Saul and Patsy (15 page)

“It’s actually more like the French version,” Delia said, a bit dryly. “So far.”

“Well, good for you,” Patsy said.

“But you know, in these matters, nothing is as simple as all that. I go through the house,” Delia resumed, “muttering his name, and I think of his parents and whether they’ll ever find out, and then I think, well, in a few weeks he’ll start school again, and it’ll be all over.” She waited. “It
will
be over, and no harm will have come to anybody, as long as he doesn’t tell anyone. He says he hasn’t. And that’s how it’s supposed to work. But sometimes it’s more complicated.”

Delia stopped talking.

“Don’t tell me you’re pregnant,” Patsy said. Mary Esther’s cries upstairs were getting a bit louder now. Where was Saul?

“Oh, no, I’m not pregnant. I had my tubes tied a long time ago, and besides, I’m . . . no, it’s not that, believe me.”

“Well, what is it?” Patsy thought she knew what Delia would say, but she didn’t want to anticipate it.

“See, the little complication is, I love him,” Delia said, her voice still absolutely neutral, even a bit cold. “Just a little bit. Of course it’s
completely
ridiculous. I mean, he’s only a boy. This is like something middle-aged men do, with their proclivity for college girls. But I do love him. Patsy, he brings in little bouquets of flowers that he’s picked. A boy does this! He brings them in for me, and we put them in water together. And you should see his smile. I don’t think I’ve ever had a smile like that from a grown man. Men don’t smile like that spontaneously. They forget how. He smiles at me and my insides just knot up, because he’s so happy to see me.” Delia’s voice continued in its uninflected way.

“Count your blessings,” Patsy instructed her mother-in-law, using the phrase she had just been thinking of. Delia was right, of course: Saul had forgotten how to smile, except to produce a result. “Does he love you?”

“Of course not. He’s just a kid. And I’m just a middle-aged woman he . . . sometimes sleeps with. I’m a diversion. He doesn’t know from love. But he’s so devoted, and so sweet, and so kind—Patsy, he compliments me on my body, can you
believe
that?—and of course there’s his skin, and
his
body, which is gorgeous, and his smile, that it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t love me, because he might as well love me, considering the way he treats me. Somehow I missed all this before, when I was an actual girl. Know what I mean? I thought when you were my age, you stopped doing foolishness like this. I thought women stopped falling in love, at least
comme ça.
”

“Well, I guess not.”

There was a long pause, and Patsy could tell from the noises at the other end that Delia was blowing her nose, though tentatively. “Of course he has a little girlfriend, too.”

“Of course.”

“But he says that it isn’t as good with her as with me.” She waited. “Maybe he’s being nice. It’s his way, being nice. He’d say it even if he didn’t mean it.”

Patsy looked through the window and saw Gordy Himmelman sitting out on the front lawn. Like the proverbial bad penny, he kept turning up. What did he want
this
time? He had reappeared again, the poor zombie. He had been doing this for about a year now. It was his first anniversary. He was just sitting there, looking skyward. He wanted someone to pay attention to him. In this way, he was like everybody else.

“Delia, I don’t think you have any rights in this matter. You can’t be jealous. You just have a fling with him this summer and then let him go back to school in the fall.”

“No, you’re right, of course.”

There was a pause of several seconds.

“What?” Patsy asked.

“Well, sometimes I go to bed and I think,
This seventeen-year-old is the love
of my life.
Which is quite silly, but that’s what I think. Don’t tell Saul I said that. Saul’s father was a good-enough man, all things considered. He was a hard worker. He worked himself to death. But a lover he wasn’t. I was married to him, and still he never noticed me except sometimes over breakfast when I brought him his coffee. As a provider, of course, I can’t complain about him.”

“Delia, you shouldn’t be romanticizing. Summer’s going to be over, and you’ll have to get your life back.”

“I know,” Delia sighed. Her voice was calm and unearthly. “I’ve had my French novel. So, how’s the baby? How’s little Emmy?”

