Ordinary Grace

6

Karl was the only child of Axel and Julia Brandt. Axel Brandt owned the brewery in New Bremen which had been built by his great-grandfather and was among the first businesses established when the town was originally settled. For more than a hundred years the enterprise had prospered. The brewery employed a significant workforce and was part of the economic lifeblood of New Bremen. In a way it was the town’s crown jewel and the Brandts were about as near to royalty as you’d find in the Midwest. They lived of course on the Heights in a sprawling white-pillared mansion with a large marble patio in back that had a view of the town below and below that the Flats and beyond the Flats the broad crawl of the river.

Karl Brandt and Ariel had gone steady for almost a year and although my mother didn’t like the idea, their relationship was more or less her doing. Every summer since we’d moved to New Bremen my mother had mounted a musical production that tapped the talent of the town’s youth and that was presented in the band shell in Luther Park the first weekend in August. The citizens of New Bremen turned out in extraordinary numbers. For some time after the last bow of the final show had been taken the talk of the town was prideful, not only because the young people had displayed such extraordinary talent but also because they were evidence that New Bremen was fostering in its youth the kinds of values that would serve both the community and the country well. In the summer when they were seventeen, Ariel and Karl had been chosen by my mother as the leads in a musical called The Boy Friend. By the end of the production the pair of stars were inseparable. For a while my mother looked on the relationship as a natural extension of the time and energy the two teenagers had invested in the production and she predicted it would not last beyond the turning of the leaves in autumn. But another summer had come to the valley of the Minnesota River and Karl and Ariel’s relationship seemed as consuming as ever. Its intensity alarmed not only my mother but also Julia Brandt who, whenever the two women happened to meet, was-my mother said in words that would have made the New York famous writers’ school proud-“cold as an Arctic winter.”

Despite her disapproval of the intensity of his relationship with her daughter, my mother liked Karl and often invited him for dinner. Ariel had never once dined with the Brandts, a fact not at all lost on my mother. Karl was polite and funny and an athlete who’d lettered in football and basketball and baseball. He’d been accepted to St. Olaf’s which was a college in Northfield, Minnesota, where he intended to play football and get a degree and then return to New Bremen to help his father run the brewery. When I looked up the hill from town and saw the walls of the mansion white among the greenery I thought Karl Brandt’s future sounded pretty swell.

That Sunday evening Karl and Ariel were going boating. Karl’s family owned a sailboat and a motor launch both docked at a marina on Lake Singleton. Ariel enjoyed boating. She said she loved the feel of the wind off the water and the clear blue circle of the sky overhead and the egrets and herons that walked stilt-like in the reedy shallows. She said she loved being freed from the stultifying solidness of dirt.

After supper she sat on the porch steps waiting for Karl. I came out and sat with her. Ariel always seemed happy to have my company. For that alone I would have loved her. My father hadn’t yet returned from his search for Travis Klement and as we sat I watched Tyler Street for any sign of our Packard.

Ariel was dressed in white shorts and a top with horizontal red and white stripes and she wore white canvas slip-ons. Her hair was tied with a red ribbon.

“You look pretty,” I said.

“Thanks, Frankie. With me a compliment’ll get you anywhere.” She lightly bumped my hip with her own.

“What’s it like?” I asked.

“What?”

“Being in love. Is it all kind of gooey?”

She laughed. “At first it’s lovely. Then it’s scary. Then. .” She looked toward the hills of town, toward the Heights. “It’s complicated,” she said.

“Will you marry him?”

“Karl?” She shook her head.

“Mom’s afraid you will.”

“Mom doesn’t know everything.”

“She says she worries because she loves you.”

“She worries, Frankie, because she’s afraid I’ll end up like her.”

I didn’t know what that meant exactly though I knew as well as any of us that Mother was less than delighted with her life as a minister’s wife. She’d said as much on a number of occasions. Her words usually went something like When I married you, Nathan, I thought I was marrying a lawyer. I didn’t sign on for this. More often than not it was said after she’d had a drink which was not something a minister’s wife was supposed to do but my mother did anyway. She had a fondness for martinis and sometimes would make a couple for herself in the evening and sip them alone in the living room while dinner bubbled over on the stove.

“She made Dad go look for Mr. Klement,” I said. “Mr. Klement hit Mrs. Klement and Peter.”

“I heard,” Ariel said.

“I do a lot of stuff I figure I should get hit for but I never do. I just get yelled at. I deserve it. I’m not the greatest kid.”

She turned to me and looked seriously into my face. “Frankie, never sell yourself short. You have remarkable strengths.”

“I should be more responsible,” I said.

“You have plenty of time to become responsible. And believe me it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” She spoke with a heaviness that weighed on me and I leaned against her and said, “I wish you weren’t going away.”

“Maybe I’m not, Frankie,” she said. “Maybe I’m not.”

Before I had a chance to press her further Karl drove up in his little sports car. For his eighteenth birthday his parents had given him a red Triumph TR3 and he drove it everywhere. He popped out of the car and bounded up the walk to where Ariel and I sat on the steps. He was tall and blond and smiling. He ruffled my hair and called me Sport and he said to Ariel, “You ready?”

“Home by midnight,” my mother said through the screen door behind us. Then she said, “Hello, Karl.”

