The Ninth Wife (38 page)

Bess crosses the lawn. The damp grass tickles her ankles. Cricket is alone on a wooden bench with Stella at his heels. Bess sees him up close and her anger at his disappearance slips into empathy. She sits quietly next to him, letting the whispering wind in a chorus of leaves speak her concern.

Stella rises to a sitting position and rests her head on the bench between them. Bess reaches out to pet her at the same time Cricket’s hand goes out. They touch and Cricket pulls back, but Bess doesn’t let him. In a spontaneous gesture, she takes his hand in hers and squeezes it gently.

Cricket’s eyes turn glassy. Bess watches his chest above his extended belly move up and down with his breath. She feels the weight of him, the pull of gravity on his head and shoulders. The thought of death makes it hard to have good posture. She remembers. “I’m so sorry, Cricket.”

Bess tries to imagine Isabella. She tries to understand Cricket’s pain, that shoulder-sloping hopelessness that news of death brings. In the quiet breeze and distant sounds of tourists’ voices and birdsongs, Bess is flooded with memories of her mom’s passing, when the doctor came down the hall of the hospital with that same tired, forlorn look. Millie had collapsed, wailing, so that the doctor had had to give her a sedative. Bess sat with her grandmother, watched her grandfather pace the hallway. She took them home, made them a pot of tea, put them to bed, and wrapped a thick blanket around herself and watched some old black-and-white movie on TV. It was hours before her body relaxed enough to let her cry. She stayed wrapped in her blanket well into the next day, when she should have been up, planning the funeral. But by that time, Millie could make the pot of tea, start the arrangements, and rock Bess in her arms.

“The least she could have done was wait for me,” Cricket says, blowing his nose in his handkerchief. “That’s so like her.”

Bess rests her hand on his thigh. It’s what her mother did when she first told Bess about her father’s accident, sitting there on her twin bed covered in Snoopy sheets and a bunched yellow blanket. Bess had first met death then. She’d cursed it, thrown heavy objects at it, slammed doors on it, kicked it till it broke her toe, ignored it, talked to it about fairness and faith, even took stupid drunken risks a few times later on in her teens to try and understand it better, but she finally learned after her mom passed away that it helped most to just sit with it and feel the loving hands of the living.

Cricket looks down at his lap, wraps Stella’s leash around his finger. “Claus said she was delirious last night. He said she was doped up and saying a lot of strange things, that she was sorry for burning the fried chicken. He wanted to know if I knew what she meant, because—” and he stops. “Because she hasn’t cooked in years and hates fried chicken, so, he wanted to know, what was she talking about?”

Bess waits for him to continue. She swipes an ant from her ankle.

“Did I tell you about the last night of my marriage?”

“You didn’t.”

“Then I’ll tell you a story.”

“Tell me.”

I
was late for dinner. This was at the end of June 1969, in Knoxville. I was in a diner not far from our house, sipping coffee at the counter, when I overheard two men discussing the news they heard from up north, about a bar raid where the cops had managed to ‘kill them some faggots.’ I’d heard that kind of talk before and I’d learned the best thing to do was avert my eyes and walk away, lest they detect the secret life I’d finally allowed myself to have for the better part of two years.

“But they said something that caught my attention: the name of the bar I had visited on a business trip to New York, a bar in Greenwich Village. The Stonewall Inn. Heard of the Stonewall riots?

“I left the diner and found a pay phone to call a friend in New York. He told me how the cops had come later than usual, out of uniform, and unleashed their penis sticks on the crowd. He said those two vacuous vermin had gotten it wrong—some were injured but no one was killed. In fact, the truth was, we fought back! Such a monumental moment in history for so many of us. Leave it to Judy Garland to start the Gay Liberation Front with her suicide.

“I felt emboldened for the first time. It’s difficult to explain. I don’t mean I went home, flung open the door, and belted out ‘Over the Rainbow,’ thank you very much. But in a very small way, on the inside, I felt a tiny crevice open that let me breathe easier and . . . truer, for lack of a better word. I was thirty years old. I’d been married eight years. And there I was, standing on a street corner at a pay phone, scared and positively rhapsodic.

