10

10

For three seasons of the year, Saint Sebastian was the tennis coach at the University Liggett School in Gross Pointe Woods where he taught U. S. History and World Civilization. In the summers he worked at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club in Grosse Pointe Shores, where the fact that he had once squared off against Johnny Mac made him the stuff of legend. At the yacht club, that match was spoken of in terms of victory, with the score widening in Sebastian’s favor over time. When Sebastian corrected them, and he always did, they took it as further proof of his humility and loved him all the more. He ate his dinner in the bar of the club’s grill where he wasn’t allowed to order steak or the crab cakes and anyone who wanted to rattle on about the game could pull up a chair and join him. Dinner at the grill was part of Sebastian’s job. After work he drove home to East Detroit, because there was still such a place as East Detroit, and whenever he could work enough doubles to swing a few days off in a row, he made the three--hour drive to Tom Lake to see his brother.

I loved it when Sebastian was with us. Tom Lake had a good court far from the amphitheater and they kept it lit at night. Pallace and I would drag out canvas folding chairs and sit and watch the two of them play. Sometimes we were the ball girls,?-Pallace running for Sebastian, me running for Duke. Pallace and Sebastian happened quickly after they met, though if my relationship with Duke were the benchmark of courtship, they had proceeded with Victorian decorum.

How beautiful those brothers were beneath the floodlights, the two of them dashing across the green rubico. Duke used twice the energy Sebastian did, maybe three times more, smashing out his serves, lunging for balls he could never return, making deep animal sounds that were not unfamiliar to me whenever his racquet connected. All Duke wanted to do was play tennis when Sebastian was there, though I imagine for his brother it must have made Tom Lake a busman’s holiday.

“Doesn’t he get tired of it?” I asked Pallace, our heads moving right to left, left to right, as we followed the bouncing yellow ball.

Once Duke lost the set, Pallace would be up. She hadn’t played much before but she had the strength for it, the grace. I, on the other hand, was hopeless, though Sebastian would bring me on to hit a few at the end of the night, praising me every time I returned his easy lob. Soon enough Duke would get restless watching girls play, and start to make noise about wanting to go back to the house for a drink.

“Sebastian loves it,” Pallace said, her eyes never leaving him, when what she meant was, Sebastian loves me.

Oh, Pallace, I thought. This is summer.

But that wasn’t what I thought about Duke. Duke threw his entire life into everything he did, into every backhand, into the modest role of Editor Webb, into me, into us. He was so sure of us that we’d decided to go to L.A. together once the summer was over. We could rent a furnished apartment in the building where I used to live or in one of the hundred buildings like it. I had talked to my agent, who said he’d have no trouble finding work for me. I told him that surely he could find something for Duke as well. I’d written to Ripley about him twice, asking him if he had any parts. No one in Hollywood looked like Duke, and if anyone had his particular brand of charisma, well, I’d never seen it.

But Sebastian was the actor when it came to the game—-a play in three acts—-so that he was one tennis coach with his competitive brother, another tennis coach with his athletic lover, and a third tennis coach with his brother’s inept girlfriend. He didn’t throw points, but he made it all look harder for him than it was, running and reaching when he didn’t need to do either. He slammed the ball at Duke, hit the ball directly into the center of Pallace’s racquet, and all but handed me the ball in a cup. I bet he did the same for the yacht club wives, for their husbands, and the kids he taught at school: power in accordance with need. At the end of the match his shirt was dry, whereas Duke had pulled his soaking T--shirt over his head and thrown it into the corner of the chain--link fence. Under the bright lights I could see the sweet indentations of his ribs, and how they cast the smallest shadows across his pale torso.