“Hello, Mrs. Drum. Beautiful evening, don’t you think? And I’ll have her home before midnight, I promise.”

“Enjoy yourselves,” my mother said though not exactly with a full heart.

Ariel and Karl got into his car and sped up Tyler Street and out of sight. At my back I heard my mother sigh.

My father didn’t return by suppertime and we ate without him. Mother had browned some hamburger and added to it a big can of Franco-American spaghetti and she kept this warm on the stove anticipating my father’s return. Jake and I ate on television trays and watched Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, though for us it was in black and white, and on our old RCA console the world was a less-than-wonderful twenty-four-inches wide. The sun was down and the distant hills had taken on the blue look of twilight when there was a knock at the door and we found Danny O’Keefe standing on the porch scratching at a mosquito bite on his arm and telling us we should come outside and do something.

Despite the impression given by his name Danny O’Keefe was Indian. Specifically he was Dakota but in those days they were known as Sioux. He didn’t like being called an Indian which was understandable given the image that had been acid-burned with ridicule and hatred into the minds of white Americans. In the valley of the Minnesota River-hell, maybe everywhere back then-it was dangerous to be an Indian. In 1862 the Sioux of the area had mounted a brief rebellion against the white settlers which all Minnesotans knew as the Great Sioux Uprising. New Bremen had been besieged and many of the buildings burned. In the end, unconscionable death and suffering was visited upon the Sioux, who’d already endured years of mistreatment and deception at the hands of the whites. Even so, the uprising was usually given a spin in the classrooms that made the Sioux look criminally ungrateful. When we were younger and played Cowboys and Indians, Danny refused to take the part his genetics dictated.

Outside on our lawn there was a gathering of a bunch of the other kids from the Flats all of whom wanted to hear the story of how Jake and I had stumbled onto a dead man. I did the talking. By then I was reciting embellishments of the story that made it terribly exciting and full of moments of danger and suspense: We thought we heard voices. Arguing maybe. We were sure someone else had been there. Had foul play been involved in his death and were we in danger because we’d found the body? Jake eyed me with mild consternation but said nothing to contradict my version of the events and in the eyes of the others I saw a look of envy and respect that was intoxicating.

We played softball in the pasture behind our house until it was too dark to see and the others scattered back to their own homes and Jake and I went inside. My father still had not returned from his search for Travis Klement. My mother was standing at the kitchen sink smoking a cigarette and staring through the window toward Tyler Street. We asked for a treat before bed and she said we could have some ice cream which we ate while watching Ed Sullivan. We got ourselves ready for bed and kissed Mother good night and from the way she turned her cheek to us but not her eyes which held on Tyler Street it was clear that she was distracted. I didn’t know what there was to be worried about because my father was often gone on a call to one of his congregation that ended up turning into a long visitation as he helped cope with some travail or he became part of a protracted vigil over illness or death.

Upstairs in our room Jake said, “You better stop telling that story.”

“What story?”

“How you were such a hero finding the dead guy.”

“I was sort of.”

“I was there too.”

“Everybody knows that.”

“You make it sound like I wasn’t.”

“Then next time you tell the story.”

That shut Jake up but I could sense him still seething on the far side of the room.

For Christmas we’d been given a clock radio with a timer that let you listen to it for an hour at which point it would shut itself off automatically. On Sunday nights Jake and I listened to “Unshackled!” which was a religious program broadcast from a place called the Old Lighthouse in Chicago. It consisted of dramatized stories of people whose lives spiraled into the darkest places imaginable where only the light of God was powerful enough to reach and save them. I didn’t much care for the religious part of it but radio dramas were rare and I enjoyed being told a story that way. Jake usually fell asleep while the show was on and that night was no exception.

I listened until the radio clicked off and I began to drift into sleep and then I heard the return of the Packard and I woke up. Below me the screen door opened and I knew Mother had gone out onto the porch to greet my father. I went to the window and watched him walk from the garage with Gus at his side.

“Thanks, Gus,” my father said.

“A good day’s work, Captain. Let’s hope it takes. Good night.”

Gus left him and headed for the church. My father joined my mother on the porch and they came inside and went to the kitchen where I knew she would dish out the warmed-over spaghetti. I lay back down on my bed. Through the heat grate I heard the chairs scrape the linoleum as my parents settled at the table and the quiet that followed as my father ate.

“We finally found him in Mankato drinking in a bar,” Dad said. “He was pretty drunk. We did our best to sober him up. Fed him something. We talked and I tried to convince him to pray with me, which he refused to do. In the end, though, he was better. He was ready to go home. He felt pretty bad about how he’d treated Amelia and Peter. He said things have been tough lately. He swore it would never happen again.”

“And you believed him?”

I heard my father slide his fork across his plate as he gathered the last of his supper. “Ruth, I don’t know that God can reach everyone. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t know how to deliver everyone to God. Travis isn’t out of the woods. I worry about him and about his family. And I don’t know what more I can do at the moment except pray for them.”

I heard water run in the sink and the clatter of plate and fork as my mother laid them there and I heard silence and I imagined her turning back to my father still sitting at the table and the last thing I heard that night was her soft voice telling him, “Thank you, Nathan. Thank you for trying.”