Henry Wirz's quest for a career ended with his becoming one of the most infamous figures in American history

By James B. Daniels

IF EVER THERE WAS A MAN who was always at the wrong place at the wrong time, it was Hemy Wirz. Wirz has become infamous as the commander of Camp Sumter, better known as Andersonville, the most notorious of all Civil War prison camps.

Heinrich Hartmann Wirz, as he was originally christened, was bom in Zurich, Switzerland. His father was a tailor who pushed his son to go into a merchant career that would take advantage of Zurich's business-friendly environment. Young Heinrich, however, had set his sights on medicine. Unable to gain his family's support for medical school, he had to settle for working as an attendant in a bathhouse—at the time, doctors believed strongly in the medicinal value of baths. Despite his efforts, young Wirz was forced to work with his father from 1823-1826. In addition to the ongoing debate regarding his profession, Wirz quarreled over religion. Although Catholics and Protestants were no longer killing each other in the 1840s, religious prejudice was strong. As he had with his choice of professions, Heinrich flew directly in the face of family traditions when he abandoned Cahdnism and converted to Catholicism.

The consequence was a deep and lasting bitterness between him and his family Heinrich's personal life went no better than his professional life. In 1824 he married a much older woman. Although ihe marriage produced two children, he and his wife fought constantly, usually about money. As he struggled in a job he disliked and fought with a woman he no longer loved, he sank deeper and deeper into debt. Finally in 1848 his wife left him and took their two children back to her parents, but she died soon afterward. Meanwhile, probably as a result of excessive debt or financial malfeasance, Wirz was sentenced to a short prison term and was exiled from Switzerland upon his release.

Wirz then set sail for the United States, where he started a new life working in a cloth mill in Massachusetts. He later went to Hopkinsville, Ky, to apprentice with a doctor. After a short stint there, he moved on to Cadiz, Ky, and tried to set up his own practice as a homeopathic physician. Homeopathy, based on the belief that diseases can be cured by gixing the patient minute amounts of the same substance that initially caused the problem, was no better received by the medical establishment in the 1850s than it is today.

In spite of that, homeopathic treatment was popular with member's of the public, who preferred its potions to the bleedings and other extreme treatments proposed by regular doctors. Wirz, who by now had taken to calling himself Henry, not only chose a professionally suspect branch of medicine, he did so at a time when the northern portion of the country was experiencing a huge surplus of doctors. Into this tight market walked Wirz, an unfriendly humorless man with a heavy Geiman accent, and a Catholic to boot. The mostly Anglo-Protestant doctors of Cadiz united against the pretentious foreigner. Even his marriage to a local widow availed him nothing, and social and financial pressures ultimately forced him to move again.

Louisiana, with its heavy French influence, welcomed Catholics, and Wirz probably experienced the only truly happy years of his life there. He found work as a slave doctor. The cutoff of the slave trade with Africa years earlier had sent the price of slaves skyrocketing. As a result, slave owners were willing to expend heretofore unheard-of sums on slaves' health. The standard rate of pay was $3 per year per slave treated. For a doctor who could get an exclusive contract with a large plantation that boasted hundreds of slaves, those fees could add up to the equivalent of a very successful practice treating free citizens in the North.

Working as a doctor to the slaves on the Marshall Plantation near Milliken's Bend, La., Wirz was in his element. His standoffish personality and nonexistent bedside manner were irrelevant. His new patients came to him whether they wanted to or not. He was paid whether they liked him or not. Even doubts about the efficacy of his homeopathy wei'e of little concern. As long as the mortality rate at the plantation did not surpass those of the surrounding area, his job was secure. In Louisiana, where the counties were called parishes because of the strong French-Catholic influence, he could shed his shabby past for the role of Dr. Wirz, a man with a family and a respectable position in society.

The election of Abraham Lincoln began the chain of events that would end that idyllic arrangement. Impelled by a sense of duty to serve the South, where he had found the life he had always wanted, Wirz entered Confederate service as a private in the Madison Infantry of the 4th Louisiana Battalion. He was soon promoted to the rank of sergeant. Following the Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861, his battalion was assigned to guard Union prisoners. It was probably then that Wire first came to the attention of Confederate Provost General John Winder During the Battle of Seven Pines on June 1, 1862, two Union Minie balls smashed into Wirz's right arm and shoulder.

He survived, but the wounds would never completely heal. Infections came and went, and his arm was virtually useless. In constant pain, he became even more unlikable and short-tempered. Unfit for frontline duty, Wirz was nevertheless commissioned a captain, probably through Winder's intervention, and placed in command of a small prison camp nearTuscaloosa, Ala, Significantly, men who had been confined to the camp during that four-month assignment later remembered it as having been better and more humanely run than the average POW camp.

AFTER A YEAR-LONG mission to Europe, Wirz returned to the Confederate States of America, where General Winder selected him to command the new prison compound at Camp Sumter The prison was initially envisioned to hold only 8,000 to 10,000 prisoners. The tiny creek that ran through it would have been hardpressed to service even the smaller number of prisoners. As the war continued, however, the prison population eventually grew to nearly 30,000 men. overwhelming both the creek and all other accommodations. The prisoners had arrived before the walls were even completed; there were no barracks inside the camp, and no attempt was made to form an orderly layout within the walls. The initial gr oup of prisoners was simply placed into the compound and allowed to fend for themselves. The confusion this produced had a grim effect on the already unhealthy conditions.

Although he would later die for what happened at Andersonville, Wirz had little power to change what went on there. To start with, he had authority only over the inner camp itself. The guard force and everything outside the stockade were under the authority of others who outranked him. To make an awful situation worse. Wire—obsessed with order and discipline, yet in charge of a place that had none—began to take every act of disobedience from the prisoners as a personal insult. If he caught prisoners sneaking into the ration lines for a second or third time. he would curse at them and threaten to deny food to the entire camp. Although he eventually ceased making such outbursts for fear of provoking a prison riot, he would later be haunted by them.

Despite his rage, other actions and events seemed to show that Wire was not as uncaring as many thought him. When word reached him that a group of prisoneirs known as the Raiders had begun assaulting and robbing fellow prisoners, he was genuinely moved to assist the prisoneirs in apprehending the offendeirs. After the six ringleaders were tried and found guilty by the other prisoners, Wirz was extremely worried about hanging them, fearing that he might later be accused of war crimes. He relented only upon realizing that denying the execution after a full trial might well result in a massive riot. Wirz further showed his concern for his prisoners by trying to get an officer who had been captured while serving with black troops transferred to an officers' prison. This violated a Confederate government decree that any white officer found serving with black troops would not be treated as an officer.

Between Wirz's airival on March 25, 1864, and September of that same year, when all prisoners fit to be moved were transferred, some 12,000 Union prisoners died at Andersonville. When General Winder died in FebruaiT 1865, Wirz was left as the sole scapegoat. Once again he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On May 1, 1865, a Union patrol arrested Wirz after sharing a meal of bacon and combread with him. His trial, presided over by Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace, who had presided over the trial of the conspiratore involved in the assassination of President Lincoln, was quick, and the results were a foregone conclusion. Purportedly, Wirz was offered bis life in retum for testimony that Confederate President Jefferson Davis had known of and approved the starvation and mistreatment of Union prisoners. As a matter of honor and principle, he refused. When Wirz was led out to the gallows, rows of Union troops stood in tight fonnations to witness the death of the man who had become known as the "Demon of Andersonville." Thus ended the unfortunate life of Hemy Wirz. A man who had always felt out of place, he had found a modicum of respect as an officer on the losing side of the Civil War. In the end, that little scrap of respect and position was short-lived, and he died in infamy.

The Problem with No Name

Meet the original desperate housewife.

When someone asks you, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" you might answer, "a doctor," "a lawyer," "a veterinarian," or maybe even "president." But in the 1950s, most girls assumed they would be housewives after they married. Betty Friedan thought women needed more options.

Growing up in the 1920s and '30s in Peoria, Illinois, Betty noticed that her mother didn't have many opportunities to use her skills. Betty's mother had been an editor at the Peoria newspaper, but she quit her job when she married, as most women did back then. Betty shared her mother's love of journalism, so she worked with newspapers in junior high, in high school, and at Smith College. Betty was very fortunate to attend college--only 6% of all U.S. citizens had bachelor's degrees in 1940, and very few of those graduates were women. After college, Betty started studying psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and won a fellowship that would help her continue her education. Betty knew most men felt threatened by smart women in those days, and she didn't want to ruin her chances to get married. So Betty turned down the fellowship.

Instead, she moved to New York and wrote for a union newspaper and then married in 1947. When she had her first child, Betty took the maximum amount of maternity leave allowed--one year without pay. Several years later, Betty became pregnant again, and her boss knew she would probably take another long maternity leave. The newspaper fired her, which Betty knew was unfair.

Betty loved her kids, but she found life as a home maker "stifling" so she started freelancing for women's magazines. Betty also surveyed her former Smith classmates to see if they were satisfied with their lives. She discovered that some of the women were unhappy, and they thought it meant there was something wrong with them.

At the time, most women focused on raising their children and managing their households. In advertisements, women claimed they were content with fancy appliances and time-saving devices. But the women Betty surveyed didn't find complete and utter joy in waxing the kitchen floor. Betty learned that she wasn't the only housewife asking herself, "Is this all?"

Betty called the feelings of emptiness and depression that women were feeling "the problem that has no name." Several magazine editors rejected the article she wrote about it. One editor wrote to her agent, "Betty must be going off her rocker. Only the most neurotic housewife will identify with this."

But Betty knew the problem was widespread, and she wanted women to know they weren't alone. So she expanded her article into a book, The Feminine Mystique, and published it in 1963. The publisher printed only 3,000 copies of the first edition, but it was a hit. Soon, colleges and organizations started inviting Betty to lecture all over the country. Women wrote to Betty and stopped her on the street to tell her that reading her book had changed their lives.

Betty continued to fight for women's rights. She helped organize the Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970--50 years after women won the right to vote--and she led the fight for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA.

"It wasn't enough just to start a movement for women's rights," Betty explained. "You had to make it happen."

Organizing for Change

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination against job applicants or employees based on their sex as well as race, color, religion, or national origin. But Betty was afraid the government wouldn't take Title VII seriously without a watchdog group. So in 1966, she co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and became its first president. NOW's "first order of business" was to protest sex discrimination against airline stewardesses. At the time, airlines hired only women as flight attendants and forced them to resign if they married, became pregnant, or turned 35. After NOW held simultaneous demonstrations around the country and took legal action, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began enforcing the Title VII law.

NOW Now
Today, NOW is the largest feminist organization in the U.S. with more than 500,000 members. NOW is still fighting for an Equal Rights Amendment. To get involved in NOW's Young Feminist Task Force, go to www.now.org.

By: Young, Cleo, New Moon, Sep/Oct2006

How Was it to be Dead?

The exact status of my marriage to Sally Caldwell requires, I believe, some amplification. It is still a marriage that's officially going on, yet by any accounting has become strange--in fact, the strangest I know, and within whose unusual circumstances I myself have acted very strangely.

Seven months ago, in April of this millennial year, I took a journey down memory lane to an old cadets' reunion at the brown stucco, pantile-roof campus of my former military school--Gulf Pines, on the Mississippi coast. Lonesome Pines, we all called it. The campus and its shabby buildings, like apparently everything else in that world, had devolved over time to become an all-white Christian Identity school, which had itself, by defaulting on its debts, been sold to a corporate entity--the ancient palms, wooden goalposts, dusty parade grounds, dormitories, and classroom installments soon to be cleared as a parking structure for the floating casino across Route 90.

