FORTY-TWO
For all of Frank’s predatory instincts, his time at Duke had been a disappointment, sexually speaking. Student life was not the cornucopia of amatory delights that he had imagined. Yes, there were legions of desirable coeds who floated like angels across the campus, but they had remained tantalizingly out of his reach. My brother watched those beauties parade by, his whole body thrumming a hymn of unbridled longing. But the girls’ dorms were fortresses, barricaded by lock and key. Strictly enforced curfews limited the opportunities for illicit trysts, especially since Frank didn’t have a car. Back then, the consequence of getting caught having sex was certain expulsion, and nobody (except Frank, apparently) was willing to take that risk. When Darla Weldfarben threw herself at him, then, Frank had been in a state of frustrated arousal for a year and a half.
My brother had never met Darla before. He realized at once that she had mistaken him for Teddy, but when he smelled the alcohol on her breath he decided not to correct her, curious to see what would happen next. When she took his hand and told him that her parents weren’t home, he had hesitated, but only for a moment. Frank silently followed her home, hoping that Darla was drunk enough not to notice that he wasn’t who she thought he was.
As it turned out, she only realized her mistake the following morning. Even through the fog of a raging hangover, she could see that the boy asleep next to her was not Teddy, even though he looked an awful lot like him. With a furious cry she launched herself across the bed and delivered a stunning left-right combination punch, one ferocious wallop to each eye. Frank tried to pull on his trousers while dodging her fists. This angry pursuit around Darla’s bedroom was conducted in mournful silence. Both knew that there was nothing to be said. Finally Frank fled down the stairs and stumbled out of the Weldfarbens’ house. As he made his way home, Darla sat on her bed and wept.
Frank didn’t tell any of us what he had done. He refused to explain where he had spent the night, but told us that he would be leaving later that day, two days earlier than planned. By lunchtime his eyes were ringed with two dark bruises. That afternoon I drove him back to Jefferson City. He sat next to me, tight-lipped and thoughtful. We drove the whole way in silence. At the train station I handed him his bag. “Whatever it was you got up to,” I said, “I hope it was worth it.”
He gave me a small, crooked grin. “Bye, James,” he said. Without another word, he walked away.
And so my brother escaped back to North Carolina, leaving the rest of us to deal with the mess he had made. The following morning Darla appeared at our front door and confessed everything to Teddy.
My brother listened, aware that he should have been consumed with fury, his heart darkened by thoughts of fraternal revenge, but what he actually felt was relief. Frank had presented him with the perfect opportunity to end things with Darla for good. When she finished her story, Teddy played it perfectly. He patted her hand and said that he forgave her, but that he couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t happened. This, he told her sadly, changed everything. He couldn’t see her anymore, not after this. She gasped and wilted pathetically into his arms. He listened to her pleas and her promises, but remained resolute. It was over, he told her, scarcely able to believe his luck.
Darla, though, was not going to give up without a fight. Teddy spent the next two days hiding in our bedroom while she loitered outside our house, hoping for another chance to plead her case. When he returned to Columbia, there was already a tear-stained letter waiting for him. She began to write him every day, begging for forgiveness. Teddy read the letters quickly and then guiltily dropped them into the trash. He decided to skip a few weeks of church, hoping that God would understand the gravity of the situation and grant him a pass.
I suspect that Darla’s campaign to win Teddy back might have worn him down in the end, had Mother Nature not intervened. A month or so after Jette’s funeral, Darla began complaining of nausea and exhaustion in the mornings. Teddy was off the hook for good, but things were about to get a whole lot more complicated for everyone else.
H
ershel Weldfarben worked ninety acres of arable land out to the west of town with his three sons. Darla was his youngest child, and his only daughter. She’d come along six years after Hershel and his wife had thought they were through with babies—a blessed, if unexpected, gift from God. The Weldfarben boys had been unceremoniously hauled through their childhoods. Hershel put his sons to work in the fields as soon as they were able to drive a tractor—which, in Caitlin County, was around the age of ten. He was a gruff, undemonstrative man, whose love for his boys, if love was the right word, was proportional to their contribution to the family business. Darla, however, was different. Hershel did not possess similar tools to calibrate his affection for his little girl, and consequently his adoration for her went off the charts. The very first time that he held that squalling little bundle of flesh in his arms, he promised her that he would protect her from all the horny little toads who would one day try to have their wicked way with her.
When he learned that Darla was pregnant, Hershel Weldfarben grimly got ready for the drive to Columbia to confront Teddy. When Darla tearfully confessed who the real father was, he changed his travel plans and went to Raleigh instead. This time he took two of his sons with him.
