Part 3 — The Second Signature
Patrice Vang read the name slowly, so that no one at table six could mistake it. “The second signature on the joint account belongs to Marlene Szymanski.” Gerald closed his eyes. I felt something loosen in my chest that I had been holding since the day I sat on the edge of the bathtub with a can of Comet, because I had known Marlene for forty years, and I had never once suspected her of anything but kindness.
Marlene is the older sister of Gerald. She is seventy-four, a retired school librarian from Rhinelander who never married. She came to every Thanksgiving, brought a pecan pie, and sat on our sofa knitting scarves for the grandchildren. She now lives in an assisted living apartment near Lake Julia, and for fifteen years I had thought her small pension and my own prayers were all that kept her there.
Patrice told the room what the records showed. Beginning in 2009, Gerald had moved $1,200 a month into the account, and every month the same sum had gone out to the same address, the home where Marlene first lived with a roommate and later moved into her own room. Her pension alone had never covered it. Gerald had promised his father, on the day of his funeral, that his sister would never be put out. He had kept the promise. He had simply never told his wife.
I looked across the supper club at the seat where Marlene should have been, empty because she could not travel. Then I looked at Gerald, and I saw not a villain but a small and tired man who had been afraid of his own wife for forty years. “Why, Gerry?” I said. “I would have said yes before you finished the sentence.” He opened his mouth like a walleye on a dock, and what came out was only: “I did not know that.”
It would be pleasant to say that this softened everything. It did not, and it should not. Gerald had hidden $310,000 from his wife for decades while she cut her own hair and sold the ruby ring of her mother to help her own sister. Wisconsin is a marital property state, and the law does not care why a man hid his money, only that he did. My lawyer, a patient woman from Wausau named Ms. Lindahl, said the court would take a dim view of the secrecy.
Marlene herself telephoned me that same night. Her voice shook like a leaf on a wire. “Bonnie, I thought you knew. I would never have signed if I had thought he was hiding it from you. I am so ashamed.” I told her she had nothing to be ashamed of, that she had signed her name in good faith for her own care, and that I would drive up on Sunday with a pecan pie of my own.
The settlement came in the spring. The court found the account to be marital property in full, and because Gerald had concealed it, awarded me sixty percent, with an order that he pay my legal fees. Dick Lemke, who testified about the overtime at the mill, told the judge he had never seen a man work so hard to look poor. The judge did not smile, but one corner of her mouth moved.
I did what I had decided in the supper club, before I had even said it aloud. From my share I set aside a sum to pay for the care of Marlene for as long as she lives, in writing, through a trust my lawyer drew up. I did it for her, because she was blameless, and a little because I wanted my husband to see for once what generosity looks like when it is not hidden in a post office box.
Jodi came to my house the Sunday after the party and sat at the kitchen table with her hands around a cup. “Mom, I said you should be grateful,” she said. “I have been sick about it ever since.” I told her what I tell every young woman who sits in my chair: that gratitude is a gift, and that it becomes a debt when someone forces it. She cried, and I cut her hair that afternoon, just a trim, with the good scissors.
Gerald moved to a small apartment on Division Street, near the post office, where he can see the box that once held his secret from his window. He has asked three times to come to dinner. I have said yes once, with the thermostat at seventy-two, and I made kolaczki from the recipe card in the tin recipe box of my mother, under Desserts. He ate four. He did not say much. Neither did I.
Forty-four years of clipping coupons taught me the price of everything, and one evening at a supper club taught me what a person is worth to herself. I repeated that on the drive to Rhinelander, with a pie on the seat beside me.
Marlene was waiting in the lobby of the care home in a cardigan the color of cranberries, holding a half-finished scarf. We sat together on a bench by the window and watched the snow come down over the lake. She handed me one needle. I did not know how to knit, and she did not mind. We worked in silence, and the heat in that room was seventy-four degrees, and I did not once think about the cost.