Summerlong (12 page)

The son of Russell Lowry, maintenance engineer at the Maytag plant in Newton, and Annie Dobrow, a part-time nurse at Grinnell Regional, Don Lowry had, until he was twelve, a happy childhood. He was good at sports—the boys in Iowa were divided, roughly, into the jocks and the 4-H kids (the ones who won ribbons for pigs at the fair)—and this made things easy for him. He was well liked by his pals before puberty, and also well liked by girls after it. He had a near photographic memory and enjoyed reading, so school was not a problem for him. It was rare that he did poorly on a test or a quiz; he never had to worry about studying.

At first, Russell Lowry was distant in the way all fathers were distant back then: he simply worked and came home. Nobody paid him much attention. You had to be quieter when he was home, but that was about it. The wick of his temper was a short one, and once lit, he could be angry for days, though a young Don associated this with maleness rather than mental instability. He assumed all fathers yelled, the way he assumed all fathers got so drunk on Friday nights that they often fell asleep in the foyer, shoes and coat still on and the door half ajar, letting in the cold.

On Saturdays, while Russell’s wife, Don’s mother, picked up a shift at the hospital, Russell, no doubt hungover, did maintenance work on the house—lawn mowing, snow clearing, roof fixing, lightbulb replacing—all with a cigarette hanging from his mouth and slugging,
between chores, scalding coffee from a singed pot. On Sundays, he went to the Catholic church with his family for the ten o’clock mass and joined the family—Don had a sister, Rosie—for a lavish Sunday supper at two (after, he always washed the dishes, “So your mother can rest,” he’d say). He attended all of Don’s baseball games, all of Rosie’s piano recitals, and church. He ate dinner with the family every night (except for the aforementioned Fridays). He hunted birds on occasion and went up to Minnesota for four days every deer season but never seemed to kill a deer. This was all rather standard behavior for that time and that place and Don never wondered about it. It was what dads did. He had no reason to try and understand it and he certainly never asked questions about his father’s happiness or stability.

And then the Shadow came. This is how Don’s father described it, years later, maybe nine years later, when he had already made up for his mistakes the best he could, which was not all that well. The mistakes were rather straightforward: Don’s father had started to drink too much, and not just on Fridays, which heightened his temper, and had begun to spend more and more of his time at the bar. The family fell behind on its bills because Russell began to spend liberally. When he was home, Don’s father was misery personified: no longer simply a tired and mildly dissatisfied dad, but a brooding, snarling wreck in front of a blaring television, the floor at his feet littered with crushed beer cans. His kids were older by then—Don was twelve, Rosie was ten—and it seemed as if they were well on their way to being fine human beings. Impressive on some levels, even, which was something Don’s father might express in his rare moments of clarity. They’d be fine without him, he used to tell them, somewhere around that time, because he was going over a dark edge and would soon fail them completely. He knew this with a sharpness and fatalism that, in hindsight, was chilling to Don. It was chilling how he spoke about his coming crash with an almost prescient vision.

Don’s mother had started to work full-time at the hospital
when the Shadow arrived. Though this was no reason for Russell to do what he did. But he did it: he began an affair with a married coworker, a fellow drunk, an assembly-line worker named Dottie Good, fifteen years his junior and married to one of the meanest men who worked at Maytag, Matt Good. Dottie and Russell left at lunch for a quick beer at Porter’s Stop, something they’d been doing regularly now that they’d bonded over their addictions. This was a small tavern near the factory, and one afternoon, Russell and Dottie got a little carried away. The Shadow never seemed to follow Russell to the tavern. Soon, Russell and Dottie, laughing, staggering in the dusty heat, found themselves six beers in and entangled in lusty sweat in the back of Dottie’s Dodge Omni, parked behind some Dumpsters. When Matt Good came in after his shift, about two in the afternoon, he must have been wondering why his wife had ditched work again and went to look for her car. He found Russell undoing his wife’s bra, taking her big breasts into his dirty hands.

Matt Good had a pistol in the glove compartment of his truck, and within sixty seconds that day would become the day that Matt Good killed his wife, and then killed himself, but for some reason he spared Russell Lowry. According to bystanders, including Russell Lowry himself, Matt Good had, before taking his own life, said to Russell, “You got kids. So I can’t. But you’re a bad man. You’re a fool. And this blood is on you.”

And then the final shot of the pistol went into Matt Good’s own mouth. The sirens were already wailing by then.

Don Lowry was twenty-two when he went to see his father one afternoon after the final classes of his college career. Russell was living alone then, in a rundown apartment in Gilman that was next to the gas station. Don had just finished his fourth year. He’d driven out to Gilman to invite his father to his graduation. His father was still a drunk, disabled by alcoholism, and he stayed alive on meager
disability checks and some handouts from his corn-farming brother and Don’s mother. Don almost never went to see him; it just wasn’t expected. Russell had never met Claire, for instance, whom Don had been dating since freshman year.

“Aw, Donnie,” Russell said. “It’s not for a guy like me. I wouldn’t know what to do at it.”

“It’s not that fancy, Dad,” Don said.

