Just then, Nell arrived. She’d left an hour after us but apparently driven much faster. She said, “Can you believe that someone is marrying Reenie on purpose?”
Patrick said, “I’m just about to tell Sam here about her dowry, the farm, the silver mine, the chalet in Zurich...”
“You can keep those,” Sam said.
“Even the chalet?” Patrick asked. “I’m very partial to the chalet.”
“I’ll make dinner,” Miranda said. “I don’t know what I have around...”
“No, I will,” Sam suggested. “Later on. I want to impress you.” He said this not knowing anything about my mother’s heartfelt but disastrous ways around a home-cooked meal. She eyed me a little skeptically, for we never scrupled to judge her cruelly because she could merely win Pulitzer Prizes and earn a healthy six figures in PR but could not whip up triple-chocolate oatmeal bars. I raised my hands palms out to protest my innocence.
Later that night, after we’d all eaten Pasticcio di Lasagna, which Sam made with a ridiculously velvety béchamel on top of the vodka sauce and double the amount of cheese, Patrick, his eyes misty with pleasure, said, “Okay, you have my permission to marry her. If she doesn’t want to, we will adopt you. That was the best meal I ever had in my life.” Patrick added, “I’ll make coffee for us, if there are any takers...”
Nell said, “You have to agree to the coffee, otherwise you’re a sissy. But I hope you have lots of activities planned because you won’t be sleeping tonight.”
My father said, “Irene told me she was going to show you the sights. That should take about fifteen minutes. I’m going to watch my old-time shows. Did Irene tell you about the deprivation she was subjected to as a child? That they weren’t allowed to watch? She usually shares that with new people.”
“Actually she didn’t,” Sam said. “When we were kids, my dad let us watch all the TV we wanted but we could only watch his shows. The effect was that we didn’t end up watching too much because they were all old Westerns.”
“Really?” said Patrick. He sensed a setup and glanced at me. “I like those myself. Did you know that Jodie Foster got her start onGunsmoke?”
Sam returned the serve. “Did you know Ed Asner and Richard Dreyfuss did too? And that Bette Davis was in an episode or two?”
Patrick beamed. Here was a man a person could talk to.
My mother then said, “Sam, I don’t want to spoil the mood but I hope you don’t mind if I ask about Felicity. Is she... well?”
“I guess she’s as well as can be expected. It’s a big adjustment. A really terrible adjustment. We never saw this coming. I was confident.”
“So you don’t think that she did this,” Miranda said.
“I don’t,” Sam said. “She hasn’t told me who she thinks did it, and it’s entirely possible that she doesn’t even know.”
“Do you always believe your clients?” Patrick asked. “Isn’t it your job to defend them either way?”
“I don’t always believe them. But I believe her.”
Sam mentioned Felicity’s illness, her severe dehydration and pneumonia and the fact that she had recently been hospitalized. My mother’s expression shifted like a series of slides from compassion to consternation to confusion. There was the instinctive response to Felicity; there was the informed response. Sam finally switched topics by asking where to put the bags. We’d all forgotten that he’d never been there before.
There was some small and mostly comic concern about me and Sam sharing a bedroom. He couldn’t believe that I’d never had a boyfriend stay over at my parents’ house before, but that was true, and even Patrick agreed that it was okay since Sam had“put a ring on it,” which phrase, I would like to be clear, he actually used. When we got ready to take a drive, my father said, “That coffee will come in handy! Sheboygan isn’t exactly Las Vegas. Make her bring you back if it gets too boring. We can watchRawhide. Did you know that Jimmy Stewart and Leonard Nimoy were—”
Miranda said, “Patrick, enough! Patrick is easily bored. Except by TV Westerns and blueprints and sparkling banter with the guy who does entablature.”
But she said that with goodwill and affection. It was a statement made by someone who not only loved her husband but admired him. That I could say the same about Sam, who also did things and knew things that I didn’t entirely understand, was a huge relief, while also suggesting that people whose marriages were founded on new relationships were lucky, since they would not run out of things to converse about for years.
In the long northern summer twilight, Sam and I took a drive past the house where Felicity had spent her childhood years, currently occupied by a couple who looked young enough to be in middle school. We parked on the former grounds of the Starbright Ministry and I explained Roman Wild’s colorful shenanigans. “My mom and I walked over here last winter, and the place was a ghost town,” I added.
It still was. There were signs of the construction intent on turning it into a municipal park, but most of the darkened buildings sat eyeless and moonlit, breathing what I imagined to be a kind of stone-tape despair. We walked down toward the lakeshore and saw how the paving-stone paths between the buildings were studded with commemorative plaques evidently endowed by former parishioners, each with a Bible verse: “Do everything in love.” 1 Corinthians 16:14 Ann Wertz Garvin and family, and “You are the light of the world.” Matthew 5:14 Katherine Furness Dooley and Peter Dooley.
“I know them!” I said. “They had eight kids a year apart.”
“They must have decided on the couples option or they would have needed a way bigger stone,” Sam said.
The plaques were beautiful. The landscaping was beautiful. No detail had been overlooked.
“I never saw inside these places,” I said. “They’re too dark to look in the windows.” I tried the door of what seemed to be a dormitory of some kind and was shocked that it was open. We walked through the building, clean and tidy, with nice built-in bunks and desks, but as spooky as one of those abandoned insane asylums so beloved of fake-ghost documentaries. (“What was that? Did you hear that noise?” “It was Dave, he just texted that he dropped the boom mic...” “Dave, did you see something? Dave? He’s not answering, we should get down there!” “He can’t answer, he broke the mic.”)
Finally, we came to the small chapel near the lake. Sam pushed the door open. By that time it was nearly dark and moonlight suddenly shot through the stained glass of St. Francis of Assisi. A quote was scrolled in gold: “Oh birds, my brothers and sisters, you have a great obligation to praise your Creator, who clothed you in feathers and gave you wings to fly...”
