little. “I’d like to do

something

worthwhile with my night.” When she climbed in the car, I had the distinct sense that she was humoring me.

We drove in silence—the NPR show I’d been listening to had come on with the ignition, and I’d switched it off in case it wasn’t to her liking (Charlie referred to the station as National “Pubic” Radio)—and as we were approaching the corner of Montrose Lane and Whitting Avenue, I said, “Would

you

be interested in going to the theater with me? Our tickets are for

The Seagull,

and they’ll go to waste otherwise. But please don’t feel like you have to—it’ll be a bit of a rush to get there.” She didn’t respond immediately, and I wondered if I should explain the play’s plot or author, or if it would be presumptuous to assume Miss Ruby hadn’t heard of Chekhov.

“I don’t know that I’m dressed right,” she finally said, and I looked over, worried that she would have on the black dress that was her uniform—I wouldn’t blame her for not wanting to go to a play in a maid’s uniform—but I saw that beneath her raincoat, she was wearing red slacks and a black sweater.

“No, you’re fine,” I said. “I’m a little overdressed, to tell the truth. Have you been to the Marcus Center?”

“Jessica went with her school to hear the Christmas carols.” Jessica was Miss Ruby’s granddaughter, the daughter of Yvonne, and I knew both of them lived with Miss Ruby; Jessica’s father was not in the picture. Yvonne had actually helped at a few parties Charlie and I gave early in our marriage, while she was in nursing school, and now she worked downtown in the ER at St. Mary’s. Yvonne was a sunnier woman than her mother, and I’d always liked her, and Ella was crazy about Jessica, who was a few years older. On the days Miss Ruby brought her granddaughter to the Blackwells’ house, if Jessica was out of school but Yvonne had to work, the two little girls would spend hours playing with Barbies in Priscilla’s kitchen. It struck me then that I hadn’t seen either Jessica or Yvonne for quite a while, not since before Harold and Priscilla had left for Washington. I said, “Is Jessica still at Harrison Elementary?”

“Yes, ma’am, she is.” A bit uncertainly, Miss Ruby added, “I suppose I could go to that play.”

I was shocked and delighted, but I intentionally remained low-key. I said, “Wonderful,” and then, as I accelerated, “Jessica was always so bright. Am I right in thinking she’s about to finish fifth grade?”

“She’s in the sixth grade with Mr. Armstrong,” Miss Ruby said. “Straight A’s on her report card, vice president of the student council, and she’s a leader in the youth group at Lord’s Baptist.”

“That’s fabulous,” I said. “Where will she go for junior high?”

“She’ll be at Stevens.”

I made a conscious effort not to react negatively. Stevens was, without a doubt, the worst junior high school in Milwaukee. We lived in the suburbs, and Ella went to private school, to Biddle Academy, but you didn’t have to be a faithful reader of

The Milwaukee Sentinel

to know what dire straits the city’s public schools were in, and Stevens was in the direst: The year before, a gun that a seventh-grader had brought to school somehow went off between classes, and within the last month, two ninth-graders had been expelled for selling crack. (Ninth-graders! And for God’s sake,

crack.

It reminded me why I’d taught younger kids, though I couldn’t have fathomed anything like that in the seventies.) “What’s Jessica’s favorite subject?” I asked.

“I guess it’s English, but she’s good at everything.” Miss Ruby pointed. “You want to save time, you should take Howland Boulevard.”

“That’s great she’s doing so well,” I said. “How’s Yvonne?”

“Not getting any sleep since the baby came. He sure does like to be held.”

“Oh my goodness, I didn’t realize Yvonne had had a baby. When was this?”

“Antoine Michael,” Miss Ruby said. “Turns two months old on the first of June.”

“Miss Ruby, that’s so exciting. I would love to see him.” I had thought my fondness for babies might be a thing I got out of my system after I had one myself, but it had never passed. I still was fascinated by their tiny fingernails and noses and earlobes, the perfect softness of their skin—they seemed magical, from another planet. When Ella became a toddler and then a child, I loved every new stage, she was always funny and charming and of course infuriating, but I admit that I mourned a little when she was no longer a newborn; that transition had been the hardest. “Maybe Ella and I could swing by some afternoon,” I said, and when Miss Ruby didn’t respond, I added, “Or let’s find a time for your family to come to our house. Would lunch a week from Sunday work? Or”—I didn’t know what time the Suttons finished church, so perhaps Sunday wasn’t ideal—“what about Monday? Next Monday is Memorial Day, isn’t it?”

