A Few Corrections Read online

  Thank you, ma’am, but Wesley Cross Sultan heads on home and turns eighteen that morning. In other words, he digs out his birth certificate and, showing more dexterity than you might suppose given his sprawling penmanship, amends a single digit. (Indeed, he shows sufficient dexterity to raise a question whether this is his first operation as a document-doctor.) Yes, he has cut another corner—slipped ahead of the others by a full year!

  Wes doesn’t hesitate—he returns immediately to Great Bay Shipping, waiting most of the morning in a diner across the street from the personnel office. When Miss Scoobles quits the building on her lunch break, Wesley scampers across the street. He speaks to another secretary and, charming her as well, is steered into an initial interview, and another, and—in short—Wes secures the job that very afternoon.

  And Miss Henrietta Scoobles? Wasn’t there a danger that she would expose him?

  “Oh I squared things with her,” Wesley used to explain, and the artful eyebrows would lift, fractionally, leaving his listener to surmise, although nothing so vulgar as a boast had emerged, that Miss Scoobles succumbed, in one fashion or another, to Wes’s “way with women.”

  . . . Or at least that’s how Wes might have recounted these events in the late fifties or early sixties, when he was still in his twenties. Back then, it was a beloved family story—“How Wesley Landed His Job”—one which, while dependably amusing its listeners, highlighted Wes’s crafty charisma, and went a long way toward explaining the secret of his success at Great Bay.

  Later, though, when Wes reached his thirties, many of his stories took a darker turn and the tale of Miss Scoobles lost its savor. Now divorced, Wes had gotten into the habit, particularly when addressing younger women, of trimming his age a bit. (Having once found it advantageous to be older than his years, he now found the reverse was oftentimes true. Only a few years late, the sixties reached even the town of Restoration, Michigan, by the early seventies, and Wes eventually discovered it didn’t always pay to be on the wrong side of thirty.)

  Meanwhile, those beautiful ringlets of his, while still abundant, lost most of their boyishness; he was graying fast. Wes took this hard, with a sense of personal betrayal—how could grayness befall one of Mother Nature’s sunniest darlings? Even as he was subtracting a few years from his age, his hair was adding years to his face. Better, under the circumstances, to avoid specific dates . . . And so Wesley’s past turned misty, as he learned to avoid, in the company of everyone but a few family intimates, the pleasures of specific, dated reminiscences. (With family, he would rake over the past eagerly, needfully.) And yet, even as his personal history receded, he deepened his allegiance to a sadly vanished era of honor and probity. Wes adopted a favorite grieving refrain called These Days, as in You know, these days, you can’t trust anybody. Or: These days, you can’t leave a single door unbolted. Or: You’ve got to get it down on paper these days. And this snowy-haired man—for the gray had turned white by the time he reached fifty—would shake his head with a dolor whose sincerity was unimpeachable. The modern world was operated by cheats, by scofflaws and check-kiters, by thieving fat-cats and do-nothing executives, and its debasement grieved nobody more than it did this wily and devious man.

  Did he feel like a hypocrite, then?

  No, it appears Wesley’s pain was authentic, as was his piercing nostalgia for an age—lost back in the wood-frame contours and the primary colors of his childhood—when a man was as good as his word. Something had gone astray . . . Something in his own life indubitably had gone astray, and on those occasions when this fifty-year-old man turned to philosophy or social commentary, the solemn burden of his own message quite overwhelmed him. Into the gaze of this man who had outfoxed Miss Henrietta Scoobles, one April morning thirty-plus years before, tears would materialize (fierce little tears, gumming those plush black lashes which, even when he was a snowy-haired man, any woman might have envied). He took his country’s moral decline quite hard, Wes did.

