Chapter 6
Any doubts that had crept into Will’s mind about the Milwaukee Mistake evaporated as soon as they walked into the house. And actually, it’d happened even a little bit before that while they were ascending the stairs of Clemens’s trademark S-shaped front porch and Rachel reminded Will, a tinge of expectation in her voice, that the architect had referred to this space in her homes as “the river bend.”
“You weren’t supposed to carry the troubles of the world back across with you when you came home at night,” she’d announced when they’d reached the top and were taking it in. Her delight at that, though, was quickly eclipsed by what she saw inside.
“Look at all that natural light,” Rachel marveled in the direction of the bank of windows while stepping into the living room.
To Will’s eyes, the space looked like a DIY project still in need of a lot of doing. The hardwood floors were scuffed and battered, the walls were white and largely bare, and he was pretty sure the windows that had captured Rachel’s attention were still in need of framing. The only reason it was pretty sure and not all-the-way sure was because he was the type of person who got nervous painting a nursery and wasn’t altogether confident he knew what a window frame was in the first place. Regardless, he knew they didn’t look like they would at the end of the restoration, and that made Rachel’s excitement over being there all the more endearing.
The only pieces of furniture in the living room were a dozen or so decidedly not period-specific chairs set up facing some framed Clemens archival prints on easels, the area in front of which the docent would presumably use to talk to them once the tour started. The night before, Will had paid the 15 dollars for their two tickets but thought he should see if they needed to check in somewhere. He was about to tell Rachel that was what he was doing when a motorcycle roared by on the street and momentarily drowned out all noise around them, so he left her to her examination of one of the prints and headed down the narrow hallway farther into the house. At the end of it, he could see an older woman with a small cashbox and a credit card reader sitting next to a table with a spread of brochures.
“Welcome to the T. M. Clemens Milwaukee historical site,” she said cheerily when he reached the back room where she was set up. Now that he was in there, he saw a second woman seated at the other end of the table.
“Thanks,” Will said to the woman who’d greeted him, while nodding a hello to the other. The latter was younger, and her hair and glasses made him think of Aunt Katie. God, he missed her. She used to take him to the movies every weekend from the time his dad left until he was 12 or 13. As he’d gotten older, he’d realized his aunt had done that as much for Will’s mom as she had for him, just a way to give her sister some time to herself each week. To know that there were people who still loved the two of them that much—it didn’t make up for what his dad had done, because nothing ever could, but it made Will even more grateful for his aunt and that time they’d had together. She’d never had kids of her own and yet had been such a natural with him that she easily could’ve passed as his mom. He wondered whether he’d have even half of those instincts when it came to his own daughter or son.
“Do you have a reservation?” the first woman asked.
“Yes. It should be under Easterly? For two?”
“Easterly—yes, there you are. You’re all set. Henny here will be leading your tour. She’ll meet all of you in the front room in a few minutes.”
Henny smiled at him, and the resemblance to his aunt grew even stronger.
“My wife was right,” he said. “The amount of natural light in here is amazing.”
“You bet,” Henny said. “Clemens put windows all over the place. She called them ‘our portal to understanding the world.’”
“She really liked a turn of phrase, didn’t she?”
Henny chuckled. “Indeed, she did.”
And then before Will knew why he was saying it: “You know, this is probably going to sound weird, but you really remind me of someone.”
“I do?”
“Yeah. My aunt Katie.”
“Well, I hope that’s a good thing,” she said, laughing again.
“Oh, absolutely. She was the best. And she actually volunteered at the historical society in our town. She would’ve loved this place.” Henny picked up on his use of past-tense and conditional verbs, and he was suddenly stuck in that limbo of how much to share with a stranger about his aunt’s death when the only reason for doing so was to add context to their small talk. Well, that, and he didn’t want Henny to misread his comparison as some sort of comment on her age. His aunt had only been 61 when she died.
In the time he spent thinking through this, it hit him again how much he would’ve liked to talk to Katie about his fears around becoming a dad.
