of them died not long after the pictures were painted. The Munster Boy did not live past age 12. The second twin on the tricycle died long before the portrait was ever painted. I don’t even know the name of the Munster girl. Aristide the Judge grew old and left a will. Amelie, beloved wife, was in white when the likeness was taken. Her dress was painted over in black after she and the child died in childbirth. They are all dark-haired, dark-eyed, sweet-mouthed, Roman-nosed.
Amelie, the first wife, is the most remarkably like-life. The others can die of boredom, possibly, but she is a question that crawls up your spine and keeps her creepily alive in the conversation of the room. As people have said on the subject of Mona Lisa, there is much to be said for a lady who preserves her mystery for 200 years.
Does that even happen? Does a driver ever really just, turn without looking, like that, speeding towards you, not thinking, not turning, not turning, not turning, straight on forward until he ramps up the side of your pontoon boat and lands on your daughters?
The speedboat with the upturned snub nose leaves a snotty crest in the river. The driver doesn’t take the trouble to check for a clear coast before he shoves up the boat’s nose and turns, and doesn’t take the trouble after. He’s on a pleasure-ride.
A pontoon boat is a family-sized craft, an oversized raft made for floating and leisurely chugging. It cannot move fast. It certainly cannot race out of the path of a speedboat.
Our pontoon boat is a sitting duck of screaming people while the speeding speedboat speeds onward and does not hear the screams of disbelief, the final, desperate belief.
Little daguerrotypes are on the tables with lockets and miniatures. A wreath of cousin someone’s hair is on the wall, with smaller wreaths of locks and a painted Chinese screen, ivory encases the table-top. The larger wreathe belongs to the Bride.
My cousins look strikingly like them.
The most poignant image, I think, is this, the dark oil seeping out of the engine and churning in the water like blood. It happens.
An Anglo-Saxon poem I read my sophomore year in high school had a line that licks round your tongue. Wyrd goes ever as it must.9
“Is he going to hit us?” screamed a younger sister, while my aunt shrieked, “Do something!” In an exceptionally slow pontoon, it was too late to do anything and we had to sit terrified in the peace and loveliness of Holter Lake for the speedboat to come crashing into our bow, landing over my two youngest sisters and on top of me.10
My brother is ready to leap gallantly into the cold dark river to search for us. Dad tells the police report that he and my uncle had pushed off the boat, but they had not; Daddy pushed the boat that covered my two youngest sisters and me back into the water.
Barbara Ellis, aged 4 years old, brown curly hair and round cheeks, knocking on the door of the tall white shotgun mansion next door, New Orleans. “Miz Miltenberger! Miz Miltenberger! Can I play with Henry?” Henry Miltenberger, 5 years old, freckly, red-haired, lanky already, lopes to the front porch, overjoyed. Mrs. Miltenberger disappears into the dark hall and Barbara throws rocks at Henry. That’ll teach him. Teach him who’s smart!
My father and uncle shoved the assassin-boat into the river, freeing my sisters, who were for the most part unharmed, and myself, who looked — dead. From my bench on the boat I was sped by helicopter to the nearest hospital in Great Falls, Montana where for the first week doctors and nurses scurried around to save me as I lay unconscious in a coma in my room in the Intensive Care Unit.11
In the picture my sister told me one night I am unconscious, with a single line of blood trickling down from my forehead from where I was scraped by the rough. The little girls are awake and crying — everyone is crying. I throw up, and I start breathing again. The pontoon slowly chugs across the lake, all the way back to the landing, and I am flown to Great Falls by the emergency helicopter on the dock.
Henry stepped out of school at age 15. His favorite teacher had taken him aside. Henry, he said, you aren’t doing us any good, and we certainly aren’t doing you any good. When his father took him along on an interview for his brother Gus. The job was offered to Henry. Henry went to work at the ports at age 15.
Dear Molly,
When Mom and I arrived around 4:00 p.m., we weren’t allowed to see you. You were on a sedative drip to calm you and to stop your thrashing. Every hour they would stop the sedative, causing the pain to hit you immediately to check where you were. One time they asked you to open your eyes and they thought they saw you open them a touch. Another time a nurse was changing your I.V. when you sat up and opened your eyes from the pain. The nurse said your eyes were glazed and couldn’t see.
We prayed for you in the chapel, and I am spreading the news so the whole nation will be praying for you. I wish I could have seen you, there are times I don’t believe it has happened, and other times I can’t stop crying. I have been praying for a miracle, that you will once again be healed and new. . . I wish with all my heart that you were healthy at home and I could call to talk your ear off!
Love,
Your Friend12
Since three days ago a lifetime is past. Since yesterday a century has passed away. The whole world prays for me; at least this country prays, and some churches in Europe. There is no brain activity at all.
Barbara was 16 when she joined her brother Sydney at Tulane. The youngest in her class.
The injury is more serious than they thought. I’m not waking up like I should, and I’m shivering, sweating, there’s a fever in my brain. My traumatized brain is encaged by a coma from a severe shock to my occipital glob, swelling to a balloon inside of my fractured skull. Soon it is going to pop.
The doctors consider my blank brain a lost case by Wednesday. My mind is irrecoverable, and my life is scarcely closer.
They give me up for lost. My parents don’t. They are always with me, praying for me, talking to me, playing music. Daddy rubs my feet and the nurses cry because fathers don’t usually care this much. Mummy paints my nails and the nurses call me Sleeping Beauty.
Four days and the medical team says to pull the plug.
Our family line has a very distinct nose. Aquiline in some. Roman in most. Roman, I’ll say Roman, a friend told my dad, it’s roamin’ all over your face. My great-grandfather told my grandfather that what he left to him was not money but a good name. Our family does not always have brains. We don’t always have beauty. But the one trait we can all account for is character. I come from a family of personalities.
Dr. Gorsuch is a man my parents trust. He’s the best in the unit, a Christian, and he is willing to take a risk. He suggests a procedure that gives me a 50/50—40/60—30/70—20/80—10/90, 5/95, 1/100? A chance of survival; prospects unknown.
I am one of the first. There isn’t a precedent, but there isn’t a choice.
Henry and Barbara are my grandparents.
My parents, distraught. Praying in the chapel; giving me back to God. There is a verse that they hold onto for dear life, Psalm 118:17. I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. The Lord has chastened me severely, but He has not given me over to death.13
Dear Molly,
Your brain was expanding so much they thought they might have to do surgery, and you had a fever