Patsy crossed her legs at the ankles. She had been thinking of getting a tattoo, a tiny one, of a flower, on her left calf, but now that she was a mom, those thoughts were starting to seem senseless. Besides, tattoos were forms of expression for the inarticulate. She could always say what she meant. “Right now? She’s just woken up. She’s crying a little. Or maybe singing. She’s really not a baby anymore. Not at fifteen months. I think Saul’ll check on her in a minute.” Patsy smiled into the phone. “Her first teeth are in, and she’s still getting cranky. Of course, Saul is still a little jealous of her. He’ll get over it.”

“She’s so adorable. And here I am, a grandmother. It’s a strange thing to have happened to me, Patsy, it’s a strange thing to have happened to a nice Jewish girl, being a grandmother. Well, I don’t know about that ‘nice.’ I was a little wild in high school, you know. Privately. In public I was a nice girl. And then . . . I stopped being wild. And then I was respectable when I was married to Norman, right out of high school, and dutiful with him, before he died so young, and
then
I was a grandmother, and now I stand at the windows watching the shadows in the afternoon and waiting for the sound of Jimmy’s pickup truck.”

“So you’ve started again.”

“Yes. I started again. But it’s not so pleasing when a woman falls in love with a young man that much younger. It’s not becoming in a grandmother. People don’t like it. And I can see why.” She stopped and waited—Patsy thought—for the words to be carried to her, and back out again, in exactly the form she wanted. “You’re right, you know. Once the summer’s over, I’ll give him up. And I will, I really will do that. A gift like that, it’s best not to try to draw it out. You’re right, it’s a fling. And, after all, I’ve been addicted to things before.” She said the last sentence with a weary inflection. “But not like this.”

“Right.”

“You won’t tell Saul, will you? Promise?”

“No. I won’t,” Patsy said.

“Wish me luck.”

“Good luck.”

“Thank you. That was nice. I always wished I had a daughter, Patsy, but now I have you. And it’s better having you than having a real daughter, because I would never have dared to tell her this. Goodbye, dear.”

“Goodbye,” Patsy said. She dropped the phone onto its cradle and sat for a moment waiting, trying to think of what Delia meant by that daughter statement. If she had had a
real
daughter, Delia had implied, she would have felt ashamed of herself and would never have confessed to having taken a lover, a boy still in high school, because . . . why? Because her daughter’s opinion would have mattered to her, and Patsy’s opinion didn’t? Or because she wouldn’t have wanted her daughter to think of her as an example? She tried to fight off the feeling that she was angry, and then she
was
angry, perspiring with anger, and not fighting it. A slight breeze blew in through the screen, and she closed her eyes to it.

She went back up the stairs and saw Saul standing in front of the window, bouncing Mary Esther and talking to her, long strings of Saul-talk. He had changed her diaper. When Patsy came into the doorway, Saul gave her a steady look. “Who was that? Was that my mother?”

“Yes,” Patsy said. She liked watching her husband hold their daughter. She took pride in Saul’s child-care skills, his intuitive leaps into infancy. Good husbands who were good lovers rarely made good fathers, too, and it was her impression that such men were exceptionally uncommon birds. Apparently Saul hadn’t picked it up from his own father, but he had gotten it from somewhere. It made up for his other relentlessly irritating habits. “She just called to chat. You can call her back any time.” Saul nodded. “Actually, that’s not right,” Patsy said. “I lied. That part about the chat. Your mother has taken a boyfriend,” Patsy said, “an actual
boy,
this time—in high school.” The words leapt out of her without her having been completely aware that she was saying them. Then they were gone, free of her, broadcast into the air.

Saul’s face immediately broke into its constituent parts, one eyebrow going one way, the other eyebrow going another, the mouth drooping down here, rising there.

Patsy said, rushing ahead of herself, “The Marschallin didn’t want me to tell you, and she said that if I had been her real daughter, she wouldn’t have told me in the first place, but I guess I just broke my promise to her.”
Jesus, listen to me,
Patsy thought.

