Ordinary Grace Read online

  We played softball in the pasture behind our house until it was too dark to see and the others scattered back to their own homes and Jake and I went inside. My father still had not returned from his search for Travis Klement. My mother was standing at the kitchen sink smoking a cigarette and staring through the window toward Tyler Street. We asked for a treat before bed and she said we could have some ice cream which we ate while watching Ed Sullivan. We got ourselves ready for bed and kissed Mother good night and from the way she turned her cheek to us but not her eyes which held on Tyler Street it was clear that she was distracted. I didn’t know what there was to be worried about because my father was often gone on a call to one of his congregation that ended up turning into a long visitation as he helped cope with some travail or he became part of a protracted vigil over illness or death.

  Upstairs in our room Jake said, “You better stop telling that story.”

  “What story?”

  “How you were such a hero finding the dead guy.”

  “I was sort of.”

  “I was there too.”

  “Everybody knows that.”

  “You make it sound like I wasn’t.”

  “Then next time you tell the story.”

  That shut Jake up but I could sense him still seething on the far side of the room.

  For Christmas we’d been given a clock radio with a timer that let you listen to it for an hour at which point it would shut itself off automatically. On Sunday nights Jake and I listened to “Unshackled!” which was a religious program broadcast from a place called the Old Lighthouse in Chicago. It consisted of dramatized stories of people whose lives spiraled into the darkest places imaginable where only the light of God was powerful enough to reach and save them. I didn’t much care for the religious part of it but radio dramas were rare and I enjoyed being told a story that way. Jake usually fell asleep while the show was on and that night was no exception.

  I listened until the radio clicked off and I began to drift into sleep and then I heard the return of the Packard and I woke up. Below me the screen door opened and I knew Mother had gone out onto the porch to greet my father. I went to the window and watched him walk from the garage with Gus at his side.

  “Thanks, Gus,” my father said.

  “A good day’s work, Captain. Let’s hope it takes. Good night.”

  Gus left him and headed for the church. My father joined my mother on the porch and they came inside and went to the kitchen where I knew she would dish out the warmed-over spaghetti. I lay back down on my bed. Through the heat grate I heard the chairs scrape the linoleum as my parents settled at the table and the quiet that followed as my father ate.

  “We finally found him in Mankato drinking in a bar,” Dad said. “He was pretty drunk. We did our best to sober him up. Fed him something. We talked and I tried to convince him to pray with me, which he refused to do. In the end, though, he was better. He was ready to go home. He felt pretty bad about how he’d treated Amelia and Peter. He said things have been tough lately. He swore it would never happen again.”

  “And you believed him?”

  I heard my father slide his fork across his plate as he gathered the last of his supper. “Ruth, I don’t know that God can reach everyone. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t know how to deliver everyone to God. Travis isn’t out of the woods. I worry about him and about his family. And I don’t know what more I can do at the moment except pray for them.”

  I heard water run in the sink and the clatter of plate and fork as my mother laid them there and I heard silence and I imagined her turning back to my father still sitting at the table and the last thing I heard that night was her soft voice telling him, “Thank you, Nathan. Thank you for trying.”

  7

  Monday was my father’s official day off. After breakfast he usually took what he called a constitutional which was a walk from the Flats to the home of Emil Brandt. Because Brandt had a sister, Lise, whom Jake had long ago befriended, my brother often accompanied Dad. I didn’t mind going with them on that particular Monday, as I was bound by my father’s stricture to stay in the yard unless given permission to do otherwise. Accompanying him was like receiving a prison pass. Ariel went along but she was often at the home of Emil Brandt anyway, not only under his tutelage for her piano and organ keyboard work and her musical composition but also working with him to complete a memoir he’d been dictating for more than a year.

  Although Emil and Lise Brandt were part of the royalty that was the Brandt family—they were the brother and sister of Axel Brandt and, therefore, uncle and aunt to Karl—they lived in a kind of exile in a beautifully renovated farmhouse on the western edge of New Bremen overlooking the river. They were Brandts in name and in fortune but they were different from the others. Emil was a piano virtuoso and a composer of significant reputation and in his youth he’d been a carouser of great celebrity. After he’d proposed to my mother and then left her, he’d gone to study music in New York City and had become friends with Aaron Copland. Copland had just returned from Hollywood where he’d hit it big with a score for the film version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The composer had encouraged the struggling Emil to seek his fortune on the West Coast, and the young man had followed that advice. From the very beginning he did well, found easy work in the music side of the film business, and fell in with a good-time Hollywood crowd. He befriended Scott Fitzgerald in the author’s final years of near obscurity, and the Andrews Sisters who were originally from Minnesota, and Judy Garland, née Frances Gumm, also of Minnesota. Until the war cut short his carousing with the stars he was a young musician with two roads before him: one that led to the glamour of continuing to compose for the big screen and the other that wound its way back to the land from which he came and the music that rose from black soil and strong wind and deep root. All this Ariel told me from what she’d learned typing the memoir he dictated.