“She, uh, passed away a year ago,” he added. “Kind of out of nowhere.” He paused. Now it sounded like he was telling this poor person he’d met 30 seconds before that she could drop dead at any moment. “I mean, it was unexpected. Because she was still pretty young.”
Will had no idea if he was making it better or worse. Fortunately, Henny just smiled an understanding smile at him.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “She sounds like she was a great lady.”
He smiled back, and relieved to have been let off the hook of his awkwardness, he gave a little half wave goodbye and headed to find Rachel. It didn’t take long because he could hear her pretend laugh—the one where you oversell how funny you think something is because in reality you don’t find it funny at all, but you can tell the other person is expecting some kind of reaction—from down the hall. When he reentered the front room, the laugh immediately made sense.
Rachel was sitting down now, right next to a couple attempting to manage a toddler and an infant. Whether she had ended up in this spot by choice or by chance, Will didn’t know, but he was positive that she would’ve been banking on this couple being far too preoccupied with their kids to strike up a conversation with the partially purple-haired woman one seat over.
She had been wrong.
“This is Ronald and Gwen,” Rachel said as Will took the seat on the other side of her. “They’re from Bartlett, and these are their kids, Ronnie Jr. and Felicity. Gwen was kind enough to be giving me recommendations on nursing bras”—Rachel turned like she was getting something out of her purse so only Will could see her face, where dismay and/or disbelief appeared to have enlarged her eyes to twice their normal circumference—“even though I told her it really wasn’t necessary since we just met two minutes ago.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Gwen said, shooting a look over Rachel’s head straight to Will, a smile plastered across her face. “We mommies have to stick together!”
“And Gwen is an expert,” her husband bragged. “I mean, breastfeeding two babies at once? I don’t know how she did it!”
Will looked at Ronnie Jr., who was around three and currently attempting to scale a radiator, and Felicity, who wasn’t doing much of anything. That made sense since she couldn’t have been more than six months old. What didn’t make sense was how their age gap translated to a period of time when they both would’ve been breastfeeding.
It seemed he was unsuccessful at hiding his confusion.
“Ronnie Jr. breastfed until he was two and a half,” Ronald clarified. Like that was a thing you heard every day from a guy on a T. M. Clemens tour.
“Is that ... typical?” Will asked, doing his best to suppress his mounting sense of horror.
“Not really,” Gwen said. “We like to say he’s a real boobs guy!”
“Did you hear that, Will?” Rachel said, still pretending to riffle through her purse. “Ronnie Jr. is a real boobs guy!”
Ronald and Gwen began to cackle, and it was now Will’s turn to bust out his fake laugh.
“Sounds like we have a fun bunch today,” tour guide Henny said, gliding into the room and causing everyone to quiet down.
“Oh, thank God,” Will muttered under his breath as Rachel gratefully gave up the hunt for whatever she had never been looking for.
Henny started by asking where everyone was from. There were 11 adults plus the two kids, with Rachel and Will and the overly enthusiastic breastfeeding brigade all hailing from Illinois. And yet their tiny group still managed to represent not only three other states—an older couple from Michigan, a younger one from Iowa, and a middle-aged guy from right there in Milwaukee—but also another continent, the mother-son expat duo from S?o Paulo saying they’d worked a day trip to Milwaukee into their visit to Chicago. They were a family of architects, which made their traveling thousands of miles to end up on this 1:00 p.m. tour across the street from a vape shop feel a little less random.
While they were still doing introductions, the baby began crying, so Gwen quickly transitioned into feeding her—and under a cover-up, no less. Even after his conversation with Gwen and Ronald, Will was impressed by just how seamlessly she did this, simultaneously attaching a human being to her body, quieting said human down, and continuing to listen to Henny as she went around the room. It kind of made being a dad look like a cakewalk by comparison, although Ronald was getting red in the face from the exertion of trying to keep Ronnie Jr. from climbing out an open front window.
