Freedom

“Yeah.” Richard, distracted, was scanning the back of the club, looking to see if any of the Sick Chelseas were lingering. Sure enough, one was. Not the conventionally pretty bassist whom Patty would have put her money on, but the tall and sour and disaffected-looking drummer, which of course made more sense as soon as Patty thought about it. “There’s somebody waiting to talk to me,” Richard said. “You’re probably going to want to head right home, but we can all go out together if you want.”

“No, you go,” Walter said.

“Really wonderful to hear you play, Richard,” Patty said. She put a friendly hand on his arm and then watched him walk over to the sour drummer.

On the way home to Ramsey Hill, in the family Volvo, Walter raved about the excellences of Insanely Happy and the debased taste of an American public that turned out by the millions for the Dave Matthews Band and didn’t even know that Richard Katz existed.

“Sorry,” Patty said. “Remind me again what’s wrong with Dave Matthews?”

“Basically everything, except technical proficiency,” Walter said.

“Right.”

“But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. ‘Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can’t live without my freedom, yeah, yeah.’ That’s pretty much every song.”

Patty laughed. “Do you think Richard was going to go have sex with that girl?”

“I’m sure he was going to go try,” Walter said. “And, probably, succeed.”

“I didn’t think they were very good. Those girls.”

“No, they weren’t. If Richard has sex with her, it won’t be a referendum on their talent.”

At home, after checking on the kids, she put on a sleeveless top and little cotton shorts and came after Walter in bed. This was very unusual of her, but thankfully not so unheard-of as to provoke comment and examination; and Walter needed no persuading to oblige her. It wasn’t a big deal, just a little late-evening surprise, and yet in autobiographical retrospect it now looks almost like the high point of their life together. Or maybe, more accurately, the endpoint: the last time she remembers feeling safe and secure in being married. Her closeness to Walter at the 400 Bar, the recollection of the scene of their very first meeting, the ease of being with Richard, their friendly warmth as a couple, the simple pleasure of having such an old and dear friend, and then afterward the rare treat, for both of them, of her sudden intense desire to feel Walter inside her: the marriage was working. And there seemed to be no compelling reason for its not continuing to work, maybe even work better and better.

A few weeks later, Dorothy collapsed at the dress store in Grand Rapids. Patty, sounding like her own mother, expressed concern to Walter about the hospital care she was getting, and was tragically vindicated when Dorothy went into multiple organ failure and died. Walter’s grief was both over-general, encompassing not merely his loss of her but the stunted dimensions of her entire life, and somewhat muted by the fact that her death was also a relief and liberation to him—an end to his responsibility for her, a cutting of his main tether to Minnesota. Patty was surprised by the intensity of her own grief. Like Walter, Dorothy had always believed the best about her, and Patty was sorry that for someone as generous-spirited as Dorothy an exception couldn’t have been made to the rule that everybody ultimately dies alone. That Dorothy in her eternally trusting niceness had had to pass through death’s bitter door unaccompanied: it just pierced Patty’s heart.

She was pitying herself, too, of course, as people always do in pitying others for their solitary dying. She attended to the funeral arrangements in a mental state whose fragility the autobiographer hopes at least partly explains her poor handling of her discovery that an older neighbor girl, Connie Monaghan, had been preying on Joey sexually. The litany of the mistakes that Patty proceeded to make in the wake of this discovery would exceed the current length of this already long document. The autobiographer is still so ashamed of what she did to Joey that she can’t begin to make a sensible narrative out of it. When you find yourself in the alley behind your neighbor’s house at three in the morning with a box cutter in your hand, destroying the tires of your neighbor’s pickup truck, you can plead insanity as a legal defense. But is it a moral one?

For the defense: Patty had tried, at the outset, to warn Walter about the kind of person she was. She’d told him there was something wrong with her.

For the prosecution: Walter was appropriately wary. Patty was the one who tracked him down in Hibbing and threw herself at him.

For the defense: But she was trying to be good and make a good life! And then she forsook all others and worked hard to be a great mom and homemaker.

For the prosecution: Her motives were bad. She was competing with her mom and sisters. She wanted her kids to be a reproach to them.

For the defense: She loved her kids!