The Lonely Polygamist (53 page)

Unable to look into Ted Leo’s watery, bloodshot eyes for one more second, Golden hung his head. “Please leave.”

“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Ted Leo said, jerking his arm away. “But I will if I have to.”

“Please.”

Ted Leo clapped down the porch steps in his ridiculous boots. He called over his shoulder, “You’re only making this harder, you dumb son-of-a-bitch!”

Shrugging, Golden did not look up. He said, “I always do.”

ROYAL TO THE END

Not yet ready to enter the house, he settled his bulk with tender care on the front steps to think. He knew, without needing any sort of confirmation, that what Ted Leo had told him about Beverly was true. In all the time he’d known her she had barely mentioned her own history, and Golden always assumed this was because she had no time for a past, rife as it was with inconveniences: the childhood hang-ups, the lingering insecurities of high school, the inevitable regrets—none of which serve any purpose except to cloud the mind and forestall the building of God’s kingdom upon earth. She was someone who was so right, so deeply correct in everything she did, that it seemed impossible that anything belonging to her, even her distant past, could be wrong.

She had intimidated him with her icy rectitude since the first day they met. It was less than a week after Golden arrived in Virgin, and Royal had arranged for all of them to have dinner together at the Cattlemen’s Club. Beverly, then in her mid-twenties and possessed of a taut Scandinavian beauty, had been dating his father for a few months and had only just been informed that Royal not only had a wife in Louisiana to whom he was still legally married, but a hulking, socially challenged son who happened to be sitting right across the table, hiding behind his menu.

Instead of taking out her anger on Golden, which some might have been inclined to do, she let Royal have it. For the rest of the night she did not speak a word to him. She was perfectly cordial toward Golden, asking him in solicitous tones how he was handling the dry desert air, about his hobbies and plans for the future, but as for Royal, who vied for her attention with snippets of Mel Tormé and questions about the quality of her food, she had only brief glances of such howling, arctic spite that even the waiter was rattled. Golden had never seen his father so thoroughly and aggressively ignored, and was surprised to find how much he was enjoying it.

It wasn’t until Royal’s final weeks in the hospital that Golden and Beverly spent any real time together. Before that, he saw her at church and occasionally at seminary study, where they took lessons on theology and church history in preparation for being baptized. Once, when Royal was out of town on business, she stopped by Big House to ask Golden if he’d noticed anything strange about his father’s recent behavior. To Golden, this seemed like the oddest of questions. As far as he was concerned,
all
of his father’s behavior was strange, recent or otherwise.

“He’s got this
look
all the time now,” she said, “and he’s started forgetting where he is sometimes.”

Golden knew the look she was talking about; he’d noticed it his first day in Virgin, and simply assumed that the manic glow in his father’s eyes had everything to do with the transforming fire of the Holy Spirit. In fact, all of Royal’s strange behavior—the sweaty, all-night prayer sessions, the spontaneous bouts of hugging and neck-kissing, the obsessive underlining of scripture with red pencil until there wasn’t a single line of scripture
not
shaded in red—struck Golden as nothing more than the slightly overzealous eccentricities of a man who had come into the Truth a little late in life and was making up for lost time.

There were a few things, now that Beverly had mentioned it, that couldn’t be easily connected to Royal’s recent conversion. He had begun wearing military-issue aviator shades day and night, chewed aspirin by the handful, often lost his balance while doing nothing more than standing at the kitchen counter buttering a slice of toast. When Golden asked Royal how he was feeling healthwise, Royal explained that if weren’t for the excruciating headaches, the jags of nausea, and the fact that the left half of his face had gone numb, he could honestly claim he’d never felt better in his life.

Golden suggested, in his mild way, that Royal see a doctor.

“
God
is my doctor,” Royal said, in all apparent seriousness, smiling the slight, unnerving smile of a saint. “And He tells me every day I’m doing just fine.”

When Royal passed out during a church social, going headfirst into the refreshment table, upsetting the punch bowl and having a leg-shaking seizure that terrified the children, everyone decided he could probably use a second opinion.

