In the Lake of the Woods. Tim O’Brien

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       —Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery)

      It wasn’t insomnia exactly. John could fall asleep at the drop of a hat, but then, bang, he’d wake up after ten or twenty minutes. He couldn’t stay asleep. It was as if he were on guard against something, tensed up, waiting for … well, I don’t know what.

       —Eleanor K. Wade

Sometimes I am a bit ashamed of myself when I think how few friends I have amidst a host of acquaintances. Plenty of people offer me their friendship; but, partly because I am reserved and shy, and partly because I am fastidious and have a narrow, uncatholic taste in friends, I reject the offer in almost every case; and then am dismayed to look about and see how few persons in the world stand near me and know me as I am.¹⁹

       —Woodrow Wilson

      Show me a politician, I’ll show you an unhappy childhood. Same for magicians.

       —Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo

My mother was a saint.²⁰

       —Richard M. Nixon

      I remember Kathy telling me how he’d wake up screaming sometimes. Foul language, which I won’t repeat. In fact, I’d rather not say anything at all.

       —Patricia S. Hood

      For some reason Mr. Wade threw away that old iron teakettle. I fished it out of the trash myself. I mean, it was a perfectly good teakettle.

       —Ruth Rasmussen

      The fucker did something ugly.

       —Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson

Vinny’s the theory man. I deal in facts. The case is wide open.²¹

       —Arthur J. Lux (Sheriff, Lake of the Woods County)

12. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965; reprint, New York: Perennial Library, 1990), pp. 21–22.

13. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 7.

14. J. W. Appel and G. W. Beebe, “Preventive Psychiatry: An Epidemiological Approach,” Journal of the American Medical Association 131 (1946), p. 1470.

15. Robert Parrish, The Magician’s Handbook (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1944), p. 10.

16. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 228.

17. Woodrow Wilson, in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (1948; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 310.

18. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 35.

19. Woodrow Wilson, in Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, pp. 310–311.

20. Richard M. Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), p. 1088.

21. Yes, and I’m a theory man too. Biographer, historian, medium—call me what you want—but even after four years of hard labor I’m left with little more than supposition and possibility. John Wade was a magician; he did not give away many tricks. Moreover, there are certain mysteries that weave through life itself, human motive and human desire. Even much of what might appear to be fact in this narrative—action, word, thought—must ultimately be viewed as a diligent but still imaginative reconstruction of events. I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident. In any case, Kathy Wade is forever missing, and if you require solutions, you will have to look beyond these pages. Or read a different book.

       7

       The Nature of Marriage

      When he was a boy, John Wade’s hobby was magic. In the basement, where he practiced in front of a stand-up mirror, he made his mother’s silk scarves change color. He cut his father’s best tie with scissors and restored it whole. He placed a penny in the palm of his hand, made his hand into a fist, made the penny into a white mouse.

      This was not true magic. It was trickery. But John Wade sometimes pretended otherwise, because he was a kid then, and because pretending was the thrill of magic, and because for a while what seemed to happen became a happening in itself. He was a dreamer. He liked watching his hands in the mirror, imagining how someday he would perform much grander magic, tigers becoming giraffes, beautiful girls levitating like angels in the high yellow spotlights—naked maybe, no wires or strings, just floating there.

      

      At fourteen, when his father died, John did the tricks in his mind. He’d lie in bed at night, imagining a big blue door, and after a time the door would open and his father would walk in, take off his hat, and sit in a rocking chair beside the bed. “Well, I’m back,” his father would say, “but don’t tell your mom, she’d kill me.” He’d wink and grin. “So what’s new?”

      And then they’d talk for a while, quietly, catching up on things, like cutting a tie and restoring it whole.

      

      He met Kathy in the autumn of 1966. He was a senior at the University of Minnesota, she was a freshman. The trick then was to make her love him and never stop.

      The urgency came from fear, mostly; he didn’t want to lose her. Sometimes he’d jerk awake at night, dreaming she’d left him, but when he tried to explain this to her, Kathy laughed and told him to cut it out, she’d never leave, and in any case thinking that way was destructive, it was negative and unhealthy. “Here I am,” she said, “and I’m not going anywhere.”

      John thought it over for several days. “Well, all right,” he said, “but it still worries me. Things go wrong. Things don’t always last.”

      “We’re not things,” Kathy said.

      “But it can happen.”

      “Not with us.”

      John shrugged and looked away. He was picturing his father’s big white casket. “Maybe so,” he said, СКАЧАТЬ