Читать книгу No Word for the Sea - Diane Glancy - Страница 6

Stephen Savard

What did I do with my cell phone? What would I do for dinner? Where was Solome? Did she leave a note? Something in the fridge? I fixed myself a sandwich. Sometimes she was helping our daughter, Soos, with the baby. Or she was at a meeting. I opened the front door. I went for a walk.

Solome Savard

Wear warm clothes.

Those were the words she heard from the next table. She had nothing but warm clothes in her closet. Winter was most of the year in Minnesota. Sweaters and trousers in logging-camp brown. Kerosene yellow. Lumberjack check. Wood-stove black. She could push the restaurant voices away, but she listened to them as she watched for Stephen.

The thought of Crane Lake and their cabin five hours north of St. Paul rested a moment in her thoughts. She remembered thinking Stephen would be president of Cobson College. The thought returned like small waves lapping the shore. Her husband, Stephen Savard, was provost of the college, and could become president when the current president left or retired. But Stephen had been depressed. It happened suddenly, but with certainty. He had been a history professor, chair of his department, dean of his division— then provost— still going where he was going. What was bothering him? They had worked all their married life for their children and their place in St. Paul among friends and colleagues. Why had she never looked beyond possibilities? What was this cut back she felt cornered in her thoughts?

She read the menu in the restaurant.

Imagine tables close as clothes in a closet. Two women at the next table talking. Imagine someone’s mind wiped clean as the next table in front of her. With a chill she remembered Stephen’s mother saying she found her father’s work-tools in the dining-room drawer. Solome remembered his distance at family gatherings.

In the restaurant, the conversations were unrelated to one another, yet all sounded together. Imagine the conversations lifted above the knives and forks like rigging in an inland harbor. Imagine seeing no one she knew in the downtown St. Paul restaurant that overlooked the Mississippi River. She thought of the miles the water traveled from Itasca, its headwaters, to the gulf in New Orleans. At least she didn’t have to explain Stephen’s absence to anyone.

Imagine a country without its own language. Well, it had a language. It just wasn’t its own. It came from across the ocean, tossing boats, stirring waves. It was itself made of other languages, bits and pieces meshing over history, reverberating in the restaurant.

She tried again to call, but Stephen must have turned off his cell phone, or left it in his office. No one answered at the house. Where was he?

When had Stephen begun? Begun what? A journey into forgetfulness. A journey into his own language, into words that did not follow their order.

Solome looked at the menu again. Should she leave or stay?

Sometimes she asked Stephen about something and it was as if he was already separated from the land. It angered him when she caught him like that. When did Stephen fall into his roily language? What did that mean? She didn’t know. Or he would repeat the same question. Where was the shore he was headed? It was as if he spoke behind a seawall.

They had been married thirty years. They had three children. One daughter, Gretchen, was working toward a Ph.D. at Columbia. The other, Susanna, was married and had a baby. Mark Stephen, their son, born twelve years into their marriage, was a freshman at Cobson College. Solome and Stephen had a resonance and a history. They shared a family. A people. A country. They shared a language, broken as it was.

She sat in the restaurant a while longer. She called Stephen again, but there was no answer at the office, or the house, or on his cell. Finally she ordered. She would eat by herself if Stephen didn’t show. She remembered in school, she had been called, Solo.

Solome had had a name from the Bible. But her mother had misspelled it. In the Bible, it was Salome, the mother of James and John. But there was another Salome, the daughter of Herodias, who had asked her mother what she should ask from Herod after she had danced for him. Herodias told her, ask for the head of John the Baptist. There were reasons— Herodias had left her husband for his brother, and John said a man should not take his brother’s wife. Herodias held a grudge, and had an answer ready for her daughter.

Why had Solome’s mother named her that? She had like the sound of it, she said. The word meant, clothed. But she felt clothed with two different women.

In the Bible, Salome had asked her mother what she should wish for, but Solome decided what she wanted. She hadn’t asked anyone. She wanted a husband, children. Then a job. What she got was a longing for something more.

When the meal came, she ate by herself in the restaurant. When she finished, she paid for it and left.

Stephen was walking along the street, several blocks from their house, when she drove up. She braked and pulled to the curb. When he didn’t notice, she honked.

“What are you doing?” She asked. “You were supposed to meet me at the restaurant.”

Imagine a language that could absorb all the shipwrecks, all the landings, all the changes, the disruptions and upsets. Imagine a language that could reach anywhere with its sound and meaning. If Stephen could just speak, he could cover his absence in the restaurant, which he now remembered. He could explain it, make it understandable or acceptable or tolerable. He wanted a language with boundaries that were never settled, as if the language were water, both changing the shore, as it was changed by it.

“Didn’t you wonder where I was?” She asked. “What did you do for dinner?”

Stephen could say he had amnesia. He could make light of his forgetfulness, but that wouldn’t work.

He hadn’t even remembered to take Brown, the dog. Solome would have to walk him later.

Did Stephen want to ride?

He’d rather walk, he told her, and Solome drove on. Stephen followed, crossing the street, walking toward their cul-de-sac, the houses circling like a squall.

Stephen Savard

I was walking when Solome drove up, angry. The next morning, I wondered about my oversight. Why hadn’t I been at the restaurant? What was I thinking when I left my office? I didn’t know. Had I written it on my calendar and forgot to look? Why hadn’t Jan, my secretary, reminded me, as she often did? Somehow it slipped away. What had I done that day? I felt stupid. It was a feeling I felt more often. There was a clear space in my mind. A place where nothing came. No thoughts. No ideas. I was in meetings— finance and long range planning. Further cut-backs were necessary. I had to remember the numbers. The reasoning. I had lunch with a board-of-trustees member. Tenure review. Allocations. More policy decisions. I could list them. Often I felt irritable. My job frustrated me. It was going by fast. I had trouble keeping up. I didn’t always have time to give my family the attention they needed. Jan, my secretary, told me that Mark Stephen was protesting something on the commons. Didn’t Mark know his father was provost?

What was the name of those bushes on campus I liked to smell? They bloomed purple in the spring.

“Lilacs,” Jan said.

“Of course,” I answered.

“It will be a while before they bloom.”

I sat in my office with the door closed. No, I had given my family everything I could. I felt angry over their demands. What were they demanding? Their weight on my shoulders. Yet I liked them. I felt pleasure with my family. How could there be contradictions? Confusion. I also thought of the presidency of the college. But the president wouldn’t retire for years. I felt it slip past me, though Solome wouldn’t give up. No, she wouldn’t. Not because of anything or anyone I could blame. But because of something within myself. I could retire— be through with this, though I would like to teach one last history course. I was on the spot. What would I say next? They were looking at me in the meeting. Sometimes I saw impatience in faculty members.

There was a frustration. A fuzz. I wrote out the report I would give at the faculty meeting at the end of the day. It took me longer than I thought. My calls were backed-up. My e-mails. My appointments.

That evening, on a walk with the dog in Hill Park near our house, I watched a plane turning on the horizon until it was gone. Solome mentioned a recent plane crash that had been in the news.

I couldn’t remember. I was thinking of something else, long ago, but I didn’t tell my wife. The little black box I carried was my childhood. It would survive a crash. What was I thinking? What crash? I worried about my memory. I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew something was happening. I felt like I was experiencing something I didn’t know. I felt a darkness in my thinking. A panic. Or a dread with a panic behind it. The feeling sat on me with its weight. I couldn’t move out from under it. I didn’t know what it was. I grew more sullen. Quiet. Sometimes I caught Solome looking at me. But it was the black box— the memory of my early years. The repeating without knowing.

“You’ve said that Stephen,” I heard Solome say.

One evening, the word, “Alzheimer’s” struck me. Where had it come from? I remembered my mother wondering if her father, my grandfather, had died of Alzheimer’s before anyone recognized what it was. I suddenly thought of a day that would come when I would be in a small room looking from a window waiting for someone, and I wouldn’t know who they were, nor recognize them when they arrived. The word and the thought that followed didn’t often come, but once in a while, as I sat in my office, or in a meeting, the dread came over me again. Was I slipping as my grandfather had slipped and died before anyone knew the word, “Alzheimer’s?” What had my father died of? Heart attack. He had been young. Maybe it hadn’t had time to show. Maybe the thought of it had crushed him.

Solome Savard

Imagine speaking someone else’s words. A mother’s. A husband’s.

She was on the phone calling members of the Faculty Wives Club when the past rolled into her memory again. She was telling the wives about one of the other wives, who had just had surgery. She was ordering flowers, making conciliatory comments. The college had turned a corner toward downsizing. She was the provost’s wife. She was a diplomat smoothing the way.

Solome stood in Stephen’s study. Jan had called. Had he left his briefcase by his desk? No. She couldn’t find it. Had he left it in the car?

She looked at the photos on the shelf. There was the family lined up in front of the Depot Museum in Duluth: Stephen, Solome, Gretchen, Susanna, Mark Stephen. There they were in front of an antique store in Stillwater. In front of Paul Bunyan in Brainerd. Was that the trip Stephen was supposed to leave with them, but some meeting had come up at the college, and she had driven ahead with the children? Later, Stephen had taken the bus to Brainerd. He had gotten off the bus with a confused look on his face, but she was there to meet him.

“Here we are,” she had called him. She remembered the relieved look on his face as he walked toward us.

