A Theory of Relativity (12 page)

“She’s . . . she’s perfect,” Dale had breathed, and Sheila had not been able to say a thing through her tears.

Things had been better after that. People had stood back in awe of the new Stephanie, and she had responded. She’d begun affecting big sunglasses and Dale’s white shirts over thrift-store pedal pushers, a decade before those pants came back into fashion. She’d taken honors in art.

Dale Larsen knew for a fact that a reporter from the
Messenger
had found out all about the fantastic circumstances of the Homecoming Queen vote and tried to get Georgia and Stephanie to talk about it.

He knew also that Georgia had refused. In a way he would not ever want to have to explain, Dale felt he owed Georgia his daughter’s life.

Father Barry’s eyes were reddening. He spoke of Georgia’s own baptism, the wedding, Keefer’s christening, all solemnized at this very altar where two coffins now lay, head to head. “I will not be able to give you the answers that will satisfy your hungry hearts. Indeed, my possible answers do not satisfy me. I remember Georgia telling me before the baptism that though her own middle name was spelled with two
f
s, like the name of the great prairie artist, her baby’s was not. ‘Father,’ she told me, ‘the second
f
was silent.’ Ill as she was, even then, she had a glad heart to share with me.”

Just after the baptism, Dale Larsen remembered, had come that big charity golf event, for cancer research, the one Andy North came all the way up here to Lake in the Woods to attend. The human-interest stories in the
Messenger
, about hereditary risk, about breast self-exams. By then the Larsens and McKennas had drifted apart, what with Georgia and Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 72

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Stephanie already grown. They’d drifted from a connection that for a short time felt like a lifeline in dark water, but was later almost shameful, something to be forgotten. Dale still asked Mark to sit in on his poker circle once in a while, though Mark was possibly the most daft cardplayer Dale had ever encountered. But that was all.

Since that day at the bridge, Dale had not slept well. He’d even thought that it was time to take his twenty and open a bait shop. His wife told him he’d been crying in his sleep, talking aloud, telling Georgia and Stephanie to get their butts home. For two nights running, he’d gone back out, after his customary rounds in the squad, to look in on Trina, their youngest, who was nineteen, and had just gotten one of those tiny little efficiencies in the hundred-year-old building that housed Wilton’s and Gloria’s Finer Designs. After a dozen years, few walls in Tall Trees were opaque to him. He knew which doors were opened each Monday by dapper managers and closed on wives with split lips and amethyst cheekbones. He knew which young father would be in jail but for the shame of the fifteen-year-old running back on the Wildwood team whose mother found the two of them in a sleeping bag out at Two Chimneys. He knew that the old bachelor, Hal Fry, had poisoned the Leahys’

collie, that the Weldons’ girl had given birth to a baby one night in the family bathroom, a baby he and his deputy had whisked to a Wausau hospital. The town was a body to him, and he its monitor. There was a knowing, a sense as sure as the vision in a doctor’s fingers, about which domestic strife should be brought to law and which left alone.

Dozens of times, he’d popped his lights off to slide past the house on Cleveland Avenue. He had been able to tell how everyone was doing inside, during the months of Georgia’s illness, from the patterns of the lights. A light burning in Georgia’s room was ordinary. If there were lights on in the kitchen, Lorraine was sitting up. If Mark’s reading lamp was on, it was a bad night all around. He counted the ambulance calls, the family cars parked overnight in numb defiance of even-odd regulation. He had not known what he could do, except watch.

“I once knew this little girl,” Father Barry was saying, “who had to do a reading in church. She’d memorized the Twenty-third Psalm. And Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 73

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she got up, all confidence, and she began, ‘The Lord is my shepherd . . .’

And she was stuck. She tried again. ‘The Lord is my shepherd . . .’ And she couldn’t remember another thing. And so she just looked out at the congregation and said, ‘Well, that’s enough for now.’

“And that, I think, is going to have to be the way we all approach this . . .”

Gordon had taken Father Barry’s place at the altar and was adjusting the microphone.