  But there was another reason why the tale of Miss Scoobles and the forged birth certificate lost favor with Wes: Sometime in the sixties, his career at Great Bay Shipping hit a snag. Initially he’d been assigned to sales, and even in his teens, when no client with actual money might be expected to take him seriously, Wes demonstrated potent powers of persuasion. Back then, what his clients met as Wesley stepped forward with his hand extended and a big gorgeous grin in place was a young-blood in love with his job. Something in this fast-talking overdressed kid’s zeal was infectious—he left them feeling cheered. While Wes still preferred dealing with women (and always would), before long he’d become fluent in a world of adult male exchanges: of cigarettes bummed and drinks downed, of companionable banter and good-natured griping (sports talk, spicy jokes, laments about taxes and Washington politicians and exacting bosses). He was at his best with an older crowd of men likely to look upon him with an amiable, avuncular eye. Often they could be cajoled, once the second beer had been drawn, into extending him a string of adage-laden career advice (Wes nodded thoughtfully, with genuine gratitude), or various admonitions about the wiles of loose women (here, Wes felt less need of instruction). At first, there were plenty of superiors eager to take him under their wing, and if that was a location where Wes never felt altogether comfortable (unlike Conrad the wrestling star, who, to Wes’s unending puzzlement, had embraced a sport that necessitated spending long minutes of your life with your head wedged in another man’s free-flowing armpit), it was a fine spot for getting business done. If something fastidious in Wes always recoiled from the stained collars and unbrushed teeth of bar-stool confidences, he was reconciled to the notion that his job required sacrifices. Hey, he was growing up fast.

  What significance lay in the seventeen-year-old’s choice of Great Bay Shipping as future employer? It’s hard to say . . . Blind chance may well have been steering Wes on that April morning. Or there may have been other, previous visits to potential employers, later excised from his narratives because he’d met with no success. Or the choice may tell us something about what it was to have grown up in Restoration in the forties.

  On that mitten which is Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, the town of Restoration lies not far from the base of the thumb-knuckle (close to the outside—the eastern—edge of the state), on the banks of the Michicabanabee River. The surrounding countryside, low and flat, is misleadingly nondescript. Four commercial worlds once intersected here. In the forties and fifties, Restoration lay along the ragged southern verge of what was being sold to city-dwellers from Detroit and Cleveland as the “real North woods”: Above the town stretched pine forests and cedar swamps, the lair of bear and deer, and farther north, wolves and caribou: the land of Hiawatha. Closer to home, westward across the state, stretched cornfields and cherry orchards, acres and acres of white navy beans, and—most important—sugar beets. The town’s leading employer was Restoration Sugar, through whose factory gates, every autumn, makeshift mountains of muddy, skull-sized sugar beets went in and eventually came out in neat paper sacks of pure white-grained sweetness. Meanwhile, some thirty miles to the south lay Flint, and some sixty miles south of Flint, Detroit: home to the greatest industrial complex the world had ever seen. Finally, less than ten miles away, along the shores of Lake Huron, at the mouth of the Michicabanabee, lay the port of Stags Harbor: Restoration’s link to a maritime world.

  Arriving at the personnel office of Great Bay, then, Wes may have been symbolically heading off to sea. Perhaps he recalled that legendary Yorkshire farmer’s son, founding father of the Michigan Sultan clan, who in 1836 tramped all the way to Liverpool to sign on as a cabin boy.

  Yet commerce at Great Bay Shipping had come a long way from the Golden Age of Sail. The company was in constant flux. Founded in 1868, in Cleveland, GBS had made fortunes for its founding partners through the transport of iron and copper ore from Lake Superior to foundries to the south. Later, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, it was active in the razing of northern Michigan’s wh
ite-pine forests—a harvest whose ultimate value surpassed that of the California gold rush. Along Stags Harbor’s Majestic Avenue, mansions went up to rival anything in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland. Nonetheless, it soon seemed that the company, while sited on the planet’s greatest freshwater system, had run out of things to ship. Its directors looked elsewhere and the business drifted ever further from its name and charter. If Wesley Sultan joined Great Bay Shipping in the expectation that he would be (metaphorically at least) heading out to sea, he soon discovered that what he was peddling to the world was mostly paper products and auto supplies—envelopes, calendars, spark plugs, windshield wipers.

