A Theory of Relativity (38 page)

“I’m sure you do.” Jurgen made his mellow voice formal, remote.

“And so you certainly can admit the possibility that even Ray, at least at one time, felt sure that Keefer would be happier and more secure among the people who knew her best?”

“I know he had a grateful heart for all you did for Georgia,” Jurgen answered evenly. “Now, Gordie, maybe we better just get this conversation on an alternate track. Because you and I—”

“And he was my friend.”

“He was your friend.”

“And you were my friend. You were my friend. You were closer to me even than Ray was. I thought you might demonstrate some loyalty. I thought if you couldn’t demonstrate some loyalty, you might at least demonstrate some neutrality.”

“Gordie, I don’t want to have this conversation.”

“Carl, I don’t want to have this conversation, either. Or any other one. Ever.”

“I don’t think you’re always going to feel that way. We go way back, Bo. I expect you there to help me hoist the—”

“We go way back, Carl. But we don’t go way forward.” And Gordon put down the telephone receiver, juggling it and bobbling it as if it were Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 254

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something scalding, his hands in a brain-stem tremor like his grandpa McKenna’s. Maybe he’d got Parkinson’s, he thought. No, he and Pop McKenna were not blood relatives.

They waited.

Nora had never noticed how little work there really was to do on the farm. Even in planting, it had begun to function, not without her, but without the constant, watchful attention she had grown accustomed to giving. Certainly, some of that was due to the fact that the land in asparagus was mature now. The asparagus did everything but jump up into the boxes by itself. Marty had quit his day job to work with his dad full-time, and they spent evenings huddled over Extension pamphlets on free-range chickens and sustainable agriculture. The appeal seemed to be taking forever. How long did it take intelligent people to do what was right? she asked Hayes one night. “I’d sure hate to be somebody on Death Row,” she’d murmured.

“We don’t have a Death Row in Wisconsin,” Hayes grunted.

“I know that, you old crab,” Nora retorted stoutly. “It was a for-instance.” But kindly though he had been about the case since the night of their argument, Hayes was still not all that keen on discussing it.

Half at loose ends, Nora volunteered to take over the presidency of the altar guild from Helen Wilton and spent hours in the jeweled, dusty silence of the nave, planning elaborate themes for the Sunday services that would incorporate the wild flowers and even the lacy weeds with cultivated blooms. She scoured garage sales for vases, urns, old milk bottles, dried silver sage and statice, grape vines and cattails. Only when Father Barry commented that he was afraid he might trip over a planter during communion did Nora scale back her ministry. Still, she drew out her afternoons at church. So few people came into Our Lady of the Lake during the day that Nora had no reason to feel self-conscious about her overalls or her perm growing out like duckweed. She sometimes lost herself in a prayer that took her like a sleep. She prayed to Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes, not because she feared their cause was lost, but because insurance never hurt. She prayed to Saint Anne, the benevolent grandmother, Saint Therese, the Little Flower, for her well-known interest in children, to Saint Catherine Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 255

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of Sienna, because she believed in taking action and was criticized as obsessive, to Saint Anthony, the patron of adoption, Saint Nicholas the Martyr, because of that awful story about the little boys he brought back to life after some psychotic butcher tried to pickle them, to Saint Thomas the Doubter, and to Saint Fidelis because he was local.

In her reveries, she asked God for assurances of his continued interest in the appeal, though she could not be sure that whether the fullness of grace she felt replenish her was God’s answer or the echo of her own supplication. During those times in her life when she’d tended toward complacency, Nora had turned to the shorter, more humble forms of prayer, her favorite, “Not my will, but thine,” but she could not quite abandon herself to that now. God needed specifics, as there were undoubtedly millions storming heaven at any given time, and only the one divine judge.

Lorraine would have welcomed an interval of stark, staring madness.

By the magnitude of her losses, she was owed greater latitude for weakness and eccentricity. But her life offered no room for a breakdown.