During this visit, I happened to hear from Dudley Phelps, who's retired out of the laminated-door business up in Little Rock, that Wally Caldwell, once our Lonesome Pines classmate, but more significantly once my wife's husband, until he got himself shell-shocked in Vietnam and wandered off seemingly forever, causing Sally to have him declared dead (no easy trick without a body or other evidence of death's likelihood)-- this Wally Caldwell was reported by people in the know to have appeared again. Alive. Upon the earth. And--I was sure when I heard it--eager to stir up emotional dust none of us had seen the likes of.

Nobody knew much. We all stood around the breezy, hot parade ground in short-sleeve pastel shirts and chinos, talking committedly, chins tucked into our necks, the pale, wispy grass smelling of shrimp, ammonia, and diesel, trying to unearth good concrete memories--the deaf-school team we played in football that hilariously beat the shit out of us--anything that we could feel positive about and that could make adolescence seem to have been worthwhile, though agreeing darkly that we were all of us pretty hard cases when we arrived. (Actually, I was not a hard case at all.)

We had a keg of beer somebody'd brought. The Gulf was just as the Atlantic is in summer: brownish, sluggish, a dingy aqueous apron stretching to nowhere--though warm as bathwater instead of dick-shrinkingly cold. We all solemnly stood and drank the warm beer, ate weenies in stale buns, and did our best not to feel dispirited and on-in-years. We chatted disapprovingly about how the Coast had changed, how the South had traded its tarnished soul for a more debased graven image of gambling loot, how the upcoming election would probably be won by the wrong dope. Surprisingly, many of my old classmates had gone to Nam like Wally and come back Democrats.

And then, around 2 P.M., when the sun sat straight over our sweating heads like a dentist's lamp and we'd all begun to laugh about what a shithole this place had really been, how we didn't mind seeing it disappear, how we'd all cried ourselves to sleep in our metal bunks on so many breathless, mosquito-tortured nights on account of cruel loneliness and youth and deep hatred for the other cadets, we all, by no signal given, just began to stray back toward our rental cars, or across the highway to the casino for some stolen fun, or back to motels or Winnebagos or the airport in New Orleans or Mobile, or just back, as if we could go back far enough to where it would all be forgotten and gone forever, the way it already should've been. Why were we there? By the end, none of us could've said.

How, though, do you contemplate such news as this possible Wally sighting? I had no personal memories of Cadet W. Caldwell, only pictures Sally kept (and kept hidden): color snapshots on the beach with their kids, in Saugatuck; a shirtless, dog-tagged Wally squinting into the summer sun like J.F.K., holding a copy of "Origin of Species" with a look of mock puzzlement on his young face; a few tuxedoed wedding photos from 1969, where Wally looked lumpy and wise and scared to death of what lay before him; a yearbook portrait from Illinois State, showing Walter "the Wall" Caldwell, Class of '67, Plant Biology, where he was deemed (sadly, I felt) to be "Trustworthy, a friend to all." "Solid where it counts" (which he wasn't). "Call me Mr. Wall."

These ancient, moistened relics did not, to me, a real husband make. Though once they had to Sally--a tall, blond, blue-eyed beauty with small breasts, thin fingers, smooth legs, and a small limp from a tennis mishap--a college cheerleader who fell for the shy, heavy-legged, curiously-gazing rich boy in her genetics class, and who smiled when she talked because so much made her happy, who didn't have problems with physical things and so introduced the trusting "Wall" to bed and to cheap motels out Highway 9, so captivating him that by spring break "they were pregnant." And pregnant again and married by the time Wally got called by the Army and joined the Navy instead, in 1969, and went off to a war.

From which, in a sense, he never returned. Though he tried for a couple of weeks in 1971, but just one day walked off from their little apartment in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, never to return with a sound or a glimpse. Kids, wife, parents, a few friends. A future. Boop. Over.

This was the extent of my knowledge of Wally the uxorious. He was already legally "dead" when I came on the scene in '87 and tried to rent Sally some expandable office space in Manasquan. She'd identified me from a bogus reminiscence I wrote for the Gulf Pines Pine Boughs newsletter, though I had no actual memory of Wally and was merely on the Casualties Committee, responsible for "personal" anecdotes about classmates nobody remembered, but whose loved ones didn't want them seeming like complete ciphers or lost souls, even if they were.

The thought that mystery man Walter B. Caldwell might still be alive was, as you can imagine, unwieldy personal cargo to be carrying home, Mississippi to New Jersey. There could probably be stranger turns of events. But if so I'd like you to name one. And, while you're at it, name one you'd find easy to keep as your little secret, something you'd rather not have spread around.

On arriving back to Sea-Clift, I decided that rogue rumors were always shooting around like paper airplanes in everybody's life, and that this was likely just one more. Some old Lonesome Pines alum, deep in his cups and reeling through the red-light district of Amsterdam or Bangkok, suddenly spies a pathetic homeless man weaving on a corner, a large, fleshy, unshaven "American-looking" clod, filthy in a tattered, greasy overcoat and duct-taped shoes, yet who has a particularly arresting, sweet smile animating tiny haunted eyes and who seems to stare back knowingly. After a pause, there's a second cadged look, then a long unformed thought about it, followed by a decision to leave well enough alone (where well enough's always happiest). But, then, in memory's narrow eye comes a fixifying certainty, an absolute recognition--a sighting. And kerplunk: Wally lives! (And will be in your house eating dinner by next Tuesday.)

In eight years of what I thought was much more than satisfying-fulfilling marriage, not to mention thirty since Wally walked away and didn't come back, Sally had made positive adjustments to what might've driven most people bat-shit crazy with anger and not-knowing, and with anxiety over the anger and not-knowing. Therefore to drop this little hand grenade of uncertainty into her life, I concluded, would actually be unfriendly. (I'd decided by then that it wasn't true, so it really wasn't a hand grenade in my life.) What was either of us supposed to do with the news, short of a full-bore "Have You Seen This Man" campaign (I didn't want to see him), "aged" photos of Wally stapled to bulletin boards and splintery telephone poles beside aromatherapy flyers and lost-cat posters, with appeals made to "Live at 5"?

After which he still wouldn't show up. Because--of course--he'd long ago climbed over a bridge rail or slipped off a boat transom or a rockface in the remotest Arizona canyon and said goodbye to this world of woes.

Case closed. R.I.P., Mr. Wall. My dream, instead of my nightmare, come true.

To which fickle fate says: Dream on, dream on, dream on.

Because, sometime in early May, Sally caught the United shuttle out to Chicago to visit the former in-laws in Lake Forest. I'm always officially invited to these events, but have never gone, for obvious reasons--although this might've been the time. The occasion was the aged Caldwells' (Warner and Constance) sixtieth wedding anniversary. A party was planned at the formerly no-Jews-or-blacks-allowed Wik-O-Mek Country Club. Sally's two grim, grown but disenchanted children, Shelby and Chloë, were supposedly coming from northern Idaho. They'd long ago fallen out with their mom over having their dad declared a croaker--prematurely, they felt. You can only imagine how they loathe me. Both kids are neck high in charismatic Mormon doings (likewise whites-only) out in Spirit Lake, where for all I know they practice cannibalism. They never send a Christmas card, though they plan to be in the "where's mine" line when the grandparents shuffle off. When I first met Sally, she was still making piteous efforts to include them in her new life in New Jersey--all of which they rebuffed like cruel suitors, until she was compelled to close the door on both of them, which thrilled me. Too much unredeemed loss can be fatal. At some point--and its arrival may not be obvious, so you have to be on the lookout for it--you have to let life please you if it will, and consign the past to its midden (easier said than done, of course, as we all know).

When Sally drove her renter from O'Hare to Lake Forest and up to the winding-drive, many-winged, moss-and-ivy-fronted fieldstone Caldwell manse, which sits on a bluff of the lake, she entered the long, drafty, monarchical drawing room with her folding suitcase--she was considered a beloved family member and didn't need to knock. And there, seated on the rolled-and-pleated, overstuffed Victorian leather settee, looking for all the world like the Caldwells' gardener asked in to review next season's perennial-planning strategies (Did we do the jonquils right? Is there a reason to keep the wisteria, since it's really not their climate?), there was a man she thought she'd never seen before but queerly felt she knew. (It was the beady, piggy eyes.) There was "the Wall." Wally Caldwell. Her husband. Back from oblivion, at home in Lake Forest.


I don't know what went on that weekend. Pensive, hands-behind-the-back walks along the palliative Lake Michigan beach. Angry recrimination sessions out of earshot of the old folks. (Her kids blessedly didn't show.) Moaning-crying jags, shouting, nights spent sweating, heart-battering, fists balled in fury, frustration, denial, and a crass inability to take it all in, to believe, to stare truth in the beezer. (Think how you'd feel!) And no doubt then the rueful, poisoned thoughts of why? And why now? Why not just last on to the end on Mull? (The craggy, windswept isle off Scotland's coast where Wally'd moled away for decades.) Mull life over till nothing's left of it, soldier the remaining yards alone, instead of fucking everything up for everybody--again. TV's much better at these kinds of stories, since the imponderableness of it all is conveniently swept away when the commercials for drain openers, stool softeners, and talking potato chips pop on, and all's electronically "forgotten," during which time the aggrieved principals can make adjustments to life's weird wreckage, get ready to come back and sort things out for the better, so that after many tears are shed, fists clenched, hearts broken but declared mendable, everyone's again declared "all set," as they say in New Jersey. All set? Ha! I say. Ha-ha, ha! Ha, ha-ha-ha! All set, my ass.

Sally flew home on Monday--having said nothing of Johnny-jump-up Wally during our weekend phone calls. I drove to Newark to get her and on the ride back could tell she was plainly altered--by something--but said nothing. It is a well-learned lesson of second marriages never to insist on what you don't absolutely have to insist on, since your feelings are probably about nothing but yourself and your own pitiable needs and are not appropriately sympathetic to the needs of the insistee in question. Second marriages, especially good ones like ours, could fill three doorstop-size reference books with black-letter do's and don'ts. And you'd have to be studious if you hoped to get past Volume I.

When we reached our house, No. 7 Poincinet Road, the sky was already resolving upon sunset. The western heavens were their brightest possible faultless blue. Pre-Memorial Day beach enthusiasts were packing up their books and blankets and transistors and sun reflectors, and heading off for a cocktail or a shrimp plate at the Surfcaster or a snuggle at the Conquistador Suites, as the air cooled and softened ahead of night's fall.

I put on my favorite Ben Webster, made a pair of Salty Dogs, thought about a drive later on up to Ortley Beach for a grilled bluefish at Neptune's Daily Catch Bistro and conceivably a snuggle of our own to the accompaniment of nature's sift and sigh and the muttered voices of the striper fishermen who haunt our beach after the tide's turn.

And then she simply told me, just as I was walking into the living room, ready for a full debriefing.

Something there is in humans that wants to make sure you're doing something busying at the exact instant of hearing unwelcome news--as though if your hands are full you'll just rumble right on through the whole thing, unfazed. "Wally? Alive? Really? Here, try a sip of this, see if I put in too much Donald Duck. Happy to add more Gilbey's. Well, ole Wall--whaddaya know? How'd the Wall seem? Don't you just love how Ben gets that breathy tremolo into "Georgia on My Mind'? Hoagy'd love it. Give Wally my best. How was it to be dead?"

I should say straight out: never tell anyone that you know how she or he feels unless you happen to be, just at that second, stabbing yourself with the very same knife in the very same place in the very same heart that she or he is stabbing. Because, if you're not, then you don't know how that person feels. I can barely tell you how I felt when Sally said, "Frank, when I got to Lake Forest, Wally was there." (Use of my name, Frank, as always, a harbinger of things unpopular. I should change my name to Al.)