There was the family at the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore on their South Dakota trip. There were the photos of the family at her parents’ cabin on Crane Lake; her father with a fishing pole in his hand. Sometimes his absence still caught her off guard.

There was Brown, the dog, with snow on his nose.

The wedding of Susanna and Brian, their son-in-law.

The baby Susan. Her first birthday party.

The photo of Solome and Jane Mead, a friend since high school, who was like a sister.

The photos of New York on their visits to Gretchen.

There were photos of several trips Solome and Stephen took to Europe. There they were in Madrid.

Stephen Savard

It came in waves. The forgetting. The remembering.

Over the summer, work began on a new student center. It would be completed in a year. I could see a piling for the corner of the building from my window. I could hear the cement trucks.

I was functioning. Completing my work for the day. Knowing where my briefcase was. My car keys.

Then the pot hole.

What was that game in which a woman pushed something like a teakettle on the floor and two other women rushed ahead of it, sweeping the ice clean and slick? Shot put came to mind, but that wasn’t the name. Ask Solome—

Why did I care about it anyway? I thought as I got in my car.

Sometimes men played the game also.

Most days, I was myself. Then papers jumbled on my desk. Moved by themselves. A forecast— What was there wasn’t there any longer. Looking at something what was it?— what did I have to do? Think of the word I needed but couldn’t find. Everything tumbling. Get a grip. Keep it buried. Don’t let them see. Get ready for the meeting. Where’s the briefcase? Call Solome. Look in the car. Not there. Not here. Can’t go to the meeting without papers. Secretary— print out minutes again. Get lunch bring to me. I don’t have— I’ll eat while I prepare for the meeting. Then the candidates for sociology and religious studies departments. Get their resumes. Jan— they’re in briefcase.

Solome Savard

Imagine an American memory. Minnesota winters. Sledding. Ice skating. Shoveling after a blizzard. Then summer baseball. Hot dogs. Paul Bunyan.

Imagine a woman’s black gabardine evening bag. A daughter looking at it. Imagine earrings in a dresser drawer. Two mounds of sequins like the sun on an afternoon lake. Why would Solome remember the mound of sequins that were her mother’s earrings? Why did those images stay in her mind at times? How often did she think of the past? And who was she with a misspelled name, Solome, a name different from others? It all harbored in her memory, that gift she wanted to name again and again.

Solome purchased a chest-of-drawers. After it was delivered, she found a stain mark down the edge. She wrote a letter to the company. A man came from the furniture store in the afternoon, and decided there was nothing wrong. He didn’t offer to repair or replace it.

Imagine an American house. An American dog.

A husband confused about the day. In need of his briefcase.

Money paid for a flawed piece of furniture.

Imagine wanting something and wanting something. The feeling never stopped barking; gnawing like a squirrel in the attic, like our dog, Brown, that didn’t stop barking.

Solome lived in America, yet the neighbors acted like they were in a country where they turned each other in. What could she do? It was as if part of her crossed through the walls of the house and settled in the dog, and she called out for someone and called out for someone in the dog’s bark.

What could she do with a dog that stayed chained in the backyard? She asked her Thursday afternoon discussion group. Jane Mead suggested putting him to sleep. Brown had dug a trench along the back of the house in frustration, uprooting a flower bed and an old toy buried long ago by one of the children. The yard man would fill it in again.

The dog didn’t bark while Solome was there. Once, in a dream, during a nap, she’d heard barking. She woke and knew what the neighbors meant. But why had they called the police? Who was it? Not the Grunswald’s. They were friends. Possibly the Morgan’s. More probably the Bernard’s whom she hardly knew. Or someone on the next street.

What did she want? Her business was the house and children, but now the walls were moving and she was unable to hold them back.

Solome e-mailed their oldest daughter, Gretchen, in New York about the neighbors who had called the police about their dog, Brown, because he barked when she left. She didn’t mention who she thought it was, and Gretchen didn’t ask.

Once Solome wrote that she was worried about Stephen.

She heard the yard man raking leaves in the back yard. Brown was yapping and jumping at him. Solome yelled from the back door for Brown to be quiet. She finally closed him in the garage.

At noon, Soos stopped by the house with the baby. Solome made sandwiches for their lunch. Then Soos put Susan down for a nap and ran errands while Solome watched her. Soos had started a romper for Susan. Solome finished it on the sewing machine while Soos was gone.

Stephen Savard

Our son, Mark Stephen, wanted to develop his own course of study at the college. He joined some students who formed a protest group. I was embarrassed that my son’s name was in the college newspaper. I knew my colleagues talked about it behind my back.

The students had sit-ins. They had marches. They chalked the sidewalks. There were demands for multiculturalism.

“You don’t know what you need to know,” I said to Mark, irritated that he dropped by my office without notice. He walked by Jan with a sense of entitlement, though she told him I was on the phone.

Sometimes Mark stopped by the house on weekends. His returns were nothing more than a meal for Solome to serve, his clothes to wash, his room to clean after he left, and a few sharp words between us as I was becoming more and more, what was the word he used— irascible?

“Why do you stay at Cobson and embarrass your father?” Solome confronted Mark one evening at dinner. “You could go to another college if you want to act like that.”

“I want to go to Cobson,” Mark snapped back. “I like the climate there. My friends are there.”

“What you do reflects on your father.”

“Ideas change. I can’t be your boy scout any longer,” Mark said and left.

“What’s gotten into you, Solome?” I asked. “You’ve never snapped at him like that.”

“What’s gotten into you?” She returned.

Solome Savard

When she was in high school, her parents bought a small cabin on Crane Lake, five hours north of St. Paul, near the boundary waters on the border of Canada. The shore was eroding, though they didn’t know it at the time. “Fitting,” her mother said. She kept the cabin after Solome’s father died, though she seldom went there. “It’s probably overrun by mosquitoes or fallen into the lake.”

But the cabin had not fallen into the lake. Solome went there when she needed solitude. Sometimes Stephen came with her. Her mother wasn’t interested in the cabin any longer, nor the children, though Mark would go occasionally with some friends. Her mother thought of selling it, but Solome asked if they could hold onto it when her mother mentioned selling.

Solome belonged to the Faculty Wives Club. She had a small job. On Wednesdays and Fridays she worked at the Minnesota Historical Society. She volunteered, actually. She worked in retrieval in the research library, going into the stacks, bringing back requested material. Sometimes she looked through the books, reading about subjects such as Ojibway winter spirits. She liked the cool, gray metal stairs, the battleship gray floors. The orderliness. The fire-proofed structure. But she felt nothing she wanted to feel. She could plug the longing now and then. Dream of an actual job with responsibility and satisfaction. That was the American dream.

There was Stephen’s briefcase— in his closet again. She called him at Cobson. Did he want her to drive it there? Yes. She was used to delivering forgotten things.

Solome had raised three children. She had served in PTA and Brownie troops. She had made some of the girls’ clothes. She took risks. She chose yellow wallpaper with turquoise flowers for the dining room. Maybe garish was the word for my risk, in that case. She was present with Stephen at dinners and social gatherings. She was the visible wife of the provost of Cobson College. She knew what to say to others.

Salome, the mother of the disciples, James and John, had been at the tomb of Jesus with Susanna, Joanna, who was the wife of Chuzas, Herod’s steward, and other women who had been healed of spirits and demons, including Mary Magdalene. What were demons? Was that what was pursuing Stephen?

But Solome’s ordinary American life was blessed. She didn’t need to worry about demons. There were no tanks in the street. No gunshots in the neighborhood. No fear for her children’s lives, though American cities were not safe, and at night she hurried toward her house along the lighted sidewalk with the dog. She wished sometimes they lived farther out in the suburbs, but Stephen liked being close to the college. They’d been in the same house nearly twenty-five years.

Where did the mind go when the circuits shut down?

Solome looked through the photo albums of trips and outings, birthdays, scouting and school programs, the high school graduations of their three children.

What was missing? God, what was it? God? Late one evening when she was waiting for Stephen to come back on a plane after a conference on retaining faculty, before she started to the airport to get him, she was passing through the t.v. channels and saw an evangelist on television. He preached a sermon and said she needed Jesus in her life. There was a woman listening who needed to be saved. Accept Jesus as your Savior. She sat in the chair and repeated after the evangelist, Lord Jesus Christ, you died for my sins, I accept you as my Savior.

Now she had an American religion.

While Salome had asked Jesus if her sons, James and John, could sit by his side in heaven, Solome asked Jesus to be by her side. Well, now she had Jesus. What next?

The sin would disappear from her life, the minister on television said. What was her sin? She was faithful. Punctual. Conscientious. Consistent. What had she done that Jesus had to die on the cross?

When she picked Stephen up from the airport, she said nothing to him about her television evangelistic experience.

Stephen Savard

In the airport forgot which gate looked at pass again again. Had trouble sleeping in hotel. Pillow hard. These— episodes turmoil. Thought of meeting. Disinterested. Only wanted to leave. Why didn’t I care about this? Always careful in meetings and information dissemination.

There were episodes? Our lives running through. Keys with Soos’ car. A call when. Have it towed. There clear up. I’ll take care I’m on my way back.

I could hear the baby cry.