“I suppose we could come.”

“Oh, Ella will be thrilled. Now, is Yvonne—is the baby’s father—”

“Clyde, he lives with us, too. He and Yvonne got married back last summer.”

“Miss Ruby, I had no idea so much was going on in your life! How did Yvonne and Clyde meet?”

“He’s at the hospital, too, down in the cafeteria.” Miss Ruby chuckled. “Sold Yvonne her pie and coffee, if that doesn’t beat all.”

“Good for them.”

When we reached the Marcus Center, we parked in a lot on Water Street and hurried inside. The ushers were closing the doors of the theater, but we were able to slip in and take our seats as the lights went down. I had never seen

The Seagull,

and I thought it was quite good—the actress playing Madame Arkadina was superb. It was not until the second act that I was overtaken by an uneasy feeling. Where

was

Charlie? Was it safe to assume he was at the baseball game, or could he be somewhere else entirely?

At intermission, I found a pay phone in the lobby, but again there was no answer at his office, and at home, Shannon said she hadn’t heard from him. I hovered between irritation and anxiety. The fact was, I had more reason to think he’d simply forgotten about the play, or even purposely avoided it, than I did to think something was wrong. In the last few months, Charlie had accompanied me to the theater increasingly grudgingly, and sometimes we skipped events altogether when I didn’t want to see a performance enough to try persuading him. The truth of our lives was that for close to two years, he had been in a bad mood; he was almost always restless and disagreeable.

To a certain extent, Charlie had been restless since I’d met him—he drummed his fingers on the table when he felt we’d stayed too long at a dinner party, he’d murmur to me, “I bet even God has fallen asleep” during sermons at church—but in the past, it had been a restlessness that was physical, situational, rather than existential. His bad mood was different. It wasn’t directed

toward

me, but it had become such a constant that the times when he wasn’t in its grip were the exceptions.

I’d tried to pinpoint when it had all started, and it seemed to have been around the time he turned forty, in March 1986. To my surprise, he had not wanted a party—he, Ella, and I had celebrated with hamburgers and carrot cake at home—and in the months before and after his birthday, Charlie talked often about his legacy. He’d say, “I just have to wonder what kind of mark I’ll make. By the time Granddad Blackwell was my age, he’d founded a company with three dozen employees, and by the time Dad was forty, he’d gone from being the state attorney general to being governor.” If I were to be completely candid, I would make the following admission: There were many things about Charlie that I knew other people might imagine I’d find irritating—his crudeness, his healthy ego, his general squirminess—and I didn’t. But his fixation with his legacy (I even grew to hate the word) I found intolerable. It seemed so indulgent, so silly, so

male;

I have never, ever heard a woman muse on her legacy, and I certainly have never heard a woman panic about it. I once, in the most delicate manner possible, expressed this observation about gender to Charlie, and he said, “It’s because you’re the ones who give birth.” I did not find this answer satisfying.

Whatever the source of Charlie’s discontent, in late 1986 and the first half of 1987, it had been exacerbated by three quarters in a row of declining profits at Blackwell Meats. There ensued a many-months-long debate about taking the company public, an idea Charlie favored, and his brother John, who was still the CEO, opposed. The five other members of the company’s board of directors were Arthur, Harold, Harold’s brother, the brother’s son, and Harold’s sister’s husband, and their votes were evenly split, with Harold siding with John. This meant the decision came down to Arthur, who, after much back-and-forth, voted with John and against Charlie. Charlie spared his father and Arthur and saved his anger for John, and the previous November, we’d all experienced a rather strained Thanksgiving, with Priscilla seating John and Charlie as far apart as possible. Although the chill seemed to have thawed in the six months since—John and Charlie saw each other every day at work, after all—Charlie still privately seethed about what he saw as John’s ignorance (a particularly sore spot for Charlie was that John had never attended business school), and the rancor was a vivid reminder that if someone else criticized a Blackwell, it wasn’t acceptable, but a Blackwell criticizing a Blackwell was just fine. Meanwhile, I had tried not to let the conflict affect my relationship with John’s wife, Nan—I invited her to lunch more often than usual, or I’d suggest we drive together to Junior League meetings—and Ella, with no idea that her father and uncle were sparring, was worshipful of her girl cousins: Liza, who had taught me string figures during my first visit to Halcyon, was now twenty and finishing her junior year at Princeton, and Margaret was seventeen and would enter Princeton in the fall.

