The Souvenir Museum, Elizabeth McCracken [bill gates best books .txt] 📗

Not everybody was dead, just a handful of significant people. Sadie’s parents, Jack’s sister, most recently Jack’s nephew, blond Thomas of the passions, who’d gone to study piano in Poland and had stepped off a building at ten thirty in the morning. He’d been twenty-seven.

It was Thomas’s death that convinced Sadie that she and Jack should finally marry. Without marriage, what was Thomas to her? She’d known him since childhood, a wiggling, insinuating, wonderful boy, a puppy, a darling; she’d known and loved him in every incarnation since. As a small child he liked to be tickled; as a teenager he’d hated haircuts and had worn his daffodil hair like a veil he intended to never lift; as a young man he developed a love of organized runs in which you had to crawl through mud and allow yourself to be shocked with live wires. It was not so much to know about a person, though enough to recognize a taste for obliteration. But without marriage he was, at his death, Jack’s nephew, not hers. So they would marry at last, and Jack would arrange everything, because Sadie, while not a reluctant wife, was at thirty-nine a very reluctant bride.

Twenty years, or nearly. She had grown stout and he furious, but to be fair they’d tended in those directions all their lives. She would have been happy to marry at city hall, but Jack’s parents, Michael and Irene Valert, astonishingly alive in their grief in Sussex, had suggested they marry in the church at the end of their drive. “Does your family have money?” Sadie had asked the first time she’d seen the former rectory his parents lived in. “Used to,” Jack answered. But this was more than residual money. In America if you used to have money you probably had a relative or a former accountant in jail, and you lived in a two-bedroom apartment miles from the city of your dreams. The Valerts’ house was the sort of place you’d rent in America for a single day in order to have that vulgar thing, a storybook wedding, to prepare yourself for the reality of married life.

Why not? Sadie had no relatives left to horrify with a church wedding. The Valerts had lost a child and lost a grandchild, and this was something that could be given. She thought of the wedding as a practical thing—she didn’t even plan to invite friends to come over from the States—not knowing how Jack would take to it, the sentimental asshole, how much he wanted an English wedding himself. His parents had lived seventeen years in America, during which time they’d had him, their last child, and had developed a hatred of the country. Not developed, it wasn’t brand-new, but now their hatred was expert. They’d repatriated when Jack went to college, and seemed like zoo animals stymied by the offspring they’d had in captivity.

She always forgot how some aspects of England were so English, so very Masterpiece Theatre: in order to get married in the village church, Sadie had to live with the elder Valerts for three weeks so that she might be registered as a spinster of the parish. Then the banns would be read, whatever that meant. Jack, on the other hand, could be where he pleased. What pleased him—“I have to,” he said apologetically—was to go to Coventry, to an academic conference on puppetry in medieval mystery plays. So for the first week of Sadie’s parish spinsterhood, she slept alone on one of the twin beds of the Valerts’ guest room and was woken every day at three thirty a.m., which was, perversely, when dawn broke in Sussex in July. It wasn’t the light that woke her, but the birds who saw the light and began laughing. Screeching. Saying in avian syllables designed to lacerate the eardrum, Well, you wanted to get married!

By the time Jack got back, his father was not speaking to Sadie for obscure reasons. Or not obscure: she didn’t plan to change her name, or to wear a white dress, or to promise (as the outdated copy of the Book of Common Prayer he gave her suggested) to be “sober, quiet, and obedient.”

“I might manage two of those at a time,” she said. “But never all simultaneously.” He didn’t think that was funny. She hadn’t known what a wedding meant in England: hats and child attendants and a dinner party to celebrate her engagement in which the women had to actually leave the dining room before the port was passed. No doubt they had all voted for Brexit. “You don’t have to obey,” said Michael Valert, “but I hope you’ll consider children. I hope you’re not so liberated as all that.” Then, with a depth of feeling that startled her, he said, “I think we could all use something to look forward to.”

They were joined in the church by a young rector with the booming voice of an old prophet, or actor, or train conductor, or possibly rector—Sadie had no experience with rectors. She knelt before him and thought of how much her little Yiddishe mama would have hated to see her do it. Then she stood up and they were married.

A month later they were in Holland, in Amsterdam: Jack and Sadie, honeymooners, newlyweds, middle-aged. Jack’s phone said aloud, in its sexy English accent, “Prepare to turn right.”

“But are you?” Sadie asked. “Prepared.”

“Never.”

“I didn’t think so.” She hooked her arm in his. With his other arm he pulled along their thunking suitcase.

They were staying in a houseboat across from the Anne Frank House.

“Does it move?” she asked.

“Does it move?” He’d always had a way of repeating her questions back, sometimes with love and sometimes with contempt and sometimes with wonder at the question itself. That was the case now. “No, I don’t—it must be moored.”

“Prepare to turn right,” said the phone. Then, “Turn right.”

Canal after canal, bakery after souvenir shop. You couldn’t deny it: Holland was Dutch. “Looks good,” said