Solome Savard

Solome was used to upward mobility, but now she sensed a collision with life as she knew it. No, life as she knew it was colliding with what she didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. She hardly was aware of it, but Stephen was stepping off a continental shelf. Maybe it was a recognition that moved in her sleep, deep in her dreams. Could Solome continue without Stephen? What had she ever done without him? Could she face herself before God alone? Oh God, what could she do? There was a landscape like a Salvador Dali painting in her head when she opened the Bible. “The Lord shall descend from heaven with a shout; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we who are alive shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Wherefore, comfort one another with these words.”— I Thessalonians 4:16–18. What comfort was that? Solome thought— Being yanked through the sky when she didn’t want to go. She closed the Bible.

Sometimes she numbered her duties to herself. Her book of numbers. Cordiality was part of Solome’s fabric, her veil. She remembered her line of duties. Her children always had been ready for school. She had been at home when the children returned from school. She oversaw homework. She got them ahead. She hosted parties when her husband was chair of the history department at Cobson College. She hosted more parties when he was division dean, and when he became provost. Once, she had planned to continue to host parties when Stephen was president.

Sometimes everything numbed her. She called Reverend Croft, her minister, and made an appointment. “I need to know about faith.” She wanted more from church. How could she tell him that? What was she doing? After their talk, a woman with the last name of Forman called Solome and asked her to their Bible study group. What conspiracy was in the church? Solome agreed to come before she knew it. She would go just once to see who these strange people were.

It wasn’t church, but the Bible and the reading of it. Maybe that was the barking dog. There were words that demanded to be heard, to be paid attention. She was a Christian in a Christian nation. But she didn’t know what that meant. She was a nominal Christian in a nominal nation. What was it like to be a believer who walked in faith? Was she in or out? Hot or cold? Maybe that’s what Brown wanted. Meaning in his life. The dog was part of Solome out there in the yard. Digging trenches as if for war. Did soldiers even dig trenches anymore?

Two of her children, Gretchen and Mark, were in college. One daughter, Susanna, whom they called Soos, returned home after her marriage and the birth of a daughter, Solome and Stephen’s only grandchild. But after a few months, Soos had reconciled with her husband. Sometimes when Stephen worked late, or had meetings, she began to feel her life was her own.

What if, in the middle of this new feeling of self-direction, her life turned a corner where she didn’t want to go? What if the walls of her house were pinching together? Slowly, of course, so slowly she hardly noticed. What if her outward course reversed? The fear gripped her. What if her direction changed to downward mobility? She couldn’t stand the thought. It was not what she wanted. What if it was some sinister force? Solome realized she was sweating.

On Monday evenings, Solome went to Bible study. She wanted to grow stronger in her faith. What did that mean? She would rely on what the Bible said, rather than on her circumstances?

Stephen Savard

Gretchen and Dennis were coming. No— they had called they might be coming but it wasn’t settled yet. What was his last name? Solome tried to remember.

“Dennis something.”

“Yes I know but what?”

“I don’t know, Stephen,” Solome said. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

What would I say to him? Why was he coming?

In the end, they postponed.

Solome Savard

Solome took the dog for a walk. She would stop to talk with Hetty Grunswald, her neighbor. Later, she would talk with her friends on the phone. She called Soos everyday, or stopped by her house. She talked to her mother nearly every day on the phone. Sometimes, on Wednesdays and Fridays, her mother met her at the Historical Society for lunch and they spent time in the exhibits. Sometimes Soos and Susan came also. Then there were the calls to Gretchen in New York of an evening while Stephen sat in his chair. Sometimes it seemed as if Stephen was purposely disengaging, losing interest in their lives. She could sense him preparing to leave, not her as his wife, but leaving his own life; not dying yet, but slowly taking his hands off the wheel. It couldn’t be time for the end yet.

Solome lived in America where there was a heaven and an earth. But there was something coming for Stephen. They both felt it in the night. It was a new territory neither of them wanted to enter.

She remembered once at her parents’ place at Crane Lake, a large boat docked. A woman in a black swimming suit ran toward her parents’ cabin where Stephen worked with her father to screen the porch. She watched the woman run toward her husband like a dream that followed sleep into waking. Soon the woman realized she was running toward the wrong house, and turned to the house next door.

“Who was that?” Solome asked her mother.

“She’s the daughter of a woman who looked in on the old couple,” her mother said.

Yes, the people who lived in the next cabin with their retarded daughter.

Solome watched Stephen return to his screening after a woman in black ran toward him in the afternoon, a black butterfly, ready to carry him away, to unthread him from her.

Once there had been a common Indo-European language with words for winter and horse, but no word for the sea.

Wear warm clothes, Solome remembered.

Once she had taken a course on language. She still remembered it, or some of it. After the common language, there had been closely related Germanic languages that formed the basis of English, which formed the basis of her American language. There had been links to Sanskrit, Greek, Latin. There was a Norman conquest; there were the Anglo Saxons. Imagine a language that could move over, make room for others. Imagine new words joined to the old ones, crossing to other worlds, spreading like the sea.

The English and American language wasn’t as rigid as other languages. New ideas were given new words, maybe new words were given new ideas. There were openings for possibilities: abstractions and complex thought.

Christianity also had added words: cedars of Lebanon, camels, myrrh. Even language had been converted by Christianity. There also was the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible, where language was purposely mixed.

Solome felt the piles of language like laundry yet to be folded. She felt cardboard. Artificial. What was her language telling her? She didn’t like herself. No, that wasn’t it.

Where were all the facts she had once memorized?

Where was all the wood she had chopped? Chores she had done?

What if she had had the opportunity to develop a career the way Stephen had? What if she hadn’t been clamped off? Was that how she saw her life?

On Monday evening, the Bible study group met at her house. The members took turns hosting the group. Solome decided to make a dessert. There were three couples, two unmarried sisters named Forman, and a man who came without his wife. The minister and his wife also sometimes attended.

The group was amazed at the Savard’s house. Solome could tell by the way they looked at the room. Didn’t they know she was the wife of a provost? She wished it were something she could hide. The man who came without his wife was the only one who didn’t seem impressed.

Mrs. Croft, the minister’s wife, thought Solome could do everything as she tasted her dessert. Flattery should have been her name.

The Bible study group was a fast-paced crowd, Stephen told her with irritation when they left.

“Do you want me to quit?” Solome asked.

“Do what you want.”

The minister’s wife had a drifty presence. She could be everything to nearly everyone. Solome admired her resistance to getting stuck in one place— Her wide berth.

Solome was who she was. But who was she? And why did she have the feeling she was on the swift current of a river moving toward a sea from which there was no return? Or sometimes she felt like she was on a river with a steep waterfall ahead. Would the river just stop, and she would find herself mid-air?

On Sunday morning at church, the group studied the travels of Paul in Acts. In the old class, the one Stephen and Solome had attended for years, the Fidelis class, they had speakers, and not much talk about the Bible.

Stephen Savard

“Brian and Soos need a small loan,” Solome told me at lunch on Sunday.

“Let them go to the bank,” I answered. I wanted to change the subject. I wanted to tell her I was embarrassed I had forgotten a colleague’s name as we left church. But Solome wanted to talk to me about their youngest daughter.

“Soos called yesterday— She has enough pressure in her marriage.”

“They weren’t in church,” I said. “They said they would be there.”

Solome looked at me. “Maybe the baby wasn’t well.”

“Maybe they spend too much money.”

“It takes a lot of money, Stephen. Susanna doesn’t work so she can take care of Susan. I don’t see why we can’t help them.”

“Because they’re dependent enough as it is.”

“No, they’re not,” Solome argued. “They handle their finances.”

“Then why are they asking for money?”

“The interest they have to pay on their Visa card— ”

“Tell them not to buy so much,” I offered.

“I think they buy what is necessary.”

“Solome— ”

I knew she could hear my impatience.

“ — that’s their problem.”

“But you give Mark what he wants— ” Solome protested.

“Didn’t we just help Brian and Soos?”

“That was Gretchen,” Solome said. “And when did you talk to Susanna— when did she say they’d be in church?”

I looked at her. “When she called.”

“I talked to her yesterday,” Solome said. “You weren’t here— ”

“She called later— ” I got up from the table. “You give them the money they’re asking for,” I said angrily, and left the dining room and went to my study.

Solome couldn’t let go of the fact that I wasn’t responsible for my forgetfulness. I knew she thought my forgetfulness was to spite her. Why would I do that?

Solome Savard

The radio station was full of static, fading in and out. Solome listened to it at night as she fell asleep, so Stephen’s snoring wouldn’t keep her awake. Solome remembered when she had returned with her parents Sunday nights from Crane Lake or after visiting her grandparents in Hastings, Minnesota, and they would hear a station in Mexico.

When she first had the children, Solome couldn’t handle the feedings, changings, spills, colic, erratic sleep patterns, the predictability of the messes. She worked all through the day and ended up at the same place each evening, exhausted, frayed, with another pile of laundry, another pile of toys scattered over the house. Stephen’s voice had pulled her through. He had called during the day, sometimes leaving between his history classes at Cobson College to eat lunch with them. Her mother helped too. But it was Stephen who talked her through the crises.

Jane Mead, her friend since high school, was always going through a crisis of her own making. Most of the time, it was Solome who listened to Jane.

