What He's Poised to Do

“A little thing?” I said. “Isn’t he your son?”

She must have heard something funny in my voice because she took me by the chin and looked me straight in the eye.

“My god,” she said. “You’re jealous.”

Then she marched on up to the house to set the record straight.

WHEN I CAME IN, Berne was standing by the kitchen table. Sarah was standing by the door. Both of them had crazy looks in their eyes. I didn’t know who had said what or who had done what, but I did know that there was a kitchen knife out on the counter about midway between them. The air was tight, like any moment one of them might go for the knife. I didn’t think they would. But you never know when family is involved. They stood facing each other like that for a long time. “So,” Berne said finally. “You expect me to believe that?”

“I expect you to believe what’s true,” said my sister.

“I believe what I know,” Berne said. “And I have had enough of hearing what’s true and what’s not true from this family, from you and from your sister and from your husband.”

I didn’t dare say anything. I just kept edging toward the knife until I was the closest of the three of us. If there was sudden movement, I could lunge for it and throw it into the trash can, or run away with it, or threaten to do myself in unless they stopped fighting. I was concentrating so hard on the knife that I didn’t see Berne take a step toward me. I flinched, expecting another blow. Instead, he let out a soft cry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If you tell me to believe you, I should believe you. That’s where my father went wrong.”

“Your mother was lying, Berne.”

“That was only half of the problem,” he said. “The other half was that he didn’t believe her. There are two sides to every story, and you always have to listen to the other one.”

I took a deep breath against his chest and held him tight. He felt like a good man to me, a man who had acted in error and was trying to set things right.

“Laurel?” I said.

“Laurel,” he said, and squeezed me close to him.

MY SISTER LEFT TOWN. She called me and told me she was leaving, and I knew from her tone that it wasn’t just melodrama. “I’m going to Lincoln,” she said.

“Are you looking for Dave?” I said.

“No,” she said. “At least I don’t think so. I just need to go somewhere for a while that isn’t here.”

Laurel was born six months later. Right up until the end, I thought she would be a boy. Berne never wavered on his prediction of a girl. When Laurel was only four months old, I got pregnant again. Now, I told Berne, I’ll be able to use the boy’s name.

“How do you know it’s not another girl?” he said.

“You think it’s another girl?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I think you’re right. I think it’s a boy.”

I dreamed about the boy who would be Laurel’s little brother. I even had a name picked out. But then I got a card in the mail from my sister. I hadn’t talked to her in months. The card had a photo that slipped out when I opened it; in the picture, she was standing by a window, holding a little baby that looked just about the same age as Laurel. She and the baby were as beautiful as a painting. Can you imagine? Sarah wrote. Ed would be so proud. Not that he’ll ever know. Or Dave, for that matter. I haven’t seen him since I got to Lincoln. I heard he went to Boston or Philadelphia. So it’s just me and my family.

You know what’s funny? she wrote. I’m the mother and the grandmother. How many women can say that?

I miss you, she wrote, and I love you.

I called the phone number on the card.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” Sarah said.

“What’s his name?” I said. I already knew the answer.

“Ed,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I figured. That was the name I wanted.”

“You wanted for what?”

“For my baby,” I said.

“For Laurel?” she said. “What kind of sense does that make?”

“No, the second baby,” I said.

“You’re pregnant again?” she said. “Congratulations.”

“But I wanted the name Ed,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “Maybe this one will be a girl also.”

“Berne thinks it’s a boy,” I said.

“How are things?” she said.

“With Berne?” I said. “Oh, you know.”

“That bad?” she said.

“No, no,” I said. “They’re good. He is who he is. He works so hard to get things right. Do you know that he hung the painting?”

“What painting?” she said.

“That portrait Dave left for me,” I said. “One day I came home, and it was hanging in the kitchen. Berne went and got it framed and everything. I didn’t say a word about it, and then a few days later we were eating dinner, and he looked up at it and said that he liked it. ‘There’s something about it,’ he said.”

“There is something about it,” Sarah said. “Listen, I should go. I’m glad you called. And I’m sorry I took the name you wanted.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “James isn’t such a bad name for a little boy.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not at all.”

After I hung up, I went outside. It was cold, so I bundled up, and it wasn’t until I got out there that I realized that I was wearing the blue scarf Berne had found in the barn. I hadn’t been in the barn much since Dave left. Laurel was scared of it; I was, too, a little bit. But the cold stung, and suddenly the barn didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I went in through the main door, brushing a web out of my face.

Dave’s bed had been in the back of the barn. I stood where his bed had been and fingered the scarf. Then I thought about taking it off, throwing it high in the air, and counting until it came down. I wondered how high I could count before it reached the ground. But I didn’t throw it. Instead, I imagined throwing it into the air, and counted in my head. I got to eight, then imagined throwing the scarf again. The second time I got to ten.

AGAINST SAMANTHA (New York City, 1928)

THE YEAR KICKED OFF WITH AN EVENT THAT I FEEL CONFIDENT describing as godly. There were floods in London that grew the river to monstrous proportions; the banks were rendered meaningless. I had an acquaintance there, and I heard about the floods in a letter. “More than a dozen souls have perished in the Thames,” Edith wrote. “Strange as it may seem, all but one were malign. Nature did its part to sweep the city clean. It was a clarifying moment.” A few days later, the moat at the Tower of London, which had been drained midway through the last century, was completely refilled by the brute force of a flood wave. On this topic, Edith was droller. “I suppose it wished to visit the Tower,” she wrote.

That was how the year began, and it continued on in that headlong spirit. In February massive hailstones rained down in both the south of England and the south of Nebraska, killing eight all told. In April, Chicago was host to what became known as the Pineapple Primary, in which more than sixty bombs were lobbed into polling places and the Nineteenth Ward committeeman was shot to death in front of his wife and daughter. The murderess Ruth Snyder was executed at Sing Sing. Edith commented upon these events in letters she sent me over the course of the spring and summer. She had a healthy appetite for both the global and the local, and a penchant for anything