A Few Corrections

Book by Leithauser Brad

Chapter One
RESTORATION-Wesley Cross Sultan, 63, of 2135 N. Westhampton, died suddenly in Lyon Hospital in Stags Harbor, of heart failure. He worked for Great Bay Shipping for 42 years, chiefly in sales. He began his career in the Stags Harbor office, and after stints in Kalamazoo and Cincinnati, Ohio, he finished his career back at Stags Harbor. He retired two years ago in order to pursue full-time his civic pursuits. He was an active member of the Rotarians, the Restoration Chamber of Commerce, the Stags Harbor Betterment Society, and the Thumb of Michigan Prosperity Council. He was also active in the Restoration Episcopal Church, where for many years he sang in the choir.
He was born in Restoration and was a graduate of the old High School on Cherrystone Avenue. He was the son of the late Chester Sultan, the well-known businessman, and the grandson of Hubert Sultan, who served as the mayor of Restoration from 1908 to 1912. Old-time Restorationists will recall Sultan Furniture on Union Street, founded by Hubert and presided over by Chester until he closed its doors in 1935.
He was married twice. His first wife was Sally Planter (Admiraal), now of Grosse Pointe, formerly of Restoration. They were divorced in 1964. He leaves his wife, Tiffany, and their two daughters, Jessica and Winnie; a son, Luke Planter, of New York; a brother, Conrad Sultan, of Miami, Florida; and a sister, Adelle De Vries, of Battle Creek.
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There are at least a dozen errors here. Indeed, errors enough to leave a person wondering whether even what's known as incontestably true is true. The life commemorated in these three paragraphs-who actually lived it? What was Wesley Sultan truly like? You might well ask, Was the man's whole existence an illusion?-and the answer you arrived at would naturally hinge on where you started. A philosopher might grandly inform us that all life's illusory. And maybe a speculative historian would announce that we have in Wesley Sultan a man who, prone to deceit, was himself surrounded by that comprehensive web of deceptions known as twentieth-century small-town American life, etc. And yet with all due respect to the pedants and the pundits among us, the deceased left behind a jumbled constellation of people-wives, girlfriends, siblings, children-prepared to testify that he was, if anything, all too real.
Our story begins on April Fools' Day. This would be a balmy spring morning in 1952, the robins and blue jays racketing in those big hospitable wineglass-shaped elms that reigned back then over the streets of Stags Harbor, Michigan, just as they did over small towns throughout the Midwest. Dutch elm disease wouldn't begin to take them down for another decade or two. On this April Fools' Day the streets are animate and graceful and Wesley is seventeen. He's a dapper young man whose lean face and compact squared shoulders make him look taller than he is. You might judge him to be six feet tall-the height which, throughout his adult life, he claimed to be. He is actually five ten and a half.
Although he might plausibly have wished to be taller, Wes could hardly have hoped to be handsomer. For here's a fact that is a fact: This boy is gorgeous. He's just now coming into his young manhood, when he will regularly be described as looking like a Hollywood matinee idol. Perhaps the chin could be a trifle firmer, the nose a millimeter straighter, but no film mogul, assessing young Wes in a screen test, would shift a hair on the boy's head: thick chestnut ringlets that throw off honey-gold sparks in the sun. And there are sparks as well in his electric-blue eyes . . .
Wes knows where he is headed. A preliminary scouting of the personnel building of Great Bay Shipping has already revealed that the first person he will be encountering is a woman and he takes this as an encouraging sign. He prefers to deal with the female sex. Palsied widows, grim girdled matrons, harried young nursing mothers who have neglected to tuck in their blouses as they run round the corner for a pack of cigarettes, acne-splotched teenagers who play the flute in the junior high school marching band-it hardly matters who they are, so long as they are members of the fair sex. He has come to consider women trustworthier than men, or more generous, or more forthright-whatever; he isn't somebody who analyzes his perceptions to a T. Wes simply knows how he feels . . .
Knows, that is, that men can be surprisingly hostile to him. Why this should be, he can't quite say (though he does have the feeling it isn't quite fair). Yet it seems other males, men and boys, frequently object to the way he talks (the wistful voice unexpectedly low, and its vowels, particularly a's, softer than customary in his region of the Midwest). Or they don't like his looks (or like his looks too much). Or maybe his stylish clothes offend them-his bone-white trench coat, his paisley silk scarf.