I know for a fact that I said nothing when I heard these words. I managed to put my Salty Dog down on the glass coffee table and lower myself onto the brown suède couch beside her, to put both my hands on top of my knees and gaze out at the darkening Atlantic, where the ghostly figures of high-booted fishermen faced the surf and, far out to sea, the sky still showed a brilliant reflected sliver of azure. Sally sat as I did and may have felt as I did-- surprised.

Sometimes simple words are the best, better than images of the world cracking open; or of how much everything's like a sitcom and what a pity William Bendix isn't still around to play Wally--or me. Or the ethical-culture response: that catastrophe's "a good thing for everybody," since it dramatizes life's great mystery and reveals how much all is artifice. "Surprised" is good enough. When I heard that Wally Caldwell, age fifty-five, missing for thirty years, during which time many things had happened and substantial adjustments had been made to the nature of existence on earth--when I heard that Wally was alive in Lake Forest and had spent the weekend doing God knows what with my wife, I was surprised.

Sally'd had three days with Wally already. She had gotten over the shock of a bearded, avuncular, and strange Wally hiding out in his parents' house like some scary older brother with a terrible wound, whom you see only flickeringly behind shadowy chintz curtains in an upstairs dormer window, but who may be heard to moan. Her attitude was--and I liked it, since it was typical of her get-up-and-fix-things positivism--that while, yes, Wally's reappearance had caused some tricky issues to pop up, needing to be resolved, and that while she understood how "this whole business" maybe put me in an awkward position (vis-à-vis, say, the past, the present, and the future), this was still a "human situation," no one was a culprit (of course not), no one had bad will (except me), and we would all address this situation as a threesome, so that as little damage as possible would be done to as few innocent souls and lives.

Wally's story, she told me, sitting on the suède couch that faced out to the springtime Atlantic, as our Salty Dogs turned watery and dark descended, was "one of those stories" fashioned by war and trauma, by sadness, fear, and resentment, and by the chaotic urge to escape all the other causes, aided by (what else?) "some kind of schizoid detachment" that induced amnesia, so that for years Wally couldn't remember big portions of his prior life, although certain portions were crystal clear.

Wally, it seems, couldn't put everything together, though he admitted he hadn't just gone out to pick up the Trib thirty years ago, bumped his head getting into his Beetle, and suffered a curtain to close. It had to have been--this he'd no doubt admitted on one of their cozy Lake Michigan beach tête-à-têtes--that "something unconscious was working on him," some failure to face the world he confronted as a Viet vet with a (minor) head wound and a family and a future as a horticulturist looming, the whole undifferentiated world just flooding in on him like a dam bursting with cows and trees and cars and church steeples swirling away in the gully wash, and him in with them. (There are good strategies for coping with this kind of thing, of course, but you have to want to.)

Cutting (blessedly) to the chase, Wally's trauma, fear, resentment, and elective amnesia had carried him as far away from the Chicago suburbs, from his wife and two kids, as Glasgow, in Scotland, where for a time he became "caught up" in "the subculture" that lived communally, practiced good feeling for everything, experimented with cannabis and other mind-rousing drugs, fucked like bunny rabbits, made jewelry by hand and sold it on damp streets, practiced subsistence-farming techniques, made their own clothes and set their communal sights on spiritual-but-not-mainstream-religious revelation. In other words, the Manson Family, led by Ozzie and Harriet.

Eventually, Wally said, the "petrol" had run out of the communal subculture, and he had migrated up to the "wilds" of Scotland, first to the Isle of Skye, then to Harris, then to Muck, and finally to Mull, where he'd found employment in the "Scottish blackface" industry (sheep) and finally--more to his talents and likings--as a gardener on the laird's estate and, as time went on, as head gardener and arborist (the laird was wild for planting spruce trees), and eventually as the estate manager for the entire shitaree. A complete existence was there, Wally said, a long way from Lake Forest "and that whole life" (again, meaning wife and kids), from the Cubs, the Wrigley Building, the Sears Tower, the river dyed green-- again, the whole deluging, undifferentiated crash-in of modern existence, American style, whose sudsy, brown-tree-trunk-littered surface most of us somehow manage to keep our heads above so we can see our duty and do it. I'm not impartial in these matters. Why should I be?

In due time, Wally got used to living semi-officially in the stone manager's cottage, scrubbing the loo, restocking the fridge with haggis, smoking fish, burning peat, reading the Herald, listening to Radio 4, snapping on the telly, sipping his cuppa, keeping his Wellies dry and his Barbour waxed during the long Mull winters. This was the wee life, the one he was suited for and entitled to and where he expected his days to end among the cold stones and rills and crags and moors and cairns and gorse and windblown cedars of his own dull nature--there in his half-chosen, half-fated, half-fucked-up-and-escaped-to destination resort from life gone kaflooey.

Enter then the Internet--in the form of the old laird's young son, Morgil, who'd taken the reins of the property (having been to college at Florida State) and who'd begun to suspect that this lumpy American in the manager's accommodation was probably other than he'd declared himself, was possibly an old draft dodger or a fugitive from some abysmal crime in his own country--some guy who dressed up in clown suits and ate little boys for lunch. The standard idea of America, viewed from abroad.

What young Morgil found when he checked--and who'd be shocked--was a "Wally Caldwell" Web site that the old Lake Forest parents had erected as a last hope, or whatever inspires Web sites. No outstanding warrants, Interpol alerts, or Scotland Yard red flags were attached to the site, only several sequentially aged photos of Wally (one actually in a Barbour) that looked exactly like the Wally out planting spruce sprigs and pruning other ones like a character in D. H. Lawrence.

Young Morgil didn't feel it would be right to send a blind message out of the blue, so he tacked a note to Wally's door the next morning--a color printout of the Caldwell home page, the computerized middle-aged face side by side with the yearbook photo from Illinois State ("Call me Mr. Wall"). No mention was made of Sally, Shelby, and Chloë, or of the fact that he'd been declared expired. The only words it contained were his parents' tender entreaties: "Come home, Wally, wherever you are, if you are. We're not mad at you. We're still here in Lake Forest, Mom and Dad. We can't last forever."

And so he did. Wally crossed the sea to home and the welcome arms of his mom and dad. A changed bloke, but nonetheless their moody, slow-thinking son. Which was the strange tableau my unsuspecting wife walked in on, carrying her suitcase and lost memories.


At the conclusion of Sally's long recitation of the missing-Wally saga, a chronicle I wasn't that riveted by, since I didn't think it could foretell any good for me (I was right), she announced that she needed to take a nap. Events had pretty well wrung her out. She knew that I was not exactly a grinning cheerleader to these matters, that I was possibly as "mixed up" as she was (not true), and she needed just to lie in the dark alone for a while and let things--her word--"settle." She smiled at me, went around the room turning on lamps, suffusing the dark space she was abandoning me to with a bronze funeral-parlor light. She came around to where I'd stood up in front of the couch and kissed me on my cheek (oh, Lord) in a pallbearerish, buck-up-bud sort of way, then ceremoniously mounted the stairs not to our room, not to the marriage bower, the conjugal sanctum of sweet intimacies and blissful nod. But to the guest room!

I might've gone crazy right then. I should've let her mount the stairs (I heard the guest-room floorboards squeezing), waited for her to get her shoes shucked and herself plopped wearily onto the cold counterpane, then roared upstairs, proclaiming and defaming, vilifying and contumelating, snatching knobs off doors, kicking table legs to splinters, cracking mirrors with my voice--laying down the law as I saw it and as it should be and as it served and protected. Let everybody on Poincinet Road and up the seaboard and all the ships at sea know that I'd sniffed out what was being served and wasn't having it and neither was anybody else inside my walls. One party left alone to his heartless devices, in his own heartless living room, while another heartless party skulks away to dreamland to revise fate and providence, ought to produce some ornate effects. No fucking way, José. This shit doesn't wash. My way or the highway. Irish (or Scots) need not apply. Members only. Don't even think of parking here.

But I didn't. And why I didn't was: I felt secure. Even though I could sense something approaching, like those elephants who feel the stealthy footfalls of Pygmy spear-toters far across savannas and flooded rivers. I felt at liberty to take an interest, to put on the white lab coat of objective investigator, to be Sally's partner with a magnifying glass, curious to find out what these old bones, relics, and potsherds of lost love have to tell. These stationary moments are the very ones, of course, when large decisions get decided. Great literature routinely skips them in favor of seismic shifts, hysterical laughter, and worlds cracking open, and in that way does us all a grave disservice.

What I did while Sally slept in the guest room was make myself a fresh Salty Dog, open a can of cocktail peanuts, and eat half of them, since bluefish at Neptune's Daily Catch had become a dead letter. I switched off the lights, sat awhile in the leather director's chair, hunkered forward over my knees in the chilly living room, and watched phosphorescent water lap the moonlit alabaster beach till way past high tide. Then I went upstairs to my "home office" and read the Asbury Park Press--stories about Elián González being preënrolled at Yale, a plan to make postmodern sculpture out of Y2K preventive gear and place it on the statehouse lawn in Trenton, a C.I.A. warning about a planned attack on our shores by Iran, and a lawsuit over a Circuit City in Bradley Beach being turned down by the local planning board, with the headline reading " HOW'S THE DOWNTICK AFFECTING HOLIDAY SHOPPING?"

I rechecked my rental inventory. (Memorial Day was three weeks away.) I took note that the N.J. Real Estate Cold Call reported that four million of our citizens were working, while only 4.1 per cent of our population was not--the longest economic boom in our history (now giving hissing sounds around the edges). Finally, I went back down, turned on the TV, watched the Nets lose to the Pistons, and went to sleep on the couch in my clothes.

This isn't to suggest that Wally's reëmergence hadn't caught my notice and didn't burn my ass and didn't cause me to think that discomforting, messy, troublesome readjustments would need to take place and soon. Readjustments requiring Wally's being declared un-dead, requiring divorcing, estate replanning, and updated survivorship provisos, all while recriminations cut the air like steak knives, and all lasting a long time and raking everybody's patience, politeness, and complex sense of themselves over the hot coals like spareribs. That was going to happen. I may also have felt vulnerable to the accusation of marital Johnny-come-lately-ism. Though I'd never have met Sally Caldwell, never have married her (though I might still have romanced her), had it not been that Wally was gone--we all thought--for good.

What I, in fact, felt was: on my guard--but safe. The way you'd feel if crime statistics spiked in your neighborhood but you'd just rescued a two-hundred-pound Rottweiler from the shelter who saw you as his only friend whereas the wide world was his enemy.

Sally's and my marriage seemed as contingency-proof as we could construct it, using the human materials we're all equipped with. The other thing about second marriages--unlike first ones, which require only hot impulse and drag-strip hormones--is that they need good reasons to exist, reasons you're smart to pore over and get straight well beforehand. Sally and I had both conducted independent inquiries back when we met, and had each made a clear decision that marriage--to each other--promised more than anything else we could think of that would probably make us both "happy," and that neither of us harbored a single misgiving that wasn't appropriate to life anyway (illness we'd share; death we'd expect; depression we'd treat), and that any more time spent deciding was time we could spend having the time of our lives. Which as far as I'm concerned--and I know that Sally felt the same--we did.