Saul went on holding Mary Esther, bouncing her. The baby was hungry and was crying softly now, working up to some real noise. “You shouldn’t have told me, Patsy,” he said, with an odd, disarming calm. “I bet she told all of that to you in confidence.”

“No kidding.” She held her arms out. “Here. Give me the baby.”

As he handed over Mary Esther, Saul appeared to be in a daze. “But you did. I wonder why. You broke a promise to her?” Patsy nodded, even though Saul wasn’t looking at her. “Who is it, this lover?”

“The yard boy.”

“The yard boy. Just like my mother to do that,” Saul said, dispiritedly. Patsy perceived—odd that she hadn’t noticed before—that Saul had no clothes on. She was so used to him by now that his nakedness made absolutely no impression on her except when he was amorous, or when she was. He pulled the window’s curtain aside. The time was eight minutes after nine o’clock, she knew. “We should move to Berlin.
That’d
serve her right. There’s Gordy, by the way.”

Stepping up close to Saul at the window, Patsy lowered the straps of her nightgown and lifted Mary Esther, who at fifteen months was becoming quite heavy. She brought her daughter to her nipple and, as she did, registered how substantial her daughter was and how soon she would not be nursing her anymore. Really, she wasn’t a baby now. All this breastfeeding would be over in no time at all. She would miss it, miss it like crazy, even with all the pain and soreness. But then there would be another baby, Theo. “What did you say?” she asked. “I was distracted.” Mary Esther was sucking at her greedily.

“I said that Gordy is here.” Patsy thought all at once that they shouldn’t be standing naked at their bedroom window looking out at Gordy Himmelman. Just being visible in their own bedroom, they were inciting him to riot. But her anger, which had not died down from the phone call, kept her there in a frozen tableau with Saul: here was Sunday morning, a day—of all days—when young married couples could lie around naked, make love, feed the baby, read the paper, do anything they wanted to do, indoors or out, and there, on the front lawn, was Gordy Himmelman, their sentry, their guard dog, their zombie, their boy. With his little demands for attention, he was getting tiresome. What Patsy craved was her own attention, hers and Saul’s and Emmy’s, and she lifted her hand, as if to start a dance, a dance of please-go-away. “Sometimes I hate my mother,” Saul said without warning.

Gordy Himmelman turned his gaze toward them. He stared for a long time at Saul and Patsy.

“You shouldn’t hate your mother. She’s only human. And by the way, we shouldn’t be here, exposing ourselves to that ruffian on the lawn,” Patsy said.

“What? What’s his name?” Saul asked. “Her boyfriend.”

“Oh, the boyfriend? His name’s Jimmy,” Patsy said, and at that point Gordy pulled out a gun from his back pocket, grinned momentarily, then opened his mouth, directed the barrel of the gun toward it, and then inside it, and fired. A flower-pattern of Gordy’s blood and brains splashed against the tree trunk behind his head, and he fell backward.

The sound of the gun made the baby startle: her arms flew up to the sides of her face, and she pulled her mouth away from her mother’s breast before looking up into her mother’s eyes for an explanation. A trace of breast milk remained on her lower lip.

Part Two

That is what people are like in my district.
Always expecting the impossible from the doctor.

 

—FRANZ KAFKA, “THE COUNTRY DOCTOR”

Nine

The day had been beautiful with clear, dry air—though the sun was penetrating in a late-June sort of way—but now no wind or breeze blew through the yard while the various officials swarmed over the front lawn. The air felt still, or stillborn. Saul, in shock, thought that the patrol cars’ flashing red lights gave the driveway the look of a movie set, or a television docudrama. Something, he wasn’t sure what, didn’t seem real about it. He himself felt less solid—unconcretized—than he had for years. Too much more de-realization, he thought, and he would fade right out.

