Ordinary Grace

  I tried to wipe that image from my mind.

  “He meant they were making out,” I said. “You know, kissing and stuff.”

  “Kissing’s not bad, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

  “Have you ever kissed a girl?”

  “Yeah. Well, actually no. She kissed me.”

  “Who?”

  “Lorrie Diedrich.”

  “What was it like?”

  “It was quick. I didn’t feel much.”

  “You didn’t kiss her back?”

  “It was at the fair last year,” I explained. “She’d been licking a licorice ice cream cone and she had this black mustache. She looked like Groucho Marx.”

  Downstairs I could hear my mother playing the piano, going over and over the music for Ariel’s chorale on the Fourth. She always got nervous before the performances she directed and playing seemed to help.

  “That girl,” Jake said. “The one with Morris Engdahl. She was pretty. They were kissing like crazy. Is she a skag?”

  My mother finished playing and the house lapsed into silence and the only sound came from outside where the crickets chirred a chorus that was probably part of some crazy bug mating ritual.

  “Yeah,” I said trying to rid myself of the image of her breasts. “She’s a skag.”

  16

  Independence Day arrived with the concussion of early fireworks as if a great battle had begun. When I got up my father had already breakfasted and gone to his office in the church where he kept the windows closed and the volume on his phonograph turned up high so the music would drown out much of the boom and rattle. My mother was up earlier than usual, the result of her anxiety about the chorale performance that evening. She was pacing the floor in the living room with a cigarette wedged between her fingers and trailing smoke behind her. When she saw me come down the stairs she stopped and her blue eyes locked on me.

  “Frankie,” she said. “I need you to go to Emil Brandt’s house. Ariel’s there. Tell her I have to talk to her right away.”

  “Can’t you call?”

  “I’ve tried. No one answers. I need you to go.”

  “Can I eat something first?”

  “Yes but quickly,” she said.

  I heard the stairs above me creak and I looked back and saw Jake in his pajamas coming down after me. “I’ll go too,” he said.

  “No, I need you to do something else for me, Jake.” She went to the dining room table and picked up a sheaf of papers. “Take these to Bob Hartwig’s house. He’s expecting them.”

  Hartwig was the editor of the weekly New Bremen Courier.

  “They’re the names of everyone performing tonight,” she said, “and a little bit of history about the piece and about Ariel and, oh, well, everything. I was supposed to have them to him yesterday but simply forgot. He’ll need them for the article he’s writing about all the celebrations today.”

  “I’d rather go get Ariel,” he said.

  “You’ll do what I’ve asked.”

  My mother when she gave a directive was not inclined to look kindly on objection. Her accomplishments with the choirs in our churches and with the summer musicals in the park had become nearly legendary but they were achieved in large measure because she ruled with an iron fist. When Jake pouted at her order she leveled on him a death-dealing look.

  I knew Jake was pissed and that later he would bitch and moan to me but to my mother he simply replied, “Yes, m-m-ma’am.”

  We fixed ourselves cereal and Jake ate silently and glowered at me though I had nothing to do with his situation. For my part I kind of enjoyed his misery.

  We got dressed and headed up to the Heights. It was a great day for the Fourth, sunny and with the promise that it would stay that way and already it was hot. At the old Sibley Road I turned to the right and separated from Jake to head toward the Brandts’ house which was half a mile distant. Jake slogged on up the Heights toward Austin Street where Mr. Hartwig lived. When I looked back he’d stopped and was throwing rocks angrily at a telephone pole and I figured that in his mind it was probably our mother.

  Ariel had taken the Packard but when I arrived at the Brandt house I didn’t see it parked anywhere. I went to the garage and peeked through a window. The only automobile inside was the black Chrysler that nobody ever seemed to drive. I mounted the steps of the front porch and knocked on the door. No one came. I called out, “Ariel! Mr. Brandt!” I received no answer and stood on the porch deep in indecision. Considering the state my mother was in I knew that if I returned home without Ariel I’d be eaten alive. I knocked again and called once more and then thought that even if Lise couldn’t hear me she probably knew where her brother was and my sister. I realized that it would have been better for Jake to have come instead because Lise would be able to communicate with him more easily. But I was the one who was there so I opened the screen door and, entering the Brandt home, I stepped into one of the most bizarre moments of my life.