It was the very busiest time. Cabaret had already opened the season at Tom Lake and Our Town was a week out from following them. The rehearsals were all in tech now, ten out of twelve. They put a stiff pomade in Duke’s hair and pinned it in the back so that he looked less like the lead in Jesus Christ Superstar and more like a respectable newspaperman in 1901. At the same time, we’d started the table reads for Fool for Love and at night we ran our lines in bed. Duke had played Eddie once before at Detroit Rep. His Eddie was the reason he’d been hired for Tom Lake. Even as he lay there on his side, his hand on my hip, I could see how scary good he’d be in the part. How it thrilled me to think of going straight from Our Town to that rundown motel room, going from the father and daughter we’d imbued with too much chemistry, to a pair of half siblings who had enough chemistry to burn down a barn. We’d show Tom Lake a thing or two about what it meant to be dark and complicated and grown--up.

We ate and drank and slept our art, pounded our art into the mattress. Actors and dancers, designers and techs of different races from different states and wildly different backgrounds strolled through a utopia of cherry trees when they weren’t being worked to a nub. Men held hands with men. No one gave Sebastian and Pallace a thought. Michigan! Who knew?

“Let’s see you take me home to East Detroit come fall,” Pallace said, her head in Sebastian’s lap. We had just come out of the lake and the four of us were lying on an old cotton blanket Sebastian had brought from home. Duke’s beautiful head was in my lap, his face pressed against my bare stomach.

“Let’s see you take me home to Lansing,” Sebastian said to her.

Pallace shook her head. “I’m not going back to Lansing. I’ve already told my folks if they want to see me they can come to Chicago.” Pallace had stayed in Chicago after finishing her training at the conservatory, though she was hoping Tom Lake would be her ticket to New York.

Duke reached out a finger and ran it down a few inches of Pallace’s thigh and Sebastian leaned over and brushed his brother’s hand away. “Scoot over here,” he said to Pallace, tapping her hip, and she laughed. She stayed where she was, sandwiched between the two of them.

Duke was so happy when Sebastian was there, we were all so happy, but still, Sebastian’s visits unsettled things, almost as if his calmness allowed Duke to be crazier than he usually was, like a kid who’ll throw himself off of ladders once he knows someone’s there to catch him. Duke was showing off for his brother because showing off was Duke’s nature, but the way Sebastian watched him, it was almost like he was waiting for something terrible to happen, and that made me look for it, too. Sebastian was trying to anticipate Duke’s craziness in the hopes that he could circumvent it, and by craziness I do not mean talent or eccentricity but something deeply nuts. When Sebastian was there to see it, it became much harder for me to pass the whole thing off as Duke simply being Duke.

Maisie holds up her hand. “I’m sorry, I have to interrupt. You can’t say crazy.”

“And you really can’t say nuts,” Nell says. “Unless you’re talking about pecans.”

“But he was crazy. Nuts. He really was.”

“Duke had things to overcome in his life but he wasn’t crazy,” Emily says firmly.

I shake my head. “I’m going to overrule you on this one.”

“It’s not that you can’t say Duke is crazy,” Maisie explains. “I mean you can’t use that word anymore. It’s pejorative.”

“I know crazy is pejorative. I mean for it to be pejorative, insofar as I don’t mean it was a positive attribute.”

“You need to find a better word,” Nell says.

“Insane?”

The three of them shake their heads.

“What am I allowed to call it then?”

Maisie gives a long exhale, which means that I am old and she can’t explain anything to me. Nell tries to explain. “You could refer to whatever was wrong with him by using his diagnosis: He had schizophrenia, for example. He had a bipolar disorder.”

“But you really shouldn’t talk about another person’s diagnosis,” Maisie says. “Unless he wanted you to.”

“He wasn’t schizophrenic or bipolar!” Emily is suiting up for battle. I can see it.

“You can’t say a person is schizophrenic anyway,” Maisie informs her sister. “He wasn’t a disease. You wouldn’t say ‘He was cancer.’?”

“I might,” I say.

“Stop it.” Emily is in no one’s corner but Duke’s.

“So you want me to tell you about Duke without mentioning that he was crazy? I’m already leaving out the sex. I’m not sure how much of a story is going to be left.”

This brings us to an impasse. They very much want to know about Duke having sex without ever wanting to know about me having sex, which is fine because I’m not telling them.