The county medical examiner came to collect the body, and to pry into the bark of the tree for skull fragments. They took the gun out of Gordy’s hand and placed it in an evidence bag. Then Gordy’s body was loaded, one man reaching underneath the skinny shoulders and another at the ankles and feet in their scruffy, unlaced high-tops, onto a coroner’s gurney. They covered all of it with a white sheet. Having loaded it— him—they took the body away to be examined in closer detail, for drugs in particular. They had explained all this. Three men sauntered toward Saul and Patsy for questions, two regular cops and one investigating detective, and Saul and Patsy offered them coffee that they declined to drink.

They had checked the scene for a suicide note, they said. But there was no evidence of one, and Saul told them it wasn’t likely that such a note would ever show up. They asked why. Saul said that Gordy could barely write at all. A suicide note was pretty much beyond him.

Outside in the sunlight, and then in the kitchen for the sake of the shade, first Saul and then Patsy explained about Gordy’s previous trips out to their houses, this one and the one they’d rented. Inexplicable, but with a vague, lost-in-space purpose. Saul explained about the remedial language-arts class, the anti-Semitic scrawlings, the beehives. Gordy didn’t really know much of anything about Jews, Saul claimed. They were a convenience. It was like Israel for the Arabs, he said, briefly losing his cool. When Saul mentioned the notes, the cops became interested again. So he
could
write, after all. They had caught him in a contradiction. Had Saul saved them, these notes? No, he had not. One of the men went out with Saul to check the exact location where Gordy had been standing.

While they were gone, Mary Esther gazed from her mother’s elbow at the two remaining men and then, once Saul returned, from her father’s arms. She seemed interested in their hats and held out her hands as if to grab them by their wide brims.

The men from the sheriff ’s office were particularly intrigued with Gordy’s obsessive fascination with Saul and Patsy’s houses. Why had he stared at them? What had he wanted from them? Why this strange attention-deficit persistence? Had he threatened the family in any way?

No, not exactly. They claimed not to know why he kept coming out to see them, but that answer was unsatisfactory; it answered nothing. Finally Patsy said, “He was a slow student. He was in Saul’s remedial class, of course, and he didn’t do well. I think he wanted us to teach him how to read. He wanted us to pay attention to him. Or to teach him . . . how to do
something.
”

Saul shook his head. “No. That’s not it. It’s more complicated. He was trying to get us to
adopt
him. He was like . . .” Sitting at the kitchen table, his fingers knitted together, Saul was about to say that Gordy was like Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s orphaned creature, made out of spare human parts, wandering around looking for love and wanting someone to notice him grunting and groaning, threatening to become a monster and then becoming an actual monster, but, strategically, he made himself go silent. After all, he himself had not known what to do with him. Finally he said, “He was like a lot of boys.”

Then, to give them a story, if not
the
story, Saul told them about Gordy’s visit from a year ago, when Gordy had waved the gun around in the front yard of their rented house and Saul had taken him and his bicycle and the gun back home. Gordy had been threatening, without actually threatening anything or anyone specifically, in detail. He had just wanted to be generically threatening, adolescent boy stuff, white rural gangsta midwestern skull-and-crossbones
Fear This
and
Don’t Fuck With
Me
sort of stuff. He was a messed-up kid; that was maybe the entire story. “He didn’t think about things,” Saul said. “He probably shot himself without thinking about it. Maybe he would’ve shot one of us without thinking about it. He had a weird kind of spontaneity.”

They nodded, but their nodding did not indicate agreement. They wrote it all down. Then they went outside again, to confer.

Half an hour later, Gordy’s aunt Brenda arrived. Saul and Patsy went outside to meet her. As she removed herself from her vehicle, a rusting Ford pickup, she expertly finger-flicked her cigarette out onto the lawn. She was still dressed in her waitress clothes, with a pink barrette in her hair, an application of lipstick and perfume, and—Saul was at first surprised, and then not surprised at all—she smiled automatically at the two cops standing near the front door of the house. She was accustomed to cops, Saul realized. For her, a waitress in a diner, cops were familiar and friendly customers, people she saw every day. But the smile was completely insincere—never had a face been built that conveyed less benevolence and good humor than this one. Her somber unattractiveness, her worn-down sorrowfulness, had no appeal.

