The Ninth Wife (46 page)

At the state border a sign welcomes them to New Mexico, the “Land of Enchantment.” Their ears pop through rolling pine forests. They turn west at Las Vegas, New Mexico, and by five
P.M
. they reach the outskirts of Santa Fe and stop at a tourist shop to pick up a sun hat for Millie. She chooses a wide brim with a small Kokopelli. “I forget what the guy with the flute symbolizes, do you know?” Bess asks the cashier. The cashier is absorbed in a Norman Mailer novel. She marks her page with a worn receipt, places the book to the side, and rings up the hat as if they just woke her from a nap. “Fertility God,” she drones. Bess watches Millie put the hat on, fix her hair under it, and wear it proudly out of the store.

By the time they reach their hotel in the center of town, they are hungry and ready to be done with the van for the day. Irv needs to take his medicine, Millie and Bess need a restroom. They check in and agree to meet in a half hour for dinner. Bess has a fleeting thought that maybe she should separate them for the night or share a room with them, but she rules against it. Millie won’t hurt him. Not tonight.

Bess lies down on her bed and surveys the room’s decor—the geometric Navajo patterns on the quilt, the cowboy boot lamp, the color-enhanced photos of cacti and chili peppers. She unpacks her toiletries, washes up, and calls Rory. Again, he doesn’t answer. What if Cricket is wrong?
What if he’s given up on me?
She feels panicked. How could she have been so stupid, looking for his ex-wives?

B
y the next morning, Irv has his spring back in his step and a broad smile. There is a glint, too, in Millie’s eyes beneath her new hat that betrays her amusement when she asks what the hell’s gotten into him.

They peek in shop windows and point at straw appliqué crosses and oil paintings of wolves and warriors. They follow Millie into a store of scented soaps. She holds a few up to their noses smelling of rose water and sweet almond. Irv buys her a bar as a gift for their new home. Following the edifying advice on new home ownership from the young shop attendant, he also buys sage to bring them into balance and cleanse their minds and bodies of negative spirits and impurities. Bess likes the sentiment; Irv likes the smell. Millie thinks it’s a bunch of baloney. By eleven
A.M.
, Bess can tell Irv is feeling the effects of the altitude and the dry heat. They stop at a coffeehouse for a cool drink and a rest. “Ready to go?” Bess asks after a while, and they nod yes.
Yes
, they say,
we’re ready
.

A
rizona greets them with postcard images: a blinding sun on a surging, liquid highway; snakeweed and ocotillos and windblown dust devils across fifty miles of a hot, bleak desert; a soaring turkey vulture circling over a dead jackrabbit in a dry riverbed; a fiery sunset over the darkening valley. They arrive into Tucson with a smattering of smudged bugs on the windshield. They crane their necks to see a passing graveyard of old fighter planes, and finally, just before nightfall, reach Millie’s sister’s house where they will stay until their furniture arrives from back East. Slowly they emerge from the van exhausted and hungry for the quesadillas she serves them for dinner, mesmerized by the drone of the after-dinner TV crime show. Bess excuses herself to take a hot shower and turn in early.

Sometime during the middle of the night when Millie must think Bess is asleep on the couch, she stands by the bay window in the living room, looking out toward the Catalina Mountains. Bess glimpses the thin, gnarled, naked silhouette of her grandmother beneath her nightgown made sheer in the moonlight. She closes her eyes and dreams of infants in wooden cradles and sunflowers poking through fog.

In the morning, Bess unloads the van into the empty two-bedroom apartment and they discuss design options. Bess investigates the mental health facility across the street and ensures her grandparents are on their radar. Then they get a tour of the synagogue and the main building for the assisted living folks and neighboring inhabitants. A large quilt hangs in the lobby with Hebrew letters sewn in at the top, a saying, they’re told, that means “From Generation to Generation.” In the dining room, elderly Jews are doing jigsaw puzzles and playing dominoes and visiting with grandkids. It smells like popcorn and cleaning fluid. On a cluttered bulletin board in the hallway there are flyers for ice cream socials and tai chi classes. There are sign-up sheets for special events: Ludy on the Piano, Pokeno with Roger, Reading with Dell, Crafts with Linda, Cards at the Café, Bingo with Joan.

