The Lonely Polygamist: A Novel by Brady Udall

Author:Brady Udall
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Families, Family, Polygamy, Bereavement, Family Life, General, Psychological aspects, Middle-aged men, Fiction
ISBN: 9780393062625
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-05-03T17:48:21.726501+00:00

23.

BIG HOUSE

In this house there is chaos. Not your everyday sort of entropy, the kind that swells and intensifies before inevitably settling back into orderliness—the warehouse fire that rages and dies, the storm that blows itself out—but chaos of the endemic variety, the kind that expresses itself not only in the full-throated shouts and erratic movement of children who refuse to be counted, in the snarls of will and purpose of the husband and wives, but in the very walls of the house itself, dented and pocked as if someone had gone after a renegade mouse with a hammer, in the finger-and face-smudged windows, the knots of hair clogging every drain, the beds in disarray, the broken clocks and temperamental doors that only the initiated can open, in the poor, swaybacked piano with the half-eaten apple secretly rotting inside its case, in the burned-out lightbulbs and hidey-holes that offer protection to the scam artists and gossipmongers who ply the halls, and in all the broken spaces of the house, ragged and piebald and worn, littered with stacks of paper and battered toys and drifts of unidentifiable objects that speak of the vast and sometimes terrifying manyness of things.

The kind of chaos that begets itself, over and over again, until it becomes a kind of order, a way of life.

Today it is Sunday afternoon, the Summit of the Wives, and there is the Father, in the middle of it all. The wives have just gotten started arguing about something—powdered milk, by the sound of it—and at least half of the children are swooping around the racetrack like a tribe of Visigoths on the attack. Mother #2: Oh, gag.

Mother #1: We can at least give it a try.

Mother #2: You ever tried it? Horrible. You never know when you’re going to get a lump, and when you do, you think you’ve swallowed a cockroach.

Mother #1 gives Mother #2 a cold stare, which Mother #2 returns, as she always does, with an aggressively cheerful smile. Mother #1: It’s not that bad. You have to mix it well.

Mother #3, whispering into her lap: It’s pretty bad.

Mother #1: It is not that bad.

Mother #4: And the kids won’t like it, there’ll be a revolt.

Mother #1: The kids will do as we tell them.

The Father, in a stupor at the head of the table, has missed the last two summits and is paying dearly for it now. The wives are angry at him, which is evident in the way they have agreed, despite their innumerable differences, to ignore him. He sits forward in his chair, straining to arrange the muscles of his face into an expression that suggests attentiveness, wondering how he’ll make it through the next two hours. Nodding meaningfully at nothing in particular, he sneaks a glance at the Official Summit Agenda, which informs him there are sixteen items still up for discussion, and he can’t help it, he closes his eyes and whimpers a little in anticipation of the suffering ahead.

For weeks the

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