Boarded Windows (20 page)

“Well, I have a birth certificate. It’s not like my birthday was just made up.”

“Where were you born, anyway?”

“Butte, Montana.”

“Butte, huh. What was she doing there?”

“I don’t know!”

“The annuities guy was from Pocatello, but maybe he was living in Butte. You ever been to Butte?”

“Well, I guess so; I just said I was born there.”

“Happenin’ town if you know where to look.”

“I don’t want to talk about Butte.”

“We don’t have to talk about Butte,” Wade said. He was using a calm, therapist’s tone now. “A few months after I saw Martha at the Piggly Wiggly, I heard from Karl Tobreste—”

“Karl knew her?”

“Somewhat. So I heard from Karl that Martha’s baby had died of Niemann-Pick disease.”

“Niemann-Pick disease?”

“It might’ve been Werdnig-Hoffmann disease.”

“What are you saying, that I’m a ghost?”

“Just listen. For a year or so, I saw her around town from time to time. She seemed to be holding it together. She was still married.”

“You don’t remember the guy’s name?”

“I remember he had blond hair and was short, maybe five six. Dimpled chin. I only saw him once. He was wearing cutoffs.”

“What’s Niemann-Pick disease?”

“It might have been Werdnig-Hoffman. So sometime in ’72, they moved away, to Portland, I think, maybe Eugene, Spokane. So that was that, and then I met you and Marleen.”

“What do you mean,
then
? You mean later?”

“Yeah, not right then. Later. At the house on Queal.”

“And I was dead.”

“Just listen. There’s no call for cleverness. You remember that first night, when we had a little cookout in the backyard and ate on the porch? That night Marleen told me she was a Northern Illinois alumna, just in the course of small talk she told me that, and right away I brought up Martha. Marleen said, ‘It’s a big school,’ as in,
What of it?”

“She denied knowing her?”

“Not in so many words. She said that NIU is a big school. And it is.”

“Well, I already knew about Martha by then. My mom never kept her secret from me.”

“And that was good of her,” Wade said.

“Except she never told me about husbands and diseases and all this.”

Wade went on: “Later—I think I was complaining about a really disgusting lunch I’d had—and she told me about a friend of hers whose dad, whenever he didn’t like his wife’s cooking, would after a few bites scrape the rest of his food onto the wife’s plate. I gave Marleen a real squinting look when she related this secondhand anecdote, because I’d already heard it, several times, from Martha. It was how she summarized her dad, who I gather was a real ass. So I looked into Marleen’s eyes and said, ‘You heard that from Martha Dickson.’ And she paused for a while, then said, ‘It can’t be unique behavior.’ That’s no doubt true, but she was flustered. ‘You did know her!’ I said. She kept on denying it, and it turned into this big thing. I started sleeping in the basement again. This was right before Bolling’s first show at the EMA.”

“So right before you left.”

“Well, yeah. The night before the concert, Marleen knocked on my door. I’d just gotten back from Oran’s. She must’ve been waiting for me to get back. When I opened the door, she was crying. She said she’d tell me the whole story, because she wanted to be with me, but that for varied reasons, including legal ones, I had to swear to secrecy. I agreed, and until now I’ve kept my promise. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, you know, debating whether or not to tell you.” Wade held his cup to his mouth and tapped the bottom to dislodge some ice. “She told me how she’d met Martha at a sit-in at the University of Chicago, how they became fast friends, how Martha moved out of some sort of commune and into Marleen’s dorm room.”

“I know all that.”

“And then the news of Mr. and Mrs. Dickson’s death reached DeKalb after an unseemly delay. And Martha left for Enswell the next morning.”

“Right.”

“Yeah, so Marleen didn’t hear from Martha for over two years, didn’t expect to hear from her ever again. Then one weekend day, Martha called your grandparents in Palatine. Sorry: What was your grand pop’s name again?”

“Dick,” I said. “Richard.”

“Marleen’s sitting in her folks’ living room, reading
Life
or something, and Dick says, ‘Well, I’ve certainly always proceeded as if I were Marleen’s dad, heh, heh. And what’s more, she’s living at home for a spell and can come directly to the phone.’”

“He didn’t talk like that,” I said.

“But something along those lines,” Wade said. “Marleen came to the phone and Dick went out to mow the lawn. Martha was doing well, she told Marleen. She’d started up a small clothing line. She hadn’t gotten into any of the boutiques in Chicago yet, but that would come soon, she said. Kind of talking herself up, but unpersuasively. Then she told Marleen how she’d gotten married a few months before. ‘To an actuary!’ she said, like
who woulda thunk it.”