  Lise Brandt was another story. She’d been born ten years after Emil, born deaf and difficult. She was the child of whom the Brandts, if they spoke of her at all, spoke in somber tones. She hadn’t attended school but had received what schooling could be given from special tutors who’d resided in the Brandt home. She was subject to tantrums and to fits of rage and only Emil seemed able to tolerate her outbursts and she for her part adored him. When Emil returned from the Second World War blind and disfigured and wanting only to feed in isolation on the meat of his bitterness, his family had purchased and completely renovated a farmhouse that was a stone’s throw from the edge of town. For companionship they’d given him Lise who was in her midteens then and had no future that anyone could see. This union had served both damaged Brandts well. Lise took care of her brother and her brother offered Lise a place where, in all the isolated silent years ahead, she would have purpose and protection.

  This too Ariel told me, but it would be a while before I understood the importance of these things.

  When we approached the white picket fence Lise Brandt was already at work among the rows of her vegetable garden wearing soiled gloves and working the damp earth with the sharp edge of her hoe. Emil Brandt sat in a wicker chair on the porch and next to him was a white wicker table and another chair and on the table was set a chessboard with all the pieces arranged and ready for play.

  “Will you have coffee, Nathan?” Brandt called out to us as we entered the gate.

  He knew we were coming and the sound of the hinges had probably alerted him to our arrival but he loved to give the impression that although he was as blind as one of the fence posts he could somehow see us. He smiled as we advanced up the walk and he said, “Is that Ariel with you and those two hooligans you claim as your sons?” How he knew the exact makeup of my father’s entourage was a mystery to me but my father spoke of him as the most intelligent man he knew and clearly Emil Brandt had his ways. Lise left off her hoeing and stood tall and plain and still as a scarecrow as she watched us intrude. Intrusion but for Jake who peeled away and ran to her w
here they communicated in signs and gestures and Jake followed her to the toolshed and came out with a garden rake and shadowed her as she began again the work in the garden.

  My father mounted the steps and said, “I’d love some coffee, Emil.”

  The blind man said, “Would you mind getting it, Ariel? You know where everything is. And get whatever you’d like for yourself. I’ve left the tape recorder on my desk and there’s plenty of paper for you at the typewriter.”

  “All right,” Ariel said. She went inside in a way that seemed to me as familiar as entering her own house.

  I sat on the porch steps. My father took the second wicker chair and said, “How is the memoir coming?”

  “Words are different from musical notes, Nathan. It’s a hell of an undertaking and I’m not sure I’m very good at it. That said, I’m having a fine time with the project.”

  The property of Emil and Lise Brandt was among the most beautiful in all of New Bremen. Along the fence Lise had planted butterfly bushes that bloomed red and yellow all summer long. Here and there about the lawn she’d created enclaves of flowers like islands that she’d edged with red brick and that exploded with blossoms of a dozen varieties in color and form. Her vegetable garden occupied a space as large as the foundation of our whole house and by the end of every summer the tomatoes and cabbage and carrots and sweet corn and squash and other vegetables grew huge and heavy on vine and stalk. Lise could not communicate well with the human world but she and plants seemed to understand each other perfectly.

  Ariel brought my father coffee and said, “I’ll just get started now.”

  “Fine,” Brandt said and offered a smile that curled smoothly into the normal flesh of his right cheek but crinkled the thick scar tissue of his left.

  Ariel went back inside and a few minutes later through the window of a room at the corner of the house came Brandt’s voice on the tape recorder followed by the rapid tap of typewriter keys. As my father and Emil Brandt talked and began their weekly game of chess I listened to Ariel’s fingers flying over the typewriter keyboard. My father had insisted that she take business courses and learn typing and shorthand because he thought that regardless of her dreams and intentions such training would stand a woman in good stead.

  “E-four,” Brandt said offering the opening move of the game.

  My father advanced Brandt’s pawn. He made all the moves for Brandt who could not see the board with his eyes but who had the marvelous ability to visualize the game as it progressed.

  My father had grown up in the rough port city of Duluth, the son of a seaman who was often gone on long voyages, not a bad circumstance apparently because when the man was home he was prone to drinking and throwing an angry fist at his wife and son. I never met this grandfather of mine because along with twenty-nine other hands he’d been lost at sea when the coal carrier he was working on had gone down in a gale off the coast of Nova Scotia. My father was the first Drum to go to college. He planned to be an attorney, a litigator. My mother told us that when she met him he was whip smart and cocksure and she knew absolutely he would be the best lawyer in the Gopher State. She’d married him at the end of her junior year at the University of Minnesota, where she was majoring in music and drama. He was, her sorority sisters agreed, quite a catch. My father had just finished his final year of law school. This was 1942. He’d already enlisted and was preparing to go off to war. By the time he left to fight—beginning in North Africa, then through numerous campaigns all the way to the Battle of the Bulge—my mother was pregnant with Ariel. The war changed Nathan Drum, changed him dramatically, and completely altered his plans. He came home with no desire to fight battles in a courtroom. He went instead into the seminary and was ordained. By the time he took charge of the Third Avenue Methodist Church on the Flats, we’d lived in four other towns in Minnesota. A minister’s family never stayed long in one place, a difficult aspect of the job we were all expected to accept without complaint. But because my mother had grown up in New Bremen and we came often to visit my grandparents we already knew the town well. Although my father and Emil Brandt were acquainted, it was the weekly chess that brought them close. The games had evolved gradually and were mostly an opportunity, it seemed to me, for my father and Brandt, two men of the same age and scarred by the same war, to relate in a manner that didn’t require my mother’s presence. Though Brandt had loved her and abandoned her, that didn’t appear to be an issue. Or so I believed then.