Frank has never told me exactly how that confrontation on campus went down. I don’t know, for example, whether or not an
actual
shotgun was involved. But within a week, my brother was back in Missouri, and a married man.
Frank moved into Darla’s childhood bedroom, and began work on the Weldfarben farm under the hawkeyed surveillance of his new family. When Claudine Meisenheimer was born the following August, Frank was no longer considered a flight risk, and he was allowed to stop work on the farm. He applied for a teller’s position at the bank that Grandfather Martin used to run. Every day he put on a coat and tie and stood behind the counter, doing his best to smile at the never-ending line of customers.
Franklin, who had only ever wanted to escape, found himself more trapped than any of us.
C
laudine was as perfect and beautiful as a baby can be. Darla had half-expected the child born of her carnal sin to have tiny horns sticking out of its head, but whenever she held her daughter in her arms, she couldn’t help wondering, just for a moment, if what she had done could really have been
that
bad, if this was the end result.
After Claudine came Andrew, Frederick, Nancy, Donny, Clyde, Todd, and Beatrice, each arriving within a year of the one before. Darla, it transpired, was chronically fertile; Frank couldn’t look at his wife without getting her pregnant. Every egg that came careening down her fallopian tubes seemed fated for instant fertilization. For the first seven or eight years of their marriage, she was pretty much always pregnant. I think the only reason she finally stopped having more children was that she and Frank were simply too exhausted to have any more sex.
As their family grew, Hershel built Frank and Darla a house on his farm. They invited me round for supper every so often, but I never enjoyed those visits much. The amount of noise generated by all those children chilled my soul. Neither parent seemed to notice the incessant symphony of bawling, bickering, and screaming, but every indignant yowl put my nerves on edge. Frank and Darla had shut down all but the most acute of their sensory faculties, and reacted only when a child’s cry achieved a degree of shrillness that I associated with physical torture. Wherever I turned, children sprawled across furniture and left a trail of infant detritus in their wakes. Their parents traipsed numbly through the house, picking stuff up, too tired to speak.
Still, they seemed happy enough. Given everything that had happened, Darla and Frank muddled through their marriage just fine—better, in fact, than many couples who had chosen each other by more orthodox means. When they had exchanged their vows beneath Hershel Weldfarben’s watchful eye, they were strangers, with no hope or expectations of the other, and this had equipped them well for married life. They were immune to the quiet creep of disappointment that can sour more optimistic unions; there was no heady first blush of romance to be mourned as the years passed. From that joyless ceremony in the empty church, there was nowhere for them to go but up.
It helped that neither blamed the other for the mess they had gotten themselves into. There was nothing to be done but to forge a way out of the thicket of their abandoned dreams. A lack of viable alternatives helped, but it was the adoration they shared for their expanding family that really drew Frank and Darla together. In the chaotic crucible of their little home, filled with all that love and noise, with each passing year they crept closer toward some sort of contentment, and each other.
FORTY-THREE
Teddy did not come home for Frank and Darla’s hurried nuptials. Nobody was surprised when he didn’t appear at the service, although his absence was noticed by Reverend Gresham. The clergyman knew that Teddy and Darla had been dating, and he was appalled when Hershel Weldfarben asked him to officiate at his daughter’s wedding—
to
the wrong twin
. He had performed the ceremony, ashen-faced with fear. His gaze kept drifting out across the empty pews as he wondered where the risen Son of God was. The words of Exodus 20:5 rattled through his head:
I am a jealous God, and will visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me
. After the service Reverend Gresham had gone home and prayed for forgiveness, petrified that a terrible, retributive hell would soon be unleashed on the town.
There was no apocalyptic visitation, however. Life in Beatrice went on as before. And when, a few weeks after the wedding, Teddy began to appear at church again on Sunday mornings, Reverend Gresham was hugely relieved. So the Messiah had not abandoned them in fury, after all. If anything, Teddy seemed more cheerful than ever. He sat in his usual pew and smiled at his new sister-in-law as she played the piano. The minister marveled at the Lord’s capacity for forgiveness.
Of course, Teddy’s behavior toward Darla had nothing to do with limitless reserves of clemency. In the circumstances, he could afford to be magnanimous. It was only when he learned about Darla’s pregnancy that he realized what a narrow escape he’d had. Every day he gave thanks to God for giving him the strength to resist Darla’s charms.
That could have been me
, he thought as he watched Frank amble about the church in cowed defeat. Teddy realized then that God really
was
looking out for him. We probably shouldn’t have been surprised when, after he’d graduated from the University of Missouri, Teddy announced that he had applied to seminary school in Kansas City. He was going to be a minister.
The prospect of his son’s ordination seemed to knock the fight out of Joseph. He no longer ranted and raved about Teddy’s faith; a bemused silence settled on him instead. He knew when he was beaten.