“I think it’s okay to say mental illness,” Nell says.

“Maybe,” Maisie says. “If it’s just the four of us.”

“We’re in a cherry orchard.” Emily raises her voice. “Who’s going to cancel us? The dog?”

“Maybe you should just tell us what happened,” Nell says. “Just the facts, without attaching any judgment to it.”

And so I relate the following without the attachment of judgment:

—-I would wake up in the middle of the night to an empty bed and go downstairs and find him on the love seat in the front hall, writing furiously in a notebook, page after page after page of notes on Editor Webb: his childhood, the girl he’d liked in middle school, his newspaper route, his secondary education, his college years majoring in English, what his parents thought about him going to college to major in English, that his parents wanted him to stay and work on the farm, his first job on a newspaper in Concord, the books he read, when he met Myrtle who would later become his wife, the birth of their daughter Emily, the birth of their son Wally. He was on his third notebook. I’d found the first two in the nightstand, his handwriting a microscopic block print, all caps. I got a headache trying to read it. Then I found the notebooks on Eddie and Fool for Love.

—-He forced himself to stay awake for an entire weekend because he’d heard it was a better high than getting high. Then he tried to punch Sebastian when Sebastian wouldn’t give him the car keys so that he could drive to the all--night diner in town for coffee. He didn’t succeed in punching Sebastian though, because all Sebastian had to do was step aside and then catch Duke when he pitched forward, like some sort of unfunny comedy routine they’d been rehearsing for years.

—-The four of us came back to the company housing late one night after playing tennis to find that the front door, which was never locked, was locked. While three of us discussed our best course of action, Duke punched out one of the small panes of glass beside the door. He didn’t sever an artery or cut a tendon, though it took Sebastian half an hour to tweeze the shards of glass out of his hand and get it wrapped. “Saint Sebastian, Saint Sebastian, Saint Sebastian,” Duke repeated as he watched his brother work. He refused to go to the hospital. “That’s the way they do it in the movies,” he said, pleased with his own decisiveness.

“In movies the glass panes are made out of sugar, you fucking moron,” Pallace said, waiting up with us even though we’d come home because she was tired and wanted to go to bed. We had to act in the morning. She had to dance.

“And the guy punching the window out always takes the time to wrap his hand in a towel first,” Sebastian said.

“And the door wasn’t locked anyway,” I said, because it wasn’t. I tried it and found it was only stuck.

Duke thought this last bit was hilarious.

—-He put out a cigarette on his arm one night, looking right at me as he did it. I jumped up and batted it out of his hand. “What in the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted, and then ran downstairs for ice. When I came back to the room I could smell it.

“Tell me,” I said, holding the dish towel to the burn. But he wouldn’t tell me.

Benny is here, even though it isn’t Wednesday night. His arm is around Emily’s waist. He and Joe must have had the daughter’s--hand--in--marriage conversation because here comes Joe right behind them, beaming.

Emily looks at her boyfriend in horror. “You asked him for me?”

“I begged him,” Benny says.

“They haven’t agreed on the specifics of your dowry yet,” Maisie says.

Nell nods. “Dad’s insisting that Benny take the goats.”

“I’m not taking the goats,” Benny says.

“That’s between me and your father,” Joe says to him.

I get another placemat, another plate. Benny’s been in this house for as long as I can remember, trying on Halloween costumes, watching movies from the movie basket, talking us into another strip of raffle tickets for 4-H. Benny all but vanished from our lives in the years of his early adolescence, but those years were followed by his later adolescence, when Maisie referred to him as The Fixture. He and Emily started living in the little house when they came home from college, though they swore it was a platonic arrangement between two young farmers desperate to escape their parents. We pretended to believe them, though we knew that Emily and Benny had been making use of the little house for a long time.

Nell goes to the sideboard and takes out the pale--blue linen napkins we use at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter lunch. Joe reaches into the high shelf to bring down the good glasses, filling them with wine so that we can toast the marriage. “Benny and Emily eternal,” we say, raising our glasses to love. They don’t know when they’re getting married, but they know that they are, and now we know it, too. Anyone looking in the window would think the wedding is tonight, here in this very kitchen.

