The Fates Will Find Their Way (13 page)

19

W
inston Rutherford’s wife lost the first baby, and the second. It doesn’t seem right to quantify lost babies, to say one was harder than the other to lose. But the first baby was its own brand of torture since she took it fully to term. They found out the week before the due date that the baby’s heart had stopped, and the next day Maggie Rutherford was forced to deliver a stillborn baby. Imagine that. Because we do. We imagine it all the time and we hate ourselves when we feel relieved, grateful, that our own wives have never fallen victim to the same tragedy.

It’s a relief that comes over us during solitary moments—brushing our teeth at night at the bathroom window, walking the dog alone in the morning fog—suddenly being indescribably thankful. The feeling fills our stomachs, wells up into our throats, and it’s hard not to let out a laugh. It’s hard not to want to let out a full-on yell, something primal and guttural, as if an untamed sound alone could describe the simple relief that we are here, that we are alive. Standing at the edge of the ocean, watching a sinking ship in a storm, we wipe our brow and wonder, in disbelief, at our own good fortune.

We went to the baby’s funeral. The box was so small we couldn’t tell if they’d had the body cremated after all. We felt guilty just wondering.

It wasn’t our first funeral. Our first funeral was Danny Hatchet’s mom’s. We didn’t know it then, of course, but our next funeral would be Mr. Lindell’s. And after that, Minka Dinnerman’s. Maggie’s second baby never made it past the first term, and they didn’t have a funeral.

You’re not supposed to tell people you’re pregnant. We learned that from our wives. You’re not supposed to tell anybody until you’re out of harm’s way. Maggie and Winston told everyone when they were pregnant with that second baby. You should have seen them. They threw a party—a small one, but most of us were there. We checked with our mothers before going, confirming that the right thing to do was leave our own children at home in the care of babysitters or, better yet—
if there’s nothing else going on
,
as long as we have you on the phone?
—in the care of their grandparents. Funny that we thought to not bring our kids even before we knew the party was to announce that second pregnancy.

Maggie glowed. She really did. She looked healthy in a bygone way. She looked healthy like we imagine our mothers must have looked when they were her age. Oh and when they told us, we were so happy for them. Winston Rutherford demanded we drink the good scotch in the kitchen while our wives talked in the living room and sipped Champagne. We didn’t understand it at the time—the way, one at a time, our wives gave us these sad, puppy-dog eyes, as we walked into the kitchen—sad, like they were sorry we were so stupid all the time or like they were just sorry for people in general—but we understood later.

Unbuttoning our shirts, tossing away our trousers, the kids tucked into bed, we might have said something as careless and harmless as, “What’d I tell you? The Rutherfords are going to be just fine. Just fine.” And it was that little remark, that daft utterance, that set our wives off, let loose their tongues. We were idiots. Maggie was only eight weeks, they said. Eight weeks! Didn’t we understand? Well, yes, maybe, we understood. But, no, they told us, we didn’t understand because Maggie might as well not even be pregnant, might as well not even be thinking of this thing in her uterus as anything real for at least another month. It was irresponsible, our wives told us, irresponsible for her to be getting her hopes up, Winston’s hopes up, our hopes up. It was just plain irresponsible.

“But isn’t it her right?” we asked gingerly, quietly. “Isn’t it her right to get her hopes up? Maybe high hopes are what will keep the baby alive?”

This—our sheer stupidity, our genuinely naïve idiocy—is, more or less, where each of them broke down in tears and succumbed to our lousy, worthless hugs. What did we know? Nothing.

“Oh,” they cried. “Oh, oh, it’s not you. I’m not angry at you. I’m just so sad for her. So sorry. Oh, I hope it lives. I do. I do.”

And we all hoped it lived. We hoped like hell that little thing took root and grew and grew and lived to be born and breathe. But it didn’t. There was a third pregnancy, but no party and no baby.

N
ot too long after losing that third baby, Winston Rutherford told us about the photograph on the wall of the museum in D.C.

Winston had taken Maggie to D.C., presumably as a break from their lives, a break from babies. They stayed at one of those little historic hotels tucked into a cobblestone neighborhood—the kind of place our wives are always begging us to take them. They walked all over, ate out each night, just what our own wives would love. Winston took her to every museum, including the new media museum where he inadvertently happened upon the picture of what looked like Nora Lindell. He didn’t show the photograph to Maggie. Somehow he thought it would make things worse. Like our mothers, our wives were troubled by our refusal to let Nora Lindell go. They thought, perhaps rightly, that it was an indulgence from which only jealousy and regret could come.