In the years that followed, Solome often thought about how long it took to raise the children. Fifteen more years before they were grown. Ten more. Five more. She felt the long haul of cooking, cleaning, car-pooling. The school activities. But again, it was Stephen’s voice she heard. Now Solome was on a smooth course. Hadn’t she earned it with her responsible life? But what if Stephen’s signal was fading? NO!

She felt the thought of losing Stephen. It was a tremor in her bedrock. Was she like one of those animals who could foresee an earthquake? Whose erratic behavior gave a signal it was going to happen?

Sometimes Solome remembered the tumult of their family history. How children tore up expectations, went their own way, stretched the family into territories the parents wouldn’t have gone. But now it was Stephen who was slipping. He could remember fifty years ago, but where was yesterday? He was not yet 60 years old. How could this happen? It still seemed like they were just beginning. Was the end already here? Did it all pass that quickly?

Sometimes he stood in the kitchen while she fixed supper. Sometimes she looked at him. “Do you know where you are?” Solome asked.

“Of course, I’m in the kitchen.”

“What are you standing there for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sit down. Look at the paper. I’ll have supper ready soon.”

Sometimes she could hear his childhood when he shared an old memory with her. Sometimes he struggled for the words he wanted. It was Stephen who first mentioned the word, “Alzheimer’s.” What would she do if their light went out? What would she do without marriage? What if their language together fractured and shut down?

Often, her husband stumbled over his words. Trickster language. Taking as it had once given. Full of fractured words broken off from other languages, making new words that then joined with others. Wasn’t it Noah Webster who imposed uniformity of spelling on words? Otherwise, her American language would be more like water, which it was. How often she thought of Crane Lake.

“We could move to a smaller house,” Stephen told her at supper. But where would the children stay when they came for a visit? Solome asked. Where would someone stay if she needed help with Stephen? When she needed help with Stephen, she thought.

What was she thinking? Maybe Stephen was just overworked. Yes. There were financial and political decisions at Cobson. A department to be eliminated. There was tension between faculty members. There was a starkness in academia, despite the festive caps and robes the professors wore during convocations and graduations and official events. Maybe that was the reason for the robes. There was student unrest and editorials protesting college policies in the student newspaper. Didn’t pressure cause forgetfulness? Yes, it did. Maybe Stephen needed to rest. Then he’d pull out of it.

Stephen Savard

I was in a meeting with the president and several faculty members who were protesting a change— opposing it— the elimination of their department. Arguing for their case. After the meeting, the president asked me to stay in his office. He said he felt I was gliding through meetings, not catching what was said, not adding my thoughts as I always had. My opinions were listened to— they were needed. Often, I took heat for the president. What was wrong? The president asked. Was I feeling all right?— Was there some problem he should be aware of? Was it family? Was Mark Stephen the problem? No. No. I was thinking we could eliminate a section of a department, instead of the whole department. It would be easier. In language, for instance, Russian has had a diminished enrollment for several years. Yes, the president said he could consider that. I returned to my office and closed my door. I put my head in my hands. I shut my eyes and swam in the darkness there. It was the first time I’d been called on my forgetfulness— my absence of mind in meetings. They had noticed. I’d been discovered. What could I do to cover my loss before they told me to leave?

“I don’t want to go to church this morning,” I told Solome. “I know there’ll be people I should know, but won’t remember their names. My memory doesn’t work like it did.” There— I had told her. But she let it slip without comment.

If Solome walked into church walked first, and said their name— she explained to me— then I would know. But I couldn’t rely on her every moment. Sometimes she stopped and talked to someone and left me standing in the open. Someone else I should know would approach and speak as though I remembered who they were, and what they did. Often I knew that I knew them, but didn’t see them often enough to remember.

“I don’t want to go to church,” I said again. But she didn’t let it slip.

“I could go alone, Stephen. Students and other faculty would wonder where you were. We belong to that church because it’s close to campus and you could be with colleagues and students. What if they no longer saw you? What would they think?”

Solome was right. Was I losing the ability to reason? I went upstairs and put on my suit.

Solome Savard

Solome’s Bible Study group became a small, tight-knit group, despite their differences. The man who came without his wife— what was his name? John Everett?— was the only one not solicitous to her.

What did Solome want? She questioned herself in times of introspection with the group. What did she hear in the bark of the dog? What longing? What? She wanted recognition of herself. She wanted Stephen to see her for who she was.

No, it was more than that. She wanted to know who she was. It seemed to her that Stephen had been himself all his life. He was his own authority. He knew what he was doing. She knew also, or had known once, but it had been pushed aside while she raised her family and thought of herself as Stephen’s wife. It was hard for her to put in words. She wanted to feel her whole being. She wanted to feel the whole of being.

Solome had lunch with Jane Mead whom she’d known most of her life. After high school, Jane had married, had been Jane Harrison for a while, but took back her name after her divorce, and kept her name when she married again. She had since divorced a second time.

“I don’t know how you stay married to one man. I don’t have the stamina it must take. I just want out when I’m not happy. Then I’m single again and all I think about is the next man I’ll meet. I look for him at the grocery, when I’m with my friends, laughing as though being with other women is what I wanted, when all the time I’m looking for a man in the crowd who’s looking at me.”

“It feels like we’re in high school again.” Solome said.

“I see our girls starting down the same path.”

“Soos wants to stay married to Brian. It’s Brian who’s not sure. I want to shake him sometimes for the pain he’s causing her. I think the baby picks it up too.”

“What else do men cause?” Jane asked.

“You haven’t been this bitter.”

“I’m just tired of disappointment.”

“I’m reading a book about the daughter of Galileo,” Solome said. “We should use it in our discussion group.”

Stephen Savard

Different pieces of conversation overheard. That’s what I was experiencing. All the conversations I’d had. The words circled, crossed over from the past, mixed into one another. I felt like I was flying over my life with nowhere to land, or I’d forgotten where the airport was. And where was the pilot? Wasn’t that his job? Solome and I picked up Gretchen and Dennis from the airport. What’s his name? I still didn’t know. I stayed in my room until Solome called me down. What’s wrong dad? Gretchen asked. His mind on something, I heard Solome say. Changes at the college. Mark Stephen at the house. Susanna and Brian and the baby. They looked at me like they did at college. Why did they look? That night I called out something to Solome. She woke and held me, quieted me.

It didn’t do any good to ask for help. My colleagues didn’t know what was happening. I saw it clearly sometimes. I had to stay where I was. Not ask for help from them. It only confused and frustrated my secretary. I wouldn’t call out again to Solome at night when I heard someone. I knew the voice came from the past, from someone already in another world.

I think Solome wanted to say something to me, but she swallowed the words. She wouldn’t ask anything of me.

At times, we had a language of politeness when meaning had gone.

It was deflection when there was something I wanted to hide.

It was imagination. Imagination was an ocean. I was trying to wash my words in it. I was trying to be shaped by language, or maybe it was language that would shape me— if I kept talking like I always had.

Solome Savard

Imagine a borrowed language. Changing. Unreliable. Imagine a language in flux, the dynamics of change and redefining the meaning of words, their messages and migrations, the different ways they could mean in combinations with other words.

Imagine spring after seven months of winter. A summer passing quickly.

On Friday, Solome had lunch with her mother at the Historical Society across the atrium from the museum shop. Her mother pushed her tray slowly. Others went around them. Afterwards, they walked through the rooms, looking at the paintings of Minnesota history and the artifacts, as they often did, until her mother tired.

“There’s an opening for an assistant in acquisitions,” Solome told her mother. “Part-time. I heard about it this morning. The Historical Society needs someone to research facts for the news releases and reviews of exhibits and programs.”

“Can you take the time to work?” Her mother asked.

“I don’t know,” Solome answered. “It sounds like something I would like.”

Later that afternoon, in the research library, Solome retrieved material on the Birch Coulee Battlefield Historical Site: the Battle from both U.S. and the Dakota perspectives for a change. She came across the native word for Minnesota, Mni Shota, turning it over and over, thinking of the changes to language. The word meant something about many waters— or something about clouds in the waters— or turbid white-edge water. When Solome wasn’t retrieving materials, she looked through other books, stopping here and there in the stacks. She turned down a Minnesota Public Radio program on the radio that was left playing in the stacks for some reason. It interfered with her reading. When Solome looked at the clock, it was nearly five.

Stephen was frustrated when she got home. She was late. He couldn’t find anything to eat. The dog was barking. Where was she? How could she be someplace else when he needed her? Solome didn’t want Stephen’s anger. Did she wish her marriage was over? She suddenly thought as she listened to him. Would she marry again? Was there anyone else she wanted to marry? How could she be thinking that? Where did those thoughts come from? The name of the Salome who asked for the head of John the Baptist was not actually mentioned in the Bible, but by other records, her name was known. Maybe that Salome was part of Solome also, a part that was veiled, hidden. If Solome wanted to be whole, she would have to look at her also.

Stephen couldn’t find a shirt he wanted. He had started getting out what he wanted to wear the next day so he wouldn’t have to face the decision in the morning. Solome was in the kitchen when she heard him yell for her. Would she become his caretaker for the rest of her life?

No, Solome couldn’t handle a job at the Minnesota Historical Society, not even part-time. Not for a while.

For a moment, Solome wanted Stephen’s head on a platter.

That’s why Jesus had to die for her on the cross.

Stephen Savard

In the fall, when the yellow leaves were shining through my window, I made a doctor’s appointment.

Solome went with me.

