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Lulu’s Boys

Summary: Lulu’s Boys

Set in 1957, this story features Lulu Lamartine, widow of Henry and mother to eight sons. As the story opens, she is visited by Beverly “Bev” Lamartine, Henry’s brother. As Bev sits at Lulu’s table, she notices his tattoos and recalls those of her late husband who died drunk in a car accident seven years earlier. She especially notes Bev’s lone swallow tattoo that appears to dive when he flexes his muscles. A flashback to Henry’s funeral describes that Bev brought a military flag to the ceremony as tribute. As Henry’s coffin was lowered, Bev tossed the flag over it, and Lulu fainted, falling into the grave. Bev jumped in to help her and she was upset for hours, unable to speak. Lulu’s eight boys all look different, prompting town gossips to wonder about their fathers. One of them, Henry Junior, was born nine months after Henry died, and Bev has come to take Henry Junior home with him.

Bev sells children’s workbooks by showing prospective customers photographs of Henry Junior, whom he claims is his own son to win their trust and their cash. He also tells them that the books will give them wings. In fact, Bev is married to a blonde secretary named Elsa who is not interested in children. Bev adores Elsa but he imagines Henry Junior as his son so often and so intently that he starts to believe that it’s true. He visits Lulu with the intention of bringing the boy home with him. When Bev arrives and meets all of Lulu’s eight sons, he admires the tidiness of Lulu’s house and the trinkets that adorn it. She asks if he is married and gives him a pincushion that she’s made to give to his lady. Bev asks if Lulu remembers the night that both he and Henry played strip poker with her, and she does. She recalls seeing them both naked and deciding, right then, that she would marry Henry and not Bev because of each man’s “reaction” in the moment. Bev recalls the jealousy he felt and feels it creep back now. He wonders if Lulu even remembers that they made love right after Henry’s funeral.

Henry Junior comes in for lunch and asks his Uncle Bev to make his bird tattoo fly, which he does, noting that Henry Junior just might have the stare that he has cultivated. The boys are shooting guns outside, teaching the youngest to shoot. Bev watches them, admiring the way they function as a pack and Lulu tells him what each one is doing in their lives, the oldest in college, the youngest still in a highchair. They adore and protect their mother together, too. When Lulu approaches Bev and touches his pants, Bev cannot resist, and they embrace. Afterward, Bev sits on the couch, bewildered, while Lulu makes supper for them all, and as she cleans the kitchen afterward, Bev remembers the night they made love in the shed years before. Lulu goes to bed and Bev thinks of Elsa. He plans to retreat without Henry Junior and without saying goodbye. Before he does, he goes to Lulu’s room and sees her sleep. He lays down in her arms and the bird on his arm flies again. [449 words]

Analysis: Lulu’s Boys

When Lulu says, “I am a woman of detachable parts,” she speaks literally about the many garments and adornments that were available to her during the strip poker game she played with Henry and Bev. More truthfully, however, she speaks about her inner self, more complex than she appears on the surface. She is a woman of deep thoughts and entangled in a myriad of past and present relationships, as represented by her many and varied sons.

Likewise, Bev is a man of many parts, but they may not be detachable. He is torn between his marriage to Elsa and his passions for Lulu, and between his life as a salesman in the city and his roots on the reservation. When Bev chooses a physical relationship with Lulu by laying in her arms at the end of the story, he is not only unfaithful to Elsa but also to the life he has created outside of the reservation. Here, Erdrich begins to explore the theme of assimilation. Bev represents the Native American who has left his home behind, found success in the white man’s world, and even married a white woman. His parents had even denied their heritage, calling themselves and him French or Black Irish. He was proud of his life as a salesman and knows that no one on the reservation would ever buy workbooks for their children. Bev is proud to have outgrown and outsmarted the others, but he cannot overcome his attraction for Lulu and her boys who represent his old way of life.

Birds are both literal and symbolic in this story. As a salesman, Bev compares books to wings. When he flips their pages, it sounds like “the panic of fledglings before they learn how to glide.” Lulu vividly recalls, very early in the tale, that Bev’s swallow tattoo could perform a trick. When he flexed his arm muscles, the bird appeared to dive, a memory that foreshadows the story’s ending. Henry Junior asks his Uncle Bev to perform this trick, but he is soon bored with it and returns to his brothers outside. Bev’s decision to lay in Lulu’s bed, to become one of her boys himself, is represented by the flight of a bird in the last line. The story recalls the wild geese and foreshadows the geese in “Love Medicine” that might have helped Lipsha work some magic, but his shortcut prevents it.

Lulu Lamartine was Lulu Nanapush before she married, the always-moving attractive teenage girl to whom Nector Kashpaw is attracted in “Wild Geese” before he meets Marie. Again, Erdrich picks up a thread from an earlier story and weaves it into this one, her technique for connecting stories from many times and places into one cohesive novel. By now, readers recognize, anticipate, and appreciate this strategy. It becomes yet another of the novel’s themes, this idea of interwoven lives, families, and experiences, the myriad ways in which we enrich or endanger each other simply by being humans, both strong and frail.

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