The tumor the doctors found in his brain was inoperable, as were the clusters of cancer that lined the walls of his lungs. Even through the pain, the delirium, the drug-induced cycle of diarrhea and constipation, he was Royal to the end. He wore his gray Stetson—the one with a medallion of uranium-rich pitchblende affixed to its headband—when the nurses weren’t around, and sported his aviator shades because he couldn’t take the light. When the young, ruddy-cheeked doctor—who Royal referred to as Little Doc Fauntleroy—suggested with some querulousness that wearing a lump of radioactive mineral on one’s head might not be safe, and that long-term radiation exposure might in fact have been a contributing cause of Royal’s cancer, Royal made a show of removing the hat and licking the hunk of pitchblende all over as if it were a piece of hard candy. Golden had seen his father make such a display many times, along with the parlor trick of passing a Geiger counter over his face so that it chattered and ticked like an irate dolphin, its needle pegging off the scale. This was how Royal demonstrated the wonder and harmlessness of radiation, which, he claimed, had never been proven to hurt a soul—except, of course, for a few hundred thousand Japs—
bada-bing!
—and was the only reliable means of keeping our great nation safe from the Reds and all the combined forces of Satan.

From the soapbox of his hospital bed he told anyone who would listen he had spent
years
breathing uranium dust in his own goddamn mine, had overseen the processing of yellowcake in the mills, had witnessed some of the biggest tests firsthand, and had breathed in the bouquet of radioactive fallout, which didn’t smell much different, he claimed, than a rich woman’s farts. And you didn’t see anything wrong with him, did you? Shit, no! Look at him! Strong as a fucking ox! And then a childlike bewilderment would smooth out the sun-gouged lines of his face, a touch of doubt would dim those luminous eyes, and he would glance around, confused as to where he was, exactly, and where it was he was headed.

Even when he was too weak to lift his head from the pillow, and hat-wearing had become a luxury left to the hearty and spry, to spite the doctors and all the other doubting Thomases, he made sure his Stetson was displayed prominently on the hat rack in the corner, where it stayed until the day he died.

Together Golden and Beverly watched him go, inch by inch. From his bedside, they took turns reading to him from the Book of Mormon and
Prospector’s Quarterly
and, when he could no longer take solid foods, fed him ice chips to keep him hydrated and soothe the sores in his mouth. At some point, when he was nearly blind and had lost so much weight the depressions and bony knobs of his body were hard to distinguish from the twist of bedsheets, he finally came to accept that he would not be spared. In his lucid moments, which seemed to come more frequently the worse he got, he made Golden promise, over and over again, that he would take care of Beverly, that they would live the Principle together, that he would make her his first wife and secure for her a place in the Celestial Kingdom.

Take care of her, boy
, Royal would say, once or twice when Beverly was right there in the room with them,
and she’ll take care of you
.

Golden, of course, never doubted this. In fact he had nothing but wary admiration for Beverly’s resourcefulness, her stoic calm in the face of so much pain. Her Uncle Victor, her guardian and only living relative, had died after a long illness only a little more than a year before and now her fiancé was being taken from her in a similarly brutal fashion, and did she once curse God or beat her breast at the unfairness of it all? No. She just kept feeding Royal his ice chips and quietly doing battle with the nurses over his morphine dosages.

One bitter winter morning when Golden was on duty while Beverly was at her apartment sleeping off a long night-vigil, he found the will to bring up something that had been nagging him since Royal’s diagnosis. “What about Mama?”

“Mama?” said his father.

“Malke. Your wife.”

For a moment Royal’s big, watery eyes went soft, as if he were remembering long-ago days bathed in golden light. He licked his lips. He said, “What about her?

“What should I tell her?”

This time, Royal didn’t take too long to think. “Tell her about this,” he said, with the slightest gesture of his head. “Tell her how I went. That ought to put her in a good mood for a while.”