Teddy stopped coming home every weekend; he was busy helping to officiate Sunday services at the seminary. But he never forgot First Christian Church in Beatrice.
When his training was finished, Teddy returned home, bringing several cardboard boxes full of religious textbooks with him. It was early summer; the brutal humidity that held us hostage every year had not yet descended. One night Teddy and I were sitting on the back porch, drinking beer.
“So,” I said, “what’s next for you?”
Teddy grinned. “Now the fun starts,” he said.
“Your first posting.”
Teddy nodded, and took a long drink of his beer.
“How do you decide where to go?”
“Oh,
I
don’t decide. I go where I’m sent.”
“Which will be . . . ?”
Teddy shrugged. “Could be anywhere. New pastors often get sent to inner-city parishes. Not a lot of fun, so I’ve heard. Much of the work is done on the street, rather than in church. We minister to prostitutes, drug addicts, and criminals.”
“Sounds delightful,” I said.
“They’re God’s children, too, James. Everyone deserves a shot at redemption, wouldn’t you say?” Teddy looked at me, his eyes steady. He spoke softly, but his words held a new, quiet confidence.
“If you say so.”
“Anyway, that’s not for me.” He paused. “I want to come back here.”
“Back
here
? Why? You could go anywhere.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” he said. “I want to come home.”
I sat there, momentarily unable to speak. Five years of study and Teddy wanted to come back to Beatrice. I thought of what Rosa had told me years ago.
You’ll leave. And then one day you’ll come back.
Finally I managed to say something. “What about Reverend Gresham?” I asked.
“Look, James.” Teddy spoke calmly. “Like I said, it’s not up to me. All I can do is pray and see what happens. Although,” he added thoughtfully, “it might not hurt to talk to Reverend Gresham, and let him know what I’m thinking. See if he can help.”
There was a certain inevitability about the subsequent chain of events. The more spiritually inclined might deem the whole thing divinely ordained.
The following morning Teddy visited Reverend Gresham, and told him quite frankly that he wanted his job one day, and would he mind putting in a good word for him when the time came? Reverend Gresham realized at once what was happening—finally, his sinful thoughts about Margaret Fitch were coming home to roost. He had fretted about Teddy’s lingering presence for years, unsure what it meant for him and his parish. Now everything became clear. He was being ousted. He meekly accepted his fate. The news almost felt like relief. The poor man’s nerves had been frayed to breaking point. That afternoon the minister wrote a letter tendering his resignation and strongly urging that Teddy be appointed in his place. His testimony about my brother’s virtues would have made a saint blush.
Reverend Gresham decided that he’d had enough of the ecclesiastical life. He went to live with his sister on the southern California coast—about as far away from Teddy as he could get without actually leaving the country—and began studying for his real estate license. Every morning the ex-minister gazed out toward the white-crested waves of the Pacific. He watched the surfers as they shot back and forth across the water, and remembered the sight of my brother levitating above the Missouri River. He never did discover that all he had seen that summer afternoon was Frank, sunbathing on a pole. But that vision had revealed truths that were far greater than the mundane facts of the matter—truths that would guide him through the rest of his long, if rather anxious, life.
Thanks to Reverend Gresham’s letter, Teddy’s interview was a formality. Within two months my brother was installed as the new minister of First Christian Church. And so the boy with the college degree—with the passport to anywhere—came home.
Once I had recovered from my initial indignation at Teddy’s unfathomable decision to return to Beatrice voluntarily, I was as pleased as anyone that he was back. I began a campaign to re-form the quartet. I cajoled and nagged my brothers until they agreed—with varying degrees of enthusiasm—to sing together again. By then, of course, we all had commitments elsewhere, so we only met once a week, gathering around the piano to learn new songs, just like old times. Sometimes we performed in public, but most of the time we just sang for ourselves. We no longer needed an audience. The simple act of making music was enough. The sound of our four voices melding sweetly together was like coming home to a warm fire blazing in the hearth.
A
year or so after I had given up all hope of my novel ever being published, I quietly pulled my typewriter back out from beneath my bed and began to write again. I had kept one copy of the first manuscript, and I placed that huge brick of words, its edges meticulously aligned, in sight at all times. It stood sentry over my efforts, its physical heft a reassuring reminder that I had done this once, so I could surely do it again.
I’m not sure what prompted me to start writing another book. Rosa had been right; there was certainly nothing to be gained by feeling sorry for myself. But it was more than that. I missed my nightly communion with Buck Gunn and his friends. Telling stories was still a means of escape. And so I put a fresh sheet of paper into the machine, ready to flee once again. This time I no longer thought about getting published, but just wrote for my own amusement. The journey, not the destination, became the thing, and I rediscovered the simple satisfaction of seeing my ideas materialize before me, sentence after sentence.