Will felt his phone buzz inside his pocket. He slid it out a couple of inches to read the text.
Frankly SHOCKED I can’t see Gwen’s bare breast right now, Rachel had typed from right next to him. He glanced at her, and her face was so unassuming, despite having sent that, that he had to play off a snort as a cough.
Impressed by Gwen or not, he sensed an opportunity to calm some of Rachel’s doubts.
I think the last few minutes make a compelling case on behalf of NOT breastfeeding, he wrote back.
He saw Rachel peek at her screen and the corner of her mouth curl ever so slightly into a smile as she hearted his text.
Henny began her presentation, referencing both the framed prints behind her and a binder with photo sleeves that she’d carried in. Despite working in IT, Will had sort of a love-hate relationship with technology, and he found the analog nature of the experience kind of refreshing.
They learned that everybody who worked there was a volunteer and that they still needed to raise around a million dollars to finish the restorations. Henny explained that what they’d be seeing was the prototype for a much larger house Clemens had gone on to build for the governor of Michigan a few years later, one that had become synonymous with her design aesthetic.
“Now as you may know,” Henny said over the noise of a diesel pickup idling outside, “Clemens didn’t think much of the house we’re standing in right now. What you may not know is that she did say if it weren’t for the mistakes she made here, she never could’ve built the Michigan house. And as far as I’m concerned, this place is pretty special all on its own.”
Rachel nodded along with everything Henny was saying, clearly enjoying herself. Will smiled.
It was at this point that it became a walking tour, and the group stood up to follow Henny to check out the kitchen. Everyone except Gwen, that is, who stayed behind in her seat to finish feeding Felicity. Rachel seemed eager to both put some distance between herself and the family and see the rest of the house, and Will had to hustle to keep up with her. He wondered as he did if she was thinking about how something as simple as listening to this talk got infinitely more complicated with small kids in tow. He was. And even noticing it kind of seemed like complaining. He felt guilty about that. Because complaining is what his dad would’ve done.
Will had a memory from when he was probably five or six of going out to dinner with his parents and them not being able to sit in the bar because of Will and having to wait like 45 minutes for a table as a result. His dad had carried on about it all the way through the meal.
“Why should we have to wait just because we’ve got a kid?” he’d said more than once. “It’s not like I’m going to ask them to make him a cocktail.”
His dad’s anger had been mainly directed at the host and waitstaff, but it had made Will feel like he’d done something wrong just by being there. Could he be that unaware with his own kid? Would he make her or him feel the same way without even realizing it?
He tried to shake it out of his head and shift his attention back to the tour, but that proved easier said than done. As they were all crowding in to hear Henny point out some of the finer features of the small yet highly functional kitchen, Ronnie Jr. grabbed his Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt and began shouting “Time for Ti-mis! Time for Ti-mis!” as loudly as he could.
Ronald, who was trying to hold his son’s hand as he squirmed to get free, initially just tried to ignore it, a bold flex given that his child was literally harder to speak over than the motorcycle had been. When it was clear that wasn’t working, he squatted down next to Ronnie Jr. and attempted to reason with him through a strained smile. Will had no idea why Ronald didn’t walk him out of the room. Henny had to stop her talk entirely, and no matter how much solidarity Will tried to muster for Ronald’s plight, at some point, the adult subjecting his three-year-old to a tour of an old house where people are trading knowing glances about sconces ceases to be a sympathetic figure. It wasn’t until Ronald offered to buy Ronnie Jr. a new train when they were done that the boy quieted down.
Their group moved into the room with the cashbox, which had been the dining room, and while in transit, Will decided to roll the dice and try on dad voice in an attempt to show himself—and by extension, Rachel—that he was not his dad and was ready to handle situations like this.
“You know, I used to watch Thomas when I was little,” he said to Ronnie Jr. He had hardly any experience talking to kids and was going for approachable but confident. It came out like the Kool-Aid Man mixed with an electric toothbrush. Rachel gave him a strange look, and he shifted back to his normal delivery. “Uh, who’s your favorite train?”