“If Stephen has Alzheimer’s, it will take years for him to become incapacitated,” the doctor told us.

The conversation seemed to move too fast. If Stephen had the disease, the diagnosis was still inconclusive. He talked past me. I wanted to wave my hand in his face and tell him that Stephen was sitting before him.

We left town after the appointment, not saying much to each other in the car.

We drove to the cabin on Crane Lake, past Ely, Minnesota, and Buyck, near the Boundary Waters, just under the Canadian border. I woke in the night. I couldn’t remember where I was for a moment. I had to think. There was nothing solid to hold onto. There were chunks and pieces of memories of the day’s events. I had driven somewhere. I was struggling with my thoughts. I didn’t know what was happening. I had to fight an urge to bolt from the room and run as far as I could. There were crossed signals. Nothing was clear. There were parts of a road. Trees rushing past. A sky looking through the trees. A wedge of light. A fighting not to drown in the absence of thought. The lake! That was it. Was a mosquito humming? No. A dog barking?— No. We had left Brown in St. Paul. Mark would feed him.

It was as if consciousness was a briefcase I carried and had to pay attention to and not leave it behind. I constantly had to think until I knew what it was. Where were the keys to the car? What if we needed to leave? I had to remember again where I was and what I was there for.

That weekend, Solome and I painted a corner of the cabin ceiling to cover a watermark above the door. I thought of all the winter ice on the roof hanging into the rainspout, leaking into the cabin as it melted. It gave me something to do.

Maybe I had become like the moon that shined through the trees at the lake at night, full and whole only part of the time. Maybe I felt I was never in the same place often, yet somehow there was a return to the same places. Maybe that’s the way I felt.

I thought of the frozen lake in winter, compacted, cracked, one edge lifting on another, groaning at night with ice slabs sticking up, the winter spirit near. What if Alzheimer’s was like that?

The next morning, we pulled the motorboat from the water for the winter. Then we went out in the rowboat. The water did not cry. What were those thought that visited me? Where did they come from?

I had been a map maker, but it was a map of history. As I talked to Solome, I felt the currents of words. I could handle language. It was the water over which I rowed back toward the land. But the language I knew now started with something other and continued to change with words from other places, until it had become a new language of images, slippages and memories. My life felt like a card-table with collapsible legs. The legs were not locked in place. What if my illness would clip the table and it would fall, taking my life with it, and therefore Solome’s? There were wars and rumors of war. Economic instability in the stock market. Wildfires. Drought. Heat. Storms. How fragile life was.

As we closed the cabin for the winter, I heard the wind high in the trees, especially the old, tall tree by the cabin next door. I felt a chill in the air. A dampness. I told Solome I thought it could snow before we returned to St. Paul. But it was the coming storm inside me.

Solome Savard

Stephen was talking to someone. Solome could hear it, and he knew she heard it, and he covered what he was saying.

“There’s someone here. I can feel it.” She thought he said.

When Stephen could speak about his forgetfulness, and his feelings about his forgetfulness, which wasn’t often, he waited until they were at some event at the college, then said to Solome, “I know him— His name is hard to remember— He’s looking at me. I have to say something.”

But Solome didn’t always know all his college associates, especially the new ones. She couldn’t always help, though she tried as quickly as she could to learn the names. She had Jan send her a list of faculty and their photos.

“Just speak like you know him,” she would say.

But to speak would let the man know Stephen didn’t know him. “I have the feeling I’m only part here,” he said to Solome under his breath.

Solome waited for him to talk more about his forgetfulness. She looked at him in the car.

“My world is small each day I feel it smaller,” Stephen finally said.

She wondered if he knew he’d even said it.

Maybe some Alzheimer’s patients didn’t know what was happening to them. But Stephen would, Solome thought. Whatever was ahead, they would face it with dignity.

Stephen Savard

The history I had studied was rearranging its chronological order. To me, all the pictures in the house were crooked on the walls. I mentioned it to Solome, but she said they looked straight to her. The whole nation of myself was a history turned down like a radio.

I crossed swollen rivers, the wilderness, the buffalo herds, the Indians encampments. At last, I stood in the cul-de-sac, the houses circling like Conestogas.

Solome Savard

It snowed more that winter than it had in a long time. Solome heard the neighbors shoveling as she read the newspaper. She heard the yard man with his snow blower on their walk. She heard the snow plow late at night. Each morning, she called her mother and then Soos to see how they were doing. The snow took on a new meaning for Solome. It was the term, white out, she heard on the news. It described road conditions in a snow storm. Solome knew part of the world was being erased before Stephen too. How could she bring it back?

She was still awake one night when she heard Mark come in. She knew the familiar noise of his car. She thought she heard another voice. Probably a friend. Sometimes Mark tired of the noise in the dormitory at the college and came back to his room. They would want breakfast late in the morning.

There were great piles of snow in the street. Some of it they hauled off in trucks and dumped in the Mississippi River at night. Solome thought of the Christmas cards she had to send. The shopping she had to do. The party at the college to host. She had to send invitations to the smaller Christmas party they would have at their house for close colleagues and friends. She thought of the preparation she had to do for it. There was the Faculty Wives Club Christmas luncheon. The Historical Society luncheon. The party for her Discussion Group. A dinner at the house of the president of Cobson College. Other parties to which they were invited. Solome went over her shopping list again for gifts for the children and grandchild. Finally she slept.

The next morning, Stephen stood at the front window. He was leaving. Slowly leaving. He knew it, and so did she. Where was the language for that?

Stephen Savard

Solome and I sat with Soos and the baby, Susan, at the Christmas program. The church was filled with poinsettias and candles, the smell of fir and cedar. Soos hoped that Brian would meet us after work. She hoped he would attend church with her, or want Susan raised in church, or find help for their marriage. But Brian didn’t come. I watched the program with Solome and Soos. The children were shepherds, angels, Mary, Joseph, the animals. The sheep were in white dresses. One lamb had a cap with ears. One said, baa, and when everyone laughed, decided not to say it again. Caesar Augustus had decided to take a census. Joseph had to go to Bethlehem. Mary went with him. The children didn’t know what to do. They all had Alzheimer’s, I thought. One child was crying. Now his father was coming for him, picking him up, carrying him up the aisle.

My thoughts came back to the sanctuary when the children were leaving— the angels with their cardboard wings and halos, the sheep and a lamb, the cows and a donkey in a brown jumper with a tail. Where had I been in my thoughts? Was I also in a recessional?

Some of our friends told us they’d noticed our absence in the Sunday school class we’d attended for years.

“Where have you been?” They asked. “We’ve missed you in the Fidelis class.”

“I’m going to another class.” Solome said. “I am examining my Christianity— the heat has been turned up.”

Solome Savard

The Christmas season was busy with parties. Gretchen came home from school for three days. She spent most of the time e-mailing or on the phone with Dennis who lived in Connecticut and didn’t come with her. Soos and Brian seemed happy. Solome’s mother was cheerful. Things were hopeful.

The bleakness of January hit after the holidays. Solome fell into the sub-zero weather. She sat in the chair and imagined she sat in a room in which there was nothing. That’s the way she felt. She rarely thought about herself as a person without Stephen and the children. When she did, it was a snow-covered field without any tracks. Solome’s volunteer job at the Historical Society was not a consideration. Two days a week. Nothing that demanded much of her. And if it did, she could let go.

Solome was too tired to go to the Monday night Bible study after Christmas. She wanted the nothingness of her thoughts a while longer. But nothing did not stay nothing. Something always began to form. A fallen hair. Dust from the air. They settled on the floor. Were drawn to each other. They formed a gray fuzz which was the beginning. More dust from the air settled on the floor. It came up in the air from the furnace. It sifted down through the ceiling and in through the insulation and the windows. She used her hand as a broom. She was on her knees on the floor. She swept the fuzz as though her hand was a broom. She swept the holy, living dust mites.

Stephen Savard

Forgot to put ice cream back in freezer. Left on counter. Ran down into drawers. Solome angry then sorry she was angry. It’s all right all right— it happens to everyone no don’t say anything— don’t.

I had another appointment with the doctor. He imaged my brain to have a map to measure its future journeys.

I could be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, though it was not certain how soon the disease would develop, or if it would. There were several things that could look like Alzheimer’s. Maybe it was a phase— an adjustment a little more jarring than normal. Maybe I was unconsciously backing out of responsibility I didn’t want. Or felt no longer wanted. His words seem to cross. Was he crossing me? I felt anger. Solome put her hand on my arm. Was he blaming me for the blame I already felt? Was I hearing him or imagining what I heard?

“How do you know for sure?” I heard Solome ask.

“Usually the only way is an autopsy.”

We were shocked into silence. The doctor must have realized he spoke hastily. We had not gone that far in our thoughts yet.

The doctor apologized.

We returned home silently in the car.

“I thought we could travel,” Solome said as we ate supper that evening.

“We’ve been to Europe several times,” I answered. “I wouldn’t mind going back to Germany.”

“I was thinking of someplace farther— why not China?”

I met a colleague in Germany— at a conference— at the university in Freiburg— a man named Siceloff. There— I had remembered his name precisely. His wife was Johanna.

“Remember?— we ate with them at a table in a restaurant on the square— alfresco—” I told Solome. “Afterwards we traveled.”

“I’ve always liked the Chinese rooms at the Minneapolis Art Institute,” Solome continued.