She walked up first to Saul, who was standing by the tree where Gordy had shot himself. “Hi,” she said. She shook his hand. Her face was a conglomeration of pockmarks and scars, perhaps the worst complexion he had ever seen on a woman. The perfume and the barrette and the lipstick did nothing to mitigate her appearance. They magnified the effect of helplessness. “Oh that boy. What a terrible situation here. That poor crazy clueless kid.” She glanced around. She sobbed once. “What did they do with his body? I got to see it. This is such a waste,” she said, the phrase coming out of her mouth tonelessly. She didn’t seem surprised, despite her spasmodic grief—the zombie affect apparently ran in the family. It was the most peculiar response to a death that Saul had ever witnessed, though it occurred to him that it might be a form of working-class stoicism. If she had any grief, she would not give it away to the likes of Saul and Patsy.

Or what—he thought—what if she had been
expecting
this?

Any parent, any guardian would inevitably, Saul thought, be crying and making a scene. That was the standard expectation. But she seemed to be in steady though perhaps uncertain control of herself, standing there in her unattractive dignity. Saul wished he could think of some other category besides
ugliness
when he looked at her. But that word was inescapable with Brenda Bagley. She made you think about her looks the way a professional beauty would; she commanded your attention. Just being around her, you fell down a notch or two, you became less than you were, because you couldn’t help but notice her shortcomings. Against Brenda’s deficiencies, the gods themselves would have struggled in vain. He also wished he had some consolation to give her, but he did not. The correct words and phrases flew away from him, were gone. Calmly, still gazing down, inconsolable, she said, “Oh, my lord, I wish I knew where Gordy’s father got himself to. He went out to Wyoming looking for work a couple years ago, and I haven’t heard from him since, and here his son is gone for good and ever. And
he
doesn’t even know. There’s something else I don’t get.”

“What don’t you get?” Saul asked.

“No TV.”

“What?”

“Where’s the TV reporters? Doesn’t this count for something? A boy dying by his own hand? Just because it was a poor kid like Gordy don’t mean you can’t report it. It’s like he counts for nothing. A pig runs away from the farmyard and they cover it on the news. A purse gets snatched and they cover it for a week. What about this? You’ve got a poor dropout being dead here by his own self-violence, and that ain’t a story? Can you explain to me how come they aren’t doing coverage?”

“Maybe they’re busy.” He shrugged. “They just aren’t here yet,” Saul told her. “Thank God. I don’t know why. Do you want to see where it happened? Brenda, how did he get that gun?”

“No. Yes. Well, okay. Sure.” She nodded her head, and Saul dutifully pointed down at the tree trunk where the blood was drying. “Right here then. How awful,” Gordy’s aunt said, reaching into her purse for another cigarette, which she lit up with a despairing shake of the head, followed by a stagy puff.

“He kept coming here,” Saul said. “To this spot. He’d stand here like a sentry.”

“I know that.” She took a long despairing inhale from the cigarette, as if gasping for oxygen.

“He’d be out in the yard, hour after hour, staring at us, you know.”

“Yes, he told me. He said he was over here.” She paused to reflect. “The gun? You asked about the gun? He found it where I had hidden it.”

“Did he ever tell you
why
he came over here?”

“No, he didn’t,” she said, rubbing her cheek. She made Saul think of a peeled tangerine. “I was just glad he wanted to do
something.
That he wanted to go somewhere. I couldn’t look after him.”

“He did it off and on for a whole year.”

“Well, it gave him a place to go.”

“A place to go?”

“Yes. I was at work, and he was old enough not to go to school—said he wasn’t learning anything—and I couldn’t think of anything to do with him, so, you know, he came over here. I guess he thought you cared about him and could maybe give him a place to be.”

“We just got used to it,” Saul said. “To
him,
” he corrected himself.

