“Sure,” I said.
“A nice man, your friend Rocky. Tell him I’m not waiting for a proposal.”
“I will. So tell me — where is Rose?”
“Gone,” said Annie, and turned her attention to the sink.
“Yes, I know, but where has she gone?”
She shrugged and began to wash the bottom of a round pot in careful circular strokes, as though trying not to wake it. “Married. So she told us. To a man named Quigley.”
“Quigley,” I said. I tried to absorb this: Rose had married a man with a funny name, and so—
“Catholic,” Annie said quietly to the pot.
“Oh.” I nodded. “Disowned.”
Annie shrugged again, miserable.
“Did he disown me, when I left?”
She spun suddenly, and held the soapy pot to her chest, as though she’d forgotten what it was — a bouquet of flowers, the hand of someone to whom she professed love. “No, of course not. We couldn’t forget you. You were always our boy.”
Exactly what I was afraid of and hoped for. “Well, at least Rose left for love.”
“Love!” Annie sniffed. “No, for love she would have stayed. She didn’t even ask!”
“Ask what?”
“If she should marry him! She should have asked!”
“Would Pop have said yes?”
“No: that’s why she should have asked.”
I laughed. Smart Rose.
“We don’t mention her,” said Annie. She put the pot back in the sink. The front of her dress was damp. “So please. Don’t.”
“You mean Pop doesn’t mention her.”
“No.” Then she said, more to the last of the dirty dishes than to me, “He’s never said her name. Not once.”
I imagined she did, though, every night: Rose, where are you?
In the living room my father snored so raspily it made the back of my throat ache. I was always their boy. I’d never been lost, just gone. Just away. Not like Rose, good as dead. Worse: she was dead but insulting them still, wherever she was. I don’t think Rose was a thing my father had ever imagined losing; he had only seen that she would lose him. An orphaned girl is hard to marry. My father had lost other children: Samuel and Libby and Sarah and Abie and Louis and Hilla. Hattie. He’d almost lost me, too, but here I was, thanks to Rocky. My father had worked to keep hold of me, I was a fortune, but Rose was the loose change in his pocket, and he’d lost her out of carelessness. He’d never told her who she should marry. He’d never told her, Your life is here, with those who love you.
He was busy telling that to me.
A Catholic, a barbarian. He knew nothing of Catholics except the words that came to him: flesh, thorns, passion. He saw gilt-edged blood when he closed his eyes. And now Roseleh was married to one.
“Lots of people hate Jews too,” I told Annie.
“The ignorant,” she answered.
Iowa Stripped to the Waist
One memorable night in my childhood, we found a vagrant sleeping on the settee on the screened porch; he’d let himself in through the screen door. We didn’t know what to do; we stared at him as though he were a dozing skunk. My father said, “Let him rest,” and in the morning Hattie (the only one of us brave enough) went out with a sack of doughnuts that Annie had made that morning, which, considering Annie’s doughnuts, was either charity or punishment.
I wondered whether the diamond pattern of the wicker had bitten into his skin the way it was biting into mine. I was home, but I wasn’t home: I was in the transient spot, the place you could fall asleep without the honest members of the household noticing. Above me, in my own bed, Rocky snored, the guy who’d engineered this neat trick: me in Valley Junction again. What a prank that telegram had been, a harebrained, cruel, canny, kind trick. I was so grateful to the guy I hated it, and to this day — six decades later — one of my greatest regrets is I never managed to tell him so.
Rocky the practical joker snuck into the sunporch early the next morning. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go look at the bright spots of your youth.” We took my father’s car, an old Jewett, which nobody drove anymore, and headed out for the city.
“I don’t think I’ll marry Annie,” Rocky said. “Do you mind?”
“Who says she wants to marry you?” I asked.
“A wise woman. But Rose! Rose has forsaken me!”
I explained what I knew of what had happened.
“A Catholic!” Rocky said, and whistled. “A bad business, that bunch. If I were your father, I’d form a posse.”
“That’s not it,” I said.
“S’okay. Little Rose, married. I never thought she’d do me this way. What’s she, eleven?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Oh, well, then, she had to settle for a Quigley. That’s some story, about your folks. So, hey: where are those bright spots?”
Des Moines at first glance isn’t pretty, but if you look hard and in the right places, it reveals its beauty. Look harder, and it gets ugly all over again.
We drove down Polk Boulevard, under the elms, past the grand lawns, then swung around and took Grand Avenue downtown, past George the Chili King’s, over to Gray’s Lake. It was 7:00 A.M., and the city was still shut down, a museum of my childhood, everything behind glass. We drove by the Jewish Community Center, where I used to go to dances, and then past the fairgrounds. I’d managed to come back home. I’d seen my family. I’d lived.
The one person I was still avoiding was Hattie.
It was like Hattie was a dear friend who I’d fallen out of touch with while I was away, one I’d thought of all the time and meant to write, and then the meaning-to-write began to eclipse the friendship itself, until the memory was half guilt, half melancholy. I’d betrayed Hattie somehow. I had the sense that she still lived in town but I’d been so lousy about everything that I couldn’t bear to look her up. And so I had to avoid all of the places she might possibly be. If this had been a movie, I suppose I would have gone to her grave and wept. I didn’t. I hate cemeteries. We should all be cremated. We should all be thrown up in the air. How would I like to be remembered? Not as a body in a box, that’s for sure.
We ended up at the State House grounds, Des Moines’ grandest spot. Once there had been some slums at the western foot of the hill, but they’d been torn down. I’d’ve loved to take Rock into the State House itself: even an Easterner would be impressed by the glory of that building. Instead, we walked around to the south side to look at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, a solid column topped by Victory, skirted at its base with sculptures of Iowa Personified, A Mother’s Sacrifice, and (at each corner) a Soldier or Sailor. A beaut of a monument when you first saw it; then, suddenly, not. The triumphant servicemen seemed on closer inspection leeringly drunk. The old mother sitting with a child at her feet was venerable, then haggard. Was that a feather duster in Victory’s hand? And Iowa Personified was a young bare-to-the-waist woman who held up her breasts, one in each hand, thrusting them toward — well, who knew? She was supposed to be offering nourishment, but she looked like a cooch dancer. The inscription above her head read, Iowa, her affections, like the rivers of her borders, flow to an inseparable union.
As a kid I’d suspected there was something smutty about that. Most astonishing to me then was that a man hadn’t left Iowa topless: a woman had. There was the sculptress’s name on the pedestal, Harriet Ketchum. I was an educated boy, and I knew that a naked sculpture implied the existence of an actual naked lady. The statue itself didn’t titillate me, but the fact that it had once been near a semiclad artist’s model did. Maybe Harriet Ketchum just looked at herself in the mirror.