Which is to say, we practiced the sweet legerdemain of adulthood shared. We formally renounced our unmarried personalities. We generalized the past on behalf of a sleek second-act mentality that viewed the leading edge of life to be all life was. We acknowledged that strong feelings were superior to original happiness, and promised never to ask the other if she or he really, really, really loved him or her, in the faith that affinity was love, and we had affinity. We stressed nuance and advocated that however we seemed was how we were. We declared that we were good in bed, and that lack of intimacy was usually self-imposed. We kept our kids at a wary but (at least in my case) positive distance. We deëmphasized becoming on behalf of being. We permanently renounced melancholy and nostalgia. We performed intentionally pointless acts like flying to Moline or Flint and back the same day because we were "archeologists." We ate Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at named exits on the New Jersey Turnpike. We considered buying a pet refuge in Nyack, a B. & B. in New Hampshire.

In other words, we put in practice what the great novelist said about marriage (though he never quite had the genome for it himself). "If I should ever marry," he wrote, "I should pretend to think just a little better of life than I do." In Sally's case and mine, we thought a lot better of life than we'd ever thought we could. We were happy. We really, really loved each other. We lived. Together. And we didn't do a lot of looking right or left.


When Sally came down later that night and found me asleep on the couch beside the can of Planters with the TV playing "The Third Man" (the scene where Joseph Cotten gets bitten by the parrot), she wasn't unhappy with me--though she certainly wasn't happy. I understood that she'd just come unexpectedly face to face with big contingency--the thing we'd schemed against and almost beaten, and probably the only contingency that could've risen to eye level and stared us down: the reënlivening of Wally. And she didn't know what to do about it--though I did.

All marriages--all everythings--tote around contingencies whether we acknowledge them or don't. In all things good and giddy, there's always one measly eventuality that no one's thought about, or that hasn't been thought about in so long it almost doesn't exist. Only it does. Which is the one potentially fatal chink in the body armor of intimacy, in the unconditional this 'n' that, in the sacred vows, the pledging of troths, in the forever anythings. And that is: there's a back door somewhere to every deal, and there a draft can enter. All promises to be in love and "true to you forever" are premised on the iron contingency (unlikely or otherwise) that says: unless, of course, I fall in love "forever" with someone else. This is true even if we don't like it, which means that it isn't cynical to think it, but also means that someone else--someone we love and whom we'd rather have not know it--is as likely to know it as we are. Which acknowledgment may finally be as close to absolute intimacy as any of us can stand. Anything closer to the absolute than this is either death or as good as death. And death's where I draw the line. Realtors, of course, know all this better than anyone, since there's a silent Wally Caldwell in every deal, right down to the act of sale (which is like death) and sometimes even beyond it. In every agreement to buy or sell, there's also the proviso, acknowledged or not, that says "unless, of course, I don't want to anymore," or "that is, unless I change my mind," or "assuming my yoga instructor doesn't advise against it." The hallowed concept of character was invented to seal off these contingencies. But in this wan millennial election year are we really going to say that this concept is worth a nickel or a nacho? Or, for that matter, ever was?

Sally stood at the darkened thermal-glass window that gave upon the lightless Atlantic. She'd slept in her clothes, too, and was barefoot and had a green L. L. Bean blanket around her shoulders. I'd opened the door to the deck, and inside it was fifty degrees. I came awake studying her inky back without realizing that it was her inky back, or that it was even her--wondering if I was hallucinating or was it an optical trick of waking in darkness, or had a stranger or a ghost entered my house for shelter and not noticed me snoozing. I realized it was Sally only when I thought of Wally and of the despondency his renewed life might promise me.

"Do you feel a little better?" I wanted to let her know that I was here still among the living and that we'd been having a conversation earlier that I considered to be still going on.

"No." Hers was a mournful, husky, elderly-seeming voice. She pinched her Bean's blanket around her shoulders and coughed. "I feel terrible. But I feel exhilarated, too. My stomach's got butterflies and knots at the same time. Isn't that peculiar?"

"No, I wouldn't say that was necessarily so peculiar." I was trying my investigator's white lab coat on for size.

"A part of me wants to feel like my life's a total ruin and a fuckup, that there's a right way to do things and I've made a disaster out of it. That's how it feels." She wasn't facing me. I didn't really feel like I was talking to her. But, if not to her, then to who?

"That's not true," I said. "You didn't do anything wrong. You just flew to Chicago."

"There's no sense to spool everything back to sources, but I might've been a better wife to Wally."

"You're a good wife. You're a good wife to me." And then I didn't say this but thought it: And fuck Wally. He's an asshole. I'll gladly have him big-K killed and his body Hoffa'd out for birdseed. "What do you feel exhilarated about?" I said instead. Mr. Empathy.

"I'm not sure." She flashed a look around, her blond hair catching light from somewhere, her face tired and marked with shadowy lines from too sound sleep and the fatigue of travel.

"Well," I said, "exhilaration doesn't hurt anything. Maybe you were glad to see him. You always wondered where he went." I put a single cocktail peanut into my dry mouth and crunched it down. She turned back to the cold window, which was probably making her cold. "What's he going to do now," I said, "have himself reincarnated, or whatever you do?"

"It's pretty simple."

"I'll keep that in mind. What about the being-married-to-you part? Does he get to do that again? Or do I get you as salvage?"

"You get me as salvage." She turned and walked slowly to where I sat staring up at her, slightly dazzled, as if she were the ghost I'd mistaken her for. Her limp was pronounced because she was beat. She sat on the couch and leaned into me so I could smell the sweated, unwashed dankness of her hair. She put her hand limply on my knee and sighed as if she'd been holding her breath and hadn't realized it till now. Her coarse blanket prickled through my shirt. "He'd like to meet you," she said. "Or maybe I want him to meet you."

"Absolutely," I said, and could identify a privileged sarcasm. "We'll invite some people over. Maybe I'll interest him in a summer rental."

"That's not really necessary, is it?"

"Yes. I'm in command of my necessaries. You be in command of yours."

"Don't be bad to me about this. It flabbergasts me as much as it does you."

"That isn't true. I'm not exhilarated. Why are you exhilarated? I answered that for you, but I don't like my answer."

"Mmm. I think it's just so strange, and so familiar. I'm not mad at him anymore. I was for years. I was when I first saw him. It was like meeting the President or some famous person. I know him so well and then there he is and, of course, I don't know him. There was something exciting about that." She looked at me, put her hands atop each other on my cold knee, and smiled a sweet, tired, imploring, mercy-hoping smile. And then we didn't speak for a little while, just sat breathing in the cold air, each of us fancifully, forcefully seeking a context in which our separate views could join forces and fashion an acceptable and unified response. I was further from the middle of events and had some perspective, so the heavier burden fell on me. I'd already started suiting up in the raiments of patient understander. Oh, woe. Oh, why?

"Something has to happen," Sally said with unwanted certainty. "Something had to happen when Wally left. Something has to happen now that he's back. Nothing can't happen. That's my feeling."

"Who says?"

"Me," she said sadly. "I do."

"What has to happen?"

"I have to spend some time with him." Sally spoke reluctantly. "You'd want to do the same thing, Frank." She wrinkled her chin and slightly puffed her compressed lips. She often took on this look when she was sitting at her desk composing a letter.

"No, I wouldn't. I'd buy him a first-class ticket to any place he wanted to go in Micronesia and never think about him again. Where're you planning to spend time with him? The Catskills? The Lower Atlas? Am I supposed to be there, too, so I can get closer to my needs? I'm close enough to them now. I'm sitting beside you. I'm married to you."

"You are married to me." She actually gasped then and sobbed, then gasped again and squeezed my hand harder than anybody'd ever squeezed it, and shook her head from side to side so that tears dashed onto my cheek. It was as if we were both crying. Though why I would've been crying, I don't know. I should've been howling.


I'll make the rest short, though it's not sweet.

I buttoned the buttons on my moral investigator's lab coat and got busy with the program. Sally said she'd be willing to invite Wally down to Sea-Clift--either to a rental she would arrange for him (using who as agent?) or to our house, where he could put up in one of the two guest rooms for the short time he'd be here. The oddest things can be made to seem plausible if you insist they are. Remember Huxley on Einstein. Remember the Trojan Horse. Or else, Sally said, she and he could "go away somewhere" (the Rif, the Pampas, the Silk Road to Cathay). They wouldn't be "together," of course, more like brother and sister having a wander, during which crucial period they'd perform what few in their situation (how many are in that situation?) could hope to perform: a putting to rest, an airing, a reëxamination of old love allowed to wither and die, saying the unsayable, feeling the unpermitted, reconciling paths not taken and those taken. Cleanse and heal, come back stronger. Come back to me. Yes, there might be some crying, some shouting, some laughter, some hugging, some crisp slappings across the face. But they would be "within a context," and in "real time," or some such nonsense, and all those decades would be drained of their sour water, rolled up, and put away like a late-autumn garden hose, never to leave the garage again. In other words, all this turmoil was a "good thing" (if not for everybody)--life's mystery dramatized, all is artifice, connected boxes, etc., etc., etc.

The Silk Road strategy didn't appeal to me, for obvious reasons. I suggested (these things do happen) that we invite the Wall down for a week (or less). He could bivouac upstairs, set out all his toilet articles in the guest bath. I had nothing to fear from an ex-dead man. I'd tin his ears about the real-estate business, talk over the election, the Cubs, the polar ice cap, the Middle East. Though mostly I'd just stay the hell away from him, fish the Hendrickson hatch at the Red Man Club, test-drive new Lexuses, sell a house or two--whatever it took, while the two of them did what they needed to do to get that moldy old hose put away on the garage nail of the past tense.

On the twenty-third of May, Wally "the Weasel," as he was known in military school, my wife's quasi husband, father of her two maniac children, Viet vet, combat casualty, freelance amnesiac, cut-and-run artist par excellence, heir to a sizable North Shore fortune, meek arborist, unmourned former dead man, and big-time agent of misrule--my enemy-- this Wally Caldwell entered my peaceful house on the Jersey Shore to work his particular dark magic on us all.

Sally became convulsively nervous, oversensitive and irritable, as the hour of Wally's arrival neared. (I affected calm to show I didn't care.) She smoked several cigarettes (the first time in twenty years), drank a double Martini at ten o'clock in the morning, changed her clothes three times, then stood out on the deck sporting stiff white sailcloth trousers, new blue French espadrilles, a blue-and-white middy blouse, and extremely dark sunglasses. All was a calculated livery betokening casual, welcoming resolution and sunny invulnerability, depicting a life so happy, invested, entitled, entrenched, comprehended, spiritual, and history-laden that Wally would take a quick peek at the whole polished array, then hop back in the cab and start the long journey back to Mull.

I will concede that the real Wally, the portly, thin-lipped, timidly smiling, gray-toothed, small-eyed, thick-fingered, suitcase-carrying bullock who struggled out of the Newark yellow cab didn't seem a vast challenge to my or anyone's sense of permanence. I had perfect no-recollection of him from forty years ago and felt strangely, warmly (wrongly) welcoming toward him, the way you'd feel about a big, softhearted pfc. in a fifties war movie who you know is going to be picked off by a Kraut sniper in the first thirty minutes. Wally had on his green, worn-smooth corduroys--though it was already summery and he was sweltering--a faded, earthy-smelling, purple cardy over a green-and-ginger rugger shirt under which his hod-carrier belly tussled for freedom. He wore heavy gray woollen socks, no hat, and the previously mentioned smelly but not mud-spackled Barbour from his days nerdling about the gorse and rank topsoil of his adopted island paradise.

