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There'd doubtless been calls to the network already; Wallingford could only wonder how Wharton was handling it, or maybe they had put Sabina in charge. They didn't like to say they'd fired someone--they didn't like to admit that someone had quit, either. They usually found some bullshit way to say it, so that no one knew exactly what had happened.
Mrs. Clausen had seen the telecast. She asked Patrick: "Is that the Mary who isn't pregnant?"
"That's her."
"I thought so."
Doris was wearing her old Green Bay Packers parka, the one she'd been wearing when Wallingford first met her. Mrs. Clausen was not wearing its hood as she drove the car, but Patrick could imagine her small, pretty face peering out from it like the face of a child. And she had on jeans and running shoes, which was how she'd dressed that night when the police informed her that her husband was dead. She was probably wearing her old Packers sweatshirt, too, although Wallingford couldn't see what was under her parka.
Mrs. Clausen was a good driver. She never once looked at Patrick--she just talked about the game. "With a couple of four-two teams, anything can happen," she explained. "We've lost the last three in a row on Monday night. I don't believe what they say. It doesn't matter that Seattle hasn't played a Monday-night game in seven years, or that there's a bunch of Seahawks who've never played at Lambeau Field before. Their coach knows Lambeau--he knows our quarterback, too."
The Green Bay quarterback would be Brett Favre. Wallingford had read a paper (just the sports pages) on the plane. That's how he'd learned who Mike Holmgren was--formerly the Packers' coach, now the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. The game was a homecoming for Holmgren, who'd been very popular in Green Bay.
"Favre will be trying too hard. We can count on that," Doris told Patrick. As she spoke, the passing headlights flashed on and off her face, which remained in profile to him.
He kept staring at her--he'd never missed anyone so much. He would have liked to think she'd worn these old clothes for him, but he knew the clothes were just her game uniform. When she'd seduced him in Dr. Zajac's office, she must have had no idea what she was wearing, and she probably had no memory of the order in which she'd taken off her clothes. Wallingford would never forget the clothes and the order.
They drove west out of downtown Green Bay, which didn't have much of a downtown to speak of--nothing but bars and churches and a haggard-looking riverside mall. There weren't many buildings over three stories high; and the one hill of note, which hugged the river with its ships loading and unloading--until the bay froze in December--was a huge coal stack. It was a virtual mountain of coal.
"I would not want to be Mike Holmgren, coming back here with his four-two Seattle Seahawks," Wallingford ventured. (It was a version of something he'd read in the sports pages.)
"You sound like you've been reading the newspapers or watching TV," Mrs. Clausen said. "Holmgren knows the Packers better than the Packers know themselves. And Seattle's got a good defense. We haven't been scoring a lot of points against good defenses this year."
"Oh." Wallingford decided to shut up about the game. He changed the subject. "I've missed you and little Otto."
Mrs. Clausen just smiled. She knew exactly where she was going. There was a special parking sticker on her car; she was waved into a lane with no other cars in it, from which she entered a reserved area of the parking lot.
They parked very near the stadium and took an elevator to the press box, where Doris didn't even bother showing her tickets to an official-looking older man who instantly recognized her. He gave her a friendly hug and a kiss, and she said, with a nod to Wallingford, "He's with me, Bill. Patrick, this is Bill."
Wallingford shook the older man's hand, expecting to be recognized, but there was no sign of recognition. It must have been the ski hat Mrs. Clausen had handed to him when they got out of the car. He'd told her that his ears never got cold, but she'd said, "Here they will. Besides, it's not just to keep your ears warm. I want you to wear it."
It wasn't that she didn't want him to be recognized, although the hat would keep him from being spotted by an ABC cameraman--for once, Wallingford wouldn't be on-camera. Doris had insisted on the hat to make him look as if he belonged at the game. Patrick was wearing a black topcoat over a tweed jacket over a turtleneck, and gray flannel trousers. Almost no one wore such a dressy overcoat to a Packer game.
The ski hat was Green Bay green with a yellow headband that could be pulled down over your ears; it had the unmistakable Packers' logo, of course. It was an old hat, and it had been stretched by a head bigger than Wallingford's. Patrick didn't need to ask Mrs. Clausen whose hat it was. Clearly the hat had belonged to her late husband.
They passed through the press box, where Doris said hi to a few other official-looking people before entering the bleacher-style seats, high up. It wasn't the way most of the fans entered the stadium, but everybody seemed to know Mrs. Clausen. She was, after all, a Green Bay Packers employee.
They went down the aisle toward the dazzling field. It was natural grass, 87,000 square feet of it--what they called an "athletic blue blend." Tonight was its debut game.
"Wow," was all Wallingford said under his breath. Although they were early, Lambeau Field was already more than half full.
The stadium is a pure bowl, with no breaks and no upper deck; there is only one deck at Lambeau, and all the outdoor seats are of the bleacher type. The stands were a primordial scene during the pregame warm-ups: the faces painted green and gold, the yellow plastic-foam things that looked like big flexible penises, and the lunatics with huge wedges of cheese for hats--the cheeseheads! Wallingford knew he was not in New York.
Down the long, steep aisle they went. They had seats at about mid-stadium level on the forty-yard line; they we
re still on the press-box side of the field. Patrick followed Doris, past the stout knees turned sideways, to their seats. He grew aware that they were seated among people who knew them--not just Mrs. Clausen, but Wallingford, too. And it wasn't that they knew him because he was famous, not in Otto's hat; it was that they were expecting him. Patrick suddenly realized that he'd met more than half of the closest surrounding fans before. They were Clausens! He recognized their faces from the countless photos tacked to the walls of the main cabin at the cottage on the lake.
The men patted his shoulders; the women touched his arm, the left one. "Hey, how ya doing?" Wallingford recognized the speaker from his crazed look in the photograph that was safety-pinned to the lining of the jewelry box. It was Donny, the eagle-killer; one side of his face was painted the color of corn, the other the too-vivid green of an impossible illness.
"I missed seein' ya on the news tonight," a friendly woman said. Patrick remembered her from a photograph, too; she'd been one of the new mothers, in a hospital bed with her newborn child.
"I just didn't want to miss the game," Wallingford told her.
He felt Doris squeeze his hand; until then, he'd not realized she was holding it. In front of all of them! But they knew already--long before Wallingford. She'd already told them. She had accepted him! He tried to look at her, but she'd put up the hood of her parka. It wasn't that cold; she was just hiding her face from him.
He sat down beside Mrs. Clausen, still holding her hand. His handless arm was seized by an older woman on his left. She was another Mrs. Clausen, a much larger Mrs. Clausen--the late Otto's mother, little Otto's grandmother, Doris's former mother-in-law. (Probably one shouldn't say "former," Patrick was thinking.) He smiled at the large woman. She was as tall as he was, sitting down, and she pulled him to her by his arm so that she could kiss his cheek.
"All of us are very happy to see you," she said. "Doris has informed us." She smiled approvingly.