“I know it,” Russell said. “I went one time when your cousin Buster graduated from there.”

“See?”

“It’s just—I know I couldn’t do it,” Russell said. He was drinking from a pint of Jim Beam.

“Couldn’t stay sober for one morning? It’s in the morning. Ten o’clock on a Monday.”

“It’s important to you?” Russell said.

“Yeah, Dad. You’ve never even met Claire.”

“You ain’t ashamed of me?”

“I sure the fuck am,” Don said, and Russell and his son wheezed out a congested laugh together, Russell because his lungs were wrecked from cigarettes and Don because he was crying.

“But she’s something else, Dad. She’s amazing.”

“I’ll be there.”

Don Lowry and his skinny old man walked across the street then, and Don bought a stack of frozen pizzas and a tub of ice cream and a thirty-pack of Busch and a few packs of Winstons for his old man.

“You don’t have to do that,” Russell said.

“Sure I do,” Don said. “I’m staying for supper.”

They made a pizza in the filthy apartment’s oven and ate outside on a picnic table near the Dumpsters. Mostly, Russell drank and smoked while Don ate. Don told him that he and Claire were moving to New York City in August.

“Who’s gonna look after your ma? And your sister?” Russell asked, and Don said it wasn’t his responsibility. The underside of
that statement was clear even to a drunk. Russell Lowry had no right to make Don feel responsible for his mother and sister. Russell chewed on his lip for a bit before lighting another smoke.

“I should put the extra pizzas and the ice cream bucket in the freezer,” Don said.

“Don’t work,” Russell said. “They let me use the ice machine across the street.”

So they walked over to it together and Russell took a key from the ring on his belt and opened the ice machine in front of the Kum & Go. They loaded in the remaining pizzas and the rest of the ice cream.

“You be sure you eat all that,” Don said.

“It was like a big shadow, Donnie,” he said then. He wouldn’t look at Don. He looked off toward the Catholic church, the biggest building in Gilman, and alternated drags of his cigarette with sips of beer. “The Shadow. It just started to creep up on me at forty, you know? And I couldn’t get right. I kept feeling like, like—you know, there were layoffs coming then, and we were in debt, big-time, we had made some decisions, your mom and I, which is why she went back to work.”

His voice trailed off.

Don spoke: “It’s over with, Dad. It’s over.”

Don stopped short of forgiving him, or saying it was okay. He just said, a few more times, it’s over now. It’s done.

“I just feel, always have felt, Donnie, that I shoulda gone to prison for it, you know?”

“For what?”

“For how it all went down.”

“But you didn’t kill anybody.”

“But they’d both be alive if it wasn’t for me.”

Russell Lowry did not show up for graduation, although a number of relatives and neighbors offered him a ride. He was too drunk. But he did drop off a gift for Don, at Don’s mother’s house, which Don left wrapped in its plain brown package until he and
Claire had arrived at their new efficiency apartment in New York. The gun was accompanied by a scraggily and shaky-handed letter from Russell that came with an explanation: somehow, years after the murder-suicide of Dottie and Matt Good, a county sheriff’s deputy—Don figured it was Steve Halverson, who had played high school football with Don—had given Russell Lowry the handgun in question. To Don, this seemed like a strange and possibly illegal gesture, but Russell provided no other context, only wrote that it was the only semivaluable possession he had and thought maybe Don might want a gun for the nightstand in a place like New York.

Over Claire’s objections, he kept the gun, kept it all of these years. It was in a hidden case, properly stored and cleaned and maintained and locked away. But he had the gun. He thought of the irony of it; in some dark places, he would think, what if he took his own life with that gun?

He wouldn’t do that; once you had kids, suicide was off the table, wasn’t it? Didn’t that make sense? Suddenly, he understood what ABC had been talking about—she wanted to slip out of this world, and hope that maybe there was some threshold to cross, some new world to go into, with a clean slate, with no shadows. But once you had kids, your world was here. If you left it, you left them.

His father had died a few years after that of liver cancer. The gun was all Don had of his father’s possessions. Had he not had that visit with his father, had a sit-down those days before his college graduation, the gun would mean nothing to him. But he was glad to have that conversation in his memory, glad his father had had the chance to tell him of the Shadow.

He had had no intention of going to see his father ever again, frankly. His sister, Rosie, never did, and his mother only did so in secret, taking him food and vitamins and money to help him stay alive, though she probably would have been better off if he had died, since Don and his sister would have gotten some Social Security money. But Claire had told him he should do it, that time before graduation. He’d been having dreams about his father, and one
day, lying in her narrow dorm bed as the sun came up and blazed onto the window, he was telling her about the dreams, stroking her bare back, and she said, “Go and see him. See him today. Tell him you’re going to New York and want him to celebrate your graduation with him.”

Claire made it seem easy. She knew how to make, back then, Don feel capable of the impossible feat. She filled his wounded heart with possibility and generous impulses that would not have been there without her. Once, when they’d come back from New York for Christmas, Claire and Don took Russell out to dinner, to a steak house in Malcolm where he’d once loved to eat, and Claire sat next to Russell as he happily cleaned his plate and then Claire ordered him a second dinner, despite his protests, which he ate half of and boxed up the leftovers along with a slice of cake for dessert. And afterward, after Claire had given Russell a hug and a quick peck on the check, he said, “It’s been a long time since anybody treated me as if I was a decent human being. Thank you.”