“I didn’t know what to do with myself. I walked around the block. And then I realized the time so I got back in my car—a diamond green Ford Thunderbird, oh yes—and drove home. That’s when I discovered my house was on fire. My kitchen, to be exact. Trucks with flashing lights and firemen with big hoses were all over my lawn. Smoke was coming out the front door and I panicked, looking around for Isabella. I called out for her, and one of the neighbors pointed to where she was standing with this blank look on her face. She was just standing there with her apron on, staring at the house.

“We had moved to Knoxville six months before so she could be nearer her sister while I was traveling. Her sister had three kids and Izzy, well . . . we didn’t have any. She and her sister used to sit in their kitchen while they cooked for the kids, but she always hated our kitchen, claiming it wasn’t ‘functional.’ It was certainly functional for me, I loved to cook, but she didn’t want me to. Not manly enough, I suppose.

“
Izzy?
I said.

“
I was cooking fried chicken
, she said, not looking at me.
You love fried chicken
.

“She looked like the living dead, like I could wave my hand in front of her face and she wouldn’t blink. I don’t know what it was, but I just knew in that moment that our marriage was over. I knew it and she knew it, she knew the lie I’d been telling ever since we were kids. It’s why I think I said what I did, right then, standing there helpless.

“
I’m homosexual
, I said.

“She kept staring at our house going up in flames.
How it burns
, she said.”

Cricket pauses for what Bess suspects is dramatic effect. Did Isabella really say that? she wonders. Or has Cricket written the movie in his head? It shouldn’t matter. Cricket’s is a story of deep sadness and loss, and on some level Bess feels the sympathetic pangs of heartache. But she can’t help thinking, too, about the facts. She has always been someone who craves historical accuracy, though the whole concept is inherently contradictory. One seeks facts, one gets versions of facts. She must be the only folklorist in America who has a problem with that. But maybe it’s time for acceptance. She should stop asking for the
true story,
as she has so often with Rory. She should stop searching for it, feeling as if she has to uncover lies so as not to be needlessly ignorant of future pain and abandonment, for that’s what it’s about, isn’t it? With Rory? To hell with it. Cricket’s sharing intimate feelings just with her, on a bench, on a quiet trail many hundreds of miles from their everyday lives. She will not ask him the truth. She will only listen, and love him.

“Isabella decided that it was her fault, that she made me gay somehow,” Cricket continues. “It made me so angry. And sad. When we first met in grammar school, I played with her because she had the most comprehensive doll collection of anyone I knew, rag to porcelain. I loved the sheer variety and artistry of them, their beautiful faces and delicate feet. But then over the years I spent time with her because of
her
, because in junior high school she drowned the dolls in chocolate pudding and called it ‘Little People in Deep Shit: a Retrospective.’ She had an uncle who was the devil incarnate, and between him and my daddy . . . well, we were just glad we had each other. Even through college I never found anyone who understood me the way she did. I grew to love her, but she was brought up a Southern minister’s daughter. When the truth came out, she didn’t
let
me love her. The more she said she could try harder to be a good wife, the more I turned away until I stopped talking to her altogether.”

Cricket stops long enough for Bess to ask: “Until you saw Claus in the market?”

“No. Until Darren made me call her. He was into all this therapy about coming to terms with your past, and he sucked me into it. He convinced me that if she knew I was in a serious relationship with someone else, with him, she might come around. Especially after all those years.”

“And did she?”

“Not really. I called, we talked. She was pleasant. I told her about Darren, she didn’t really respond. She told me she had gotten married again. He was older, two grown boys. They had a good marriage until he passed away from a heart attack. His boys send her Christmas cards, she said, but that’s about it.”

“You make her sound lonely.”

“Well, she was. Quite so. I called her when Darren died. She didn’t say she was sorry for my loss or anything of the sort, but she listened and that was nice, I suppose. She said if I ever wanted to come visit, she’d enjoy the company.”

“So you visited her?”

“Only when I heard she was sick a few months ago. She was in New York, seeing a specialist. I took the train up.”

Bess puzzles over a new thought. “Was that the day after my party, when you were so mysterious about putting Stella on the bus?”

“I believe so.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me where you were going?”