“I remember nearly missing the plane in Frankfurt,” I said.

“We wouldn’t go on our own,” Solome told me. “We’d take one of those faculty tours that guide us along. We get their brochures in the mail all the time.”

I knew Solome was high on responsibility. She was low on the feeling of loss. She would face her worries. She had run at first because she was frightened. Maybe horrified was more like it. But she came back. She would go on as she always had.

Solome Savard

Wear warm clothes, she remembered. Those warm clothes would have to be faith. What else did she have to wear? She dragged herself back to Bible study, though her discussion group was reading a book that numbed faith.

Imagine a language not your own. Imagine a Monday night Bible study where a little group studied the book of Hebrews. They were Else and Bill Renke, Elaine and Harold Franklin, Charlotte and Ralph Steward, the Forman sisters, sometimes Pastor and Mrs. Croft, and of course, John Everett, the man without his wife. Solome listened to John Everett read the list of men who had lived by faith— Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel.

“Faith is evidence of things not seen. Faith is the substance of things not seen,” Reverend Croft concluded. Solome would have to think about that.

Solome lived in a country founded by pilgrims. The Indians had been pushed out of the way, their languages nearly extinguished. The continent had been cleared of buffalo. Their history was kept neatly in exhibits and in the stacks of the Historical Society. Refugees and immigrants still arrived, but the new wave of immigrants was non-European from Somalia and Mexico and all parts of Asia. The whole world seemed to be coming.

Stephen continued to manage his work with small lapses. It was as if being in the office, he could do office work. He also still traveled to meetings. Sometimes Solome went to conferences with him, when wives were invited. Otherwise, she kept busy with shopping, working on Wednesdays and Fridays, lunching with the Faculty Wives Club, or with Soos or her mother. She had her discussion group on Thursday afternoon, church on Sunday mornings and the Bible study on Monday evenings. She walked the dog, visited with Hetty Grunswald, and other neighbors and friends. She looked forward to trips to Crane Lake.

Solome still felt like two different women, divided between the responsibility to her husband and children, and doing what her mother wanted. But there was another Solome. One who wanted to do what she wanted. But what was it she wanted?

When a friend died suddenly in late February, Solome saw his widow grieving in a side row of the church. Solome thought of the loss of Stephen, who sat beside her. Her mother on the other side. She remembered her father’s funeral. The smell of flowers. The words summing up her father’s life. At least, the end of those two lives were known. The anxiety of the journey to the end was over for them. Now their work of grief began.

Stephen Savard

Solome and I lived on Upper St. John Street in St. Paul.

Did she think there were enough saints in their address? I had asked.

Soos and her daughter, Susan Anna Stiple, and Soos’ husband, Brian Stiple, the son-in-law, came for supper one night in March. Solome had e-mailed Gretchen that she was planning a family dinner for Friday evening, if there wasn’t another heavy snow, which was forecast. They would miss her.

But the snow wasn’t heavy, and I picked up Solome’s mother after work. We had settled at the table. The food was served. I felt like myself. The evening felt solid. Yet Solome seemed nervous, as if at any moment we could topple off the earth.

Mark often brought home friends from the college. They seemed in awe of being in the provost’s house. Mark always had a different girl. Tonight he said he was bringing Jill, but showed up with Jean.

After dinner, on that Friday evening, the phone rang. It was Gretchen.

She was getting married. That was the news. Gretchen and Dennis were going to marry. Strange, I thought— when Gretchen called or wrote, it often seemed they weren’t together.

“What’s his last name?” Solome asked.

“Dennis’ last name is Kamrar.”

“What nationality is he?” I asked on the phone. “What religion?”

“What difference does it make?” Gretchen said to me. “I’m going to marry him. Do you have something against the name?”

“Are you pregnant?” Soos asked.

There were four phones in house. Solome, her mother, Soos and I could talk at once.

As long as Dennis was her boyfriend, and they were getting married, it didn’t matter. Gretchen had several boyfriends during her long college career, which began at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and ended in New York. Solome said she knew Gretchen probably lived with them at one time or another. She left that thought in the category of things she didn’t want to consider.

“Are you going to be Gretchen Kamrar?” Soos asked when her first question wasn’t answered.

“No, I’m not pregnant. And yes, I will keep Savard as my name.”

Would Solome call the church first thing tomorrow morning and find a date in June when they could have the wedding? Gretchen also wanted the reception at the St. Paul Club.

“What’s wrong with the University Club?” I asked, but my question went unanswered.

“June?” Solome asked. “Gretchen, it’s the first of March. You can’t prepare for a wedding in three months. Especially with you out of town.”

But Gretchen insisted it could be done.

“It took six months for Soos’ wedding.”

“I’ll help you, mother,” Soos said on the phone from the other room.

Soos stayed on the phone after Solome and I returned to the table. Brian was holding Susan on his lap. Mark and the girl he brought with him, Jean, were gone.

Solome told Brian that Gretchen was getting married.

“I heard,” he answered.

Solome’s mother brought coffee from the kitchen when she hung up the phone.

“Did Mark leave?” Solome asked.

“They’re standing outside,” her mother answered. “Jean is smoking.”

When everyone returned to the dining room, Solome served dessert. As we ate, I saw Solome look at the yellow wallpaper with turquoise flowers.

“The risk you took with the paper is beside the point, isn’t it?” I said.

They looked at me, not asking what I meant.

Solome Savard

Solome called Jane Mead the next day. They had raised their children together, though Jane had only one daughter, Soos’ age. They attended birthday parties and dance recitals. But the girls had gone to different schools and hardly knew one another any longer.

“Gretchen is the one I thought would remain single,” Jane said. “I’ll tell Cathy. She’s one who would like to get married.”

On Saturday morning, Solome called the church. Every Friday and Saturday evening in June was taken for weddings. The St. Paul Club was booked too. Solome called Gretchen who flew into a panic. She would not settle for that.

“Try Saturday afternoon. Saturday morning. We’ll have a picnic on the lawn of the club, if necessary.”

“There was a reception at the Historical Society last year.” Solome told her.

“I don’t want my reception at a museum.” Gretchen said flatly. “I want the club.”

“The St. Paul Club is booked. The University Club?”

“No.”

On Monday Solome called the church again. There was no time. She asked Reverend Croft to review his calendar in June.

“Do you have any afternoons?” She finished.

“I have a wedding at 2:00 every Saturday afternoon.”

“Early on Friday evening? A 6:00 wedding?”

“I’ll give you to Martha.”

Solome would regret a 6:00 wedding. An early wedding meant a sit-down dinner at the reception. You couldn’t have people for a light buffet until after 8:00.

“No, 6:00 is too late,” the secretary said. “He has an 8:00 wedding on June 21st.”

“Why is that too late?” Solome asked.

“The wedding parties come to the church at least two hours before the wedding. They want time to get ready. The photographer takes pictures. You can’t overlap weddings.” Martha explained. “You can’t have one party arriving as the other is leaving.” Solome heard her impatience too. She knew it was true.

“5:30. 5:00?”

“There’s a possibility on Friday, June 6th.”

“June 6th is too soon. Is there a Saturday morning later in June? 11:00?”

“I have an opening on Saturday morning the 28th, though I’ve already had another inquiry—”

“We’ll take it,” Solome said.

Gretchen was not happy about a Saturday morning wedding.

They could postpone the wedding, Solome suggested to her. They could have it at another church.

No, Gretchen wanted to be married in the church she’d attended as a girl. She wasn’t getting married in a church she’d never attended.

No, she wanted the wedding in June and not August because they would be interviewing for jobs and she would be writing her dissertation. Dennis already was teaching at New York University, though his job was not permanent. They wouldn’t hire her, Gretchen said. The same institution usually didn’t place both husband and wife.

Solome tried to persuade Gretchen that June was too soon for a wedding. It would be too much of a strain. Impossible, really. They could have a July wedding.

“No,” Gretchen said.

Soos’ wedding had been large. Solome had planned most of it. Soos was struggling in school at Cobson and didn’t care about the details. Solome always felt that Soos married Brian in a fit of desperation. Maybe it wasn’t true, but there was an impatience in Soos to move onto something else. A marriage, for instance.

Gretchen, on the other hand, knew how she wanted the wedding. She was busy with her studies, but she would take time to plan it. Solome would help her. Dennis’ parents would take care of the flowers, the rehearsal dinner, but Solome would have to make arrangements with the florist and decide on the restaurant. Solome and Stephen would pay for the wedding, the music, the reception, the invitations and stamps. Then there was Gretchen’s dress, veil, shoes, and a hundred things they hadn’t thought of yet.

“Just find a place for the reception,” Gretchen said.

An 11:00 wedding would have to do.

“At least, she wants to be married in a church,” Solome told Stephen.

Solome called the St. Paul Club again. Could a wedding brunch be arranged at noon on June 28th? No, the club was booked. They were sorry. There was nothing they could do.

“We could remove our membership,” Solome said.

They made no further apology.

“A canopy on the lawn of the church?” Solome asked Gretchen.

“No.”

She called the St. Paul Club again. “We’ve been members for 15 years. We need a place for a reception.”

June was a busy month. There was nothing they could do.

Solome called the University Club and booked it before they could turn her down.

Gretchen came home the following weekend with Dennis.