He brought with him a bottle of twenty-year-old Glen Matoon and a box of Cohiba Robustos--for me. I still have them at the office and occasionally consider smoking one as a joke, though it'd probably explode. He also brought--for Sally--a strange assortment of Scottish cooking herbs he'd obviously bought for his parents at the Glasgow airport, plus a tin of shortcakes "for the house." He was at least six feet two, newly beardless, nearly bald, weighed a fair seventeen stone, and spoke English in a halting, swallowing, slightly high-pitched semi-brogue with a vocabulary straight out of the seventies U.S. He said "Chicagoland," as in "We left Chicagoland at the crack of dawn." And he said "super," as in "We had some super tickets to Wrigley." And he said "z's," as in "I copped some righteous z's on the plane." And he said "g-b," as in "I banged down a g-b"--a gut-bomb--"before we left Chicagoland, and it tasted super."

He was, this once-dead Wally, not the strangest concoction of Homo sapiens genetic material ever presented to me, but he was certainly the most complexly pathetic and ill-starred--a wide-eyed, positive-outlook type, ill at ease and conspicuous in his lumpy flesh, but also strangely serene and on occasion pompous and ribald, like the downstate S.A.E. he was back when life was simpler. How he made it on Mull is a mystery.

Needless to say, I loathed him (warm feelings aside), couldn't comprehend how anybody who could love me could ever have loved Wally, and wanted him out of the house the second he was in it. We shook hands limply, in the manner of a cold prisoner exchange on the Potsdam ridge. I spoke tersely, idiotically: "Welcome to Sea-Clift, and to our home," which I didn't mean. He said something about how ". . . whole layout's . . . super," and he was "chuffed" to be here.


Wally was in my house in Sea-Clift for five uncomfortable days. I tried to go about my diurnal duties, spending time early to late in the office, where I had summer renters arriving, plumbers and carpenters and cleaning crews and yard-maintenance personnel to dispatch and lightly supervise. I sold a house on the bay side of Sea-Clift, took a bid on but failed to sell another. Normally I'd have been home for lunch, but in grudging deference to what was going on in my house I ate glutinous woodsman's casserole, Welsh rarebit, and ham and green beans at the Commodore's table at the Yacht Club, where I'm a "non-boating" member.

Each evening I went home, tired and ready for a rewarding cocktail and supper and an early-to-bed. Wally was most times in the living room reading Time magazine, or on the deck with my binoculars, or in the kitchen loading up a Dagwood, or outside having a disapproving look at the arborvitae and hydrangeas or staring up at the shorebirds. Sally was almost never in sight when Wally was, leaving the impression that whatever they were carrying on between them during the day and my absence--hugging, face-slapping, laughing that ended in tears--was all pretty trying, and I wouldn't have liked seeing her face then, and in any case she needed to recover from it.

I certainly didn't know what the hell any of us were doing--though who would? If you'd told me that the two of them never so much as spoke, or that they went for polka lessons, or read the I Ching together, or shot heroin, I'd have had to believe it. Was it, I wondered, that everything was just too awkward, too revealing, too anxious-making, too upsetting, too embarrassing, too intimidating, too intrusive, or just too private to exhibit in front of me--the husband, the patient householder, the rate-payer, the sandwich-bread buyer? And also now a stranger?

In bed each night, with Sally returned, though asleep when her head hit the pillow, I lay awake and listened to Wally's human noises across the hall in "his" room. He played the radio--not loud--tuned to an all-news station that occasionally made him chuckle. He took long forceful pisses into his toilet to let off the lager he drank at dinner. He produced a cannonade of burps, followed by a word of demure apology to no one: "Oh, goodness, who let that go?" He walked around heavily in his sock feet, yawned with a high-pitched keening sound that only a man used to living alone ever makes. He did some sort of brief grunting calisthenics, presumably on the floor, then plopped into bed and set up an amazing lion's den of snarfling-snoring that forced me to flatten my head between pillows, so that I woke up in the morning with both hands numb as death, my eyes smarting, and my neck sore.

During the five days of Wally's visit, I twice asked Sally how things were going. The first time--this was two seconds before she fell into sleep, leaving me in bed listening to stertorous Wally--she said, "Fine. I'm glad I'm doing this. You're magnificent to put up with it. I'm sorry I'm cranky . . . zzzzzzz." Magnificent. She had never before referred to me as magnificent, even in my best early days.

The other time, we were seated, facing across the circular glass-topped breakfast table. Wally was still upstairs sawing logs. I was heading off to the Realty-Wise office. It was Day Three. We hadn't said much about anything in the daylight. To freshen the air, I said, "You're not going to leave me for Wally, are you?" I gave her a big, smirking grin and stood up, napkin in hand. To which she answered, looking up, plainly dismayed, "I don't think so." Then she looked out at the ocean, on which a white boat full of day fishermen sat anchored a quarter mile offshore, their short poles bristling off one side, their boat tipped, all happy anglers, hearts set on a flounder or a shark. They were probably Japanese. Something she noticed when she saw them may have offered solace.

But. I don't think so? No grateful smile, no wink, no rum mouth pulled to signal no worries, no way, no dice. I don't think so was not an answer Ann Landers would've considered insignificant. "Dear Franky in the Garden State, I'd lock up the silverware if I were you, boy-o. You've got a rough intruder in your midst. You need to do some nighttime sentry duty on your marriage bed. Condition red, Fred."


Wally gave no evidence of thinking himself a rough intruder or a devious conniver after my happiness. In spite of his strange splintered, half North Shore-fatty, half earnest-blinking-Scots-gardener persona (a veteran stage actor playing Falstaff with an Alabama accent), Wally did his seeming best to spend his days in a manner that did least harm. He always smiled when he saw me. He occasionally wanted to talk about beach erosion. He advised me to put more aluminum sulfate on my hydrangeas to make the color last. Otherwise, he stayed out of sight much of the time. And I now believe, though no one's told me, that Sally had actually forced him to come: to make him suffer penance, to show him that abandonment had worked out well for her, to embarrass the shit out of him, to confuse him, to make him miss her miserably, make me seem his superior, plus darker reasons that I assume are involved in almost everything we do and that there's no use thinking about.

But what else was she supposed to do? How else to address the past and loss? Was there an approved mechanism for redressing such an affront besides blunt instinct? What other kind of synergy reconciles a loss so great--and so weird? It's true I might've approached it differently. But sometimes you just have to wing it.

Wally and I never talked about "the absence" (which Sally said was his name for being gone for thirty years) or anything related to their kids, his parents, his other life and lives (though, of course, he and Sally might've). We never talked about when he might be leaving or how he was experiencing life in my house. Never talked about the future--his or Sally's or mine. We never talked about the Presidential election, since that had a root system that could lead to sensitive subjects--morality, dubious ethics, uncertain outcomes, and also plainly bad outcomes. I wanted to keep it clear that he was never for one instant welcome in my house, and that I pervasively did not like him. I don't know what he thought or how he truly felt; I only know how he was in his conduct, which wasn't that bad and, in fact, evidenced a small, unformed nobility, although heavy-bellied and gooberish. I did my best. And maybe he did his.


Wally departed on the morning of Day Five. Sally said that he was going, and I made it my business to get the hell out of the house at daybreak. I hung around the office the rest of the morning, catching cold calls and running credit checks on new rental clients.

Then I drove home, where Sally kissed me and hugged me when I walked in the door as if I'd been away on a long journey. She looked pale and drained--not like somebody who'd been crying but like somebody who might've been on a roadside when two speeding cars or two train engines or two jet airplanes collided in front of her. She said that she was sorry about the whole week, that she knew it had taken a toll on all of us, but probably mostly me (which wasn't true), that Wally would never again come into the house, even though he'd asked her to thank me for letting him "visit," and even though having him here, as awful as it was, had served some "very positive purposes" that would never have gotten served any other way. She said that she loved me and that she wanted to make love right then, in the living room on the suède couch where this had all started. But because the meter reader knocked at the front door and the neighbor's dog started barking at him out in the road, we moved--naked as two bushmen--up to the bedroom.

Next day, I assumed--believed--matters would begin shifting back toward normal. I wanted us to drive over to the Red Man Club for an outing of fishing and fiddlehead hunting, and a trek along the Pequest to seek out the Sampson's-warbler pairs that nest in our woods and nowhere else in New Jersey. I intended to put in an order for a new Lexus at Sea Girt Imports--a surprise for Sally's birthday, in three weeks. I'd already made a trip up to consult color charts and take a test-drive.

Sally, however, stayed in bed all day, as if she herself had been on a long and arduous journey. While she rested, I drove myself over to the movie theatre at the Ocean County Mall and saw "Charlie's Angels," then bought lobsters on the way home and cooked them for dinner--though Sally barely rallied to work on hers, while I demolished mine.

She went to bed early again--after I asked if maybe she should call Dr. Blumberg on Monday and schedule a workup. Maybe she was anemic. She said she would, then went to sleep at nine and slept twelve hours, emerging downstairs into the kitchen Sunday morning, weak-eyed, sallow, and sunk-shouldered--where I was eating a pink grapefruit--to tell me that she was leaving me to live with Wally on Mull, and that she'd decided it was worse to let someone you love be alone forever than to be with someone (me!) who didn't need her all that much, even though she knew I loved her and she loved me. To this day I don't understand this calculus, though it has a lot in common with other things people do.

She was wearing an old-fashioned lilac sateen peignoir set with pink ribbonry stitched around the jacket collar. She was thin-armed, bare-legged, her skin wan and blotchy from sleep, her eyes colorless in their glacial blue. She was barefoot, a sign of primal resolution. She blinked at me as if sending me a message in Morse code: goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

Oh, I protested. May it not be said that I failed of ardor at that crucial moment. (The past, critics have attested, seems settled and melancholy, but I was boisterous in that present.) I was by turns disbelieving, shocked, angry, tricked-feeling, humiliated, gullible, and stupid. I became analytical, accusatory, revisionist, self-justifying, self-abnegating, and inventive of better scenarios than being abandoned. Patiently (I wasn't truly patient; I wanted to slit Wally open like a bulgy feed sack) and lovingly (which I surely was), I testified that I needed her the way hydrogen needs oxygen--she should know that, had known it for years. If she needed time--with Wally, on Mull--I could understand. She should go there and do that. Hang out. Plant little trees in little holes. Go native. Act married. Talk, slap, hug, giggle, groan, cry.

But come home!

I'd tear down conventional boundaries if we could just keep an understanding alive. Did I say beg? I begged. I already said I cried. To which Sally said, shoulders slack, eyes lowered, slender hands clasped on the tabletop, her little finger lightly touching the covered Quimper butter dish she at one time had felt great affection for, and that I subsequently winged across the room to death by smithereens, "I think I have to make this permanent, sweetheart. Even if I regret it and later come crying to you, and you're with some other woman, and won't talk to me, and my life is lost. I have to."

Strange grasp on "permanent," I thought, though my eyes burbled with tears. "It's not like we're dealing with hard kernels of truth here," I said pitiably. "This is all pretty discretionary, if you ask me."

"No," she said, which is when she took her wedding ring off and laid it on the glass pane of the tabletop, causing a hard little tap I'll never, ever forget, even if she comes back.

"This is so terrible," I said, in full cry. I wanted to howl like a dog.

"I know."

"Do you love Wally more than you love me?"

She shook her head in a way that made her face appear famished and exhausted, though she couldn't look at me, just at the ring she'd a moment before relinquished. "I don't know that I love him at all."

"Then what the fuck!" I shouted. "Can you just do this?"

"I don't think I can't do it," Sally--my wife--said.

And essentially that was that. Double negative makes a positive.

She was gone by cocktail hour, which I observed alone.


