dubiously—“Dad and Maj are swimming with the boys and Liza, Jadey, and the baby drove to town to get bug spray—careful, ’cause the mosquitoes are a bitch right now—Uncle Trip is sleeping, and Nan is playing tennis with Margaret. Am I leaving anyone out?”
“Uncle Trip’s here?” Charlie said.
Arthur grinned. “Would Labor Day weekend be complete without him?”
At that moment, as Arthur opened the screen door and Charlie and I followed him inside, I may as well have been listening to them speak Portuguese—very few of the names meant anything to me, and it seemed that a tremendous amount of time would have to pass before they did. But I was wrong, and even by the end of the weekend, I could have decoded the summary haltingly but accurately: Ed was the oldest brother, the congressman; Ginger was his wife, prone to migraines or to faking them, depending on whom you believed (either way, there seemed to be a consensus among all the Blackwells besides Ed that Ginger was joyless and rigid, and thus she served, perhaps as they intended, as a cautionary tale for me); the boys were their sons, Harry, age ten, Tommy, age eight, and Geoff, age four; also falling under the heading of “the boys” was Arthur’s son, Drew, age three; Jadey was Arthur’s wife, and the baby was their eleven-month-old daughter, Winnie; John was the second oldest brother, the husband of Nan; Liza, age nine, was John and Nan’s older daughter, and Margaret, age seven, was their younger daughter; Uncle Trip was nobody’s uncle but had been the third roommate in the triple shared by Harold Blackwell and Hugh deWolfe at Princeton University in the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940; and finally, Dad was Harold Blackwell, and Maj was Priscilla Blackwell. Joe Thayer, with whom Ed and John were out fishing (the Blackwells owned five boats: a cutter, a motorboat, two Whitehall row-boats, and a canoe), was, at thirty-six, the oldest child of Walt and Sarah Thayer—the Thayers were another Halcyon family—and was a lawyer in Milwaukee. Joe was also a man whom, eleven years later, at night on the campus of Princeton, I’d find myself kissing on the lips. But this was the least of what I didn’t know that afternoon.
We’d entered the big house—the Alamo—through a pantry that led to the kitchen. Both the existence of the kitchen and its lack of fanciness surprised me. The refrigerator was white with rounded corners (it looked to be from the forties and hummed loudly). There was a large gas range with four burners, and an oak table with a greasy finish was pushed against the wall, its other sides flanked by chairs with thin navy blue cushions. On the wall hung a clock with a cream face, black minute and second hands, and a Schlitz logo in the center. What was striking was how full the room seemed—it was stocked like any kitchen for a large family, onions and potatoes in a wire basket hanging from the ceiling, a spice rack next to the stove, boxes of cereal stacked atop the refrigerator, and an open bag of potato chips sitting on the table. I gestured toward the chips. “I thought you ate all your meals at the clubhouse.”
“Alice, man cannot live on breakfast, lunch, and dinner alone,” Arthur said.
“Only thing the Blackwells are better at than eating is drinking,” Charlie said. “Speaking of—” He opened the refrigerator and withdrew three cans of beer, passing one each to Arthur and me. After Charlie had snapped the tab on his, he took a long swallow, and when he was finished, he said, “Christ, is it good to be here.”
Arthur turned to me. “I assume Chas has gone through the whole plumbing spiel with you.”
I looked at Charlie. “Oops,” he said, but he was smiling. To Arthur, he said, “I was afraid she wouldn’t come.”
“I offer a math lesson,” Arthur said. “There are now—Chas, is it seventeen Blackwells here? Eighteen? And there’s one bathroom, and I don’t just mean in this house, I mean in all the houses. Well, Maj and Dad have a half- bath, but that’s off limits to everyone but them. What I’m trying to say is, efficiency is appreciated.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“The pipes aren’t the greatest, so flush early and often,” Charlie said.
“If you take a massive crap, let a wire hanger be your friend.” Arthur turned his hand sideways and made a slicing gesture.
He didn’t shock me; to be fair, I didn’t know if he was trying, or if he was just being himself. Arthur struck me as childish, but I didn’t mind childishness—it wasn’t by accident that I worked at a school—and besides, meeting Charlie’s family, I wanted to be a good sport. I said, “Is this the same bathroom where your father came upon the flamingo?”
“You told her about that?” Arthur laughed, shaking his head. “Classic, absolutely classic. You should have heard that thing honking and growling. Who even knew flamingos made noise? Let me give you the grand tour.”
The three of us walked from the kitchen into the living room, an enormous open space that contained, against its north wall, the largest fireplace I had ever seen—it was a fireplace I could have stood inside. On the walls above it were mounted animal trophies: High up were a moose and several deer (at least two with six-point antlers), and lower down were trout and salmon, pheasant and wild turkey and a ruffed grouse. In one corner was what I might have taken for the showpiece of the collection—a stuffed black bear standing upright at roughly eight feet, its mouth frozen open in a ferocious growl, a heart-shaped patch of white fur on its chest—except that the beast had been stripped of its gravitas by the placement of a cowboy hat on its head. I wondered, didn’t the bear frighten the younger grandchildren?
The furniture in the living room was mismatched and faded, dominated by two white bamboo couches with cushions I suspected had once been red but were now a washed-out dark pink; both couches held a smattering of aquatic-themed throw pillows featuring lighthouses, sailboats, and shells. On a shelf beneath the large bamboo coffee table, board games were stacked in boxes that were also faded and, in some cases, coming apart (I glimpsed Scrabble, Monopoly, and Candy Land, as well as a few jigsaw puzzles). On the front wall, jalousie windows ran vertically from waist height to the ceiling and horizontally from one end of the room to the other. Many of the panes were open, and they revealed a screened-in front porch crowded with wicker furniture on a vast straw rug. At the far end, between the walls, there was strung a hammock in which—it took me a second to notice—a middle-aged man appeared to sleep soundly. Beyond the porch was Lake Michigan.
“Bedrooms are this way.” Arthur guided us into a short hallway leading to two smaller rooms. The first had another straw rug, a low king-size bed covered in a white spread, two bedside tables stacked high with hardcover books and papers, and a mirrored dressing table whose light blue paint was chipping. The second room had a double bed on a mint-colored iron frame and a not-new-looking television set propped on the dresser. It wasn’t until I saw the two bedrooms on the other side of the house, both of which contained several single beds and were spare except for the clutter of children’s toys and small articles of abandoned clothing, that I realized the first bedroom must have belonged to Charlie’s parents.
“If it’s all right, I’ll use the famous bathroom now,” I said.
“That away.” Charlie cocked his head, and as I walked in the direction he was gesturing, Arthur called after me, “Flush early and often.”
I found myself in a hallway where old-looking coats and flannel shirts hung on hooks, and carelessly stacked