  I hadn’t been inside the house enough to know it well and I found myself prowling like a burglar. I crept to the kitchen which was far cleaner and more orderly than the one my mother kept. I looked through the screen door into the backyard at the large lovely garden but no one was there. I returned to the living room and stood a moment knowing I should check the back room where Ariel transcribed the life story of Emil Brandt but feeling more and more certain that I was trespassing in an unconscionable way. I’d almost decided to leave and take my chances with my mother when I heard an odd utterance from one of the rooms far down the hallway. It was a soft guttural cooing and I wondered if maybe the Brandts had some bird in a cage somewhere.

  “Is anybody there?” I called.

  The cooing went on a moment or two more then stopped and I thought someone would answer but no one did and the gentle dove-like song began again.

  I’ve compared the sound to that of a bird but in truth it wasn’t like any bird I’d ever heard before, or any animal for that matter, and once the mystery had presented itself I was a goner. I had to know.

  I eased my way down the hall one soft and utterly silent step at a time keenly aware that the Brandts’ farmhouse though renovated was still an abode of ancient construction, like the house that served as our parsonage, and at any moment my foot could hit a loose board that would cry out like a kicked cat. There was a beautiful runner over the floor into which had been woven an Oriental scene of trees with bare black branches where bluebirds sat and I tiptoed on those thin branches and on the mute bluebirds toward a door that was slightly ajar at the end of the dark hallway. I put my eye to the gap in the doorway and saw half a bed neatly made and on the far wall a window with gauzy curtains that muted the morning sunlight but I couldn’t see the source of the noise. I reached out and nudged the door open farther.

  I had never before seen a fully naked woman in the flesh. Not even the photographs I’d ogled in Playboy a few days earlier prepared me for what I beheld in Lise Brandt’s bedroom on Independence Day in 1961. The room was a glory of flowers cut from her garden and bursting from vases set on every flat surface and the air was powerfully redolent with their fragrance. Her back was to me. She’d let her hair down and it fell in a long brown flow over her shoulders. She stood at an ironing board with a hot iron in her hand and she bent to the work of pressing her brother’s freshly laundered clothing which was in a basket near her feet. She was the source of the cooing, a sound full of contentment as if the hot tedious labor in which she was engaged was the most delightful pastime imaginable. With each stroke of the iron she swayed dramatically as if to music only she could hear. I watched the strong muscles of her shoulders and back and buttocks tense and release and every part of her body seemed alive in itself and not just an element of some larger configuration of flesh.

  I was stunned but not senseless and I knew that any moment I might be discovered. I remembered well the near-catastrophic incident in the garden only a few days earlier when I’d accidentally
touched her. I backed out of the room and crept silently down the hallway though I could have screamed bloody murder and it would have made no difference. I stepped outside onto the front porch where I sat with my hands on my lap waiting for Ariel’s return.

  Twenty minutes later Lise Brandt appeared at the screen door fully clothed. She’d tied her hair back in a ponytail. She eyed me suspiciously and using that voice I knew she hated she asked, “Wha you wan?”

  “I came for Ariel,” I said facing her so that she could read my lips.

  “Gone. Driving with Emil,” she said in a flat voice and slurring the words she could not hear.

  “Do you know where they’ve gone?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you know when they’ll be back?”

  Another shake. Then she asked, “Where’s Jake?”

  “On an errand for my mother.”

  She stared at me. Then she said, “Wan lemonade?”

  “No thanks. I’d better be going.”

  She nodded and, finished with me, turned away.