Somewhere once I read that harsh words are all alike. You can make them up and be right. The same is true of explanations. I never caught them smooching. Probably they didn't smooch. Neither did they stop midsentence in an intimate moment just when I strode through a door. (I never strode through any without whistling a happy tune first.) Sally and I never visited a counsellor to hash out problems, or endured any serious arguments. There wasn't time before she left. Apart from when I first knew Sally, Wally had never been a feature of our daily converse. Everybody has their casualties; we get used to them like old photographs we glance at but keep in a trunk.

My personal view is that Sally got caught unawares in the great, deep, and confusing eddy of contingency, which has other contingency streams running into it, some visible, some too deep-coursing for us to know about. That she began, in spite of what she might've said, to fear permanence, to fear no longer becoming, to dread a life that couldn't be trashed and squandered. Put simply, she was unprepared to be like me--which is a natural state that marriage ought to accommodate and make survivable. Heavy-footed, unnuanced, burping, yerping Wally may have reminded Sally that she had unfinished business in the last century and couldn't reason it away in the jolly manner in which I'd reasoned myself into a late-in-life marriage and lived happily by its easy-does-it house rules. First marriages have too much past clanking along behind them; but second ones may have too little, and thus lack ballast. And so it's good odds that Sally had no choice but to hand me her wedding ring like a layaway clerk at Zales and push herself out of the eddy of our life and take the current wherever it led.

I'll admit that I'm no longer so blue about Sally's absence as once I was. I don't feature myself living alone forever, just as I wouldn't concede to staying a Realtor forever, and mostly tend to think of life itself as a made-up thing composed of today, maybe tomorrow, and probably not the next day, with as little of the past added in as possible. I feel, in fact, a goodly tincture of regret for Sally. Because even though I believe that her sojourn on Mull will not last so long, by rechoosing Wally she has embraced the impossible, inaccessible past, and by doing so has risked or even exhausted an extremely useful longing--possibly her most important one, the one she's made good use of all these years to fuel her present, where I found a place. This is why the dead should stay dead and why in time the land lies smooth all around them.

By: Ford, Richard, New Yorker, 8/28/2006

The Key of Love

By: Laura Kalpakian

Her husband has no understanding of music. And she doesn’t get the games he loves. But in a crisis, they suddenly find themselves in harmony.

I’m stuck in traffic, the kids are squabbling, and I’m feeling completely overbooked, what with dinner needing to be early be cause of a flute recital and late because of a soccer game and the dog still at the vet’s.

“The light’s changed, Mom,” says Juliet, 17. Gridlock lets up; I hang a left and get on the freeway. “This isn’t the way to the dry cleaners, Mom. If I can’t wear my blue dress, I don’t even want to play at the recital tonight.”

“You look like a pincushion in that blue dress,” says 15-year-old Mary from the backseat. Mary insists on being called Mojo, in keeping with her cheerleading, track, and gymnastics skills. “You’re so skinny, you stick out of it,” she adds.

“Shut up, muscle head,” Juliet replies good-naturedly. “You’re coming with me tonight, aren’t you, Mom?”

“Mom’s coming to our game,” says Mike, 13, already taller than I am and still growing into his enormous feet.

“Your dad and Mojo are going to your game, Mike. I’m going to Juliet’s recital.” My announcement sets off a new scuffle, which I try to ignore.




Actually, we hardly ever miss Mike’s games. I missed a couple when I had double pneumonia. But my husband? Never. Greg’s a physical therapist, and he’s at work before seven every morning just so he can leave early for games and practices, track meets and pep rallies, planning boards for sports parents.

When Greg Kelly and I first started dating, I thought going out to endless sporting events was tons of fun. He liked to stand up and shout. He kept his eyes on the game and his hand in mine while I tried to follow his running patter of stats and tactics. I’d never met anyone like him. I was a music-ed major from a family who used Super Bowl Sunday to go to the mall because it would be deserted. But sports were like a religious faith to Greg’s family. To this day, my in-laws’ house is full of trophies won by Greg’s brothers. Not by Greg. He was born with weak knees, so hardcore athletics were out.

What did I care about bad knees when I fell in love with him? He had a strong mind, a great smile, energy, and enthusiasm. Early in our marriage, we could see that we’d need separate rooms for music and sports or we could not live together. So when we moved to this house, we put the piano in the living room. The TV occupies center stage in the family room, just off the kitchen. When Juliet was an infant, Greg would pace in front of the TV, patting her to sleep while he watched reruns of games. Sometimes he’d get so involved with the action, he’d shout and wake the baby up.

I chose Juliet’s name for its musical lilt and romantic association. Greg liked the name because “Juliet Kelly” had the ring of an all-star athlete. He had great plans for Juliet.

“Look at her knees,” Greg used to say when she was just learning to toddle and would fall down. “Her knees are great.”

But Juliet surprised him. Surprised me, too, for that matter. One day she announced to her father that she didn’t want to play Girls Little League. Then, at age nine, she gave her dad the bad news: She wanted to play the flute.

Greg couldn’t believe it: his daughter turning her back on athletics? But he accepted her decision gracefully, like a defeated coach, crossing the field to shake hands with the winner. No hard feelings.

Juliet’s recital was held in a small church with fine acoustics. I got misty listening to my daughter play Debussy’s “Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” In her blue dress and high heels, she looked very grown-up performing with an ensemble of advanced wind instrumentalists.

I’d taught several of these young musicians and knew almost everyone there. However, I couldn’t place the woman who came up to me after the performance, older than I, with an anxious air and a deferential manner. Her shoulders were hunched, and her hair was badly dyed-too dark for her pale face.

“Mrs. Kelly, I’m Cathy Waiters,” she began. “My son is so impressed with your daughter Juliet. She’s such a fine musician.”

I told her thanks and asked her to point out her son. She nodded toward a corner where Juliet was deep in conversation with a tall kid with black hair, olive skin, and a bemused smile on his face. “Shannon,” the woman said, “Shannon Walters is my son.”

Juliet had mentioned Shannon. But I’d always assumed she was referring to a girl. “Shannon tells me you are a music teacher, Mrs. Kelly,” she said.

“Call me Sara, please. Yes. I teach a few piano students at home and part-time in the elementary school.”

“Music is a great gift. I am so grateful my son has a passion for it. Music has given me a lot of solace in life.” Cathy looked wistful, and for a moment, I thought she might tell me why she had needed solace. But the moment passed.

On the way home, I asked Juliet, “Why didn’t you ever mention that Shannon was a boy?”

“You never asked.”

What could I say? I’d never asked.

“I was wondering if we could invite Shannon and his mother to my family birthday party next week,” Juliet went on.

“What about your girlfriends? You always ask your girlfriends.”

She ignored this observation. “I thought if you and Dad met Shannon’s mother, then you’d let us date.”

“We let you date! You went to the prom last year with Mike Weinstein.”

Keeping my eyes on the road, I felt Juliet’s patronizing look. “I’ve known Mike since the first grade,” she said. “He lives down the street, remember? That doesn’t qualify as a date.”

“Tell me about Shannon,” I said calmly.

“Well,” she laughed, “he’s not a girl.”

Shannon was the only child of hardworking Cathy and a feckless man named Dusty Waiters. Cathy had divorced Dusty several years ago, but he still lived in town. Once reminded of his name, I recalled a guy who’d broken up a couple of PTA meetings with his boisterous demands; he had seemed to those present a bully who indulged in chaos for its own sake.

Juliet said that Dusty never showed up at Shannon’s recitals or jazz concerts and only visited Shannon when he thought he could embarrass him or hurt Cathy’s feelings. Shannon was very protective of his mother. He was incredibly talented. The music teacher charged Shannon half of what she charged everyone else, Juliet went on, because he was so gifted and Cathy’s salary as a receptionist was so paltry. Shannon had already picked out the university music schools he would apply to–all top places. “He wants to write music, not just play it,” Juliet added. “He wants a music scholarship more than anything else.”

I listened silently. Clearly, their relationship was established. How had I missed this? “Don’t worry, Mom,” Juliet added. “I just want to go out with Shannon, and I know what you and Dad are like.”

I wanted to ask, “What are we like?” But I didn’t venture there. I was half afraid she would tell me–and half afraid she would duck the question and that her evasion would keep me awake at night.

After we got home, I slipped into bed beside Greg, who was reading some coach’s memoirs of a winning season. He asked about the recital so he could be specifically enthusiastic when he talked to Juliet tomorrow. I told him, though I didn’t mention Shannon Waiters. I was not at all sure how Greg would react to Juliet’s affection for this boy. He kissed my cheek, turned out the light, and rolled over.

I lay there, listening to his quiet breathing. How odd, I thought. All these years I have lived with Greg, our separate strengths and weaknesses, values and instincts have braided together, so that to our children, we seem to be a single unit. And yet he still has a tin ear for music, and I have little understanding of the sports he loves. What are we like? Could I even answer that question?

As summer drew to a close, baseball fans statewide were suddenly ignited into a frenzy of excitement when our usually lackluster major, league team, the Condors, started winning. Collective euphoria reigned when the Condors qualified for the division play-offs. The Condors had a chance at the World Series! For the first time ever!

During the games leading up to the play-offs, Greg, Mike, and Mojo all took places at the table where they could see the TV. They barely spoke. After they ate, they would slide to the low couch in front of the TV.

Juliet and I did the dishes, looking over our shoulders now and then at the TV. One night, during a commercial break, Juliet walked over to Greg and asked about having Shannon Waiters and his mother as our guests at her birthday.

Mojo laughed. “Shannon’s a geek!”

I was about to reprimand Mojo, but Greg did it for me. Then the commercial ended, and his attention returned to the TV.

“Dad,” Juliet repeated, making a move as though she might step in front of the TV, “I want to invite Shannon and his mother to my birthday.”

Greg nodded, still spellbound by the Condors. “Sure, honey, invite her. Any friend of yours is welcome.”

“Greg,” I said.

Juliet shook her head. “Wait till the next commercial, Mom.”

Birthdays are a big deal in our family. You don’t have to do any chores, and you get to choose whatever you want for breakfast and dinner, no questions asked. One year, Mike wanted frozen corn dogs. Mojo wanted pizza.

For her birthday dinner, Juliet asked for my special pasta with clam-and-artichoke sauce, a recipe I had gotten from the chef at Café Eden. To go with this, she asked for a big summer fruit salad and a green salad, a spectacular plate of hors d’oeuvres served with rustic Italian bread, and her favorite chocolate orange cake. We tied balloons to the light fixture over the table. I ironed the best tablecloth and put out china and crystal glasses for both wine and water.

Yes, all was in perfect readiness for Juliet’s 18th birthday, complete with special guests Shannon Waiters and his mother. Except that the Condors’ final play-off game was scheduled for that same evening. We had to have the TV on.

I tried to reason with Greg, to no avail. “You’ll watch TV and ignore the party. Ignore Shannon and his mother. Ignore Juliet.”

“I won’t. I’ll pay attention. I’ll be…whatever you want. But I have to see the game, Sara!”

“It’s only the play-offs.”

“Right! More important than the World Series! If they lose, they may never get another chance.… ”

“What about Juliet?”

“She can watch the game too. So can Shannon and his mother…what’s her name–Cathy?”

“What if they don’t want to? What if they don’t care about the game?”

“That’s not possible. Everyone cares.”

“OK, here’s a compromise,” I offered. “You can sit in a place at the table where you can still see the TV, but the sound will be off. Then you can still carry on a conversation with Cathy and Shannon.”

“Shannon sounds like a girl’s name.”

“I assure you, he is not a girl. Just ask your daughter.” Something in my voice must have rung Greg’s alarms, because he agreed to the compromise.

Mike and Mojo grumbled audibly and said they’d rather watch the game upstairs than have dinner with the Waiters. I forbade this. It was Juliet’s birthday.