Lorraine was alarmed at the sight of her son. Gordon looked ghastly, the skin rubbed red under his eyes the only color in his face, his blond hair childlike with the wet tooth marks of the comb. She was reminded of him as an eight-year-old, after a fall from that tree fort, the snapped raw bone of one forearm shining in the sinister light of the emergency room. (“Aren’t you the little heartbreaker?” the nurse cooed, and Georgia, bored by all the flustered attention her brother was receiv-ing, snapped, “No, he’s a little arm breaker.”) Gordon began steadily, “I’m here to talk about Georgia O’Keeffe McKenna Nye, my . . . my sister . . . who was a good person. And I’m going to start by reading from the journal I kept during her sickness, just one part. It won’t take too long.” He opened a green spiral notebook. “It says, ‘I am beginning this journal, diary or document or whatever it may be while sitting at Georgia’s bedside at the University of Minnesota Clark Medical Center on the morning of April 3. Ray is on the other side. He is on this tiny little cot, and his big feet are hanging over the end, and he is trying to gather a few minutes of sleep in the respite that has been provided by Georgia’s last injection of morphine.

Timmy Upchurch is out in the visitors lounge on a couch.’ Tim”—Gordon looked up, and searched the pews—“Tim was there all the time for us. Anyway. It goes on, ‘I can hear Georgia’s labored lungs, attempting to draw in breath around the irresistible impulse to cough. She coughs approximately every ten to fifteen minutes. I have had to watch in pseudosecrecy and pretend to agree with her when she says, “I feel better today” partly because of our parents. She is not a naive person, but this bitch of a disease has overcome all her cynical wit. I see her sneak a Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 74

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whimper. But the patented Georgia smile stays in place. All she wants is to get home and get Keefer back in her arms. She does not want Keefer to see her here. She thinks it would scare her baby. I do not think anything about Georgia scares Keefer. I do not think Keefer can see anything but Georgia’s smile. When we came in here, before Ray came home, the nurse in the ER asked me if Georgia’s teeth were caps, because they are so perfect. Georgia is the bravest woman I have ever met. I think she must be one of the bravest women in the world.’ ” Gordon laid the notebook down.

“I don’t think my sister was a remarkable person to the whole world. She didn’t have time for that. But she was a remarkable person to me. She was a remarkable wife to Ray, putting up with him being on the road all the time when other wives might have complained about that. She was very proud of him. We were very proud of her.” Diane Nye sneaked one eyeful of Lorraine. She had to look at something, or she would scream.

Nothing about Lorraine except the gray-striped suit that wasn’t quite a suit and her gray kid gloves—-gloves! in June!—looked any different from the other day. Lorraine was wearing not one speck of makeup, and she had done her hair in the dark. It was so disrespectful, Diane thought, staring hard at the open hymnal in her lap.

And it was awful of her to notice. Ungracious, unkind. Georgia was their child. They must feel everything she felt, everything they were able to feel. But they could not feel the ineluctable coring out of self that howled inside Diane. Even Big Ray could not fully enter the loss of a mother who had built the flesh of her child, carried a baby in her body, next to her heart, felt him flicker, move and then grow . . . there was no genius that exceeded the capacity to make a person. This death was a crime against creation. But Keefer Kathryn, their consolation, looked so sweet in the white dress embroidered with daisies she and Ray had bought for her, and the little white patent shoes. Baby had refused to wear the matching headband; four times Diane had slipped it on her head, and four times Keefer had pulled it roughly off and told Diane, “No no!” She was finally so exasperated that Diane started to tell Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 75

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Baby to wear the pretty hat for Mommy, but Big Ray interrupted her. He was right. He was wise sometimes. She could, Diane knew, get all caught up in appearances sometimes. Shelby said it was a way of keeping things tidy on the outside so she didn’t have to mess with the inside. And Shelby was probably right.

“They just don’t dress her up, Mother,” Ray had said. Well, Diane thought, oh well. Big deal. These poor people had other things on their mind than fussing over Baby’s wardrobe. Diane should have come up here when Georgia got sick. She should have, but Lorraine had been so rigid, so defensive; the McKennas had roped Georgia off to such a degree even Raymond felt excluded. Still, they had done . . . the impossible. She had to give them that. Diane could not conceive it; imagine her lithe, clean Alison corroding, drooping.

