16
The Milkman and the Senator's Wife

As I drove back to my house, I tried to put the pieces together in my mind. About forty years ago, Trapp had been married. His wife's sister was his "perfect" bridge partner. Then something happened at a bridge tournament. Trapp's partner went insane, he and his wife got divorced, and he never played in a national tournament again.

His wife's crazy sister, his perfect partner, was the mother of Sophie Castaneda, who was the one who threw the letter in the garbage.

Sophie was the mother of Toni, who had yelled "Shut up! Leave me alone!" at me when we were six, and who had also made the terrible mistake of asking Trapp, "Are you sure?"

I don't know if that makes any sense to you, but it didn't to me.

When I got home I asked my mother how long she had known Sophie Castaneda.

She flinched at the name. "I've known of her for a very long time. I've only met her a few times."

"Did you ever meet Sophie's mother?"

"No."

"Then why do you think she was insane?"

"I don't just think she was insane," said my mother. "She was sent to an asylum."

"Is that why Sophie divorced her mother?"

"Sophie didn't divorce her real mother," my mother corrected me. "Senator King remarried after Sophie's mother was put in the insane asylum."

"Sophie's father was a senator?" This was news to me.

"He would have made a damn good president, too," my mother added.

"So what kind of crazy things did Sophie's mother do?"

"Everything. The way she lived was crazy! She was the reason Henry King never became president. Mind you, I was just a little girl at the time, but I heard stories. One time, she gave the milkman a thousand dollars for his clothes."

I had never heard of a milkman. I supposed it was like being a mailman, only with milk instead of mail.

"He was still wearing them at the time," my mother continued. "She paid him to take off his clothes and give them to her. And then she made him wear her dress and all her underneath things."

"And he wore them?"

"For a thousand dollars, he did. That was a lot of money in those days."

I thought it was a lot of money in these days. I walked down the hall into my room and tried to make sense of what my mother had told me. I wondered if she had her story straight.

I hate to say this about my own mother, but she doesn't always know what she's talking about.

I picked up a deck of cards and practiced shuffling. Gloria had taught me how to shuffle cards so that they'd flutter perfectly together.

If it was something my mother had heard when she was just a little girl, then who knows who told it to her, or how much of it she understood? It seemed to me that maybe the senator's wife had been doing something else with the milkman, and the senator came home unexpectedly, and they both just grabbed whatever clothes were the closest. That made a little more sense, but either way, my uncle's "perfect partner" sounded a bit weird, to say the least.