Juliet grumbled, too, though she knew that muting the TV was the best she could expect under the circumstances.

On the afternoon of the party, the overhead fan cooled the kitchen and family room; lemonade in crystal glasses and the hors d’oeuvres were laid out on the coffee table in front of the couch. Juliet looked lovely in a pale summer sheath. Shannon wore a tie, a dress shirt–long sleeves and cuff links, no less. Cathy looked prim and uncomfortable in a beige summer suit. Mike and Mojo were planted on the family-room floor, right in front of the TV. Greg hung back and chatted with both Shannon and Cathy, though his gaze hardly strayed from the game. His face registered the Condors’ every run, hit, and error.

After a few minutes, Juliet and Shannon strolled outside to the patio and the garden. I passed the hors d’oeuvre plates to Cathy and made small talk about the kids being seniors this year, applying for colleges and the like, asking about music schools. Cathy spoke in her slow, cultured fashion. “Shannon plays tenor, soprano, and alto sax, all three. I sometimes cry just to hear him practice. He has a gift. I will rejoice when he goes to college. But I’m afraid I will be diminished. Alone.”

Though I could imagine her being a very gracious receptionist, she was clearly ill at ease with me. Spreading a bit of Brie on her bread, Cathy asked, “What will I do with myself?. My job is nice but quite dull. Certainly not like yours. Being a music teacher must be wonderful.”

“I like watching kids improve at things. Training, discipline, and experience. Musicians have to work every bit as hard as athletes.”

“Sports uses the whole body,” Greg offered, then added, “Top of the fourth.”

“So does music,” said Cathy before I could even reply. “Look at the hands of a pianist. Look at Sara’s hands.”

My hands, strong, with long fingers and short nails, are really pretty undistinguished. I laughed and passed the roasted red peppers. “Do you play an instrument, Cathy?”

“I read music. I used to play the piano. We don’t have one anymore.”

I would have invited her to play ours in the living room, but then the whole birthday party would be broken up, Juliet and Shannon outside, Cathy at the piano, and the rest of them mesmerized by the Condors.

My pasta water was about to boil, and though I had the salads all done, this clam-and-artichoke sauce has to be done all at once and served immediately, so I left Cathy on the family-room couch with Greg and went into the kitchen. My family erupted with loud cheers as a Condors batter hit a home run and brought three men in.

I looked over and saw Cathy Waiters smiling. She asked if the Condors had ever played in the World Series. Astonished, Greg told Cathy that this would be their first, assuming they won the play-offs.

By the top of the sixth, we were all at the table, the meal served, and we’d sung “Happy Birthday to You” to Juliet at least three times. I was pleased at the lemony scent, the fresh-chopped parsley, and the whiff of the sea from the clam sauce. Now I was free to enjoy my lovely daughter’s 18th birthday and study her guests.

Shannon Walters was livelier than his mother, but there was a low-key quality about him just the same. Very different from the high school kids I was used to. He glanced over at Cathy often, as if to offer confidence to his mom, rather than the other way around.

Throughout dinner, the phone kept ringing after every base hit–Greg’s brothers calling from Oakland and Seattle. Finally, Greg just put the phone on the table. I wanted to throw it across the room but knew it was hopeless.

And then I heard a knock at the front door. I got up, fully prepared to send away Mojo’s cheerleading girlfriends.

A man stood at my door. Perhaps. 50. Tall and broad shouldered, he exuded a burly confidence. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, and, I realized with a start, he was the image of his son, Shannon. Shock scrambled across my face.

“Hi!” he said. “Dusty Walters. Cathy’s neighbor told me where Shannon and Cathy were off to, and I got your address out of the phone book.” He opened the screen door and shook my hand with a grip a little too tight. “I need to talk to Shannon.”

“I don’t think you can come in right now,” I said. “We’re having a family party.”

“Won’t take a minute,” he said, pushing past me into the living room. “You play the piano, huh? What a waste of time. Are they back there?” He waved in the direction of the voices, and, speechless, I followed him into the kitchen.

Greg, Mojo, and Mike tore their gaze from the TV and stared. But their shock was nothing compared with the look on the faces of Shannon and Cathy Waiters. Cathy blanched. Shannon’s face seized up as Dusty burst in and greeted them.

Shannon stood up. He seemed about to vault over the table, to stand between Dusty and Cathy. He glanced at Juliet. “This is my father,” he said, color flooding his sallow complexion.

The phone rang again, and Greg picked it up. His brother from Oakland.

“Don’t mind me. I just wanna talk to Shannon, but it can wait,” said Dusty, plopping down on the couch. “I’ll just watch the game till you’re done.”

He popped a couple of olives in his mouth, found the remote, hit the mute button, and turned up the volume. The noise and clamor of the game filled the space around us.

Shannon turned to me. “Excuse me for a moment.” He walked to the couch.

“Great game!” cried Dusty without turning around. “Except the bums are losing.”

Suddenly I saw, or thought I saw, the whole tapestry of Cathy Walters’s past: the bright-eyed woman she must have been when she married Dusty Waiters, how he must have seemed to her larger than life. And then how she had lived in his shadow. I understood how Shannon gave her strength and purpose and how she would indeed be diminished when he left home. And yet I knew that she would do everything in her power to help him leave, to help him fulfill his dreams.

As I listened to the drone of Shannon’s voice while he spoke quietly to Dusty, I felt I was in the presence of a kind of heroism. Not gold medals, not triumphs on the court or the mat or the field or the ice, but just as hard earned, practiced, and demanding. I felt bad that I hadn’t been able to protect Shannon and Cathy from Dusty Waiters, but I knew that Shannon and Cathy had been protecting each other for years.

“I said I’ll wait,” Dusty insisted, brushing Shannon off. “I’ll just sit here and watch. Everyone in America is watching the game.” He popped a few more olives. “Hit the ball!” he cried out to the TV.

Shannon went back to Juliet. “Maybe Mom and I should leave.”

“No.” She took his hand. “I don’t want you to leave. Either of you.”

Greg barked into the phone, “Don’t call back–I’ll call you,” then hung up on his brother. He looked at me. Suddenly, I knew the answer to the question “What are we like?” We’re in accord, that’s what we are. No matter the ways in which we are different, fundamentally, we are in accord. Maybe that’s the gift of a long marriage: that you give up a part of your individuality to be part of another person, and he gives up his to be part of you.

Greg strode across the family room and took the remote from Dusty Walters. He turned the TV off. The sudden silence fell upon us like the collapse of a huge tent, billowing out to the farthest corners of the room. It was quiet, save for the hum of the fans. A distant dog barked.

“Mr. Walters,” Greg said, “maybe everyone in America is watching this game, but we’re not. You need to go somewhere else to watch it.”

Greg then tossed the remote over to the counter. He offered his hand to Dusty Walters, said it had been a pleasure to meet him, and in the same fluid movement, pulled him to his feet, clapped him on the back, and escorted him out of the family room, talking nonstop about stats, RBIs, and the inadequacy of the shortstop as he ushered Shannon’s father to the front door. We heard it close.

“Is everyone ready for birthday cake?” I asked, looking at Cathy Walters’s frozen expression. “Cathy?”

We heard a car start up and drive away. Cathy’s face seemed to thaw, and though it would be too much to say she smiled, her features assumed an uncertain ease.

Mojo cleared the plates, and I sent Mike looking for the birthday candles. Greg came back into the room and sat down in my place, beside Cathy. His back was to the TV. Mike handed me the birthday candles and reached for the remote. He popped it on, and the roar from the stands, the crack of the bat filled the room.

“Turn it off,” said Greg.

“But, Dad,” Mojo cried, “it’s the top of the ninth. And they’re down by two runs!”

“Turn it off,” Greg repeated. And this time Mike did so. The fan turned overhead. “It’s a birthday party. What we need is some music.”

Yes, I thought: This is where discipline, training, and experience pay off. In this family, there are no weak knees.

http://www.st0ries.com/

Unleashing the Energy

Most scheduled gatherings of teachers are, in fact, meetings at which teachers yawn their way through lists of informational items announced and commented on by the principal. If any clear communication results from these meetings, it takes place in the parking lot long after the official meeting has ended. In my years as acting principal, I led many meetings that fit this description.

Yet I have also led faculty meetings that were productive gatherings filled with creative collaboration and teacher learning- When conducting such meetings, I felt like a facilitator of unbounded teacher energy. I watched as leadership emerged and creativity surfaced from normally quiet staff members, as teachers launched rich, vociferous conversations around real issues, and, when necessary, willingly allowed meetings to stretch beyond our contractual time.

How One School Got There
One of the most dramatic changes I saw in faculty meetings occurred at Pleasant Hill School in Palatine, Illinois. The teachers and I both knew that the meetings I conducted were top-down and filled with administrivia; at times we spent more minutes deciding whether to have more or chicken salad at the faculty luncheon than we did on analyzing critical data from local assessments. We knew that good meetings, like good lesson plans, should have clear goals, an organized agenda, and a setup that encourages people to interact respectfully. But we wrestled with how to make change. What was the best way to break through a stultifying structure and turn meetings over to teachers?

Then attendance at a day-long professional development session with a talented consultant shifted how we organized our school improvement efforts and conceived of faculty meetings. Realizing that we needed a structure and a modus operandi for faculty to meaningfully participate in our school improvement goals, we formed five standing voluntary committees: Teaching and Learning, Safety and Discipline, Staff Development, Communication, and Budget. Each committee met monthly, and our faculty meetings soon connected directly to committees' work. Reports and recommendations from committees became the main agenda for OUT weekly faculty meeting. Any faculty member could suggest an agenda item for consideration. Unless I had crucial issues that could not be shared elsewhere, my agenda items came last. Faculty meetings became, in actuality, faculty meetings.

Setting Ground Rules, Facing Fear
We established ground rules that made these meetings productive as well as democratic.

We made attendance voluntary; however, if a teacher chose to miss a meeting, that absence was interpreted as tacit support for all decisions made at the meeting.
We promised to listen to one another.
We agreed to take turns speaking.
We committed ourselves to respecting differences of opinion.
We agreed to invite quieter teachers into the conversation, and teachers who spoke often and impulsively agreed not to dominate discussions (this was the hardest rule to keep).
We agreed to say what needed to be said at the faculty meeting, not in the parking lot.
We promised to respect confidentiality.
Personally, I was scared. Giving up control of faculty meetings meant I had to trust teachers and have faith in the process of collegiality. I didn't have time to attend most of the committee meetings. I had to trust that teachers would wrestle with school issues and report about them directly to fellow teachers and staff — always supporting our major commitment to serve kids in all we did.

Slowly as I let go and the committees did their work, teachers took ownership of crucial issues. I heard fewer comments like "she always …" or "they won't let us do that." Teachers emerged as true leaders, able to make decisions and hold themselves and others accountable. Teachers began directing the parade; I only had to stay informed so that I could stand in front of the group and look like I was leading. As Roland Barth has quipped, "Hey, I am the leader. Wait up!"

Complaints still surfaced. Some teachers thought that they were being asked to do "the principals job." Others objected to the multiplicity of meetings. Strong-voiced teachers still dominated the meetings; chronically cranky teachers remained cranky. Our smaller leadership team, consisting of the chairs of each committee, tackled these and other issues. My work as principal continued, and the many problems that were mine alone to resolve remained on my desk. The buck still stopped with me.

Unleashing the creative energy of teachers can be difficult and scary; it occasionally feels like losing control. But at Pleasant Hill, once we gave teachers more control, faculty meetings no longer stimulated naps — they promoted real conversations about teachers' aspirations and shared goals. For teachers to begin their journey, I first had to let go.