Keefer
was,
however, wild as a jackrabbit. Big Ray had carried Keefer into the church, and they all sat down in the first row, but as soon as Keefer saw Lorraine, she had gone scooting across the aisle and into Lorraine’s lap. She’d run right in front of the pallbearers bringing in the coffin. Look at Keefer Kathryn, Diane thought. She was the picture of Raymond as a baby, big and rosy and strong. Georgia might not even have been part of the mix. Raymond could have had his pick; the phone rang off the hook, girls who’d been pageant queens, journalists, Rainy Kittredge was a model . . . and Diane had even thought, God forgive her for it, at least he would have the chance to start a new life after . . . it was over.

Georgia had not wanted to mix with the other players’ wives, and she expected Raymond to stay home and play Scrabble with her when his parents knew that there were places he ought to be seen for the good of his career. He had, after all, chosen to delay his career, to finish college, to stay with Georgia, though he could have left and turned pro, and it simply meant that he had more to prove. It was as if Georgia thought of Raymond’s gift as a job you could leave at the end of the day.

And moving up here, that had been the last straw. It had thrown Raymond off, just entirely thrown him. She and Ray personally believed that Raymond would have placed in the top three, for sure the top ten on the Knockout two years or more earlier if Georgia had not been so Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 76

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hot to have a baby right off the bat. When he told them, Raymond had just given them that moony smile and said, just happened, Mama, meant to be. And then Georgia wore Raymond out telling him she had to be with her mother after the baby came.

Tour players did not live in Wisconsin. They did not live in three-tavern burgs with the only course run by some Catholic cult or other, the fairways hard and bald as an alligator park.

Now, her son would lie in this cold ground.

Diane could not protect him any longer. She wanted to beat her fists against these ugly walls, this church that looked like a hunting lodge only missing a moose head, beat her fists against these square, fat people with their flat, backward voices and their dark, ugly clothes.

He’d been so alone here. She’d heard it in his voice.

Since they had first seen the miracle in Raymond, when he was six or seven, they had protected him, the way you protect a rare orchid cutting. The neurological illness that had first sent Diane to Shelby, the migraines and the shooting pains in her hips and legs that meant Big Ray had to lift her into the bath some mornings, Raymond knew nothing of this. He had known nothing of Big Ray’s midlife crazies, his

“executive assistant,” that battleship butt from Apalachicola, the nights she and Shelby spent driving down on South Street, watching from the playground shelter until Big Ray’s Lincoln came nosing into that woman’s apartment parking lot, jumping out, snapping pictures with that little disposable camera, her running off to Caroline’s house and drinking a whole bottle of Nyquil, Raymond Jr., knew none of that.

And he shouldn’t have known. He’d had a gift and a gift meant the responsibility to put that gift first.

Gordon was holding his hand up as if to ask for the patience of the crowd. Diane could see the tears.

He was only a boy.

This was not Gordon’s fault. Gordon had loved the game of golf. He had loved Ray. And it had not been Georgia’s fault, either. There was good in Georgia. Delia and Georgia had grown so close. Delia had purchased the herbs Shelby couldn’t send, the hexaphosphate and Inositol.

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Delia and Craig had come visiting, trying to re-create those beach picnics they all used to have back in Flordia, trying to raise Georgia’s spirits.

There was Lorraine standing now, jouncing the baby, nodding to Gordon. This church was so hot and stinking with incense Diane felt as though she had a dirty sponge pressed against her face. If Raymond hadn’t called them, heartsick, just last month, confessed it all to them, they’d never have known how pressured he’d felt by Georgia and Lorraine and Mark to name a guardian for Keefer, to name the McKennas as guardians for Keefer. It was as if Keefer were not a Nye, as if none of them even existed in her life. If Big Ray hadn’t helped Raymond find his own lawyer, they actually might have lost Keefer, too. It was the only thing that kept Diane going. Baby was their little sunshine. She had brightened right up once they’d got back to the hotel, after that terrible mess at the McKennas. She looked exactly like Brent and Brooks.