Ordinary Grace

Chapter 6 begins with backstory on the Brandts. We learn that Ariel’s boyfriend, Karl, is the son of Axel and Julia Brandt. Axel owns New Bremen’s brewery, which was “one of the first businesses established when the town was originally settled” (55). Frank goes on to say that the brewery “was the town’s crown jewel and the Brandts were about as near to royalty as you’d find in the Midwest” (55). Karl “lived of course on the Heights in a sprawling white-pillared mansion with a large marble patio in back that had a view of the town below and below that the Flats and beyond the Flats the broad crawl of the river” (55).

Ariel and Karl meet through the youth musical production Ruth Drum has put on every summer since the Drums moved to New Bremen. While Ruth disapproves of the intensity of the relationship, she also likes Karl, who, we learn, plans to attend St. Olaf College, play football, and return to New Bremen, to run the family business.

Frank and Ariel sit on the front porch and discuss love. Ariel tells Frank that their mother worries about Ariel in the context that Ariel will wind up as Ruth has: trapped in a positon in life that is less than ideal: “…I knew as well as any of us that Mother was less than delighted with her life as a minister’s wife. She’d said as much on a number of occasions. Her words usually went something, When I married you, Nathan, I thought I was marrying a lawyer. I didn’t sign on for this” (57).

Nathan Drum remains gone from home, looking for Mr. Klement with Gus. Frank’s friend, Danny O’Keefe, comes over after dinnertime. Danny is half-Dakota Sioux and related to Warren Redstone, the man Frank and Jake find rooting through the Skipper’s pockets earlier in the book. A group of neighborhood boys has gathered on the Drum family lawn, wanting to hear the story of Frank and Jake finding the dead man. Frank embellishes the facts in a way that consternates Jake. The group of boys play baseball. Later that night, Jake urges Frank to stop recounting finding the Skipper in a manner that paints Frank a hero. Nathan Drum arrives home; Frank listens to him tell Ruth about finding Mr. Klement in a bar in Mankato, drunk and feeling bad about hitting his wife and child but also refusing to pray with Nathan and Gus. Ruth thanks Nathan for trying. 

The next day, Monday, Nathan, Frank and Jake walk to the home of Emil and Lise Brandt. Ariel comes along, too, and we learn that “she was often at the home of Emil Brandt anyway, not only under his tutelage for her piano and organ keyboard work and her musical composition but also working with him to complete a memoir he’d been dictating for more than a year” (62).

Frank goes on to say that “Emil and Lise Brandt were part of the royalty that was the Brandt family,” and we learn that they are uncle and aunt to Karl Brandt, Ariel’s boyfriend (62). Emile and Lise live “in a kind of exile in a beautifully-renovated farmhouse on the western edge of New Bremen overlooking the river” (62). Frank says of Emil that he “was a piano virtuoso and a composer of significant reputation and in his youth had been a carouser of great celebrity” (62). After leaving New Bremen for New York, Emil went on to Hollywood, where “he’d hit it big with a score for the film version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men” (63). Emil is drafted for World War Two and returns to New Bremen blind and disfigured, “wanting only to feed in isolation on the meat of his bitterness” (63).

Lise Brandt is ten years younger than Emil and “born deaf and difficult” (63). Lise is “subject to tantrums and to fits of rage and only Emil seemed to tolerate her outbursts and [Lise] for her part adored him” (63). Jake Drum, due to his stutter, also has a special relationship with Lise, and is able to get along with Lise in a way others are not, the two even creating a special mode of communication that is akin to a crude form of sign language. Lise spends the majority of her scenes in the novel gardening.

Nathan Drum and Emil Brandt play chess on the porch, with Nathan moving pieces for both of them. We learn Nathan Drum fought in World War Two first in North Africa, and also at the Battle of the Bulge. Nathan and Emil discuss Ariel’s admittance of being unsure about Juilliard and Mr. Klement, who served in the Korean War. The scene concludes with Frank stating, “They continued to talk and I watched Jake and Lise in the garden and listened to Ariel clacking away on the typewriter in the study, and the world inside that picket fence seemed like a good place, a place in which all the damaged pieces somehow fit” (69).

That afternoon, Nathan gives last rites at the burial of the Skipper. Later that evening, we learn from Ruth that Warren Redstone is Danny O’Keefe’s great-uncle, and that Jake Drum has gone to Danny’s house to help Danny look for Redstone. Frank, concerned, runs to Danny’s house. Danny’s mom tells Frank to look for Jake and Redstone by the river. Frank locates the two other boys there, and the trio then finds Redstone sitting in his lean-to, a structure “made of driftwood and lashed into a frame with scavenged pieces of corrugated tin as roof and siding” (74).

Danny hands Warren Redstone a letter addressed to him; Redstone reads the letter using the glasses of Bobby Cole, the boy killed by the train. 

Ruth’s father comes to dinner at the Drum household that evening. He brings his wife, Elizabeth, his former secretary and the woman he married after his wife, Frank’s grandmother, died of cancer, when Frank was an infant. Nathan Drum and Ruth’s father do not get along. Ruth does not get along with Elizabeth. Ruth’s father discusses the “influx of Mexican farmworkers and how it was bringing an unwelcome element to the valley”; Nathan responds by asking “how the farmers were supposed to get the work done without the help of migrants” (78).

After dinner, Frank and Jake clean dishes and discuss what to do with the revelation that Redstone is in possession of Bobby Cole’s glasses. They decide to tell Gus, who they find playing poker in the church basement with Halderson, a mailman, and Officer Doyle. The presence of the other men stops Frank from telling Gus about Redstone being in possession of the eyeglasses. A knock on Nathan Drum’s office door, above the group, makes them all pause.

Gus has been tasked with fixing the church’s furnace, but since it’s summer, has been in no hurry to do it. The furnace’s ducts are disconnected; Gus has stuffed the vents with rags, to assure that Nathan doesn’t hear him drinking and gambling in the basement. Gus now removes the rags to better hear the conversation between Nathan Drum and the Sweeneys, Edna and Avis. The Sweeneys are the Drum’s neighbors; Edna is the woman Frank enjoys spying on through the fence.

Nathan and the Sweeneys discuss the Sweeney’s intimacy issues, with Nathan functioning as an ad hoc marriage counselor. Frank and Jake return home without telling Gus about Redstone. Nathan Drum comes into the boy’s bedroom later that night to say he’s aware of Gus gambling in the church basement.