But Charlie was less and less inclined to participate in family gatherings—he certainly didn’t initiate any—and he could be guaranteed to show up for a Blackwell brunch or dinner only if his parents were in town, which wasn’t more often than every six weeks. A month before, in April, John and Nan had bought a table for eight at a benefit for the art museum and invited us to sit with them, and Charlie hadn’t gone at the last minute; it was a Saturday evening, he’d been drinking heavily while watching a baseball game in the den, and when he came upstairs and saw that I’d hung his tuxedo on the back of our bedroom door, he said, “No way I’m putting on that monkey suit.”

“Charlie, it’s blacktie,” I said, and he said, “Tough titty. I’m wearing what I have on, or you can go without me.” I had thought at first that he was kidding, but he’d maintained his refusal to change clothes, which was the same as refusing to go. When I’d asked what I was supposed to tell John and Nan—I knew they’d paid a hundred dollars a plate—he shrugged. “Tell ’em the truth.” Instead, I said he’d come down with the stomach flu. When I got home that night, he was still watching television—some police drama—and he smiled impishly and said, “Do you forgive your scoundrel husband?” Because it wasn’t worth it not to, I did, but that Monday, I ordered pamphlets from two treatment facilities for alcoholics, one local and one in Chicago. When I showed the pamphlets to Charlie, he said angrily, “Because I didn’t want to change my clothes the other night? Are you kidding me? Lindy, get a fucking grip.”

At some point during the spring, Charlie’s malaise had expanded to include not just his brothers but also his upcoming twentieth reunion at Princeton, which would occur in early June. In advance of the event, he’d received a bonded leather book in which alumni provided updates about their professional and personal lives, and before bed, he’d taken to reading aloud from it in tones of scorn and disbelief: “ ‘Having made partner at Ellis, Hoblitz, and Carson was an achievement outmatched only by the indescribable pleasure of seeing the sunrise over Maui’s Haleakala Crater as Cynthia and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage . . . ’ I’m telling you, this guy didn’t know his asshole from his elbow in college. Oh,

here’s

a good one: ‘I find it humbling to think that my oncology research literally saves lives . . . ’ We all knew O’Brien was a homo.” I did not find these excerpts or Charlie’s editorializing enjoyable, mostly because I’d be trying to read my own book, and they were interruptions. We didn’t have to go to the reunion, I pointed out once, eliciting a snappish rebuttal: Of course we had to go! What kind of chump skipped Reunions? (That was what Princetonians called the event—not

the

reunion, just capital-R Reunions.) It was clear that the book had touched a nerve, that while working for a family-owned meat company sufficed in Maronee, at least on good days, Charlie questioned how impressive it sounded in a more national context. Though I tried to be sympathetic to his insecurities, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was, on balance, a rather fortunate problem to have.

In recent weeks, he had been coming home from work later and later and rarely calling to say where he was. Sometimes, it would turn out, he’d been at the country club, sometimes he’d stopped at a bar for a drink (this bothered me most, because it seemed seedy—in Riley, husbands and fathers frequented bars, but they didn’t in Maronee), and sometimes he’d driven directly from the office to a Brewers game. The Blackwells had four season tickets, formerly Harold’s, which were shared among Charlie and his brothers but often went unused. On these nights, when I asked whom he’d gone with, once it was Cliff Hicken (he and Kathleen, the friends who’d held the backyard cookout where Charlie and I had met, had moved from Madison to Milwaukee three years after we had, when Cliff had taken a job as vice president of a financial advising company), and once Charlie had gone to a game with a younger fellow from work, but several times, it sounded like Charlie had gone alone. He’d arrive home as I was going to bed, and I’d feel simultaneously angry, distressed, and too tired for a confrontation. I’d postpone a real conversation until morning, by which point I didn’t have the heart to begin today with what was worst from yesterday. In any case, though he never said as much, I had the sense that on many of these mornings, Charlie was too hungover to do more than force himself out of bed and into the shower.

It had occurred to me that he could be having an affair, but I didn’t think he was. We still had sex regularly, if not with the frequency we’d enjoyed early on, and he was, in smaller ways, as affectionate as he’d ever been. In the middle of the night, he’d take my hand and hold it while we slept; the previous week, I’d awakened around three to find him rubbing his feet against mine. When we got up, I’d asked, “Were you playing footsie with me last night?” and he’d said, “Lindy, don’t pretend that footsie isn’t your favorite game.” His ongoing bad mood had not obliterated his usual personality; it was more that it accompanied it, like a sidecar on a motorcycle. And as for the possibility of him having an affair, really, he seemed more preoccupied than secretive.