“We’ll stay in my room, mother. We’re nearly married,” Gretchen said. “We live together in New York.”

“But I send your mail to the same address,” Solome said. “I didn’t know you’d moved.”

“I just moved down the hall. My old roommate saves my mail.”

Solome had lunch at the University Club with Gretchen and Dennis. They gave instructions on the arrangement of the ballroom. Solome continued to talk with the manager while Gretchen and Dennis continued their errands.

In the afternoon, Gretchen and Dennis registered at various stores. They came home that evening for supper, tired and cranky.

Gretchen came to St. Paul over her spring break later in March. Dennis stayed in New York.

On Monday, Solome and Gretchen looked for Gretchen’s dress. Gretchen wasn’t happy with any of them. She would keep looking, even though they were running out of time.

On Wednesday, when Solome worked at the Historical Society, Soos and the baby accompanied Gretchen to look for bridesmaid dresses at Daynard’s. But Soos soon ran out of patience with the baby, and Gretchen continued by herself.

“You could do something different,” Solome told her that evening after dinner. “Look for dresses the girls can wear again.”

While Gretchen was on the phone to her bridesmaids and Dennis, Solome sat in the family room looking through the modern art book she kept for perspective.

She studied the work of Salvador Dali. His markings were like so many boats on the water. Where was a word for the sea? Maybe Salvadore knew a structured life cut into. Maybe he knew an erasure of form and structure.

What if the sun moved backward and gave her life back to her? What if Gretchen had stayed at school over spring break and Solome had her days to herself? What if Solome told Gretchen about Stephen? She had said she was worried about Stephen, but she hadn’t told Gretchen why. When would they tell the children? Weren’t they a family that shared things? No, Solome was there to help her daughter. She would endure the disruption of Gretchen’s rudeness when she was stressed, and not burden her further. At least, Stephen was himself. There were times she thought his forgetfulness would go away.

Gretchen had decided on a black and white wedding. Her bridesmaids would wear tailored, black dresses. The four girls liked Gretchen’s idea. That would make it simple and practical.

“Is this a funeral or a wedding?” Stephen asked.

Stephen, who was slipping, sometimes could get to the point. But often, it seemed his judgment was impaired. He said what he thought without weighing its effect.

They took Gretchen to the airport on Sunday. She felt everything was up in the air. Out of her control.

“Sometimes things are that way,” Solome said. “It will turn out all right,” she assured her. “You can look in New York for a dress. I’ll fly there if you want.”

Stephen Savard

I lived in a world of shifting objects. What was on my desk was not there any longer. Things disappeared. Things I didn’t know appeared. What was the use of this? What that? It jumbled until I threw my briefcase in fury. That would take care of it.

Plans for the wedding was all I heard. In the middle of it all, the president of Cobson invited Solome and me to dinner.

“You’re not the same, Stephen,” he said. “Do you need a sabbatical?”

“No no.”

Solome sat politely frozen at her place. She was up against the wedding— now this— the accusations that I was not the same.

There was a time I lectured without notes. There was a time the students didn’t mind staying beyond the hour. When I talked, fact moved to fact, departed into anecdote, came back to the point, moved in another direction again. The students listened, took notes, sometimes forgot to take notes because they were intent on listening. Sometimes my lectures had been electrifying. That was what one student course-evaluation said.

As chair, I held the large history department together despite backbitings and feudings. No, by Christ. It was not going to be that way. I held meetings in which we talked our way through the arguments and grievances until they reached departmental understandings. We came through that disruptive period as a solid department that remained solid. As division dean, I held other departments together through discussions and decisions regarding curriculum and allocation. As provost, I maneuvered the college through the challenges it faced, with the president, of course. I was instrumental in hiring the new treasurer who would guide Cobson through a necessary tightening of the belt.

“I had a dream of you, dad,” Soos called one morning. “You had wings. They were small, but they were on your back.”

“Maybe I’ll fly through the wall ahead,” I said. I don’t think Soos heard me because I heard Susan crying in the background and a hurried, “I have to go, dad.”

I also gave guest lectures, but found I couldn’t talk as long as I had, and then I couldn’t talk without notes.

Now the wedding was taking everything. The reception would be $20,000 minimum with all the guests. I heard Solome on the phone. What menu? What wines? What band? Where would cake sit? Stephen what do you think?

Solome Savard

Solome flew to New York to look at the dress Gretchen found. Stephen was supposed to take her to the airport, but at the last minute, had a meeting he couldn’t get out of. There was a time when he could leave Cobson College, get back the minute the meetings started and know exactly where he was. Solome could have taken a cab, but she told Stephen she would call Jane instead.

“Do we ever realize what we’re getting into when we have children?” Jane asked when they slowed in airport traffic.

Solome had hoped to visit the Metropolitan Museum and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but didn’t have time. Gretchen also was in the middle of exams and did not want Solome to do anything but help her with the wedding.

What would Solome wear? She had a dress from Soos’ wedding, but it was frothy. Why did they make dresses for the mother of the bride like that? A battle ship? Because she felt like she’d been in a siege by the time the wedding arrived.

When Solome returned to St. Paul, she found a straight silk dress with sleeves at Daynard’s. Was it too simple? No, it was better than looking like the wedding cake. She wanted to take Soos to look at it. She delayed the purchase, and it was gone when she returned with Soos and the baby.

The next week, Solome found another dress at Daynard’s. It wasn’t black, but a dark blue, almost purple. Periwinkle, the clerk said. What a name. It was a storm front on the horizon after an overly warm afternoon.

Solome wanted petunias that spring, but she didn’t have time to hoe and weed. She told the yard man to plant them along the walk in front of the house. She only hoped he would get it done before the wedding. He usually told her when he would work, and what he would do. He also shoveled their snow in winter, letting it accumulate sometimes before he came with his snow-blower.

Late in April, when the yard man was working, Solome went to the post office and stood in line to purchase stamps, both for the invitations and the inner envelope with the R.S.V.P. card. Then she addressed the invitations to all the guests they decided on after long discussions. Stephen stamped the envelopes. They drove to the post office and put them in the mail with a feeling of accomplishment.

Stephen Savard

I had another appointment with the doctor. Again, we returned home silently in the car.

We had been safe all our lives. Or was safe just a condition that seemed like it was safe, yet was not, for any of us? The doctor’s appointment had steered me into clarity. Safe was a mirage. It was tenuous. It was there by a thread. The physical world was not stable. Was not sure. Could not be counted upon. It only seemed that way.

Solome and I had spent our lives together. We had been blessed with opportunity, which we had taken. Now I sat in the chair in our living room and knew one day I wouldn’t know Solome. She must have seen it in my face because she looked away.

Where would my mind go? My being? My soul?— if that was the word. What was the soul, other than the term in the long history of inquiry? The soul did not have a map. It dwelled among lions. The soul was arid. The soul was contradiction. It went south when it should go north and north when it should go south.

Solome Savard

Where was Stephen going? Solome wanted him back. She didn’t want him to go. Or she wanted him to go quickly, before there was time to suffer. Solome knelt on the floor in front of Stephen in his chair and cried with her head on his knee. He put his hand on her head. When she looked up, she saw the distance in his eyes. It was as though she were on one promontory and he on the next, and there was no way between them.

Solome cried at her Monday night Bible study group. She had not attended regularly because of the preparations for Gretchen’s wedding. She also had given up her Thursday discussion group and cut back on her hours at the Minnesota Historical Society. She began sifting through her friends, calling those she could be honest with, discarding the others, for the time being anyway. Jane Mead was the only constant. The Faculty Wives Club was out. She had caught their glances toward Stephen at a Christmas party.

Stephen was going to a place he didn’t want to go. He was facing nothing. But nothing did not stay nothing. It had a ghost. At times, she thought she could hear Stephen in the house. She thought she heard him rush in the door the way he did as a young man when they were first married. Maybe because she wanted him to. Maybe because she longed for him to return to himself and say he was going golfing, or maybe they could go somewhere and eat and she didn’t need to bother with dinner. The phone rang and she wanted it to be Stephen, but it was her daughter, Soos, who wanted her to watch the baby, Susan. She had some errands to do, and by the time she got the stroller from the car and the diaper bag and bottle, she might as well stay home. Solome agreed to watch Susan and felt anger that she agreed. What else was she doing? She had some errands to do herself.

What about candles for the windows and altar? Gretchen called with more concerns for the wedding. Would they show up in morning sun?

Dennis had a nephew who would be ring bearer. What about the ring bearer’s pillow? Gretchen liked simplicity. The pillows she looked at were all full of bows. Could Solome sew one? Did Solome want a corsage? No. What would they do with baby Susan? Gretchen didn’t want a baby’s cry interrupting the ceremony. What music would they choose? Gretchen wanted a trio or quartet. Maybe Bach’s Jess. Handel’s Hornpipe and The Rejoicing. Pachelbel’s Canon in D. What order would the family be seated? What about the seating arrangements at the rehearsal dinner? How many Kamrar’s were coming? What about the logistics of changes and maneuvers between church and the club? A limousine? A friend’s vintage car?

Then there was the buying and wrapping of gifts for bridesmaids and groomsmen, the reader, the ushers, the friends who handed out the programs. What was the minister’s fee? Did they want the woman at the church to oversee? She had a needle and thread and safety pin if needed at the last minute. She knew the timing, when the bridesmaids and maid of honor started down the aisle. The ring bearer. What order and when. Anything to make it easier.