  Envelopes, calendars, spark plugs, windshield wipers . . . Wes sold them with brio and a likable grace. He was burning up the road, first in a maroon-and-gray DeSoto and later, as he continued to prosper, in a ’67 tomato-red Bel Air convertible with Ramjet fuel injection. He met people from all over the place: from Saginaw, Pontiac, Lansing, Mount Pleasant, Detroit. The jaded weariness that slumped the shoulders and coarsened the language of most of the other GBS salesmen was something that, frankly, he couldn’t understand, at least during his first few years on the job.

  No, it took a long time to see that in the particular game he was playing, the one called Making a Career at Great Bay Shipping, the real winners were not the salesmen but the executives. To them went the respect, the social standing, the bulk of the money. Moving up meant moving over; Wes needed to change departments.

  What he needed to do was apparent and yet—and yet none of the various attempts to transplant him to a stationary desk job was a success, quite. The failure dogged Wes through the years. Was it true he lacked certain organizational and planning skills? Or was it merely a matter of his heart lying elsewhere—of his being, as he liked to assert, “a people person, not a paper person”?

  Or was it a case (a doubt that increasingly haunted him) of some quiet personal resistance among the bosses, the bigwigs, the hotshots? As a grandson of the mayor of Restoration, Wesley Cross Sultan theoretically held an impressive, career-advancing pedigree. Yet he was a womanizer, and an occasionally reckless boozer, and while neither practice was alien to the (all-male, naturally) management of GBS, Wes pursued his passions with a flagrance that chafed a few sensibilities. After all, a Great Bay executive was accountable to the community. A salesman was different. He could be something of a hell-raiser.

  Mostly, Wes kept his worries and complaints to himself. Day after day, he climbed into his car and roared off to his next appointment. Yet toward the end of his career, sometimes he would compare his job to one of those soured marriages whose partners, despite a hundred incompatibilities, cannot quite bring themselves to cut the marital bond. Wes held on at Great Bay through the decades, and the company, relocating him here and there (Stags Point, Kalamazoo, Cincinnati), held on to Wes.

  Hence, the tale of how, at the age of seventeen, he outwitted the personnel department of Great Bay Shipping eventually lost most of its luster. In time, Wes—an indefatigable storyteller—all but dropped it from his repertoire. And yet the little ruse fashioned on April Fools’ Day, 1952, stubbornly persisted. In March of 1994, company records revealed that, having reached the age of sixty some months before, Wesley Sultan was eligible for early retirement, and Wes (though with bitterness and resentment, feeling backed into a corner) accepted the offer. After forty-two years, he was an independent man at last. He was out on his own at sixty— even though he was only fifty-nine.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On Wednesday the seventeenth of May, 1958, Wesley Sultan met Sally Admiraal. Twenty-four years old on the books of Great Bay Shipping, Wes was actually twenty-three. Sally was nineteen.

  As she describes it: “You must understand: He was unlike anything or anybody I’d ever known. It wasn’t just his looks, although of course you can’t underestimate the effect of those ice-blue mesmerist’s eyes of his. Honestly, he was too much for me.”

  And she for him, probably. Wesley the salesman prided himself on being able to charm the shoes off a duck, but his tools of persuasion were comparatively crude: persistence, amiability, repetition, sincerity of expression, repetition. Sally had it in her power to do something he could never quite manage—she could turn a phrase. She too loved to tell stories, but hers had the authoritative, graceful, allusive cadences of a lifelong bookworm. Words would always have a way of tripping up Wes. In social gatherings particularly, he slipped into malapropisms that mortified him—pointing up, as they did, his lack of formal education. But Sally (who later in life would spend twenty-one years, contented years, editing text for a small Detroit newspaper) loved words for their own sake.

  Eventually, Wes learned to take pride in Sally’s gifts. He especially relished her “superlative vocabulary” (a phrase he employed so invariably as to wind up not praising her breadth but unwittingly highlighting his own limitations). Academically, Wes had always fattened the middle of any classroom’s bell curve, whereas Sally was always found out there where the elite end of the curve grazed the axis. Most years she was first in her class, and in 1956, four years after he’d dropped out, she was senior class valedictorian at Restoration High.