Admittedly, these are not the clothes his friends or his classmates wear. As far as Wes is concerned, his classmates have small town written all over them, they have Restoration High School stamped on their foreheads. It's apparent in the way they dress, and talk, and even stand. It's as though they don't see what Wes sees: There is another-a larger and a brighter-world out there.
In truth, Wes has never been a reader, and most of his cosmopolitan dreams of a brighter life have their origin in the Mercury Movie Palace on Restoration's main street, Union Avenue. Wes is an avid moviegoer. But he also looks to magazines, to billboards, to the occasional tourist from the big city, caught pausing briefly in a Union Avenue service station or luncheonette. Wes keeps his eyes open.
If his clothes occasionally bring him a stranger's taunt-then so be it. He's used to being pestered and teased. For nearly the whole of his life he has been engaged in an intense civil war with his brother, Conrad, who is two years younger and who cares nothing for clothes or for movies or for the game of trying to charm the world's women. The brothers' battles are frequently public, and much appreciated as neighborhood entertainment. On ramshackle, struggling Scully Street in the modest community of Restoration (pop. 4,200), few neighborhood chronicles offer the long-term interest-few have done so much to liven up evening conversation in the street's cramped and poorly ventilated kitchens-that the Sultan brothers' ferocious, ever-evolving rivalry does. People regularly take sides, including their mother; everyone knows that Conrad is their mother's favorite.
On this brilliant April Fools' Day in 1952, Dora Sultan has been a widow for a decade. Her husband, Chester Everett Sultan, drowned in a swimming accident in Lake Huron on June 21, 1942. Chester was known to be a strong swimmer, and out along the edges of his small funeral service-like uninvited guests who keep a respectful distance but will not be chased altogether from the scene-a number of nasty rumors circulated. It was just possible that Chester Sultan had come to an unnatural end. Today, more than half a century later, when all the facts we have are catalogued and assessed (Chester's equable mood in the weeks before his death, his sedentary lifestyle and high blood pressure, his heavy consumption of beer on the day he died and the chilliness and choppiness of the water), suicide seems only a remote possibility. But we'll never know for sure.
Whatever was actually in the man's head as he stepped into the icy lake on that first day of summer, 1942, Chester had long been something of an aimless soul. He hadn't held a job since the dissolution of the family business, Sultan Furniture ("You can live like a Sultan too"), in 1935. The store's final days had been rancorous. In late 1934, with bankruptcy looming, Chester invited in a partner from outside the family. It seems there was little left to do but argue, and each was soon accusing the other of being a swindler. Their raging over the division of assets continued long after there remained assets to divide. The store, a Restoration town landmark, was boarded up.
The loss of Sultan Furniture altered Chester's life in various unexpected ways. It turned him away from churchgoing (he quit attending services at First Restoration Methodist). It led him to the Democratic party (he went to his grave insisting on Herbert Hoover's personal responsibility for the Depression which eventually sank the store). And it sharpened his thirst. He became a steady, a daylong, drinker.
Chester spent most of his days on Union Avenue, in the "library" of the Caprice Club, where over the last seven years of his life he played tens of thousands of hands of pinochle. When the weather was warm, he and his "gentlemen friends" (a term employed without self-conscious irony; by all reports, Chester was a constitutionally humorless man) whiled away their afternoons in Restoration's Toledo Heights Park. Chester showed something of a proprietary attitude toward the park, whose fountain had been inaugurated by his father, Hubert Sultan, mayor of Restoration from 1908 to 1912. (Hubert's failed 1912 reelection campaign was stained by accusations of financial irregularities-something of a motif in the Sultan family annals.) For all his fervent new Democratic ideals, Chester badgered the police to keep Toledo Heights Park free of bums and riffraff-those among the unemployed who, unlike Chester's "gentlemen friends," had failed to prosper even in pre-Depression days. In their search for a park, the lowlife settled literally lower: down in Restoration's Memorial Gardens, on the banks of the Michicabanabee (Me-she-cah-bah-NAH-bee) River-the very park that, as the family's fortunes spiraled downward, Chester's two sons, Wesley and Conrad, would eventually think of as their own backyard.
Chester's death soon confirmed widely whispered suspicions that neither the grandeur of the gabled gingerbread and fish-scale Victorian-era house on Crestview Boulevard, in the heart of Restoration's "Heights" section, nor the prestige of the Sultan family name would safeguard the widow and her f...