American Wife

We were on our third iteration of a figure Liza called crab’s mouth when the sound of tinkling glass silenced the porch. On my watch, I saw that it was seven-forty. Had the children eaten yet? If not, they were behaving remarkably well. “If you’ll permit a doddering old man to say a few words,” Harold Blackwell said, and there were hoots and whoops of support; Arthur brought his fingers to his mouth and whistled. Charlie was just inside the screen door, and he poked it open and motioned for me to come up the steps. When I did, slipping in next to him, he took my hand and whispered, “Everything okay?” I nodded.

“What a tremendous pleasure for Priscilla and me to have you all here.” Harold Blackwell looked around the porch. “And how blessed we are as a family.” Although I was still prepared for his words to sound at least a little fake and canned, I was again struck by how kind and genuine he seemed. “Looking at the group assembled here, I can’t tell you how proud it makes me,” he said, and I thought he might cry. (I tried to imagine him as a presidential candidate uttering the phrase unwashed and uneducated, and it was difficult; already that notion of him was elusive, replaced by this man just a few feet away, his face lined, his hair brown like Charlie’s but thin and combed back, the vulnerability of his scalp.) He did not cry. Instead, smiling, he said, “We’re so very pleased to meet Alice. A special welcome to you, my dear.”

“Hear, hear,” Charlie said, and rattled the ice in his cup—he’d been drinking whiskey.

John called out, “Alice, think you can tame the Blackwell bronco?”

“She hasn’t been knocked off yet,” Charlie said.

“Was that knocked off or knocked up?” someone yelled—it seemed like a comment Arthur would make, but it could even have come from Uncle Trip.

“Settle down, fellas,” Harold said. “My point is simply that I hope someday all of you will have the opportunity to look out at three generations and feel the love and pride that are in my heart tonight. May God forever bless and protect the Blackwell family, and may the light of His spirit shine through all of us.” Here, he held up his glass, and everyone voiced assent; a few people said, “Amen.” Conversations had just begun to resume when Arthur loudly cleared his throat, then actually climbed atop a chair. “This seems as good a time as any,” he said. “When I heard Chasbo was bringing home a new girl, I wanted to do something in her honor. So I wrote a poem—” At this, the porch erupted into raucous cheers, including from Charlie. Arthur pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, looked at it, then refolded it. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got it memorized.”

“Watch out, Shakespeare!” Charlie called.

“All right.” Arthur swallowed and nodded once. “Wait, it’s a limerick—did I mention that?”

“Just say the friggin’ poem,” John yelled.

Arthur looked directly at me and smiled.

“ ‘Nymphomaniacal Alice

Used a dynamite stick as a phallus

They found her vagina

in North Carolina

And bits of her tits down in Dallas.’ ”

In the ensuing silence, I could hear the lilt of the tiny waves hitting the shore below us, and one of the little boys in the grass out front said, “But it’s mine.” And then on the porch there was a delighted sort of roaring, and I quickly realized, though I had trouble believing it, that the roar had come from Mrs. Blackwell. Soon everyone else joined in, guffawing and applauding. I was so shocked that I could have cried—they’d have been tears of astonishment, not of sadness or hurt—but I knew that it was very important not to. I kept my head up, smiling in a glazed kind of way. I didn’t look at Charlie because I was afraid I’d see a gleeful expression. I wondered, had the children heard? Had Miss Ruby?

“Again!” Mrs. Blackwell cried. “Encore!”

And in case anyone had missed a word, Arthur began, “ ‘Nymphomaniacal Alice . . . ’ ”

When he’d finished, Mrs. Blackwell, still smiling joyfully, said, “I defy anyone who says I don’t have the cleverest sons in Christendom. Arty, you’ve outdone yourself.”

“Far be it from me to offer praise to one of my younger brothers,” Ed said, “but that was masterful.” (And here Ed was supposed to be the uptight one.)

Uncle Trip nudged me. “It’s not every day you get a poem written in your honor, is it?”

I gave a spluttery fake laugh that was the best I could manage.

Charlie and I were still standing side by side, not looking at each other, but I was pretty sure he was grinning while speaking through clenched teeth when he said, “You’re horrified, right?”

“Arthur didn’t write that.” I was barely moving my lips, either. “I first heard it from a boy named Roy Ziemniak in 1956.”

Charlie chuckled. “Beg, borrow, or steal,” he said. “That’s Arthur.” Then he said, “You’re doing well. I know this isn’t easy.” He turned to me, and we looked at each other straight on, and his expression wasn’t gleeful; it was tentative. His face in that moment was very familiar to me; perhaps this was in contrast to everyone else I’d just met, but I was surprised by the familiarity. Charlie’s brown eyes and the crinkles at their corners, his bristly wavy light brown hair, his light pink lips, dry right now, which I had spent a good deal of the last seven weeks pressing my own lips against—his features were comforting. It was much harder not to touch him than it would have been to touch him, to set my palm against his cheek or neck, to lean in and kiss him, to wrap my arms around his body and be hugged back. It was comforting also to know that eventually—if not tonight, then soon, and for a long time to come—I’d again be alone with him and we could talk about everyone else or not even talk but just be together in the aftermath of interacting with these other people. I felt so lucky, it seemed practically a miracle, that of everybody on the porch, he was the person I was paired off with, he was my counterpart. Not Arthur, thank God, or John or Ed, but Charlie—Charlie was the one who was mine. Certainly he could be a joker, too, but I felt that he had a more sympathetic heart than his brothers, that he understood more about the world, about human behavior; Charlie’s joking seemed a decision rather than a reflex. (Of course I later wondered: When you are the object of a person’s affection, do you naturally credit him with a sympathetic heart and an understanding of the world? Perhaps your impression is right only insofar as it applies to you; in your presence, he is indeed possessed of these qualities for the very reason that you are the object of his affection. He is not observant so much as observant of you, not kind so much as kind toward you.)

As Charlie and I regarded each other, surrounded by the chatter and clinking of the Blackwell cocktail hour, it occurred to me that if I had visited Halcyon before he and I had gotten engaged, there was a good chance we would not have done so. In the contexts of our families, the differences between us loomed large. But in this moment it seemed a good thing that I hadn’t known what I was getting into; I was glad it was too late.

WE WALKED TO the clubhouse for dinner in a sloppy sort of caravan, and beyond a grove of pine trees, another