D.C. didn’t go as Winston had hoped. It’s not that Maggie cried or made scenes or that she was impossible to console. It’s more that she didn’t do much of anything. At dinner, she ate what was put in front of her, drank what was poured into her glass. He took her dancing one night and she moved like a zombie. “Like a fucking zombie,” he said. “Like she might break if I squeezed too hard.” She seemed younger than ever, Winston told us, but not in a good way, not in a youthful, carefree way. Instead, she seemed to be regressing mentally. He didn’t know how else to say it. She was losing weight, losing sleep, and he didn’t know how to talk to her anymore. “I’m losing her,” he said. “I think I’m losing her.”

One night, a week or two after getting back from D.C., Winston woke up and Maggie wasn’t in bed. He checked the clock; it was past four a.m. At first he thought she was in the bathroom and he almost fell back asleep.

He found her in the living room, the good scotch on the coffee table, a tumbler in her hand. It must have been going on for a while, possibly since the second baby. He left her on the sofa, went to the upstairs office, closed the door behind him, and called Chuck Goodhue, who woke up his wife, and asked what they should do. Both Peg and Chuck ultimately suggested counseling, preferably for both of them, definitely for Maggie. Funny to think that the Goodhues are probably the last people any of us would call now for marital advice. But, back then, it seemed reasonable. Names and phone numbers were exchanged. Recommendations were made. Maggie started seeing a therapist twice a week. They stopped trying to have babies.

T
en years later, Maggie told Winston she was having an affair. “I can’t sleep without the dog,” was all he said when she told him.

“Classic,” said Danny Hatchet when Winston told us the story. “Classic Rutherford. I love it.
I can’t sleep without the dog
. Man, that must have pissed her off.”

A few of us shook our heads, like we were disappointed in Danny’s inability to see the bigger picture. We shook our heads and waited for Danny to produce one of his ubiquitous joints from thin air, but he didn’t. Maybe we’d shaken our heads once too often, and for the first time, Danny was trying to be good. What we hadn’t anticipated was how much this annoyed us. It seemed some of us had become accustomed to those unexpected pot breaks during tough times. Some of us had come to look forward to them. Danny must have sensed something amiss because, out of nowhere and in response to nothing, he said, suddenly, “I’m forty-three years old. We’re forty-three years old. At some point we have to start acting like it.”

If we’d been paying attention to anything other than ourselves, our wives, the Rutherfords, we might have been more curious about Danny’s lack of weed at that moment. We might have been curious about any part of Danny’s life for that matter, and how, in spite of being one of our oldest friends, he seemed to become less and less clear to us. There were so many mysteries. What, for instance, were those packages that were always in the backseat of the Nissan whenever we bothered to glance inside? We’d assumed they were drugs and so we never asked. But we now wonder if they weren’t really care packages for Sissy and the girls. If we’d been more curious, we might have understood or at least guessed that Danny’s sudden ambition to be drug free after three decades as a pothead had something to do with his real, if not completely ridiculous, desire to make a go of it with Sissy Lindell, though she lived six states away. Perhaps Nora had never been his preoccupation, in the way that she had been ours. Perhaps it was Sissy all along.

We really might have been able to put these things together, but we didn’t. We were too busy with our own lives.

M
aggie Rutherford was the one to move out of the house. She moved, in fact, out of the state, someplace south—Florida maybe?—with a man she’d met at a grieving seminar.

“You can’t grieve forever,” Winston yelled as she pulled out of the gravel drive on Sycamore for the last time, a new man in the driver’s seat.

And as far as any of us know, Maggie Rutherford, née Frasier, finished out her life in Florida, grieving for three children she never even had, married to a man who had also devoted his life to sadness.

20

W
e never understood why Minka Dinnerman’s dad kept a copy of
Hustler
tucked in the recess behind the base of the toilet in the first-floor bathroom of the Dinnerman house. Mrs. Dinnerman was the hottest of all the moms. In some ways, it was a shame that she had to be called a mom at all. It seemed beneath her station. Or, as she might have said,
a station beneath me.

At any rate, we all thought it was kind of weird—Mr. Dinnerman’s greedy and unappreciative need to have more than one hot naked lady in his life. Probably we thought it was also weird that Trey Stephens bothered to look behind the toilet, but before we could think too much about what Trey’s poking around through other people’s things might mean or lead to, he reminded us that there was a real live copy of
Hustler
magazine just waiting to be perused.

We started taking turns using the first-floor bathroom whenever we visited the Dinnerman house. Maybe Mrs. Dinnerman thought it was strange—four to eight boys stopping by on any given day, each of them needing to use the bathroom at some point during their visit—or maybe she knew what we were up to. She was definitely the kind of woman who knew more than she let on. She was, it occurs to us now, also the kind of woman who might have purchased a girlie mag and put it in a somewhat obvious hiding spot where her teenage daughter’s male friends might “accidently” discover it. Who knows? Anything is possible. (In retrospect, we should have wondered that Trey never bothered using the Dinnerman bathroom once he’d made the rest of us aware of the magazine’s existence. At the time, we suspected it was because he wanted extra time with Mrs. Dinnerman, despite his protestations that she didn’t “do it for him.”)