“God-
damn,
” Brenda suddenly erupted, a high keening wail. “I told and told him about guns, like I was in the NRA or something, and I sure damn well trained him to respect them. I just
whacked
it into him. You saw me trying to knock some sense into him. Made me feel
terrible
! If you didn’t hit him, he wouldn’t notice. ‘Guns don’t kill people,’ I told him, ‘people kill people.’ This last time I hid that .22 so
no
one could find it, in a shoe box.” She looked up, and her face took on a sudden fearful radiance. “No one. But then
he
did.” The on-the-spot Channel Seven Mobile News van was speeding up the driveway, followed by Channel Three’s news van. Maybe there would be a helicopter and skycam shots, and a direct-feed breaking-news story from the crime scene. Finally, the occasion felt like a movie premiere. Brenda touched her hair. The poor woman—what did she think she was doing, trying to get on television? Attract the talent scouts?

“Miss Bagley?” The police investigator, the detective—Saul was having trouble remembering his name, maybe because of the distraction of the weapons, and each time he saw one of them, the cop looked unfamiliar—took her aside for some questions and a statement and an identification. Saul overheard him asking her about a suicide note. They were certainly interested in suicide notes. Well, responsibility, after all. Cause and effect, after all. A villain, a fall guy. Saul suddenly wondered if maybe—just maybe—there might be one, might be a suicide note. Mentioning
him
. Barely readable, scrawled, but still scratchily specific. The Channel Seven reporter, whom Saul recognized as Traci McMahoney, hurried away from the mobile news van in a rather purposeful beeline toward him, followed by the camera and sound men. Involuntarily, he stood up straight and cleared his throat.

She was extraordinarily pretty, a small-town former beauty queen probably, with blond hair arranged in an expensive feathery style, startlingly blue eyes, and a strange expression of artificial concern. She was the visual antidote to Brenda Bagley. In spite of himself, Saul felt charged up, on the verge of a statement. Also in spite of himself, he gazed at her as she approached him. She had great legs with excellent calf definition. She worked out somewhere. They all did, now. Guiltily, he turned, looking for his wife. About ten feet away, Patsy had Mary Esther in hand, but Patsy was also checking on Saul. Mary Esther was sobbing quietly. Patsy’s bangs were falling down over her sad eyes as she then hefted Mary Esther from one arm to the other. What was she being sad about? Gordy’s death? That Saul had stared helplessly at the Channel Seven reporter? No. Saul had—they both knew it—a tendency to misstate himself in situations involving the stress of public speaking, so he flashed her his brimful-of-confidence expression; she did not seem immediately reassured.

The other news team, the one from Channel Three, had gone over to wait to interview Brenda until after the detective had finished with her, but this one, the Action News Team from Channel Seven, had stayed here. After Traci McMahoney had set herself up so that the house showed in the background, but before the videocam was rolling, she asked Saul if he’d be willing to answer a few questions on-camera. He nodded. She aimed herself at the lens, touched her hair, and then did her intro. Today, she said,
The Uplands has been a scene of tragedy,
in what appears to be a suicide by a Five Oaks man, Gordon Himmelman, who lived with his aunt on Strewwelpeter Street. The young man had shot himself in the front yard of one of his former teachers, Saul Bernstein. So far there was no explanation as to why he had taken the trouble to bike over to his teacher’s house to shoot himself. No suicide note had yet been found.

Ah, Saul thought. So that settles that.

Traci McMahoney pivoted toward Saul. “You were his teacher.”

“Yes.”

“And in what subject?”

“Language arts.” Saul looked at her and at the microphone, then at the sound guy. He felt something coming on, something wrong. “Last year. Not this academic year.
Last
academic year. He had dropped out.”

“How were his grades?”

“His grades? It was a . . . remedial class.”

“Oh. In that case, how well did you know the young man?”

“Pretty well. I don’t know. How well does anybody know anyone?”

Traci McMahoney frowned. “Had he threatened you? Had he threatened anyone at school?”