  I walked home trying to set in my mind so that they would be there forever every detail of Lise Brandt naked and ecstatic at her ironing board. My mother when she did the ironing at our house did it grudgingly and was always in a foul temper. But she did it fully clothed and I couldn’t help wondering if that made a difference.

  • • •

  Ariel had been driving with Emil Brandt at his request. She’d taken him on a long swing that morning through the river valley with the windows of the Packard down so that he could absorb the summer day. He was, he told her, ripe for inspiration. He needed the feel of the country air in his face, the smell of the land in his nostrils, the sound of the birds and the rustle of the cornfields singing in his ears. Emil Brandt who’d written no music in a long time claimed he was ready to create something great, a celebration of the Minnesota River valley. His brush with death, he told Ariel, had changed his outlook. He was more inspired than he’d been in years. He was ready to knuckle down and compose again.

  She related this to us all at lunch around the kitchen table while we ate fried bologna sandwiches with chips and cherry Kool-Aid. My father said, “That’s wonderful to hear.”

  But my mother was skeptical. She said, “Just like that?”

  My father put down his glass and shrugged. “Like he says, Ruth, a brush with death. It can change a man dramatically.”

  “When we last talked, it was clear to me he’s still struggling with that darkness of his.”

  “Work is what he needs to bring him back to happiness,” Ariel said.

  My mother looked at her. “Is that your opinion?”

  “It’s what Emil says.”

  “Can I have another sandwich?” I asked.

  “Fry yourself up a slice of bologna,” my mother said.

  “Me, too,” Jake said.

  I threw two slices into the frying pan which was still on the stove and started the burner.

  “I don’t know,” my mother said.

  “You don’t know him,” Ariel said.

  My mother shot Ariel a look I’d never seen before, edged with meanness. “And you do?”

  “Sometimes I think I’m the only one who does,” Ariel said. “He’s a genius.”

  “I won’t dispute that,” my mother said. “But he’s a great deal more. I’ve known him all my life, Ariel. He’s a very complicated man.”

  “Not really,” Ariel said.

  My mother said, “Oh?” That one word. Like an ice cube against bare skin. I glanced at Ariel who clearly was not about to back down.

  “I’ve put his life story onto paper,” Ariel said. “I know him.”

  My mother propped her elbows on the table and folded her hands beneath her chin and stared at Ariel and asked, “And who, pray tell, is Emil Brandt?”

  “A wounded man,” Ariel replied without hesitation.

  My mother laughed but there was a chill to it. “Ariel, dear, Emil has always been a wounded man. He’s always been a man too misunderstood, too little appreciated, too bound by our provincialism here, too everything that did not advance the wants, needs, and desires of his own often selfish heart.”

  Jake left the table and came to the stove. I figured he was moving to safety.

  “You told me once that greatness demanded selfishness,” Ariel shot back. “And anyway he’s not selfish.”

  “He’s simply great?” Mother laughed again. “Oh, sweetheart, you’re so young. You have so much to learn.”

  “You throw my age at me like it was some kind of handicap.”

  “It is in a way. Someday you’ll see that.”

  My father held up his hand as if to make peace, but before he could speak Ariel said angrily to my mother, “I thought you were his friend.”

  “I am. I have always been. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see him as he is. He has many faults, Ariel.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “I’ve seen him in moods so dark I’ve wondered if he would ever come out into the light again. It’s amazing to me that he hasn’t tried suicide before.”

  “He has,” Ariel said.

  My mother looked at her in a startled way. “You know this how?”

  “It’s in his memoir.”

  “He’s never said anything to me about it.”

  “And maybe there’s a reason for that.” Ariel’s eyes were hard and sharp in the way of railroad spikes. She scooted her chair back and rose to leave the table.

  My mother said, “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. For a walk.”

  “Good. You need to cool off. You have an important performance tonight.”

  “Fuck the performance,” Ariel said and turned and stormed out the door.