“Maid of honor.” Emily points to Maisie. “In fact, you will be the only maid at all.”

“What about me?” Nell asks.

“Officiant,” Emily says.

Nell clutches a dish towel to her heart. “Seriously? I get to marry you?” She throws herself into Emily, wraps her arms around her sister.

“You’ll have to get ordained on the internet,” Benny says.

Maisie smiles, glad to see Nell cast in a speaking role.

“What about the two of us?” Joe comes to stand beside me.

Emily shakes her head. “You’ve done your work already. Now I think you should just sit back on a blanket and enjoy yourselves.”

Joe and I will enjoy ourselves. For reasons of love and stability and property, we’ve hoped for this day. We believe that marriage will be good for both of them, all of us. Benny is laughing, kissing Emily’s cheek. When is the last time I looked at Benny Holzapfel? When he was twelve? Sixteen? His college graduation? I see him tonight. Benny, so bright and full of ideas, Benny attentive to everyone, Benny who smiles at Emily even when she’s turned away, Benny who I just now realize has grown to look like someone I used to date.

Maybe I’ve missed it all this time because the resemblance is vague, or maybe I missed it because you’d be hard--pressed to find a man less like Duke. Benny opened his retirement account at twenty--three. He’s drawn up plans for his family’s orchard and for this orchard that go out twenty years. But damn me if there isn’t something about his neck. It’s not the kind of likeness that would make a girl in a mall run up for an autograph, or make an old woman at the grocery checkout ask if people tell him he looks like Peter Duke. It wouldn’t have occurred to me had we not been spending our days immersed in this story, but now that I’ve seen it I can’t unsee it. Even his hair, which he wears in a bun, is hair that is familiar to me. And I wonder if this was how Emily finally gave up her obsession with Duke when she was in high school: She learned to see just a bit of her beloved in the boy next door.

“I wish we could have a proper party,” Joe says to Benny. “At least get your parents over here.”

“Well, we can’t,” Emily says. “As much as I enjoy a good party with the Holzapfels, everybody’s got too much work to do.”

It is less about work than it is Gretel Holzapfel’s asthma. Kurt and Gretel are careful to only see people outside and at a distance. In the morning I’ll get up early and make Gretel an apple cake to leave on her back porch. That will make her laugh. Emily, the eldest of three, is marrying Benny, the youngest of four. The Holzapfels already had three children when we moved to the farm. I remember Gretel coming to the house the day after we moved in, an apple cake in her hands, three young Holzapfels marching behind her. Two years later when she found out she was pregnant with Benny, she sat at my kitchen table and cried great tears. “We were done!” she said. They had given away the baby clothes years before. They had given away the crib. All of their children were finally in school and Gretel had part of her days to herself again. Now she would be straight back to diaper pails and booster shots, leaky breasts and the pervasive smell of spit--up. When, four months later, I found out I was pregnant with Emily, Gretel said I did it just to keep her company. That’s how far back our children go.

The eldest three Holzapfels are scattered now, one daughter teaching English in Milwaukee, one daughter a nurse practioner in Petoskey, a son at the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton. None of those grown--up children had any interest in the farm. The Holzapfels’ midlife mistake alone will save them. Maybe Benny thinks he owes them that much.

“This must be how England felt when Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine,” Maisie says.

Nell looks at Emily in horror. “You’re giving him France?”

“I’ll take the goats if I get France,” Benny says.

“Aren’t any of you afraid I’m going to run out the door screaming?” Emily digs through the refrigerator for the pizza kits I’d ordered for the occasion.

“We always know where to find you,” Maisie says ominously.

“By the time Richard the Lionheart is born, the two of you will rule all of northern Michigan.” The history of the British monarchy is Joe’s winter hobby, and it thrills him to see that his girls have been listening, in the same way I imagine it would thrill me if they could sew.

