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