Cricket looks at her, tilts his head. “We all have things we’re reluctant to share.”

Bess nods at his reference to her story of Rory’s wives. It makes her think, too, of Rory’s decision not to tell her up front about them. Maybe she should have been more sympathetic. How would she have reacted, she wonders, if he did tell her up front? She would have still been shocked, maybe even turned off from pursuing anything further, but she would have trusted him to tell her the truth about anything right from the start, no matter how difficult it is. How much is that worth in the portfolio of love?

“I’m still confused,” she says. “If you had already been back in touch and had seen Isabella in New York, why was Claus chasing you that day in the market? That was a long time after the party.”

“First of all, it’s Claus we’re talking about. I never liked that pebble-brained bully. He teased me relentlessly when we were children.” Cricket picks at a tooth with his pinky. “But mostly I was avoiding them, both of them. I did see Isabella in New York, it’s just . . . her fragility scared me. I could see how ill she was. I could see how much she needed someone. I didn’t want to go through that again, not after Darren. A person withering is a terrible sight.”

An image comes to Bess of her mother’s arm, pale and thin by her side as she lay in her hospital bed, asking for a tissue or pitcher of water across the room, how it would rise unsteadily, arduously, from elbow to wrist to hand to finger, wavering and falling after only a moment’s effort, a bird with broken wing. That same atrophied arm had once shoveled snow from their walkway, carried a sleeping child up to bed, had shot up over her head in triumph when the Baltimore Orioles won the pennant.

“So she went back to Denver and I didn’t return her calls for a month,” Cricket goes on. “Claus was right to yell at me. I was being a bastard. Which is why I wanted to make this trip. I wanted to make it up to her. I wanted to be there for her.”

“You were. She knew you were coming.” Bess wonders how much of the bond that Cricket feels with Isabella was woven by marriage. Would he be here if they had remained simply childhood friends? And how much of that bond is patched with duty and guilt?
Who will be there for me when I die?
Bess has had this thought before, a single person’s worry, but perhaps she’s downplayed it too much. Perhaps it’s the single most important reason why she wants not just present companionship, but someone to call her husband, her child, people who, even out of duty, would be there when she needs it most. No, that’s stupid. There’s no guarantee. Look at Rory, he’s not going to be there for all his ex-wives. And it’s selfish. What about being the one who’s there for others? What about bucking up and being alone, so what? What about making younger friends?
What about just loving others and trusting in the world that it will return that love?
Bess shudders at this last thought, for its origin seems not from within but something foreign pulled magnetically from above. It is something her mom would have said.

“I miss him,” says Cricket.

Him
. Is that what he said? He’s thinking of Darren. And why not . . . she’s thinking of her mother. Isn’t that what death does, makes you think of all death, past and future, even your own? And isn’t the one that has hit the hardest the one that rises to the surface every time to let you know how little has healed? “I know you miss him,” she says. Bess didn’t really know Darren, but she remembers things about him: his sly laugh, his knowledge of wine and Shakespeare monologues, his affectionate towel snaps at Cricket.

Cricket says no more and she lets him be. If this is how their friendship deepens—with a simple phrase like
I miss him
—then so be it. It’s a start.

“I need to check on my grandparents, see that they haven’t beaten each other up. You okay here?”

“I’ll come.” Cricket pauses a beat, sighs deeply, and pushes himself up off the bench with great effort. Stella rises on her haunches, alert to new movement.

“We should eat,” says Bess, readjusting the Velcro strap on her sandal before she stands. “We have a lot of distance to cover.”

Before they leave the bench, before they come upon Millie standing by a lamppost in the shade like she’s waiting for a bus and Irv bent over a nearby water fountain, sipping from a small arc of water, before they jointly point to a rectangular loaf of white bread on a wooden shelf and give exact change, adding to their basket hickory-smoked sausage and corn jelly and rhubarb pie, before they tug Stella away from the stump of a tree where her nose detects her predecessors, before they return to the van and gasp from the combustible heat of its interior and the burning vinyl seats that will stick to the flesh of their thighs, before all this—Cricket gives Bess’s wrist a squeeze. “Thank you for listening,” he says. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”