Millie picks up the schedule for the bridge club and chats up one of the residents sitting in his wheelchair while Irv wanders out to the courtyard and eases into a bench in the shade. Bess follows him. She’s been looking for an opportunity to speak with him alone ever since her illuminating car ride with Millie, though, given the number of enlightening conversations she’s had over the last couple of days, she’s beginning to feel talked out. Why did all this stuff have to surface at the end of the trip, when she’d been wanting it all along?

“I know about Rose,” she says, taking a seat next to Irv. “Did Gram tell you she told me?”

“She did.”

Well, that’s progress, thinks Bess. She wonders what their conversation was like.

A lizard hurries behind a flower pot. The heat of the midday sun is ponderous. “Did Rose look like Peace, your mannequin? Is that why you brought her along?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” says Irv. “I liked the look of her, that’s all. But it’s best she’s gone.”

Does he not comprehend the inner workings of his thoughts and feelings, Bess wonders, or is he hiding something? “It was you, wasn’t it?” she says.

Bess watches her grandfather’s reaction for indications that she figured out the truth, that she had mulled over Millie’s story umpteen times trying to fill in the gaps, to make sense of statements that seemed slightly off for reasons she couldn’t explain. “I figure,” she says, and then runs her version by him: that he was the one sleeping with Rose, that he got Rose pregnant and didn’t want Millie to know, so he asked his best friend to say it was his. Irv could then look like the good guy in Millie’s eyes and she’d be more likely to accept the baby. Sam then threatened to expose the truth, causing their big fight right before he left Gerald in the hospital. Irv never told Millie the truth, but he told Bess’s mom that, biologically, he was her father. Which means, Bess continues, he is her biological grandfather, her heritage.

Irv wipes the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief, then puts it back into his pocket. He looks off into the distance, blankly, as if he didn’t hear what she had just said and was enjoying the quiet. “Your mother was a beautiful baby, did you know that?” he says after a long minute. “A beautiful, beautiful baby.”

When is the keeping of secrets an inviolable right, and when is it a cop-out? Bess wonders. When does one have the right to try to expose someone else’s secrets? If the sun wasn’t stifling; if she hadn’t packed up everything to be on her way to California; if she could just press a button in front of a big-screen TV and watch the life of her grandfather through from the beginning, maybe she’d understand his actions, his justifications, his wrongdoings and righteous acts the way they really happened. Maybe she’d understand the ways he loved. Maybe she could find out the truth.
How much can we truly know?

Millie opens the door, sees them, and retreats slowly, letting the door shut on its own. In the blinding sun outside, it appears as if she disappears into blackness.

“Gramp,” says Bess, “if you had to do it all over again, would you? Get married, I mean?” Bess wants, once and for all, the definitive answer she so craves about marriage, about life, about choices and happiness. She doesn’t want him to sugarcoat their sixty-five years together, to inaccurately tally the good and the bad and lump his whole lifetime into a general feeling of remorse or contentment. She wants him to
think
, to think
hard
. She wants to hear the truth. But the question slipped out and she knows what she’s going to hear.

“Yes,” he says, “I would do it all over again.”

T
he end
. Irv says this wistfully and it makes Millie mad. They have all elongated their good-byes with clinging hugs and choked-back tears and they are standing now by the driver’s side of the van in the parking lot of the synagogue, immobilized and fidgety.
What are you talking about?
This isn’t the end
, Millie snaps with the familiar vestiges of anger in her voice. She is sad and stressed, Bess allows. He has reverted to his woebegone, past tense mindset. It was bound to come out. It is time to leave and trust they’ll find their balance.
I’ll call you later
, she says.
Don’t hurt each other anymore.
I love you very much
.

In front of the synagogue, a large desert agave fans out its succulent, fleshy, pointed green leaves, and from its leaves, a single asparagus-like stalk sprouts straight up into the air for a good fifteen feet. According to the man Millie was talking to, the plant, called a century plant, is old. The agaves grow their stalks only when they’re ready to die. The stalk blooms for the first and last time at its tip in yellow, waxy flowers, then one day the stalk falls over. The green leaves start to shrivel. Bess sees the agave in her rearview mirror as she departs. It will be gone soon, removed from the premises and planted over. But this morning it stands tall, taller than the nearby trees, thicker than the streetlight, sharp-edged and stubborn, reaching to the sky in a burst of color.

