Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson Page B

to be wrong: She’d counted on him making his half-joke propositions to her forever.
    A year later, Bill Alberts was pursuing June.
    He wouldn’t have dared when she was in high school or home for vacation from college. Even being from where she was from, June had been prom queen of Prebble High and sorority sweetheart. In her mind, at least, she didn’t need to make any compromises.
    But being back, living in a rented top of a house with a daughter, on her own—that carried a certain air of defeat that made her approachable.
    And she did join him for weekend lunches. She invited him along on Sunday-afternoon forays with Peggy and Bea and Father Matthew. At that time, while she was working for the Brown County school district, June was planning to open a flower store. Weekends, she led the whole group (Peggy often brought along a friend) into the woods, where she foraged, bringing back branches, leaves, pussy willows, cattails and pinecones. She mixed these up with the flowers she bought sparingly, arranging them in vases on the floor.
    Bill thought June showed a great talent. He hired her to do a weekly arrangement for the real estate office. It was set on the front table, as you walked in, with a little card that said
Flowers by June Umberhum
.
    One day, he stopped by Bea’s office. She was working on a mortgage, phone to ear, wearing golf clothes, knitting. He stood in her doorway and said, “You know, I go to see a psychiatrist. And for years, every time I lay on that couch, I heard a strange sound. Like little bones snapping. And finally then, you walked into my office one day with your needles and black yarn and I knew what it was. I told her, I said, ‘Dr. Klicka, you’re knitting on my time.’ ”
    â€œAnd?” Bea said.
    â€œShe wasn’t the least bit apologetic. She said Anna Freud knit.”
    June went along as his date to the opening of his Riverclub, which he hoped would put Green Bay on musicians’ touring circuits. Billy Eckstine played. Bill had recruited him after he’d heard him perform at the Holiday Inn in Milwaukee. “Nobody wants crooners anymore,” Bill said on a Wednesday afternoon in the office. “And he was a big star in the forties and fifties.” The party was on the top story of the old canning factory, overlooking the river, their Fox River, which required darkness and scattered light to achieve any romance and to obscure its mounds of coal and sulfur and the smokestacks of the paper mills.
    But the next evening, returning the knit black cashmere shawl and evening bag she’d borrowed, June lingered in the Maxwells’ living room, to describe the event. In front of Bea, Dr. and Mrs. Maxwell, and Peggy, June did barefoot imitations of Bill—his crooked walk, coattails flapping. He was a short man, so, giving her performance, June bent her knees. She copied how he played the drums at the end of the opening-night party, his tongue going outside his mouth, his face contorting. She was a good mimic: Everyone laughed except Bea and her father, who stood up and left the room, saying,“Leave the poor man be.”
    â€œHe had pictures of Jewish jazz drummers framed behind the bar,” June said, “and one of Vince Lombardi. He said that was for the hoi polloi. It was the only one I recognized. Get with the
times,
I wanted to say.” Then she hummed a little something from “Let It Be.”
    Bea’s hands shook. Bill Alberts had told her that there were an inordinate number of great Jewish jazz drummers. It seemed to be his only source of pride in his heritage.
    â€œAnd authors, too,” Bea had told him.
    By now, Bea knew the names in his pantheon. Buddy Rich, Tiny Kahn, Stan Levey, Mel Lewis, Shelly Manne, Jack Sperling, Saul Gubin, and Dave Tough. He’d played her cuts of each of their hits. She especially remembered Saul Gubin, who’d recorded sound tracks in Hollywood