“I thought you said he sold annuities or whatever.”

“He did. But when Marleen told me the story, it was actuary. I didn’t correct her. It’s obnoxious to correct people’s stories. Martha kept her update short, I guess, only asked Marleen a few general questions. There was a lull in the conversation, Marleen told me, and then Martha explained that along with an actuary and a thriving small business, she had a baby boy, a sweet, quiet, easy, handsome baby. ‘Well, that’s great,’ Marleen said, ‘he sounds wonderful.’ Martha said, ‘He’s absolutely amazing. You look in his eyes, and, I don’t know, it’s just, there it is, the music of the spheres.’” Wade was again imitating what he said was Martha’s wheat-bred singsong, girlish yet slightly edgy. “‘Wow,’ Marleen said,” Wade said. “‘Yeah, it changes your life,’ Martha said. ‘So I’ve heard,’ Marleen said. And Martha: ‘He’s just had a nice melk supper, so he’s sleeping now, and I—”

“Why are you like dramatizing this phone call?” I said. “You can’t possibly know how it went.”

“Marleen told me how it went,” Wade said.

“Why would she tell it to you like that, like a play?”

“I don’t know why she told it to me like that,” Wade said. “That’s how she wanted to tell the story. It was her story.”

I dropped my head for an instant, then looked back up at Wade.

“‘I wish I could see him,’ Marleen told Martha over the phone,” Wade went on. “‘Oh, I hope you’ll be able to,’ Martha said. Then there was another pause, and Martha said, ‘But you have to be in the right place for that change, you know. We’re still young. I know I don’t feel like a grownup yet. Mike’s older but he’s a kid at heart.’”

“That was the husband’s name, Mike?” I said.

“No, I just threw that in there,” Wade said. “I really don’t remember his name. So Martha said, ‘I could sure use more time to run my business. And Mike’s incredibly busy.’”

“If his name’s not really Mike, would you stop calling him Mike?”

“I’m starting to think it
was
Mike,” Wade said, and then in Martha’s alleged voice: “‘And we’d like to do more camping—pretty rugged camping, you know, and some rafting. Mike’s heavy into white-water rafting. Some of those rocks would split a baby’s head right in two, like Solomon.’ ‘Well, Solomon didn’t actually go through with that,’ Marleen said. ‘But you know what I mean,’ Martha said. ‘And we’d just like to go to a movie on impulse every so often without having to find a sitter. It’s ludicrous what these sluts want you to pay them just to sit and watch the boob tube, and as you know, my folks aren’t around to help, me being an orphan, all but disowned by my surviving siblings.’”

“This is how Martha talked?” I said.

“This is how she talked in Marleen’s story,” Wade said.

“Did my grandpa talk like you had him talking in Marleen’s story? ’Cause I don’t remember him talking that way—‘for a spell’ and all that.”

“Maybe he talked like that with his daughter’s friends, you know, stressing the avuncular in some innocently flirty way,” Wade said.

“But when my mom started talking as Martha, did it sound like Martha to you?”

“It didn’t sound quite like the Martha I knew, but it wasn’t so far off from the one I talked to at Piggly Wiggly. So I guess Martha went on for a while like that about her hard luck, then said, ‘We want our weekends back, Marleen.’”

“Our weekends back?” I said.

Wade laughed. “Marleen repeated that in the exact same incredulous way. Nature/nurture, huh? Except I suppose Marleen said,
‘Your
weekends.’ Then Marleen said, ‘Hey, I can’t imagine having kids now. Christ, I’m back living at home.’ Martha’s voice got more serious: ‘Marleen, I’d like you to imagine it.’ ‘I’m not sure exactly what you’re driving at,’ Marleen said. Martha said, ‘Where are you now? Are you someplace private?’ Marleen said, ‘I’m alone. My dad’s mowing the lawn.’ Martha said, ‘Is it a gas mower or a push?’ ‘Gas.’ ‘Okay,’ Martha said, ‘that should be pretty private. Marleen, I need to just be completely open here. I know we haven’t kept in close touch, but I’m not just blowing smoke when I say you’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met, the most intelligent, most beautiful, most deep—deepest. The instant I saw you in the back of that car, I thought,
Now here is a great soul. Here is someone who knows what matters.’”
Wade paused. “So then there’s a beat,” he said.

“A heartbeat?” I said.

