American Wife (31 page)

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.’ ”