Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson Read Free Book Online

beheld him from, it was hard to see him as good-looking.
    His hands were always moving, making fists or baskets in midair, his fingers snapping or drumming on the desktop. Dark against the cuffs, his wrists and hands were attractive.
    Bea walked to her car, holding her keys out in front, with a light step.
    She felt something—a yes-and-no feeling. Not like
the
something, but something else, new, an agitation like the scratchiness of wool in spring.
    She found out that evening from her mother that Bill Alberts had been a bachelor in Green Bay for many years. He’d lived with his parents. Even after he finally bought his own place—the Kaap river mansion—he went home every night to his mother’s table for supper.
    â€œUntil he married
her
,” Hazel said.
    Some years ago, Bill Alberts had married Marge Garsh, a local girl, the undertaker’s daughter. “And I suppose then
she
cooked.”
    From the church, Bea’s mother knew the lady who had been his childhood nanny. The old woman still went to iron his shirts every Tuesday and Thursday, but she wouldn’t do a thing for the wife. “Doesn’t like her,” Bea’s mother said, as if that made perfect sense.
    Money had never been a problem for the Alberts family. His father was chief surgeon at the hospital and his mother was a doctor, too, an obstetrician. That would have been unusual, even scandalous, for a woman in her time in Green Bay to have four children and keep working—except that they were Jewish. All they did was held to be in another category.
    Bill Alberts himself had already made several other fortunes—ruining the city, his own father said. Bea’s mother repeated that with a down-curved voice that contained a certain relish.
    Bill’s taste differed from his European parents’, that was for sure. He had a sharp, flat American vision. Tract houses did not offend him, Bea knew, and his developments from the fifties were made of sound materials and planted with young trees. She golfed in a club that ended at the backyards of one of his subdivisions. They were cheerful houses, hard to tell whether rich or poor, and though small, they were somehow smart.
    Thirty-five years later, when those trees were mature, most of the houses were still standing and in good repair.
    But he didn’t like to think of himself as a realtor. Everyone knew his passion was jazz music. In the thirties, some of the Big Bands had played Green Bay at the Ace of Spades, and apparently Bill’s parents—the two doctors—had gone dancing. He himself played drums. For years, he’d bored anyone who would listen to his stories about trips to Chicago in the forties and fifties to hear the great bands at their peak. He’d bought himself a whole building downtown, the old Green Giant canning factory, to turn into a nightclub for his band.
    Most evenings, he smoked a cigar in his office, music playing out the open windows: Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Jo Jones. At seven, he headed to dinner at a restaurant downtown before his own local band convened. They called themselves the Fox River Trotters. They all called him Little Jazz.
    Rumor had it that there was no family life inside the stone house Bill Alberts owned on one of Green Bay’s oldest and best streets. It had been the carefully tended home of the Kaaps, an elderly brother and sister who lived together for more than forty years and walked on the river path every afternoon at four.
    â€œHe runs around,” Mrs. Maxwell said.
    â€œReally?”
    â€œI think so, sure. Yes.”
    But though they believed he was an unfaithful husband, Mrs. Maxwell and her friends were not sympathetic to Bill’s wife. They said it was because Marge had let old Mabel Kaap’s rose garden go to rack and ruin.
Thank God she’s not here to see it
.
    â€œThey say Marge doesn’t like music,” Bea’s mother said. “And you know him.”
    But it