“No, a little pause,” Wade said. “‘Listen,’ Martha said, ‘Mike and I are looking for a permanent foster mother. We’re prepared to offer three thousand dollars, cash on the barrelhead, for what we understand to be an immense commitment. We’d offer more if we could. But that’s our savings. Our savings is actually a few dollars less, but Mike thought we should use a round number. That’s one of the things I love about Mike: he rounds up.’”

“You’re making all this up,” I said.

“I’m not,” Wade said.

“This is so fucking cruel of you,” I said. “Everything you do is selfish and cruel.”

“This is the story Marleen told me,” Wade said, reaching out for my hand. “I’m telling you the story she told me.”

“Martha was a fucking burnout,” I said. I was crying. “It’s the kind of shit you think when you’re fucked up, selling a baby. That’s all it is, just burnout bullshit.”

“Well, Marleen reacted like you are. ‘Jesus, Martha,’ she said, ‘that’s not even funny.’ But after another minute or so, she knew Martha was serious. Marleen asked how many potential foster parents Martha had propositioned so far. You know, in a cool, sarcastic tone. ‘You’re the only,’ Martha said. ‘You’re the only. It struck me like lightning that you were the one.’” Wade was moving into a more earnest, womanly voice for Martha. “ ‘As a matter of fact, it struck me twice,’ Martha said,” he said. “‘I was still in the hospital, and the little guy was nursing, and I said—I don’t think I said it aloud, but I said
, I don’t know who your father is, but Marleen Deskin is your mother. That’s why I had this baby, for Marleen.
I set that thought aside. It’s crazy, I said. But then it hit me again, just last night, a totally external voice, your voice. It didn’t sound like your voice, but it was. This baby needs you, Marleen. Needs you, needs you, needs you. And you need him.’

“Marleen hung up in disgust, not quickly, not slammingly—slowly, but in disgust. Three days later, Martha called to apologize. It was a highly emotional time …, she told Marleen. But by then Marleen had given the proposal more thought. And a week after that she drove to Enswell in one of the smaller U-Hauls.” Wade paused for a few seconds and then began to rhapsodize: “The wheat fields, the sunflower fields, barley, flax, wheat, wheat, wheat, the stretches of tree-lined train tracks und die große Grassteppe, the hay bales, the clotheslines, the junkyards, the peeling barns, the grain elevators, the Plains sunflowers yellowing the roadside, the little bluestem empurpling the prairie, the lone tree in the middle of a field, rough and spindly like a Giacometti sculpture, the seductive hills as the western edge of the Drift Prairie foreshadows the Missouri Plateau—”

“Can you stop?”

“Marleen of course was no stranger to agrarian landscapes, but rural Illinois is comparatively rather dull, and as she got closer to Enswell, everything seemed beautiful, romantic, and authentic, and when she got to Enswell itself, the city looked green and hearty, antisuburban, with squat boxes and gray rectangles rising without ostentation above the trees, cars muscling down Foster in and out of the valley.”

I noticed the pizza chefs were staring at us.

“The next day, Marleen struggled with the faulty left rear wheel of your little stroller. ‘That’s the boing of a distant diving board,’ she told the baby you, ‘and that’s the squeak of a swing set, and that’s the chirp of a sparrow, on which His eye is said to be on.’ And three days later, she told me, she finally got you to drink the formula. And a month later she rented the two-bedroom next to the church.” Wade handed me a napkin. “Over a year passed before she told her parents, who missed her, you know, ‘tremendously,’ who didn’t understand why they were being ‘shut out.’ So finally she told them she’d adopted a baby, a baby a friend couldn’t take care of, because the friend was a druggie who later OD’d. The story she told you.”

“So Martha’s still alive?” I said.

“Probably,” Wade said.

“What do you mean, probably?”

“Just to infer from life-expectancy stats.”

“But you don’t know where she is?”

“For a while I guess it was Portland, or Eugene, Spokane, Seattle, like I said. Maybe Aberdeen. Marleen never heard from her again. An unqualified severing of contact was part of the agreement. It was a handshake agreement, but nonetheless.” He paused awhile. “The last time I saw Martha, though, was Pittsburgh in ’85. Bolling was playing this little club, and she came to the show, stood right up front smiling at us the whole time. I played a few flashy runs for her until Bolling gave me a gubernatorial look. She hung out with us after the show.”

Wade reached into the breast pocket of his coat, draped over his chair, and took out another instant photo.

“What’s that bank in Owatonna have to do with any of this?” I said.