  “E-five,” my father announced and moved his own pawn. “Ariel says it’s fascinating. Your memoir, I mean.”

  “Ariel is a young woman and young women fascinate easily, Nathan. Your daughter is gifted in many ways but she has a lot to learn about the broader world. Nf-three.”

  My father lifted Brandt’s knight and moved him to the proper square. “Ruth believes she’s destined for greatness. What do you think, Emil? D-six.”

  “D-four. Ariel’s a fine musician, there’s no doubt about that. As talented as any I’ve heard her age. After Juilliard I suspect that she could audition and secure a position in any fine symphony orchestra. She’s also a gifted composer. She still has a great deal to learn, but that will come with time and maturity. Hell, if she wanted, she could even be a fine teacher. What I’m saying, Nathan, is that she has enormous potential in so many areas. But greatness? Who can say? That’s something, it seems to me, that depends more on God and circumstance than on our own efforts.”

  “Ruth has such hopes for her. Bg-four,” my father said and moved his bishop.

  “All parents hope greatness for their children, don’t they? Or maybe not. I don’t have children so what do I know? D takes E-five.”

  “B takes F-three. It may be a moot point. Ariel’s talking about not going to Juilliard.”

  “What?” Brandt’s sightless eyes seemed full of amazement.

  “I’m sure she’s just dragging her feet. Last-minute doubts.”

  “Ah,” Brandt said and nodded his understanding. “Natural I suppose. I have to say, I’ll miss her when she goes. I’m not sure I’ll be able to trust my memories to someone else. Q takes F-three.”

  The work Ariel did for Brandt was part of the arrangement struck to compensate him for his time working with her to improve her playing and her music composition. My parents could in no way afford to pay properly for such a service. For a man of Brandt’s stature it was paltry payment but his help was clearly offered as a favor because of his affection for my mother and his friendship with my father.

  “What did Ruth say when Ariel dropped this bomb?”

  “She went through the roof,” my father said.

  Brandt laughed. “Of course. And you?”

  My father studied the board. “I only want her to be happy. D takes E-five.”

  “Bc-four. And what is happiness, Nathan? In my experience, it’s only a moment’s pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time. Better, I think, to wish for her wisdom, a virtue not so fickle.”

  “Nf-six,” my father said hesitantly.

  “Qb-three,” Brandt immediately responded.

  My father studied the board a minute, then said, “Qe-seven. Do you know Travis Klement, Emil?”

  “No. Nc-three.”

  “He lives in Cadbury. His wife is a member of one of my congregations. He’s a vet. Korea. Had a tough time over there. It’s eating at him, I believe. He drinks. He’s hard on his family. C-six.”

  “Sometimes, Nathan, I think that it wasn’t so much the war as what we took into the war. Whatever cracks were already there the war forced apart, and what we might otherwise have kept inside came spilling out. You and your life philosophy, for example. You may have gone to war thinking you were going to be a hotshot lawyer afterward, but I believe that deep inside of you there was always the seed of a minister.”

  “And in you?”

  “A blind man.” Brandt smiled.

  “I don’t know how to reach Travis.”


  “I don’t know that everyone you reach out to you can help, Nathan. A lot to expect of yourself, it seems to me. Bg-five.”

  My father sat back and stroked his cheek. “B-five,” he said but not with great conviction.

  “Dad,” Jake shouted and came running from the garden. He had a rake in one hand and in the other he held a wriggling garter snake.

  “Don’t hurt it, Son,” my father said.

  “I won’t. Neat huh, Frank.”

  “A snake? Big deal,” I said. “When you find a rattler, let me know.”

  Jake’s enthusiasm wasn’t dulled by my response. He returned happily to the garden where Lise waited. They gestured to each other and Jake put the snake down and they both stood and watched it glide swiftly away among the stalks of sweet corn.

  There seemed something preternatural about the relationship between the two of them and I have always believed it was because neither could communicate easily with the rest of the world. Though deaf, Lise had been trained to speak but was greatly reluctant to mouth the utterances that sounded odd and flat to the rest of us. Jake could barely complete a coherent utterance at all. They communicated in signs and gestures and facial expressions and perhaps even on a level that superseded the physical plane. With everyone else except her brother and Jake, Lise could be difficult. I believe now that it may have been a form of autism but in those days she was called touched. People thought of her as slow or simple because she would not look at them directly when she spoke, and on those rare occasions when she was forced to leave the safety of her yard and enter town, she would cross the street to avoid contact with someone approaching her on the sidewalk. Mostly she stayed inside the white picket fence and took care of the flowers and the garden and her brother.