Their thirty-fifth anniversary fell in May. They dined, on a gift certificate sent by an anonymous well-wisher they could not find to gratefully refuse, at a fancy seafood restaurant in Merrill. Offered Chilean sea bass in a thyme reduction sauce, Lorraine agreed she certainly could use one, but the server only gave her a baffled smile. Over the course of the next two weeks, school was drawing to its close, with its festival of final projects and exhibits, the culmination in the students’ work on the gifts they would offer, the sculptures Lorraine was keenly aware hold pride of place for parents long after the children themselves had made homes of their own.

And the machine that spread the news about the outrage now proceeded of its own momentum; Lorraine pulled along with its progress, posing for photos for magazine stories prepared months before, pulled to respond to a request from
Redbook
that she write her own first-person narrative—all she would really have to do, the editor who called insisted, would be to write down the facts; someone would massage the facts into a story, but even writing down the facts had taken a week of Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 256

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nights at the table with Nora busily looking up facts and dates Lorraine could not remember.

At a seminar in Wausau on integrating art into other sections of the curricula, which took up one whole day of the Memorial Day weekend, when they had Keefer, Lorraine was approached by a woman who first asked her to sign a copy of the column on the case that had appeared in
Woman’s Day,
and then condoled her on losing her “adopted granddaughter.” The sheer glass wall of ignorance daunted Lorraine, who nonetheless took time to carefully explain that she had not adopted her granddaughter, that adoption had fused their lineage before Keefer was ever born. Patty Roe of the American Academy had called to tell them that there was indeed not one, but thirty references to “blood relatives” in the Children’s Code, and that it was her belief that the law would not truly be sound until each of them was amended. Greg Katt no longer charged them for his thrice-weekly telephone calls, sharing details of the opposing side’s arguments, the points their side rebutted, the questions from the panel of judges. The McKennas now owed Greg Katt and his posse more than $40,000, the hope of a new trial with all its attendant costs still ahead. Quietly, Lorraine and Mark visited the Soderberg boy and remortgaged their long-since-paid-for home on Cleveland Avenue.

Lorraine kept hats off the bed, and shoes off the table. She carefully closed her umbrella before stepping inside her front door. During the long evenings in May, she set herself the task of clearing out Gordon’s and Georgia’s teenage memorabilia, but was sidetracked almost immediately by one of Gordie’s college biology textbooks. She carried the book down to her work table. Using a root charcoal and a handful of nubbin-old pastels, Lorraine began sketching what would be, by August, a series of fourteen, vastly imagined magnifications of the shredded gossamer of a sickle cell, a tumor cell, a healthy erythrocyte.

She would call them “Cell Lives.”

Retirement, Mark realized as they waited, was receding further and further to a distant horizon for him. That was fine. Medi-Sun employed chemists in their seventies, took pride in their embrace of older colleagues. Though Northern Mutual had come forth with the $500,000

premium, it would be ninety days before the check arrived. Through Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 257

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their attorneys, both sides had agreed to permit Great Wisconsin to manage the estate until a final decision was reached. During meetings at work over a bizarre legal claim—a woman who’d blamed her divertic-ulitis on the four thousand milligrams of C she’d ingested every day since 1985—it slowly dawned on Mark, piecing together various references and comments and mental snapshots of the yearly Medi-Sun picnics at Fidelis Hill with the peculiar atmosphere in the conference room, the anxious glances some of the managers sneaked at him when the corporation’s lawyer spoke, that one of their counsel, Jamie Zavara, was actually the husband of Judge Sayward. Mark’s first instinct was to disarm the young man—it was a small town; they were coworkers. But the man’s manner, his avid, almost greedy intelligence, put him off.

Thereafter, he quietly informed his boss, he would communicate with the legal division through memoranda.

Dale Larsen called one night and invited Mark to join him, a few of his deputies, Bud Chaptman, and Hart from the high school for a few hands of poker. Mark went and gratefully consumed more than his share of beer. He’d offered muzzily to walk home, but Dale, who had, Mark noted, tipped more than a few himself, drove him slowly home in the cruiser. Dale urged his wife to include Lorraine in her bunco night, but Sheila felt too shy to approach Lorraine, whose new haircut and forceful public face only rendered her more intimidating to acquaintances who’d considered her demeanor perfectly nice, but regal enough to give an ordinary person pause, before any of the events of the year began. Dale began to see how a single event of ordinary grief opened bystanders and made them generous, but an enduring misery of crisis hardened and repelled. Marooned by their own exigency, the McKennas probably needed the welcome interference of friends more than they had during Georgia’s illness, when well-wishers had tripped over one another on the path to the door of the house on Cleveland Avenue.