And to Don, he said, “You are luckier than lucky, son. You really are. But you deserve to be lucky. You do.”

Don was grateful for that night, though he didn’t know it would be the last time he saw his father, who must have already been sick. Don had balked at the expense—they’d been scraping by in New York, and a lavish dinner, even one at a rural Iowa steak house, was not something they could really afford. But Don had followed Claire’s cheerful lead and picked up the tab as if he had no care in the world when it came to money.

In truth, all of Don’s better impulses have been Claire’s. Everything in his life that he has done well—anything to do with his job, his marriage, his kids, his friendships—has all come from Claire. Now, he feels as if he has drained all the goodness and happiness from her. The Shadow has come for him too.

Oh, Claire! Eau Claire!

I love to see you on campus. I love running into you.

That is all I have to say.

Your new friend, Don Lowry

This was the first note that Don Lowry had ever written to a girl in his life, and he had written it six weeks into his first semester of college and handed it to a girl named Claire Miner, who was in his French class and whom he ran into everywhere: he had served her a slice of pizza in the dining hall, had worked out on a nearby treadmill at the rec center, had seen her at the diner downtown, and, the time when he had finally introduced himself, he had looked up from his book at the library to see her sitting at a desk across from him. He always raised one casual index finger in greeting, as if he were an Iowa farmer passing in a rattling pickup, half-smiled, and turned bright red.

Claire found him adorable.

After French class, she thanked him for the note.

“I just realized, you know, that Oh Claire was the same as Eau Claire, like the city in Wisconsin, and then I realized that, in French class, like, the name of the city in Wisconsin means clear water. And that your name means clear, and it is so fitting because I don’t know if this makes sense, but you have the clearest eyes I have ever seen.”

“What?” she said.

“You just have a clear face, that’s what I mean. Like, I mean, beautiful. And no bullshit. It’s there. It’s all right there. I love clarity like that in a girl.”

And then she, though not a blusher, blushed.

“Woman,” she corrected. It was a bad habit of hers, correcting people, editing their sentences. She often did it when nervous, but Don didn’t seem to mind.

“Right,” he said, grinning, as if suddenly confident. “Woman.”

She had always been a force in social situations, never shy, never bashful. It exhausted her, the social effort of gatherings, but in high school, in New York, walking her way to the strange and somehow isolated all girls’ prep school where she went with one hundred other girls, she dominated the classrooms and the hallways with her big laugh.

She told jokes of the most raucous nature, belched in the cafeteria, made up raunchy fight songs for the Boswell School Beavers, and, in general, was a card.

She had chosen Grinnell for its strangeness. She had grown up in a small two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side, with summers in Sag Harbor at her grandfather’s place. Her father was a philandering poet who did better in Europe than he did in the States and, financially irresponsible and unwilling to work a day job, offered almost nothing to the family’s coffers; what he made for giving public readings and lectures he spent on travel and food and drink. Claire’s mother was a filmmaker who’d had some early success and then was relegated to freelance work at any place that would have her. She directed and shot toothpaste ads and dog food spots. She began to have affairs out of boredom and revenge, highly visible affairs, messy entanglements that were plain as day and hurt large swaths of people. She often taught five or six classes a semester as an adjunct lecturer. Still, Claire’s cultural pedigree had helped her get a scholarship to the Boswell School, and she had loved it. Although acutely aware of how much richer many
of the other girls in her school were, she did not mind the disparity. She often spent her vacations in exotic parts of the world, perpetually the friend-who-gets-to-tag-along, and by the time she had come to Grinnell she had been to Greece and Turkey and Costa Rica and London and southern France and Scotland and New Zealand, and never, never in her fucking life had she ever met a guy as cute and with triceps as cut as Don Lowry.

A week later, they borrowed Don’s mother’s car—he lived at home to save money that semester, which almost nobody at Grinnell ever did—and drove north to see the fall colors, driving up along the Mississippi River and then taking the back roads east to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. They checked into a Super 8 there, Don Lowry charging the room on a brand-new credit card. It was 1995 and credit cards for college students were something new. Don had a $250 credit limit. Don did not have condoms, but Claire did. She was also on the pill, which her mother had insisted she get on before leaving for college. When they checked into the room, Claire, clinically and in a businesslike way, asked Don some questions about his sexual past, as she had been instructed to do in the college’s orientation session.

They had three condoms. At six in the morning, Don walked to the PDQ gas station and bought more. It was the era of safe-sex hyperawareness. Even two virgins, with only a handful of blow jobs between them, used condoms religiously, fueled by the fear of AIDS and whatever else might befall practitioners of unprotected sex.

Oh, Claire!
he had moaned as he came the second time, sending them into a fit of giggles and pretend moans and orgasmic noises that, although meant to be parodies, turned them on enough to fuck again after a shower.