  As such, she’d been the logical recipient of the newly established Albert Kakenmaster Fellowship, awarded to the graduating senior “of greatest scholastic achievement and promise.” The fellowship would have permitted her to attend the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, with all tuition fees and incidentals paid. However, since it was only appropriate that the scholarship be given not to a girl but to a boy, on whose shoulders must fall the responsibility of supporting a family, Sally was bypassed. As was Beryl Vestrand, the salutatorian. The Kakenmaster Fellowship went to Tom Hendrix, who stood third in the class.

  The rationale for the decision had been explained to her by kindly Mr. Hennepin, the sweaty-templed principal of Restoration High, and, given the prevailing mores of the time, his logic made perfect sense to Sally, who enrolled instead at little Bayview College in Stags Harbor. Though far less prestigious than the University of Michigan, Bayview had the advantage of convenience; she could commute from home, from nearby Restoration, thereby deflecting the objections of her parents, neither of whom saw much point in her attending college at all. She took up the study of English, reasoning that it would prepare her to become a schoolteacher. She’d always liked school.

  And she liked home. An only child (a few months before she was born, an older brother with a congenital heart defect passed away, one day before his third birthday), Sally had felt little sense of solitude or loneliness while growing up: The sparkling little bungalow on the weedy outskirts of Restoration had felt densely populated. In addition to her watchful father, Henry (who owned a little grocery store in downtown Restoration), and her watchful mother, Kathy (who kept a house so clean, a visitor could have dined confidently off any floor), there were near-daily visits from relatives: uncles and aunts, cousins and second cousins. These were big, overspilling Dutch immigrant families, who operated truck farms and dairy farms, automobile repair shops and hardware stores. And in addition to her parents, and her relatives, there was the Lord Himself—Who tenanted every one of the Admiraals’ dustless rooms.

  The Lord of that household? As Sally would later describe it, He was not so much a jealous as a zealous God: It turned out He had very strong views about everything under the sun. Sally was in junior high school before she came to the confounding realization that the God Who oversaw the homes of her classmates was often unclear in His dictates, leaving the Presbyterians, even the Catholics, with a great deal of maneuvering room for discussion and interpretation. This was decidedly not the case with the Lord of the Restoration Christian Reformed Church, Who, through his agent the Reverend Karl Koekkoek, forbade dancing, cursing, and gambling, as well as scores of less speakable vices. If He did not expressly forbid, He certainly frowned upon, moviegoing and smoking and music-making, as well as all reading pursued for pleasure rather than instruction or gain.
(He was oddly lenient toward coffee—though preferably served weak—but He had no use for soda.) Any woman caught with her nose in a book before sundown was patently guilty of neglecting her duties to home and family. The underlying point seemed to be that the human soul was the very fuel for the fires of Hell—and hellfire, like fire anywhere, was always hungry . . .

  Later, Sally would joke a little, good-naturedly, about a God Who was the “finest chaperone a girl could have.” But no degree of subsequent joking, no classes in the worldly philosophers or readings in comparative religion, could dislodge from her mind her Dutch ancestral inheritance: the unshakable solidity of His omnipresence. It had come as another shock, when she reached her teens, to discover that for some of her friends God was not actually in the school desk standing before them, in the clock on the classroom wall, in the whirrings of the projectors in the audiovisual room.

  It was a simple, an unquestionable, and a life-defining proposition: God was everywhere. He was like the sun in the blade of grass, and if no biology lab scalpel or microscope could ever hope to unweave and isolate the golden thread spun throughout the green fabric, the grass stalk was nonetheless inconceivable without the preexistence of the solar flame. No sun, no grass; and no God, no world . . .

  And yet He was an altogether more accommodating Presence (as Sally learned early on, long before reaching high school) when encountered within the confines of her own bedroom. She’d been a sickly schoolgirl, and as she would lie in bed, awaiting the delayed arrival of a healthy adolescence, it became apparent that He was willing to overlook her delinquency if she chose to while away the long daylight hours with a book. She read voraciously. It was a practice tacitly agreed to by her parents—who, for all the exigencies of their faith, occasionally turned an indulgent eye upon their frail, sole-surviving child . . .