The Ninth Wife Read Online Free

a different life, have traveled to America and—for one reason or another—decided to stay.
    For this, Bess loves America. She doesn’t buy American products just because they’re American. She’s never stepped foot in a McDonald’s. She doesn’t know all the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” or the “Star-Spangled Banner” or, if you get right down to it, the Pledge of Allegiance, except for the reference to God, which she wouldn’t say out loud anyway as a matter of principle, preferring the phrase one nation, under Canada . Rather, the America Bess loves is a beautiful quilt of cultures and art forms, sewn together with the threads of rich histories, and a new sense of place, of home. She’s seen a Japanese calligrapher clap to the rhythms of gospel, a mariachi vocalist marvel at Tibetan sand paintings, a Greek bouzouki player fall in love with a Midwestern decoy carver. Things like that stir her heart, giving her some of her greatest pleasures in life.
    And so after karate, she went to her office to pick up a plate for her party, but she knows deep down that was an excuse, one of many she’s used to come back to her office during off hours to feel grounded. She needs this grounding today especially. Thirty-five years seems insignificant in the midst of such ancient traditions; in her office, her own story is dwarfed by the quills and feathers, the trills and echoes of other people’s ancestors who, she imagines, stand regally on the tops of mountains, along riverbanks, in sexy sweaty jook joints at the edge of wide open fields.
    Bess knows too little about her own ancestry to feel connected to a past. Her father—an amateur folksinger and folklorist in his own right—died in a car accident when she was eight. He was a troubled teenager who ran away from a broken home to unlisted numbers and a new identity. Why he chose the name Gray, Bess couldn’t say. Weeks of research turned up little about his original name or past history, other than he was three-quarters Polish, one-quarter German. By the time Bess located her paternal grandparents, one was gone and the other was mean with Alzheimer’s, living in a nursing home in Georgia with white walls and rented furniture.
    Carol, her mother, who was taken by cancer when Bess was in college, was adopted. She was darker in complexion and ethnic-looking, and, despite Bess’s questioning on the facts of her adoption and her biological makeup, Carol repeatedly said she cared not a bit about the people who gave her up and to leave it alone. Ethnic-looking, therefore, was as far as one got in description, hypotheses running the gamut from Mexican to Middle Eastern. The only hope Bess has of attaching herself to a culture is her grandparents on her mother’s side, who adopted Carol and raised her Jewish, encouraging her to do the same with Bess.
    Millie and Irv Steinbloom—the most important people in Bess’s life—are a feisty, shrunken couple married sixty-five years. Though they are intensely private about their marriage and how or why they adopted a baby girl, they love telling stories about their own childhoods and how they met, which Bess captured one time on tape for a high school project. She asked them what their families were like in the Old Country. Their answers astounded her. There were brothers who were bootleggers, cousins who were escape artists, wealthy uncles and aunts who were robbed blind by the system but sure to have hidden away treasures, don’t you worry.
    Bess told it all to her mother. “It’s unbelievable what they’re saying, Mom. Did you know Gram’s father was a spy?”
    “Nonsense,” she had answered. “My grandfather was a night watchman with a couple of daytime mistresses.”
    Bess gave up. If only she was half this, half that, quartered, portioned, and percentaged neatly to give the census takers a run for their money. Instead she was blended into something so vague as to be called, finally, a