What’s funny now is thinking about Minka Dinnerman—at the time more mousy than cute—sitting upstairs in her bedroom doing homework with a couple of her girlfriends while Chuck Goodhue, the man who would one day risk his marriage to be with her, was jerking off in her downstairs bathroom. Who could have predicted a thing like that?

And who could have predicted that their five-year affair would be discovered only because of a car crash (Minka’s), and because of an unexpected display of emotion (Chuck’s)? It was awful the way Peg Goodhue’s cheeks went all scarlet when Chuck started crying at the funeral. Her whole body turned blotchy and pink. In general, Peg wasn’t what you’d call the delicate type. Something about her psychiatry degree usually filled us with dread and suspicion, not sympathy and sorrow. But the day of Minka’s funeral, she seemed like a little girl, all pink and red like that. It made you itch just to see her. Obviously, nothing was for certain the day of the funeral, but it would have taken an idiot—Danny Hatchet? Was it Danny who had to ask what all the fuss was about after the ceremony?—not to realize the implications of Chuck’s tears.

I
t’s easy to hate Chuck for being so careless. It’s not like he met Minka five years into a lackluster marriage. They were already sneaking around as early as that Christmas party with the chili lights and the oily hors d’oeuvres. It’s easy to hold him accountable, to get mad at him. His infidelity did nothing for our own home lives. For at least a few weeks after the gossip broke,
Peg Goodhue v. Chuck Goodhue
became
Wives v. Husbands
. “They’re trying to make it work,” we told our wives whenever the subject came up. “You’re more mad than she is.”

“That’s not the point,” our wives said. “The point is men are idiots. Peg’s gorgeous.”

“Minka wasn’t so bad-looking, either. Jesus, look at her mother.”

“You’re disgusting,” they told us.

“Minka’s
dead
,” we said. “You can’t be jealous of a dead woman.” Maybe we said this last line with a little bit of a chuckle, maybe while we used a foot to shut the refrigerator door, while we twisted a cap off a cold bottle of beer.

“The affair still counts,” they said, slamming the swinging door to the kitchen behind them, a futile but amusing effort to witness, the door swinging limply in their wake.

W
here we grew up, nobody went around saying that they weren’t getting married, that they weren’t going to fall in love, have children, raise a family. You didn’t have to talk about it one way or the other; it was something we all assumed, especially the girls. That said, it’s hard to pinpoint when it started being odd that so-and-so wasn’t married, that they weren’t even dating. But at some point, it
did
become odd.

Minka, for instance, we noticed wasn’t married when our wives started suggesting she not be invited to holiday parties. “It’s
strange
,” they said. “Don’t you think? That she doesn’t even date? Maybe she’s interested in one of you.” Whenever they suggested something so outlandish, we couldn’t help but laugh, make light of their worry. Because, truly, it had never even dawned on us—none of us but Chuck Goodhue—that Minka was game for something like an affair.

While we didn’t really understand what Minka’s singleness had to do with her right to attend our parties, we did understand that oddball requests from our wives, left ungranted, led to week-long silent treatments that ultimately ended in our caving anyway. It was a strange request, perhaps, but not one worth fighting over. Minka Dinnerman was definitely not worth fighting over.

Danny Hatchet and Trey Stephens’ singleness stood out to us more. Maybe because they made it stand out, especially at bachelor parties or when poker games ran late and some of us had to leave before the game ended because our wives needed relief from watching the kids. “They’re asleep,” we argued, hoping to prolong the curfews they’d imposed. “What do you need relief from?”

“That’s not the point,” our wives would say when we complained. “That’s why it takes
two
people to have a baby. If babies could be raised by one person, we’d be able to make them all on our own.” We winced at how naturally they had developed what Danny Hatchet had, since Mrs. Hatchet’s suicide, referred to as mom-logic.

It’s difficult to remember whose idea it was—ours? our wives’?—to start setting Trey Stephens up with the single women we knew from work. (This was what? five? seven years before the incident involving Paul Epstein’s daughter?) Maybe we were tired of Trey being single. Maybe we really thought he needed a companion. Yet we never even considered setting up Danny Hatchet with the single women we knew. Trey was more viable than Danny, more accessible, more normal. Trey had recently come into money, was essentially a man of leisure at the young age of thirty-five. Danny still wore sweatshirts, still lived paycheck to paycheck, still worked construction on and off as the mood struck him. Danny Hatchet rented; Trey Stephens owned. There was no question which of the two we’d be introducing to the single women from our law firms and doctors’ offices.