The rest of that morning and afternoon Golden spent watching his father suffer: wracking coughs and whole-body tremors and two watery bowel movements requiring a crack duo of cheerful orderlies to change the bedsheets out from under him while he wept and cursed as if under attack by ghouls. By nightfall Golden was heartsick, all but done in with boredom and dread, and, as always, Beverly showed up just in time, when he was certain he couldn’t take another minute.

Go home
, she told him, as she always did, squeezing his wrist in a way that brought a lump of gratitude to his throat,
get yourself some sleep
.

No, there was simply no way he could have managed it without her. It might as well have been the motto of his existence, tattooed on the billboard of his forehead:
COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT BEVERLY!
Not only had she seen him through his father’s death and initiated their limited courtship and eventual marriage, she had helped him gain control of his father’s finances and assets while he took a bruising crash course in the construction business. She suffered four miscarriages before having her first success and then gave birth to ten healthy children in a row, losing one along the way, even as she managed her day-to-day household down to the color of the hand towels in the bathrooms, almost single-handedly raising their children even as she brought her husband along slowly on the finer points of duty and fatherhood, talking him through sibling spats and IRS audits and client lawsuits and the tricky inner workings of the church, all the while overseeing the expansion of the greater empire, which involved arranging the courtships of and marriages to his three other wives as well as steering the whole hurly-burly crowd of them through privation and sickness and loss and every other conceivable sort of domestic weather, fair and foul.

And what had he ever done for her? Besides offering himself as a figurehead, a convenient mannequin she could dress and pose and move about as she saw fit? Not much. Unlike some others, she had never expected anything from him, he knew this. She understood better than anyone that he was not so much his father’s son as a pale, off-brand imitation, a cheap replacement, a consolation prize who offered little in the way of consolation. Though she still occasionally pushed him to take the lead, to put more trust in his “patriarchal instincts,” she seemed to have accepted that he would always need her steadying hand, that she would always have to be there to prop him up when the hard winds began to blow.

He was thinking about all this as he eased himself up from the porch steps and entered a queerly silent Old House. There were children inside, they were just being exceptionally careful not to make any noise: Nephi pretending to read a book, Louise and Sariah sandwiched between the couch and the wall, carrying on a cryptic conversation in sister-sign language, Em at the piano, staring at the sheet music like a mannequin in a music store window display.

“Your mother?” Golden put his hand on Em’s shoulder and she whispered, hardly moving her lips, “Upstairs.”

Beverly was seated on the cushioned stool at the side of the bureau. The late afternoon sun, partially blocked by a raft of clouds, filled the room with swirling motes. She was sitting straight-backed, as always, with her hands in her lap, looking shrunken, significantly smaller than the bigger-than-life woman who loomed in his imagination like a giantess. But mostly it was the look on her face that unnerved him. It was as if all the pins and clasps and fasteners that had been keeping her expression so securely in place for so many years had suddenly sprung loose, giving way to reveal an entirely different person, one who looked, despite the sharp cheekbones and wrinkles around the mouth, to be a lost and frightened girl.

He had seen her like this only one other time: the day his father died, driving home from the hospital in his dusty Thunderbird, the hard morning glare on the windshield. She sat next to him, her eyes dry but her face cracked open as it was now, Royal’s last effects held tightly in her lap: his boots, his rings and wristwatch, his Stetson with its gaudy uranium brooch.

As they came around the big bend in the river she told him to stop the car. He pulled over near the bridge, and she got out, picked her way down the rocky slope, and, with a wild-animal screech and a surprisingly athletic throwing motion, slung the hat Frisbee-style toward the river. At first Golden didn’t think it was going to make it, but the hat had stopped its end-over-end tumble and for a moment caught the air like a kite, spinning out into an elongated parabola and settling softly into the water, where it bobbed along shallow eddies between scrims of bank ice, listing to one side until the bowl filled with water and it sank from sight.

By the time she made it back to the car she had already recomposed her features into that famously impervious countenance, the one she would maintain dutifully and without variation until, as far as he knew, right now.