Chapter Thirty-six

H
ere,” says Cici, “take these and I’ll meet you outside.” She hands Rory two tumblers of San Pellegrino and points him toward the French doors that lead out to the pool. She is house-sitting in Berkeley for a professor who married the daughter of a Texas oil tycoon. It’s a sprawling Mediterranean-style home in a quiet cul-de-sac with soaring ceilings and views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Mount Tamalpais. The floors, Cici had told Rory on her tour of the house this morning, are Brazilian cherrywood. Rory has never seen anything like it—the massive fireplace in the family room, the contemporary art, an elevator! “Bloody hell,” he had said when he first stepped onto the terrace overlooking the garden. “I could use a tiny cottage like this.”

Cici was delighted at his proposal to come visit. Knowing him the way she did, she wasn’t at all surprised by his call, or that he was already halfway across the country without a plan, concocting one as he went. She
was
surprised, instead, that his old Corolla had enough life in it to make the trip.
This might be her last
, Rory admitted.

It took him three days to drive from Chicago; he arrived late, got a good night’s sleep, woke to the smell of fresh coffee, and went for an invigorating four-mile run before breakfast. Now he’s lounging by the pool, where Cici joins him carrying two towels. Rory is struck by how much she looks like Olive Ann. She’s twenty-five now, and for the last seven years, every time Rory has seen Cici he’s been in awe of her girl-to-woman transformation. How did she get to be a beautiful, six-foot gazelle of a creature? How did she emerge from those hard years with her mother and the Alaskan winters to be a strong woman of independent means? Rory is full of pride. “Please,” she says, pointing her chin to a couple of lounge chairs. “Have a seat.”

“So how’s school?” he says. “You’re on break now?”

“It’s going well. I’m taking one summer course, and working at the library.”

She turns to sit and Rory catches sight of a wide V-shaped tattoo on her lower back just above her bikini bottom. “Business, right?” he says.

“I’m actually going for a dual MPH/MBA.”

“What’s MPH? Miles per hour? You out to change the speed limit?”

Cici smiles. “Master’s in public health. I think I want to do something with health care policy. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a job in Washington.”

“Oh now, don’t be getting my hopes up unless you mean it. You tell me what I can do to tip the scales and I’ll get right on it.”

“All right, I’ll keep you posted.” She scratches the scar on her knee. Rory had taken her to the hospital for at least one of her knee surgeries when she tore her ACL riding a dirt bike on a treacherous mountain trail. She learned to love riding motorcycles in Alaska. Rory thought maybe her need for speed was one of the ways she pushed herself to overcome her panic attacks.

Rory lathers sunscreen onto his face and neck. The sun is high and bright, though the air feels cooler and less humid than what it typically is in D.C. this time of year. “And your mom?” he says. “Where is she living?”

“She’s in Salt Lake City. When she’s on her meds, she functions well enough. She’s still painting, so that’s something.” She takes a sip of her drink. “She does look really old, though, but I guess illness does that.”

To the untrained ear, Cici has all but gotten rid of her stutter through modification therapy, but he can still detect a hesitation here and there or a slight prolonging of certain vowels. She has developed maneuvers to help disguise these remnants of troubled speech, like raising a glass to her lips and drinking. He detects it mostly when she speaks of her mom.

“What else? What about your dating life?”

“Don’t have one.”

“Why not? Attractive girl like you?”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t sleeping with someone, I said I don’t date. I’m too young for that, don’t you think?”

“I do,” he says, acknowledging that he’d been married three times by the time he was her age.

“So,” she says, leaning back in her chair like a sunbather. “Your turn. You haven’t told me yet why you’re on another road odyssey.”

“Right,” he says, also settling in. “It’s a story.”

“Of course it is.”

Over the years, Rory’s role in Cici’s life has shifted from something like a stepfather to more of a friend. That has partly been due to Cici warming to her own father, a gruff, albeit bighearted fisherman who tried to be there for her when Olive Ann couldn’t be. But Rory suspects it’s also due to their personalities: Cici grew up fast into a worldly sophisticate, while Rory moved from coast to coast, hardly ever fancying himself a good enough parental role model. So she talked to him about stocks and film and sports and men (always men, not guys) and he asked her for relationship advice.