There was the assumption that people who got on TV were sufficient unto themselves, Dale ruminated.

He nagged his wife to call on Lorraine, at least ask her to lunch. As a man, he felt that he could not do that without causing talk, the kind of rumors that would be more damaging for the fact that they would be Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 258

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true. Dale Larsen’s heart went out to Lorraine, but too far, and it was a bittersweet reckoning to admit to himself that people in their fifties were not, after all, beyond the nonsense of secret crushes. When Sheila finally rolled into bed one night tossing out the intelligence that Lorraine had agreed to a lunchtime pep walk, Larsen seized his wife in a bear hug, and it was after midnight when they finally parted to den in the accustomed hollows of their respective sides of the bed, lingeringly, gasping, each of them privately grateful and confused beyond words by the resurgence of passions they thought they’d left in the birthing room with Trina long years before.

On the night that they watched a Tom Brokaw special report entitled

“Thicker than Blood?” Emily Sayward and her husband discussed, briefly, the idea of moving back east and starting a practice together.

The discussion had not been much more than desultory. Jamie loved his job. And Emily loved the safe, quiet sixties life on Hat Lake they could give as a gift to Emory, their son, who would begin school in the fall. Later that same night, as they undressed in the dark, presumptive current between them, Jamie had suggested it might be time for another child, a little brother or sister for Emory, and though Emily emphatically agreed, dispensing with the cervical cap that very night, she mentioned the next morning her concern that she was thirty-eight now. What if she could not become pregnant? What if there were issues? And when Jamie, busy replacing a rotten deck board, replied that they would adopt—that no one in Columbia had ever heard of Tom Brokaw—she had refused, irrationally and pettishly, to speak to him for a full day.

In late May, at Sandpiper Reserve, in the final hours of a tournament dedicated to Raymond Nye, Jr., and to benefit Keefer Kathryn’s scholarship fund, Big Ray’s left arm tingled, then went numb, and over fear from that, he supposed, his heart began to gallop, and, in a little bever-age cabana off the ninth hole, he’d vomited. Haven Corcoran and Lee Jurgen bundled him into the car, over his faint protests, and by that night he was ensconced in a private room at Tampa Memorial, where Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 259

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the next morning, he underwent angioplasty. Too much bacon and eggs in there, the cardiologist gently chided him, pointing at Ray’s gut. Lose the golf cart and walk from this day forward, the doctor further added.

That night—when Diane arrived home from Wisconsin, wringing her hands and imploring him not to die, she couldn’t take any more, not one single thing more, she was going to have one of those lives where one tragedy toppled over into another tragedy and another tragedy—he’d quieted her down and taken her hand and told her what he’d been thinking about when they’d run the icy liquid into the vein, and that was Gordie McKenna. “Now, don’t get yourself in a swivet, Mother,” he soothed her gruffly. “I just have a notion we ought to be in touch.”

“Be in touch?”

“When I was lying there, in that room, never knowing if I’d ever see another sunrise, I got to thinking about the first time Ray brought Gordie to the house. You remember? It was Caroline’s wedding. And the two of them came up here at five in the morning, getting me out of bed, saying, ‘Dad! We’re going to have us some beer and eggs! Beer and eggs, that’s what you need, Dad!’ Both of them in those big shorts the surfers wear, Ray jumpin’ up on the bed, you screamin’ . . .”

“Ray, what could that mean now, honey?”

“It’s that . . . when I thought I was about to die, I thought, Diane, Baby is right where she ought to be, except . . . and it’s a big except, one of our own girls should have wanted more than anything else on earth to raise our son’s only child. That’s the truth and you know it is, Diane.