“Gordo,” Ronnie Jr. replied without otherwise acknowledging him.
“That’s what he calls Gordon,” Ronald said.
“Oh, sure,” Will said. “I remember Gordon.”
More specifically, he remembered that Gordon was indisputably the biggest asshole on the island of Sodor, which kind of explained a lot about the preceding five minutes.
“Did you know George Carlin was the narrator on Thomas when we were growing up?” he tried with Ronald. “Crazy, right?”
Ronald had the same reaction to this that Rachel had had to Will’s sounding like a deranged, talking pitcher of red drink. “Who’s George Carlin?” he asked.
“You know, the comedian?”
Nothing.
That was enough chitchat with Ronald and Ronnie Jr.
“So, everyone talks about Clemens’s front porches because of the river bend,” Henny said. “But if you look out the windows here, you’ll see a large back porch, too, that she envisioned as being able to sleep an entire family. And you might be wondering: Why? It’s not like the Upper Midwest is ideally suited to indoor-outdoor living. Well, turns out fresh air is pretty desirable when there’s tuberculosis everywhere like there was back then. And on a related note, you might want to hug a scientist and say thank you for vaccines.”
Will thought of his aunt again. She’d been a high school chemistry teacher, and she’d made him swear up and down that if/when he and Rachel had kids, they would have them fully vaccinated. Once he’d assured her that they would, she’d shaken her head and said, “It’s just those antivaxxers—they’re like flat-earthers but without the whimsy.” The memory made him happy and sad at the same time. It was one of the last conversations they’d ever had, just a few months before she’d died.
“All right,” Henny said, “we’re going to walk back through the house to the staircase so we can check out the second story. Mr. Fiesterly, lead the way.”
Will liked Henny too much to care that she’d screwed up his name, so he started their retreat from the dining room. And as much as he wanted to believe that she’d chosen him due to some sort of unspoken cosmic connection via Aunt Katie, the truth was that after Ronald and Ronnie Jr., Will was closest to the door, and father was now busy arguing with son about whether he needed a diaper change. That porch may have been designed to combat tuberculosis, but it would’ve been no match for the fresh hell coming out of Ronnie Jr.’s pants, incriminating evidence that the three-year-old continued to deny at all costs.
The smell reached Rachel a second or two after Will, and she slid past Ronald and Ronnie Jr. to rejoin him and make their escape. True, they were fleeing a full diaper like it was one of the undead, but in their defense, zombies at least had the good sense not to be Gordon people. There was no point in suffering for someone who was already a lost cause, especially when that someone shared zero of your DNA.
“They may need to go back to breastfeeding,” she whispered to Will when they were several steps in front of everyone else. “Because whatever that kid is eating now does not agree with him.”
“I think my eyes were about to tear up.”
“Don’t judge me,” she continued, leaning in even closer and slipping her fingers through his as they approached Gwen burping Felicity. The two of them were at the spot where the hall emptied into the front room, the baby staring Will down over her mom’s shoulder as he and Rachel approached. “But if our child ever smells like that, I don’t know that I’ll be able to love it anymore.”
Rachel gave his hand a loving squeeze, and his lips parted for what was about to become a chuckle. Which was really too bad.
Not because her joke wasn’t funny. It absolutely was, in that deadpan, slightly twisted style that was Rachel’s specialty, and it eased some of the pressure he’d been feeling using Ronnie Jr. as a litmus test for his parenting instincts. It was just that little Felicity—perhaps in a show of solidarity with her brother, perhaps acting on behalf of every baby everywhere who had ever been insulted by a grown-up—took it upon herself at that precise moment to let loose a torrent of projectile vomit so vile it made Ronnie Jr. smell like a florist. Given the proximity of the baby and the narrowness of the hallway, Will never stood a chance.
And once someone’s vomit has passed through your parted lips and into your open mouth, it really is impossible to never not taste it again.