Stephen Savard

We met Dennis’ parents a month before the wedding. They were pleasant. They stayed at the St. Paul hotel. We picked them up for dinner before Gretchen and Dennis arrived from school in New York City.

The children were late because of Friday evening air traffic into the Minneapolis / St Paul. We had to wait twenty minutes at Hudson’s Restaurant. We all felt awkward and tense. We tried to compensate with too much agreeable conversation. Solome had made reservations so Mrs. Kamrar could see if Hudson’s was acceptable for the rehearsal dinner. I talked with Mr. Kamrar while the manager showed the women the banquet room.

Solome Savard

Solome didn’t think the Kamrar’s noticed Stephen’s forgetfulness. If he forgot what he was doing, or who the Kamrar’s were, he didn’t ask. Solome had coached him before the evening. “You might forget their names, but don’t ask. We’re having dinner with these people we don’t know, but we’ll act like we know them.” Stephen seemed to understand.

But Stephen remembered their names. He knew what to say. Solome felt the edge of her worry lift like a lid that had been pushed down too tight.

Gretchen had arrived tense and stressed. This would not be a pleasant weekend. She had a folder of final papers to grade. She carried another folder of wedding plans.

Solome felt like she had when a storm came up on Crane Lake and the wind blew in off the water— she remembered she felt the lake was a veneer that would lift. Did Gretchen realize how much work the wedding was for Solome?

On Saturday, they met with the photographer who wrote down the names for the groups in the photographs Gretchen wanted. There was Solome and Stephen. Soos, the baby Susan and Brian Stiple. Mark. Her mother. Mrs. Kamrar wanted more time to think about her list. It seemed official— like a list of who got into heaven. There was something sacred about the family. She felt it then. She knew there were tears in her eyes. She knew she couldn’t let Gretchen see them. Her father had died just before Soos’ marriage. Maybe Solome was remembering him.

Solome knew so little about Dennis’ family. His parents. Brothers and sisters. Who would be coming? Their spouses? Children? Grandparents? It seemed unfair to Solome— she had raised Gretchen as her own and now had to give her up to a family she didn’t know—

Mrs. Kamrar would fax her list the following week. She still wasn’t sure who was coming. Solome wasn’t either. How about Stephen’s sister and a cousin who would bring the sister?

“How many pictures with the bride’s and groom’s attendants?” The photographer continued his questions. They would look at her wedding pictures the rest of her life. It was an investment they decided to make. They were in it. They would carry through and not stop short.

Family. That’s what she had. But Mark, her son, didn’t understand how precarious his father was. He didn’t want to know. Neither did the girls. Mark’s life was bound up with his friends at college. Stephen’s and her predicament simply wasn’t in the range of Mark’s interests. She wanted to sit him down and talk to him. She wanted to say how much she needed him, but he was in his life that did not include worry about a father who was losing his memory, his mind, his language, himself.

At times Solome wanted to be immersed in the details of the wedding forever. It took her mind off Stephen.

Stephen Savard

One day shuffled into another. There were more problems with the new student center on campus. Construction would have to be delayed. There were new problems with students. They protested this or that. I couldn’t always sort through what they were disgruntled about.

Gretchen flew to St. Paul for several showers given by friends and families for whom Solome had attended showers and sent gifts and attended ceremonies. It was fair play. You gave. You got. It was part of our lives to help set the course for our children’s lives also.

One evening, Gretchen called in a panic, saying her dress didn’t fit. Solome flew to New York and met her for a fitting. There wasn’t time to have it altered in there. Solome brought the dress back to St. Paul and took it to a seamstress she knew.

When Solome was in New York, she called the night before she returned.

“Have you fed Brown?”

There was silence.

“Go out and do it now.”

I hung up without thinking to say, good-bye.

Solome Savard

Solome and Stephen had new material from the Alzheimer’s Association. Someone to stand by you. The heading read. She looked up from the chair angrily. Where was the someone? Not in her living room. She looked at the sofa. The arm chairs. The small tables. She looked at the lamps. The recessed lighting she’d put in the ceiling to light the corners of the room. She looked at the pictures. The room was her. All her. She was happy with her house. But who was the someone standing by her? She looked at the pamphlets. No, there was no one in her house.

Great strides had been made, the summer issue began. Two new drugs had been approved by the FDA for treatment of the disease. Tracine and donepezil hydrochloride. She couldn’t even pronounce them. Several other drugs were currently in development to help improve memory and alleviate or postpone symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. More pharmacological treatment options were expected with the next eighteen months.

What were these words saying? They were sunflowers with heads too heavy to hold up. Had she seen a picture of sunflowers? In the travel section of the Sunday paper? Not that she remembered.

She returned to the pamphlet. One of the communication systems in the brain, the cholinergic system, is defective in individuals with Alzheimer’s. In the brain, acetylcholine, one type of neurotransmitter involved in nerve cell communication, delivers messages from one nerve cell to another. An enzyme called, acetylcholi-nesterase, breaks down acetylcholine after it is used. Otherwise it accumulates between nerve cells.

These words are monkeys, she thought. Chattering to no one. Solome felt her throat close momentarily as the lump brought up the tears.

Research has shown that there is not enough acetylcholine in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s. By inhibiting the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine, scientists hope to keep higher concentrations of acetylcholine intact.

Tracine and donepezil hydrochloride function as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, and decrease the breakdown of acetylcholine.

Solome turned to the first of the article. Were Tracine and donepezil hydrochloride the two drugs mentioned at the beginning? She’d forgotten, but found that they were.

Could she hand out Alzheimer’s pamphlets with the wedding programs? The beginning and the end.

Late in May, Gretchen faxed the program for the wedding. Solome had to find the printer and then fax Gretchen the choice of fonts. She sat in the print shop proof reading while she waited for Gretchen’s response.

Prelude

Seating of the Parents

Processional

“Canon in D,” Pachelbel

“Trumpet Voluntary,” Clarke

Call to Worship

Scripture Reading

I Corinthians 13:1–8

Prayer

Appreciation

Questions of Intent

Meditation

The Prophet, “On Marriage,” Kahlil Gibran

Vows of Marriage

Exchange of Rings

Lighting of the Unity Candle

“Concerto for 2 Violins & Orchestra in D Minor,” Bach

Scripture Reading

Ecclesiastes 4:9–12

Prayer

“The Lord’s Prayer,” Malotte

Pronouncement

Benediction

Introduction

Recessional

“Hornpipe,” Handel

“The Rejoicing,” Handel

Solome proof-read the names of the Maid of Honor, Bridesmaids, Best Man, Groomsmen, Ring Bearer, Reader, Parents, Minister, Greeters and Ushers.

Solome tried to pick up the programs from the printers on Wednesday after work, but the store was closed by the time she got there in traffic. On Thursday, she called the Minnesota Historical Society and told them she couldn’t come to work on Friday. She might have to miss more days because of the wedding. She didn’t even have time to read the newspaper. Why was her voice shaky? Why did she nearly cry?

How inconvenient it was to have Gretchen out of town. How many phone calls? How many questions would Solome have to answer by herself? She decided to clear a place in Soos’ room. She couldn’t return with the baby before the wedding. The yard man moved a picnic table upstairs for the wedding gifts.

Mark couldn’t return to his room because Dennis was there. He was angry that he was moved out of his own room. But he suggested they help him pay for an apartment he found near the college, which he was going to ask them for anyway, which they already had anticipated.

“Dennis is only here for the weekend,” Solome told Mark. “You can stay with a friend for a day or two.”

“They’re all moving. No one has a place. They want to stay with me.”

“Stay in the new apartment then.”

“There’s no bed.”

“Use your sleeping bag.”

“On a hardwood floor?”

“Go buy a bed this afternoon.”

“I want my own bed.”

“You can have it after the wedding.”

“I just finished my finals. You didn’t even ask.”

“Mark, I have more on my mind than I can handle at the moment,” Solome said. “Why can’t you see that? I’m sorry I didn’t ask about your finals. How were they?”

“Nothing you would care to ask.”

Stephen Savard

How had we become disrespectful to one another? Had it always been there under the surface? Where had the nastiness come from? How many of my own outbursts did I have to quiet? How long would I know to quiet them?

I heard the vacuum cleaner running upstairs. I felt like I was listening to the buzz inside my head. I felt I was at Crane Lake with my children in water wings that were slowly losing air.

I knew I would last a while longer. Maybe even through the wedding. I could live many years. The medicine I was taking seemed to help. I was physically healthy, but inside my head, I was full of holes. No, it wasn’t holes. It was clutter. Little filings that stuck to open circuits, clogging them. My face was as it always was. It was my brain that would deteriorate, no, was deteriorating. There would be lesions, open spaces. I thought of the doctor’s words. How long would Solome have to live with my body after my mind had gone? No, it was going to be harder than that.

The day would come I would call out for death, and it would not come.

What was this disease? Where did it come from? How did I get it? How fast would it come? What was ahead? How could a man forget how to sit down? Would I eventually stand at my chair and not know to bend my legs and sit? Would Solome push me behind the knees to let me know to bend my legs? It hadn’t happened yet. Why was I rushing ahead? No, it was not here yet. But it would come. I would lose words, the basis of our relationship.