My second novel was a thriller that centered around a plot to assassinate the U.S. president. The hero was a humble detective who, on a hunch, was trying to piece the puzzle together before it was too late. (His adored wife, a beautiful but callous redhead, left him halfway through the book, only to be ravaged by a rare and unspecified wasting disease that sentenced her to a long and painful death with nobody by her side.)
I vacillated for weeks when it was time to write the climactic scene—I couldn’t decide whether the assassination attempt should succeed or not. The president was to be shot with a single bullet, but it was up to me whether or not the marksman hit his target. It was strange, having the fate of the leader of the free world in my hands. Finally, with a heavy heart, I decided that the president should die.
I wrote the final scene in one frenzied weekend in the late summer of 1963. The plotters were a nefarious gang of malcontents and Communists, directed from behind the scenes by a sinister mastermind, who, in a stunning denouement, was revealed to be the venal and ambitious vice president. The villains killed their man during an open-air presidential motorcade in Kansas City. Once again Rosa was my first reader, but she did not like it as much as my first effort. Still, I was pleased with my work, and decided to submit the manuscript to the same publishers as last time, just in case. Once again my aunt and I collated copies and addressed envelopes together. We dropped them in the mailbox toward the end of October.
About a month later, during a busy Friday lunch, the door of the diner was flung open and Buddy Steinhoff appeared, panting and red-faced. He glanced around the room, and then ran to the jukebox and ripped the power cord out of the wall. The song came to an abrupt stop in mid-verse. Everyone turned toward Buddy, who was standing in the middle of the room, his eyes wild.
“The president’s been shot!” he cried.
There was instant uproar. Men got to their feet and started shouting; some women began to cry. My father bustled into the back room and retrieved the transistor radio that he sometimes listened to. He placed it on the counter and turned the volume up high. The news from Dallas crackled through the room, and everyone fell still and silent. The horror that I saw on people’s faces was nothing compared to the flat-out terror that was coursing through me. Somewhere in the mailrooms of several New York publishing houses lay fat yellow envelopes, date-stamped
one month prior
to the killing, setting out exactly how it was all going to go down. There was page after page of irrefutable evidence of my complicity in the crime.
We closed the diner early as people scattered home to watch the tragedy unfold in front of their television sets. I hurried to Rosa’s school where the children had all been dismissed. My aunt sat at her desk, a haunted look on her face. She looked up when I walked in.
“You’d better lock that door behind you,” she said. I did as I was told and then sat down opposite her.
“What are we going to do?” I whispered.
“Nobody’s going to believe that you just made this all up,” she said flatly.
“I chose Kansas City, not Dallas.”
Rosa shook her head. “They won’t care about that.” She sighed. “All it will take is for one person to read your book. They’ll notice the date the packet was mailed, and that will be that.”
Suddenly those yellow envelopes had become death warrants. I swallowed. “Can we get the manuscripts back?”
“I wouldn’t know how,” said Rosa gloomily.
That night we hunkered down in front of the television set and watched events unfold, wondering what on earth we had gotten ourselves into. The mug shot of Lee Harvey Oswald stared out at us from the screen. I wondered what he knew. The awful thought occurred to me that perhaps I’d been right, all along, that this
was
all Lyndon Johnson’s doing. If he ever got wind of what I’d written . . . it didn’t bear thinking about. After all, he was in charge now. I wondered fearfully what lengths he would go to in order to silence me.
Then Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby, and we didn’t know what to think. Was Ruby paid to silence the killer, stop him from telling the world what he knew? More important, would they be coming for me next? I waited anxiously for dark-suited FBI agents to pull up in front of the house in an unmarked car. Visions of cold, subterranean rooms crowded my imagination. Interrogators would slam their fists down on the table and scream at me, demanding to know where I’d gotten my information.
For the first time I could remember, my aunt appeared genuinely rattled. Every shadow held sinister secrets, every unexplained noise promised doom. She changed the locks on her front door, and bought a small pistol that she kept in the small table by her bed. We didn’t dare tell anyone else what was going on, in case they, too, were whisked away for knowing too much. I lay awake at night and listened for the telltale sounds of approaching government spooks.
I desperately began to hope that my second book would suffer the same ignominious fate as my first. There was nothing I would have liked more than for those manuscripts to rot, unopened and forgotten, at the bottom of a pile of unsolicited submissions.
Luckily for us, the publishing industry held steady in its continued indifference to my work. My manuscript remained mercifully unread. There was no late-night knock on the door, no clandestine hush-up. As the months passed, Rosa and I slowly allowed ourselves to hope that we might get out alive.