  Ariel had never sworn that way before, never with that particular word anyway, and it seemed to have stunned us all. The only sound was the sizzle of the bologna in the frying pan.

  Then my mother shot back her own chair and stood as if to go after Ariel.

  “Don’t, Ruth,” my father said and laid a hand on her arm. “Let her walk it off.”

  “I won’t tolerate her disrespect, Nathan.”

  “There will be time for her to apologize and she will, Ruth. You know it. There’s a lot of pressure on her today, on both of you.”

  My mother stood looking at the screen door and her mouth was a line stitched across her face. Then I saw her relax. “You’re right,” she said. She looked down at my father. “You’re right.” Then she said with a whisper of astonishment, “Emil tried to kill himself before.”

  She left the table and went to the living room and a moment later the sound of the piano filled the house.

  17

  There was a parade that afternoon as there was every Fourth of July. The high school band marched in their braided uniforms and so did members of the VFW, many of them dressed in the military finery in which they’d served. The firemen drove their trucks, and the mayor and other city politicians rode in cars and waved, and there were flatbeds made into floats and hauled behind pickups cleaned and waxed for the day, and the Highsteppers rode their beribboned show horses, and even kids joined in the parade, pulling their pets or small siblings behind them in Radio Flyer wagons decked out in crepe of red, white, and blue. The procession marched along Main Street between cheering throngs and turned at Luther Avenue and continued a quarter mile to Luther Park which was full of vendors selling cotton candy and hot dogs and bratwurst and mini-donuts and helium-filled balloons. Every organization in town seemed to have a table where they hawked homemade pickles or baked goods or beautifully crocheted antimacassars and pot holders. There were games with prizes and there were polka bands and a temporary dance floor that had been laid out on the grass. There were shows in the band shell that included local musicians and storytellers and performers of odd feats. And there was a beer tent courtesy of the Brandt brewery.

  Jake and I watched the parade and with some of the money we’d e
arned mowing my grandfather’s lawn we bought stuff to eat and tried our hands at ring toss and knocking down milk bottles in hopes of winning a stuffed toy that we really didn’t want. We ran into Danny O’Keefe and he joined us. When the sun dropped from the sky and evening settled over the park the crowd drifted to the band shell behind which had been set the fireworks for a huge display that would follow the performance of Ariel’s chorale and crown the day. All the folding chairs were occupied by the time Jake and Danny and I arrived and we leaned against the trunk of a big elm on the periphery but still with a good view. Stage lights came on and the mayor stepped to a podium and gave a brief speech and then a girl named Cindy Westrom came up to read an essay about freedom that she’d written for a contest sponsored by the VFW and that had won her twenty-five dollars. I said I had to go to the bathroom and left Jake and Danny and headed toward the portable toilets that had been set up near the beer tent.

  I waited in a short line and while I stood there I saw Morris Engdahl come out of the tent. He was alone and sipping his beer, eyeing the crowd over the lip of the cup as if he expected to fight us all. I turned my back and a moment later a toilet became free and I shot for it. I took care of business and even though it smelled pretty bad in there I lingered inside for a couple of minutes more to give Engdahl a chance to move on. When I stepped out a man shoved past me into the toilet dragging a kid of about five who was holding his crotch in desperation. I looked around carefully, relieved to find no sign at all of Morris Engdahl.

  Back at the elm tree I found that Jake and Danny had been joined by Warren Redstone. They weren’t talking, just standing there together staring at the stage of the band shell where a girl in a drum majorette outfit was twirling a baton that had flames at both ends. It was a pretty good trick and when I joined the group I watched the girl too and didn’t feel like I needed to say anything. The flaming baton was followed by a banjo player who plucked out a rousing rendition of Yankee Doodle while another guy tap-danced like crazy. We all applauded wildly. Then a woman who taught drama at the high school got up and read the whole Declaration of Independence and right in the middle of it someone grabbed my arm and swung me around and I found myself staring into the angry besotted eyes of Morris Engdahl.