Teachers began directing the parade; I only had to stay informed.

We agreed to say what needed to be said at the faculty meeting, not in the parking lot.

By: Rooney, Joanne, Educational Leadership, Sep2006

Symphony for twelve wheels and a coal scoop

Yes, son of Bristol, you can go home again

I became acquainted with Norfolk & Western's class M 4-8-0s at an early age. I was boosted into the cab of No. 467 at Bristol Shop before I was old enough for grammar school. I didn't know what I was looking at, except that there was a lot of heat from that open firedoor. But I was hooked.

Witnessing these rare (though I didn't realize how rare at the time) little creatures going about their business in the yard in my home town of Bristol, Va., and coming and going on the Abingdon Branch mixed train (often called the "V-C" after the Virginia-Carolina Railway that built the Branch, and sometimes called "The Carolina Queen") was as educational as it was fascinating.

Bristol Yard was not the only place I got to watch these engines. My grandfather spent the last 14 years of his career as express messenger on the "V-C", and I made many trips with him on his run. Over the years, I rode behind Ms 382, 429, 495, and several doubleheaders: 382 and 429; 382 and 396 (a non-superheated Bristol yard engine that branch crews hated because it worked the fireman harder -he had to shovel more coal to produce the power of the superheated engines); 429 and 495; and 382 and 429 with the 433 (another Bristol yard engine) pushing. The N&W used the three-engine train to haul rock to a highway project in North Carolina. The 433 was cut in ahead of the mixed train's coaches on the rear, and was cut off at White Top to return to Bristol light. An M was rated for only 325 tons on the 3-percent grade up to White Top, and 10 loads of rock in 50-ton hoppers was roughly 850 of the 975 tons that three of them could handle.

After about 30 of these excursions with my grandfather, one day at West Jefferson I mustered up the courage to ask engineer Joe McNew if he'd let me ride the 429 back north. He said, "OK, but when we stop at White Top you drop off on my side (away from the depot) and go back to the rear end."

So I set up the drop seat on the fireman's side and took it all in as the West Jefferson switching was completed. We stopped to align the split-rail derail for our movement and again to put it back in derailing position. And then we were off.

It was downhill or level through Smethport, Warrensville, Bina, and Lansing, but, as we left Tuckerdale, White Top Mountain loomed ahead, and the 429 began to give out with that gruff, irritated bark (the antithesis of "cracking at the stack") that was familiar to me as the way an M used to describe just what was wrong and what it intended to do about it. Bristol Shop had her valves square, and she was speaking with authority. Fireman D.S. Nichols' work with the shovel had a rhythm of its own -- the chuck of the shovel going into the coal pile in the tender, the hiss of the air-operated Butterfly firedoors opening in response to Nichols' foot on the operating pedal, the clank of the heel of the shovel hitting the firedoor frame to spread the coal, and the loud clack of the door slamming shut after the shovel was withdrawn. Chuck-hiss-clank-clack-chuck-hiss-clank-clack chuck-hill-clank-clack.…

Let the music begin to play
As we passed the flag stop at Nella, the mountain started to get nasty (ruling grade: 2.5 percent) and McNew widened on the 429 -- that angry gruff bark increased mightily in volume. And Nichols' chuck-hiss-clank-clack stepped up its tempo. George Gershwin fans can talk about his song "Fascinatin' Rhythm" all they want, but it had nothing on the music I was hearing that bright summer day, on a half-century-old Twelve-Wheeler walking up White Top Mountain and telling the world what was going on in its own language, to the counterpoint of Nichols feeding his fire -- a symphony for twelve wheels and a scoop shovel.

Today, the Abingdon Branch is mostly a bike trail; the Bristol Ms are all gone except the 433 enshrined in the branch's namesake city; the crew members, including my grandfather and Joe McNew, have passed on.

Over the years, I grew to appreciate that these little engines had an interesting history. In 1906-07 the Norfolk & Western Railway obtained 125 4-8-0 locomotives to which it assigned the class letter "M." First to come were 50 from Baldwin numbered 450-499; the other 75, Nos. 375-449, came from American Locomotive Co.'s Richmond Works.

The 4-8-0 wheel arrangement found little favor among American railroads; at the same time N&W started receiving 4-8-0s, the 2-8-2 wheel arrangement, with its deeper firebox over a pair of carrying wheels, or trailer truck, was beginning to demonstrate advantages. But N&W liked to use the weight of the firebox for adhesion, so it raised the firebox over the last driving wheels and lengthened the front end of the boiler, providing a four-wheel leading truck for the weight of the boiler and for increased guidance in curves. The M was little more than an enlargement of N&W's class W-2 2-8-0, with more heating surface and slightly smaller grate area. It shared the 2-8-0's 200-pound boiler pressure, cylinders of 21-inch bore and 30-inch stroke, 56-inch drivers, and tractive effort of 40,163 pounds, less than most contemporary Consolidations of comparable weight. But it was a somewhat better steamer than the W-2, and was considered faster.

No cab deck, controls on the boiler side
The Ms, like all the Ws, had no cab deck behind the backhead. The firebox extended to the back of the cab, and the fireman baled coal while standing on the tender deck.

The engineer sat on a drop seat be side the firebox, and his utensils were arranged more or less conveniently up to his left. The throttle lever hung down over the shoulder of the firebox, and was directly connected to the throttle in the steam dome by an operating rod that passed through the front of the cab, above the boiler, and through a packing gland in the back of the dome. The reverse lever was in front of him against the side of the firebox with the water glass just above, and the injector controls -- a water valve, the overflow valve, and the operating lever -- were in front of him against the outer wall of the cab. His position might have been somewhat cramped, but his visibility to the front was superb. On the fireman's side, there was a drop seat for the times he could use it, a water glass, and injector controls arranged like the engineer's.

Like the W-2s, the Ms were equipped with piston valves arranged for inside admission operated by Stephenson valve gear; the valve rod was in the same vertical plane as the piston rod, evidently to minimize the length of the steam passages between the valve and the cylinder. N&W's use of these modern valves began before the turn of the 20th century. Where other railroads stayed with slide valves until the advent of superheating caused lubrication problems that made such valves obsolete around 1910 or so, the N&W owned 648 locomotives equipped with inside-admission piston valves before the first superheated locomotive hit the property.

N&W bought 100 M-1 4-8-0s (numbers 1000-1099) from Alco and Baldwin in i907; the big difference from the M was the application of a somewhat unsatisfactory design of Walschaerts valve gear, and the boiler check valves attached to a separate dome atop the boiler. The M-1s were all gone by 1947.

The Edwardian era was not a good one for steam locomotive aesthetics on the N&W. Contemporary locomotives on other railroads were beginning to bring pleasurable elements and balance to steam locomotive appearance, but N&W's typical (for the day) big cabs with 12 windowpanes on each side perched on the back end of wagon-top boilers with a drastic taper in the second course, behind a big old headlight mounted high on the smoke-box front doomed the Ms and M-1s from the start -- just like their N&W predecessor classes. They were born ugly and no re-arrangement of details ever made them any prettier; lowered headlights on some of them in later years helped, but not much.

To me, though, an M never was homely. It was home.

The reign of the M as the queen of N&W's freight power was brief; steam locomotive technology advanced rapidly in the era, and size mattered. Sixty-one larger 4-8-0s (classes M-2 and M-2a, b, and c) came in 1910-12 giving the N&W the continent's largest fleet -- 286 Twelve-Wheelers. Then the Mallet floodgates opened. One-hundred-ninety superheated 2-6-6-2s (classes Z-1 and Z-la) started coming in May 1912. It had taken locomotive designers less than six years to develop a machine that could do the work of a pair of Ms, and use a little less coal and a lot less water than the two 4-8-0s while doing it. (The 4-8-0 concept proved to be a dead end as far as locomotive technology was concerned; the M-2s were not as good as other roads' 2-8-2s of comparable weight, and no further expansion was possible with the firebox over the drivers.)

The Zs were just the beginning. The first Y-2 came in 1918 -- the sire of what would become the world's largest fleet of 2-8-8-2 Mallets.

The advent of each larger locomotive downgraded the Ms; local freights, work trains, branch lines and yard service were to be their homes from then on. Of course, by then they'd demonstrated their virtues; they were good steamers, lightfooted, and handled sharp curvature nicely. But by the mid-1920s there weren't enough homes for all of them and the Ws, too; scrappings began then and accelerated through the Depression-riddled 1930s.

Mighty tall assignment for the class M
Many Ms received Baker valve gear in the 1910s. The configuration of the valves directly over the pistons rather than being offset to the outside required the use of a rocker arm to get the motion from the outside of the wheels to the inboard vertical plane of the valve. This, in turn, required the combination lever to be hung from the vertical arm of the bell crank of the Baker valve gear and the union link to be aft of the crosshead, with the reach rod to the rocker arm attaching just below the bell crank connection. The action of the union link and combination lever was thus close enough to be visually combined with that of the eccentric crank and its rod to make a mesmerizing melange of motion.

Eight Ms (382,386,439,447,457,482,493,and 495) received superheaters in 1915. When the 386 and 493 were scrapped in the late '20s, their superheaters were applied to the 429 and 459. The superheated Ms were favored for the more demanding branch line and local freight services requiring locomotives with light axle loadings where a fair turn of speed was desired.

The terminus of the spectacular Abingdon Branch mixed train was moved from Abingdon to Bristol after World War II, and 15 miles of running on the fast Bristol line main was required as both a prelude and postlude to the twice-a-day battle with White Top Mountain (N&W's highest summit, at better than 3,500 feet). Thus, "a fair turn of speed" was desired. The 382,429, and 495 were sent .to Bristol for that service. In the mid-1950s the 382 and 429 were fitted with N&W-designed 20-ton, 12,000-gallon, 12-wheel tenders that had originally been constructed for Y-2 2-8-8-2s (the 495 was scrapped in 1953). Several other Ms without superheaters were assigned to Bristol as yard engines; a couple of them had the big tenders.

"Fair turn of speed"? The Bristol Line CTC dispatchers thought nothing of turning the V-C out of the west end of the siding at Abingdon while the Tennessean, all streamlined equipment and powered by a class J 4-8-4, was getting near the east end of the Abingdon siding, coming in to make its station stop. They expected the M would get over the high-speed hump east of Wyndale and go into Bristol without delaying the streamliner, and it would, too. Wyndale Hill was the last challenge for the fireman who'd already shoveled his way over N&W's highest summit twice. When the V-C was on time, the Tennessean wasn't close. But when the branch train was late, the M's fireman was in for some fast shoveling over Wyndale.

It's been about 50 years now since I got that ride on the 429 over White Top Mountain. Along the way, I've made a few of my own chuck-hiss-clank-clacks firing Southern steam excursions on Consolidation 630 and Mikado 4501 -- the language was the same but the dialect was different. Southern excursion engines weren't gruff; they cracked at the stack, in the traditional fashion of all Southern power -- a sassier sound. And Nichols' proficiency with the scoop shovel was an unreachable dream for me.

The memory of that day is still embedded in my mind, no doubt taking up room in my rapidly contracting cerebral capacity that should be available for more useful things. There's nothing I can do about that. It won't go away, and I don't want it to go away.

But wait a minute. Incredibly, there's an M actually running in 2006 at age 100. One of the 429's sisters, Baldwin 475, is operating on the Strasburg Rail Road in Pennsylvania, not far from her birthplace in Philadelphia.

I had never seen the 475 run; in my recollection, it had never been assigned to Bristol, and when N&W sent an M to Bris