Double dates with Trey were always fun. He drank well, ate well. His public school taste had somehow become more refined than ours. Maybe money was its own refiner. At any rate, his taste was inspiring. It made us want to appreciate wine. It made us happy to spend money. He was also able to charm our wives without coming across as a sleaze. For some reason—though they deny it now—Trey was one of the few friends they approved of. Maybe they liked flirting with him and we were the naïve ones. But honestly, they just seemed to enjoy his companionship, his enthusiasm for
their
company. Almost like he brought out the youthful forgotten girl inside them—asking them questions about crushes they’d had in high school, about former flames, about sneaking out of the house late at night, about their first prom. Who knows what it was? What we noticed, as their husbands, was that they were always a little more fun to go home with after a night out with Trey. Always a little more bubbly, flirty, a little bit tipsier than usual.

In some ways, Trey had matured more quickly than we had into a man who told the sorts of jokes our fathers used to tell and we’d roll our eyes as if to say
enough already
, but whatever girl we’d brought home to introduce him to would giggle. And so as much as we thought our fathers were total cornballs, we kind of liked that they could charm our girls for us.

How Trey developed this quality without children of his own, we didn’t know. He might have learned it from his own father—Mr. Stephens was the type of guy who would get a little liquored up and come downstairs to the basement and start telling a story or giving a piece of advice that everyone but Trey thought was mesmerizing. There was that one party—maybe right after Danny Hatchet hit the dog?—when he came downstairs just as the last of us were about to leave and started telling us how to write country songs. He said, “What you’ve got to do, what you’ve got to do is, the next time you’re a little bit drunk, you’re a little bit high—” he winked in the direction of a cluster of girls “—you go outside, sit under the stars, maybe with a girl, definitely with a girl, and you write a country song. That’s it. Get a little high. Get a little drunk. Write a country song. Make a million dollars. That’s my advice, boys. Take it. Live it. Don’t let there be a buffer between your heart and your mouth. Wisdom to live by. Take my word for it.”

The only time Mr. Stephens became grating to the rest of us, and not just Trey, was when he was aware of his own charisma. Somebody—Drew Price? Paul Epstein? almost definitely someone short—would say something incidental, offhanded, like, “Oh, man, you’ve got to write that down. That’s brilliant,” and suddenly Mr. Stephens was off, a lunatic instead of a visionary: “That’s right,” he’d say, tumbler in hand. “A buffer. Ha! Don’t let there be a buffer between your hands and your mouth. Your heart and your mouth. Whichever. You get the picture. Epstein, write down whatever it is I said the first time and remind me tomorrow. Probably a country song of its own. Write it down. You need a pen?” Suddenly Mr. Stephens had gone from a welcome interruption to a full-fledged intrusion; his interruption went from lasting five, ten minutes at most to sometimes lasting an hour.

If Trey had learned his charisma from his father, he’d learned to temper it with control and caution. “Too cautious,” our wives say now, in retrospect. “There was always something too cautious about him. Like he was pretending. Like he was trying very hard to fit in.” At the time, we swear they didn’t see him that way. None of us did. We saw him as a fortunate, as a charmer, whose one shortcoming was that he hadn’t found a woman worthy of his steady attention. But that was hardly Trey’s deficiency, we thought. That was a limitation of the town, a limitation of the drab friends we had. We were to blame. Not Trey. Never Trey.

But then Ginger Epstein turned thirteen and Mrs. Epstein walked in on them. Our mothers called. “Can you imagine?” they said. “Can you even imagine?”

“No,” we said, and we couldn’t. We really couldn’t even imagine.

A
fter Minka’s funeral, nobody thought the Goodhues would last. Nobody thought their marriage would survive. If the Rutherfords couldn’t get through three dead babies, how could the Goodhues get through a five-year affair? But they did. Somehow. Something to do with Peg and that psychiatry degree and her stern Northern upbringing. Who knows? Peg wasn’t one of us. She never had been. Chuck had met her in college, brought her back to our town to start a practice, raise a family. And, in spite of everything, they did just that. They stayed together, raised two of the prettiest girls in the neighborhood, and somehow seemed better off for the affair.

Mrs. Dinnerman, after the funeral, aged quickly. Overnight, she went from being an older woman you still had to consider sexually to being, well, old. Parents aren’t supposed to lose children. Everyone knows that. Mr. Dinnerman sold his fleet of Mercedes, put the pink Greek Revival on the market—Jack Boyd and his second wife, Molly, snatched it up immediately—and the Dinnermans moved to Russia. And, like that, it was as if Minka and her mother had never even been here, had never even existed. The only thing they left behind—Jack showed us during the housewarming party while our wives were checking out the upstairs bedrooms, marveling at Molly’s renovations, trying hard to pretend not to mind that she was only twenty-five, ten years their junior—was a ratty copy of
Hustler
.