Emily and Benny turn their heads towards one another. They don’t raise their eyes. Maisie and Nell are busy with the salad but Joe sees it and he looks at me, thinking the same thing.

“Are you pregnant?” As soon as the words are out of my mouth I wish I’d waited until after dinner, wish I’d pulled Emily into the pantry and whispered the question in her ear, but I have asked her and so we all stop, hold our breath, those wineglasses still within reach.

The blush rises straight from Emily’s heart, and even though I would have sworn that Benny had been standing on the other side of the table, he is there beside her, his arm around her shoulder. “Nope,” he says, pressing his hip lightly against hers.

Emily looks at Benny. She is saying nothing but is also asking him a question and without answering he is saying yes.

“We’re getting married and we’re not having a baby,” Benny says. He picks up Emily’s wineglass. “Proof.”

“We’re not having a baby,” Emily says, and I understand that she’s telling us there will be no babies.

“Plenty of time for all of that,” Joe says.

The happiness in his eyes makes my eyes fill up, and I hope for his sake we can leave this alone, talk about whatever it means on some other, less celebratory day, but forestalling conversation is not a skill in our family’s wheelhouse.

“Or not,” Emily says.

“Or not what?” Joe asks, teasing her. “Not enough time? Is this going to be a very long engagement?”

Everyone is waiting now. Hazel is waiting. Emily opens her mouth but nothing comes out.

“We’re not having children,” Benny says.

Joe shakes his head. “You don’t know that.”

“I know that,” Emily says.

We should have one night that is not about the future or the past, one night to celebrate these two people and nothing else but we’ve blown it. “You don’t want children?” I ask her.

Emily tips back her wineglass. She drains it. “I don’t know if I want them but I’m sure I’m not going to have them.”

I am making our three daughters quilts from my grandmother’s dresses, from their grandmother’s dresses and my dresses and the dresses they wore when they were children. I started collecting the fabric when I was a child because even then I knew I would have daughters one day and I would make them quilts. My daughters will give these quilts to their daughters and those daughters will sleep beneath them. One day they will wrap their own children in these quilts, and all of this will happen on the farm.

“I know this isn’t the way you planned things,” Emily says. “I know it’s not what you want.”

“It isn’t about what we want,” I say, but that’s a lie. These children we’ve never spoken of? We want them very much. We long for them.

“Crops used to fail once every fifty years,” Benny says, his voice quiet because all of us are silent. “The crops have failed twice since I was born. The winters are milder, the lake is warmer, the trees aren’t staying dormant long enough. They bloom too early, the freeze kills the buds.”

Joe holds up his hand. “Why are you saying this? What do you think we don’t already know?”

But Benny doesn’t stop. His voice comes without drama or demand and still, he keeps talking. “Sooner or later we’re going to have to stop putting in cherry trees.”

“No,” Joe says.

“I really cannot stand this,” Maisie says.

“It’s not going to be cold enough for them anymore. We’re going to have to start thinking about wine grapes, strawberries, asparagus.”

“So plant the grapes,” Joe says. “It doesn’t mean you don’t have children.”

“It sort of does,” Nell says. “Once you think about it.”

“You, too?” Joe asks. “Have the three of you signed a pact?”

“I have no idea what I’m going to do,” Nell says. “But I’ll tell you, I think about it.”

Maisie tightens her arms across her chest. “Who doesn’t think about it?”

Emily sits down on a kitchen chair and Benny stands behind her, his hands on her shoulders. We are all so tired.

Emily picks up a fork and balances it on one finger. She looks at nothing but the fork. “I can eat vegetables and ride my bike and stop using plastic bags but I know I’m just doing it to keep myself from going crazy. The planet is fucked. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I’ll tell you what, I’m going to spend my life trying to save this farm. If anybody ever wonders what I’m here for, that’s it.”

Nell reaches across the table and takes her sister’s hand, and Joe, Joe who never walks away from us, goes out the kitchen door. He is standing at the edge of the garden, his back is to the house. He is looking at the trees.